DoubleClick Search gets UI, control, and transparency improvements with new Performance Bidding Suite

As a search marketer, you know that bid optimization is one of the critical aspects of managing search at scale, providing sophisticated technology to meet your unique business goals. Over the past 18 months, the DoubleClick Search team has been focused on enhancing our automated bidding tools -- understanding that this is the engine that drives campaign performance. We've rebuilt our bid optimization platform from the ground up -- no single line of code is the same! -- and our users are already seeing some impressive results: 88% have experienced significant improvements in campaign performance, with 50% doubling their conversions at half the CPA (1).



Our investments in bid optimization span beyond revamped technology and algorithms. We wanted to make it easier for you to state your goals and monitor performance, to better harness and discover the power of automated strategies. The result is our new Performance Bidding Suite, which includes updates to the user interface (UI), new strategy options, and increased transparency into bid engine decisions. With our Performance Bidding Suite, you can:

• Quickly find the right goal with a refreshed user interface. Easily express bid optimization goals that match your business objectives. Whether you’re looking to maximize revenue or target a position, the new UI makes it even easier to find the right strategy for your unique goals. Our updated UI is designed to capture new bid strategies as they are released.


• Easily enter your Target Spend goals. With our new Target Spend strategy, maximize important KPIs like actions, transactions, revenue or clicks within a given monthly spend. Learn more


• Efficiently set default minimum and maximum bids on a strategy. Spend more time managing bid limits for the keywords you care about most, while DoubleClick Search handles the rest through a bid strategy-wide setting.


• Exercise even more advanced controls. The Advanced Configuration tab in the new bid strategy UI is designed for those who want to even further influence bid strategies. The first option we’re releasing gives you control over how a bid strategy handles high-traffic or low-converting keywords in ROI strategies. Stay tuned for more advanced controls. Learn more

In addition to a cleaner interface, new strategies, and advanced controls, the Performance Bidding Suite provides increased transparency into bid decisions and impact. Drive more insights with features that allow you to:

• Chart your Max CPC bids to visualize trends over time. You can now chart keyword bids for a defined date range, alongside any other metric in our UI to easily analyze bidding frequency and bid changes.


• Better understand our decision-making with bid rationale summary. As part of the change history tool, our new bid rationale feature (beta) reveals the reasoning behind any changes to specific bids.


• Preview intended bids. Our bid preview feature shows the target bid DoubleClick Search intends to submit for a particular keyword. This provides insight into the range of bids the system is likely to submit, based on the current bid and performance, to offer guidance in setting bid limits.

With these transparency features from the Performance Bidding Suite, you have powerful insights into how different settings impact campaign performance, and can tweak these settings if needed.



If you'd like to get started exploring the Performance Bidding Suite, you can check out the latest release notes and updated articles in the Help Center, or view our recorded webinar here.



Posted by the DoubleClick Search team



1. Google internal data, 2012

Introducing the new Ads Developers Google+ Page

Today we are excited to introduce a new channel for communication - Ads Developers Google+ Page. It's a place to stay informed, engaged and connected on Ads products and developer tools.

Add our Google+ page to your circles for the latest product and feature announcements, best practices, case studies, as well as opportunities to interact with and learn from Google's Ads Developer Relations team and other members of the developer community.

We look forward to having one place to bring timely updates, concise announcements, and to share information in multimedia formats across all Ads products, as well as to listen and respond to your comments.

 - Danial Klimkin, Ads Developer Relations Team.

How To Make Blogger Blog Mobile Friendly

In today's fast paced world, there's not one soul left who doesn't own a Mobile Device. For people living in the stone ages, a Mobile Device plays the same part as two cups being attached to one another via a string!



There's a vast variety of mobile devices. Some of the popular choices include Cell phones and Tablets. If you are reading this blog, chances are that you are using one too. Therefore, it is important for bloggers to optimize their websites to be viewed on mobile devices. Doing this would have three, very substantial advantages on your part.

1. The user will be able to browse and surf your website with ease and efficiency
2. The website will load much faster than thought possible
3. The interface is perfect for newbies.

You can choose to customize your Blogger site to appear more user-friendly to those of your followers who are always on the move. It will enhance your sites rank and get you into the good graces of Google (wink wink)!

To do the above, Blogger has come up with an option that would allow you to have a mobile site interface of your blog. Its hassle-free and easy-to-use. Your domain would remain the same (compared to the annoying addition of 'm' in the starting of your URL) and at the same time, the user is going to have the option of switching to the desktop version if he so wishes.

