Upcoming extended AdWords API/Scripts, Ad Exchange, and DFP API Downtime

Update: Ad Exchange will be affected by the downtime as well. Please see below for details.



As previously mentioned, we have an upcoming AdWords, Ad Exchange, and DFP service outage. This will occur on Saturday, September 22 -- AdWords, Ad Exchange, and DFP systems will be unavailable from approximately 10:00 am to 8:00 pm Pacific Time (17:00 Saturday to 03:00 Sunday GMT) due to system maintenance.



AdWords

During this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual (with the settings you established as of 10am PST), but you won’t be able to make SOAP API calls or download reports. Requests to the AdWords API will fail with an HTTP 50x error during the maintenance window. Please also keep in mind that any automated rules scheduled during this time will not run and AdWords scripts will not execute during this period. We encourage you to verify your campaign settings prior to the outage.



Ad Exchange

During this time, your ad serving will continue to run per changes made prior to downtime period, but you will not be able to make API calls to Ad Exchange Buyer SOAP API. On Ad Exchange Buyer REST API, only the Direct Deals related API calls will be affected. For the Ad Exchange Real-Time Bidding Protocol, you will not be able to make changes to pre-targeting settings, everything else should continue to run as usual.



DFP

As mentioned above, ad serving will continue to run per changes made prior to the downtime period. If you use the audience feature in your network, any API call to the AudienceSegmentService service will fail with a SegmentError.UNEXPECTED_ERROR error. Also, if you target any audience segments in your line items, any calls to LineItemService, ForecastService, or LineItemCreativeAssociationService that involve those line items will fail.



We apologize for any inconvenience, and appreciate your patience as our engineers work to keep AdWords, Ad Exchange, and DFP running smoothly.



 - Kevin Winter, Ads Developer Relations Team

Better bids, better ads, more downloads: New app promotion tools for advertisers

With more than one million apps currently in the Google Play and iTunes Stores, we know that those of you advertising apps are looking for ways to drive valuable installs at scale while helping your apps stand out from the crowd. We recently launched several app promotion features designed to help those of you who have created an app promotion campaign in AdWords, or are considering creating an app promotion campaign, maximize your return on investment.



CPA Bidding with Conversion Optimizer

You are constantly looking for ways to easily optimize your campaigns and attract the right customers at the right cost. Google’s Conversion Optimizer helps increase conversions across our search and display networks while decreasing cost per acquisition. Conversion Optimizer analyzes historical conversion data and adjusts bids on an ongoing basis to help you maximize your ROI. We're now extending the power of this automated bidding feature to app advertisers to help you drive efficient app installs at scale.

With Conversion Optimizer, instead of a traditional CPC bid, you can set a target cost per acquisition (CPA), based on your average cost per download. Conversion Optimizer will use historical conversion data and other signals to place CPC bids automatically, in order to hit the target CPA with as much volume as possible. While results vary per campaign, strong early results from our beta campaigns show a 20%+ decrease in cost per install with the addition of Conversion Optimizer. It’s important to note that Target CPA bidding does not guarantee a particular cost per install. The tool is now available to all advertisers that have created app promotion campaigns, and we’re excited to help you move beyond manual bid management to free, automated optimization.



Ad Formats

For advertisers looking to promote your apps to app users, capturing the attention of potential users and driving them to download your app is key. Many advertisers use our text ads to drive people to an Android or iOS app, and we've now optimized text ads for Android or iOS apps to include more information about what users are getting, what they have to pay for it, and how others feel about the app.

The ad rotates to display all the information when a user clicks on the ad.
The user has to click on Download to go to the app download page.

With AdWords, app advertisements are automatically updated with the latest information like reviews and ratings. You simply create a text ad that points to your app download page, and AdWords supplies the graphics and formatting. We’ve found that when app advertisers provide users with this kind of important information about their apps, many have seen their cost per conversion decrease by about 25%.



If you’d like to learn more about Google’s app promotion features and see a live demonstration of how to implement and optimize these tools in your AdWords account, tune into our webinar on September 12th at 10am PST. Register today by visiting this link: http://goo.gl/B49ma.