Steps to help you make your blog mobile user-friendly:

Works For Both New And Old Version of Blogger Layout:

1. Go to Dashboard
2. Click on Settings
3. Hit Mobile and Email and
4. You will find the option Turn on the mobile Template on Mobile Devices, please click Yes for it.

Blogger's New Interface

Blogger's Old Interface

That's it! Visit your Blogger site on a Mobile Device and checkout the magic that you just created! We will advice you to switch the pages widget on on your desktop version too in order for the page bar to appear in the mobile device.

Try it out and let us know if it worked for you.

Cheers!

DoubleClick Search gets UI, control, and transparency improvements with new Performance Bidding Suite

As a search marketer, you know that bid optimization is the engine that drives campaign performance.



Earlier last week at SES San Francisco, the DoubleClick Search team announced UI, control, and transparency improvements to their newly-launched Performance Bidding Suite for bid optimization, making it easier than ever before for search marketers to harness and discover the power of automated strategies. Learn more about the new improvements and the impressive results users are already seeing at the DoubleClick Search blog!

DoubleClick Search gets UI, control, and transparency improvements with new Performance Bidding Suite

As a search marketer, you know that bid optimization is one of the critical aspects of managing search at scale, providing sophisticated technology to meet your unique business goals. Over the past 18 months, the DoubleClick Search team has been focused on enhancing our automated bidding tools -- understanding that this is the engine that drives campaign performance. We've rebuilt our bid optimization platform from the ground up -- no single line of code is the same! -- and our users are already seeing some impressive results: 88% have experienced significant improvements in campaign performance, with 50% doubling their conversions at half the CPA.¹



Our investments in bid optimization span beyond revamped technology and algorithms. We wanted to make it easier for you to state your goals and monitor performance, to better harness and discover the power of automated strategies. The result is our new Performance Bidding Suite, which includes updates to the user interface (UI), new strategy options, and increased transparency into bid engine decisions. With our Performance Bidding Suite, you can:

• Quickly find the right goal with a refreshed user interface. Easily express bid optimization goals that match your business objectives. Whether you’re looking to maximize revenue or target a position, the new UI makes it even easier to find the right strategy for your unique goals. Our updated UI is designed to capture new bid strategies as they are released.


• Easily enter your Target Spend goals. With our new Target Spend strategy, maximize important KPIs like actions, transactions, revenue or clicks within a given monthly spend. Learn more


• Efficiently set default minimum and maximum bids on a strategy. Spend more time managing bid limits for the keywords you care about most, while DoubleClick Search handles the rest through a bid strategy-wide setting.


• Exercise even more advanced controls. The Advanced Configuration tab in the new bid strategy UI is designed for those who want to even further influence bid strategies. The first option we’re releasing gives you control over how a bid strategy handles high-traffic or low-converting keywords in ROI strategies. Stay tuned for more advanced controls. Learn more

In addition to a cleaner interface, new strategies, and advanced controls, the Performance Bidding Suite provides increased transparency into bid decisions and impact. Drive more insights with features that allow you to:

• Chart your Max CPC bids to visualize trends over time. You can now chart keyword bids for a defined date range, alongside any other metric in our UI to easily analyze bidding frequency and bid changes.


• Better understand our decision-making with bid rationale summary. As part of the change history tool, our new bid rationale feature (beta) reveals the reasoning behind any changes to specific bids.


• Preview intended bids. Our bid preview feature shows the target bid DoubleClick Search intends to submit for a particular keyword. This provides insight into the range of bids the system is likely to submit, based on the current bid and performance, to offer guidance in setting bid limits.

With these transparency features from the Performance Bidding Suite, you have powerful insights into how different settings impact campaign performance, and can tweak these settings if needed.

If you'd like to get started exploring the Performance Bidding Suite, you can check out the latest release notes and updated articles in the Help Center, or view our recorded webinar here.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

1. Google internal data, 2012

New Developments for the DFA API

We have some exciting changes and important announcements for the DoubleClick for Advertisers community as we begin to improve our overall approach to APIs for the product. This is just the first of many improvements that will come over the next several quarters.



DFA API v1.19 - Security at the Forefront


The newest release of the DFA API, v1.19, is now available. This release brings two major security enhancements. SSL encryption, a feature we originally slated for v1.18, is now mandatory on all API requests. This is in line with a Google-wide effort to leverage HTTPS connections for greater security.