Posted by Chrix Finne, Product Manager, Mobile Ads

Announcing the September 6 DS release!

The latest DoubleClick Search (DS) release includes the following new features:

• Budget pacing report: Allows you to set a budget (different from a campaign’s daily budget) across multiple campaigns and see if you’re on track to spend it. Tracking spend against a budget goal is a common need for many users. These reports save time for agencies that need to look at such data on a regular basis. You can:




• Enter KPI expectations and see if your campaigns are on track to deliver on them.


• Visualize week-over-week, day-over-day, or month-over-month trends and changes easily.


• See how each campaign is contributing toward budget and KPI.

Learn more about Budget pacing reports on the Help Center, and look for an in-depth blog post in the coming days.

• Inventory management is now fully launched: We recently blogged about the beta release of DS inventory management, which allows you to use your Google Merchant Center feeds to efficiently and automatically update your search campaigns. This feature is now available to all DS users. Check out the Help Center to learn more about managing your inventory in DS.

• See the number of changes to campaigns and other objects: These new columns display the number of changes to campaigns, ad groups, ads, or keywords for the specified date range in the upper righthand corner. They introduce change history information into the main campaign management functionality. You can:




• Discover the number of changes for any object by using the new Impact analysis default view (above the performance summary graph, click the first dropdown to the right of View). This view displays all changes columns, along with some stats such as clicks, actions, and revenue. You can use this view to help track these metrics and quickly determine the campaign changes that caused the metric changes.


• Click a number under one of the changes columns, and DS will take you to a Change history page with details on each change.


• Use impact analysis and date comparison together to correlate performance variations with changes made to objects.


• Chart these columns on the performance summary graph. For example, select Ad changes from the Select a metric dropdown, and see a visual representation of the total number of ad changes within the current date range.

• See when an object was created in DS: Find the new and not-so-new by adding the Creation time column to see when an object (such as a keyword) was created in DS. To access this column, along with the individual changes columns, click the Columns button above the performance summary graph. Under Available columns, navigate to Change history > Change stats.

We also added quarterly and yearly options for date range. When selecting a date range in the DS UI, there are new options for This quarter, Last quarter, This year, and Last year.

Read the Help Center release notes for more information on these features, and on issues fixed in this release.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

DoubleClick Ad Exchange Buyer REST API Version 1.1 Released

Version 1.1 of the Buyer REST API has been released bringing the following changes:

• A list method has been added for the Creatives resource. 


• The adgroupId has been removed from the Creatives resource. 


• A region property has been added to the bidderLocation[] object. 

Creatives.List Method added 

The list method retrieves a list of all of the authenticated user's active creatives. Optional parameters allow you to set the maximum number of Creatives resources to return each time you call the method. You can also filter the contents of the list by the status of creatives, for example to restrict the contents of the list to those ads that have been approved. Valid status values are approved, disapproved, and not_checked.



Removed adgroupId property 

Beginning with Version 1.1 of the Buyer REST API, the adgroupId will no longer be returned from method calls. In addition, passing the adgroupId value to a Creatives method will raise an error. However, a creative submitted through the API can be used to respond to a pretargeting match for any ad group. The removal of this value means that the key to uniquely identify a creative now consists of accountId + buyerCreativeId.



Added region property to bidderLocation[] 

The bidderLocation[] list in the Account resource now includes a third value. The region property describes the region for the bidder location. You can contact your customer representative to determine whether or not your account is in the new quota system.



The value of region describes the geographical region from which the Ad Exchange should send requests. This value is used by the new quota system. Allowed values:

• ASIA 


• EUROPE 


• US_EAST 


• US_WEST 

 -- Irene Smith, Ad Exchange Team

Discussions in Google Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheets users now have the ability to collaborate more efficiently with discussions in Google Spreadsheets. This updates brings features like the ability to +mention users to add them to the discussion.



Release track:

Rapid release



Editions included:

Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Government and Education



For more information:

http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2012/09/google-spreadsheets-now-with-discussions.html



whatsnew.googleapps.com


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Setting lookback windows in Path to Conversion reports

Have you ever changed your Floodlight lookback window and then waited a few days in order to see how conversion numbers would change? Have you ever misconfigured your lookback windows in the trafficking UI and wished you could regenerate your conversion numbers with the correct lookback windows?