Secondly, this release of the DFA API supports OAuth2 authentication in addition to the API passwords tied to your DFA user profiles. We recommend using this new approach. In time, we plan to phase out the profile-specific passwords in favor of making OAuth2 the single, standard way to authenticate against our API. Please see our documentation for more information on how OAuth2 is integrated with the DFA API and reference our client libraries, all of which will soon be updated with examples of using OAuth2 instead of an API password.



Our release notes page has been updated with complete notes on v1.19.



DFA Reporting Gets an API


Less than a year ago, we announced the availability of the new DFA Reporting system. This new system offers the power, flexibility and data access required to keep up with today’s always-connected, multi-device consumer. Compared to Report Central, data in the new DFA Reporting system is fresher, can be segmented by the hour, and includes a host of new features including geographic reporting for all ads. Today, we are pleased to launch an API for the new DFA Reporting system.



The DFA Reporting API is a language-neutral REST API that offers programmatic access to the same reports as can be generated through the DFA Reporting user interface. Along with improved speed and performance, the new API will allow you to create, edit, and schedule Standard reports. We will continue to launch additional features to the new DFA Reporting API over the next few months. Support for this API has been added to the Google APIs Client Libraries. The Java library currently has the most complete example set.



Version Enforcement on the Java DART API


The Java DART API, long the bread and butter of integrating with our ReportCentral service, has a large range of versions currently in use. We are going to begin enforcing a minimum version requirement on this API on November 3rd, 2012. At this time, clients will be must be using one of the newest versions of the Java DART API -- version 13.4, version 13.6, or version 13.8. We recommend you take the opportunity to consider the new DFA Reporting API. Come enjoy the benefits of its newer technology.



Changes to Our Deprecation Policy


This past April, Google announced changes to the deprecation policies surrounding our APIs to help keep our products moving and innovating quickly. DFA is joining this overall Google effort. As such, as of November 3rd, 2012, DFA will remove the depreciation policy for all of our APIs.



The removal of the deprecation policy doesn't mean we have changed the way we think about our APIs. As signaled by the launch of the new DFA Reporting API, we are more committed than ever to offering stable and relevant APIs to our developer community. We will continue to work very hard to communicate any changes to our APIs well in advance, regardless of the APIs' deprecation policy. Our commitment to our clients and to the API remains unchanged.



Until November 3,2012 we will continue the deprecation policy we currently have in place. With the the release of v1.19, version v1.17 is now deprecated. Version v1.17 will continue to be supported until September 8th, 2012, when it will be entirely removed from service, as previously announced. Meanwhile, version v1.18 will be deprecated in November and sunset in early December, 2012.



As always, we highly value your feedback and questions. Please join us on our forumwhenever you’d like to reach us.




- Joseph DiLallo, the DFA API Team

How To Really Increase Alexa Rankings?

I can't remember how many times I ahve seen the following titles, "How To Boost Your Alexa Rankings", How To Increase Your Alexa rankings, It's really amazing to see that most of the people really don't know how alexa work and what will increase alexa rank of their blogs in a guaranteed way. I will quote from alexa's official blog regarding what they say about increasing the alexa rank.

Do Alexa Rank Boosting Services Work?

Their are countless number of services on the internet that charge for increasing alexa rankings, that promise that they can easily increase your alexa rank, however according to alexa's official blog's, all of these services are scam. Here is the official statement from Alexa:

Of course we can't forget the people who will charge you to increase your rank. I wonder how much money these services have made over the years. I can tell you with absolute certainty, that you may as well burn your money in a voodoo traffic pyre while chanting "Alexa" over and over. Maybe that will work. But these programs definitely don't and you can look at their traffic rank as proof. If that isn't enough to convince you, how about this... even trying to boost your rank through these means is resorting to fraud. That is no way to run a business. And for those wicked souls who recommend pinging, port scanning or crawling our site to boost your rank, cut it out. Hacking our site is not just a waste of time, it is a crime .

So How To Really Increase Your Alexa Ranking?

Here is what alexa's offical blog say about increasing alexa's rankings:

So, how do you increase your Alexa Rank? Get more traffic to your site. It is that simple. Write that in your blogs. It might not get you as many readers as "Increase your Rank in 3 Easy Steps" but at least it will be true