The new Path to Conversion report (P2C) available in DFA Reporting offers greater flexibility around setting and managing lookback windows when you run a report.

Example 1: I’m interested in seeing the impact on conversions if I shorten the lookback window from its original 30-day Floodlight configuration.

Select “Custom” from the new Lookback Window drop-down under Report Properties.

The “From Floodlight” option simply uses the pre-calculated lookback window value that is already applied.

Unlike Floodlight lookback windows, which are based on calendar days, custom lookback windows use a simple 24-hour calculation. A 2-day value for clicks means that the clicks will need to be within 48 hours of the conversion to count. A 0 value will effectively remove clicks or impressions from attribution eligibility.

For this report, I want to allow a 7-day window for clicks and only a 3-day window for impressions.

Once I have changed the lookback window, to understand its effects I can add any of the following dimensions to my query:

Conversion Dimensions

• Floodlight Attribution Type indicates if the conversion is a click-through or a view-through conversion using the Floodlight lookback windows.


• Recalculated Attribution Type tells me if the conversion is a click-through or view-through conversion using the 7- and 3-day lookback windows I configured under Report Properties.

Per Interaction Dimensions

• Similarly, I can compare Floodlight Attributed Interaction to Recalculated Attributed Interaction to see how attribution changed using my new lookback windows.


• Within Floodlight lookback window indicates if the interaction was already in the Floodlight lookback window or if the new lookback window brought the interaction into this conversion path.

Example 2: I am seeing a number of conversion paths with large periods of inactivity for many users. I would like to evaluate the impact on conversions using only more recent activity without changing my original lookback window.

To do this, I can select the “Max gap between interactions” option under Report Properties.

Setting a limit on the number of days will end a conversion path if the distance between two elements in the path is greater than or equal to that number of days. This is good for tidying up longer paths to focus on more recent events.

This is just one simple demonstration of the power of the Path to Conversion report. The new lookback window tools in the Path to Conversion report provide a way to analyze your conversion data with greater flexibility.

Try it today and let us know how it helps you out!

Posted by Jason Gessner, Software Engineer, DFA

Creating better relationships and improving productivity

We’ve been amazed at the adoption of the recommendation engine, a new tool that helps advertisers and publishers find new relationships and links based on relevance and revenue potential. Google Affiliate Network now sees over half of all new relationships being created from our recommendations. Today, we’re excited to share new enhancements that further simplify the process of creating relationships and getting links.



For publishers:



Creating relationships

The Advertisers tab includes three sub-tabs to help you easily sort through new opportunities.

• Recommended is now the default view for the Advertisers tab, featuring a customizable list of available advertiser programs that Google algorithms predict may be a good fit for you.


• Invitations are from advertisers that want to work with you -- including those with private programs. To join, just click the ‘Join’ button for that invitation.


• Browse existing shows the status of advertiser programs you’ve already applied to.

Getting the best links

The Links tab features recommendations for links that we estimate will perform well for you, and we now include new criteria for recommendations, like Staff picks and Exclusive opportunities. You can still view ‘Browse all links’ to search for links as normal. You'll also notice three new sub-tabs – we've consolidated Products and Subscriptions under the Links tab.

• Recommended links are ranked primarily based on average earnings.


• Staff picks are curated by Google Affiliate Network account teams based on relevant performance or seasonality.


• Exclusive opportunities feature links only available through Google Affiliate Network.

For advertisers:



Creating relationships

The Publishers tab includes three sub-tabs to help you easily sort through high-potential publishers that may be a good fit for your program.

• Recommended is now the default view for the Publishers tab. New search filters enable you to quickly narrow down the list of publishers that are a good fit.


• Pending makes it easy for you to review publishers and quickly approve them in bulk. We sort publishers by relevance to help you approve the best recommendations first.


• Browse existing shows the status of publishers that you’ve already taken action on, as well as any non-joined publishers you can recruit.

Please let us know what you think by posting a comment here or in the Google Affiliate Network forum.




Posted by:

Ali Pasha, Product Manager

Robin Anil, Software Engineer