Improved workflow and productivity in DS

(cross posted from the DoubleClick Search blog. To learn more about DoubleClick Search, contact your Account Manager or request a call from a DoubleClick Search specialist.)

In addition to Floodlight segmentation, we’ve made some exciting enhancements to the DS3 UI over the past few weeks, including new filter options, keyword defaults, and a settings bar for campaigns and ad groups. Read on to learn how these new features can help you work faster and better in DS3.

New filter options: ‘Does not contain’ and ‘Starts with’

When you set up a filter that has the options Contains, Equals, and Does not equal, there are now two additional options: Does not contain and Starts with. When combined with the recently released ability to filter by multiple terms, you have an even more powerful set of filtering options.

Apply default settings to keywords

When creating keywords in the DS3 UI, you can now apply default values to keywords as you enter them in the text box. This makes it easy to apply the same values to several keywords, while also customizing the settings for some keywords when needed.

For example, if one keyword in an ad group is performing well, you can set a specific max CPC bid of $10, while keeping all other keywords at the default bid of $5. To apply a default, exclude the field from the row in the text box. Learn more about the proper formatting of default keyword settings in the Help Center.

New settings bar for campaigns and ad groups

When you select a campaign or ad group in DS3, you’ll now see a settings bar near the top of the page. This bar gives you a quick overview of campaign/ad group settings. If you need to make a change, you can simply click the Campaign settings or Ad group settings button and edit the settings in the inline panel that appears. Look for even more useful information in this bar in the future.

For more information about the latest DS3 release, including fixes to known issues, check out the release notes. And keep an eye on the blog for information about improvements to uploads, downloads, and reporting!

Posted by the DoubleClick Search Team

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Counting All the Cookies in Ad Planner

We’re always looking at ways to improve data in DoubleClick Ad Planner. For example, back in April we changed the algorithm for calculating unique visitors (users). Now we are also updating the way we estimate unique visitors (cookies). Generally you should see this value go up across the board which will more accurately represent the relationship between real people and cookies.

Previously we looked at a sample of cookies for a site and built a model to extrapolate overall statistics for that site. Now we have a much smarter process where we look at the overall number of cookies on a site and use that to estimate overall traffic, resulting in bigger, more accurate, values. As before, we look only at the aggregate number of cookies, not the cookies themselves.

The Ad Planner product team is continually striving to bring the most accurate and comprehensive view of sites on the internet to our users. The end result of this latest effort is that now you’ll see more accurate cookie values represented in Ad Planner.

Roshan Khan, Product Manager

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Ushering in a New Era for DFA Reporting

You might notice a small change when you sign in to DoubleClick for Advertisers today -- the link to DFA Analytics at the top of the page now reads “DFA Reporting.” Although this is a small change to the interface, it represents a big step towards an entirely new reporting system in DFA -- one that is fast and flexible, fully integrated with other DoubleClick advertiser products and that can deliver key insights in this world of advertising to the multi-device, always-on consumer.

The rubber met the road with last month’s reporting launch of Report Builder and Multi-Channel Funnels in DFA, representing the first of many exciting new developments for reporting in the coming year.

Please join the DoubleClick product management team for an upcoming webinar, Introducing the New DFA Reporting, to learn more about these major enhancements to DFA’s reporting system.

Date
October 18, 2011

Time
12:30pm EST / 9:30am PST

Register
To register for this webinar please visit http://tinyurl.com/dfareporting

We look forward to hearing your feedback and questions during the webinar!

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

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Attend a DFA Training in October

Whether you're looking to brush up on certain features of DoubleClick for Advertisers or are entirely new to using the product, the DFA training team offers a variety of training experiences that best suit your needs. In addition to in-person classroom training for a deep dive on the product, we also offer a regular rotation of webinars focused on a particular hot topic.

Visit the DoubleClick Learn Center to register (sign-in required).

Classroom Training

DFA Fundamentals: This all day course (10am-5pm) is useful for new DFA users who are looking to understand the fundamentals of third-party ad serving including best practices for campaign trafficking, serving your ads and pulling reports.

• Chicago - October 19
  
• Minneapolis - October 24
  
• Santa Monica - October 24
  
• San Francisco - October 26
  
• New York - November 2

DFA Trafficking Lab: This lab provides users with practice at running campaigns. It covers basic DFA functionality including assigning landing pages to creatives, updating campaigns, setting up geo-targeting and using creative rotation. As a prerequisite, attendees should have taken the DFA Fundamentals class in the previous two months or have less than two months trafficking experience.

• Chicago - October 20
• Minneapolis - October 25
• Santa Monica - October 25
• San Francisco - October 27
• New York - November 3

MediaVisor: Learn more about MediaVisor in this course that covers how to plan and create campaigns, advertisers, site placements and IOs as well as how to send RFPs.

• New York - November 3

Webinar Training This month join us for webinars focusing on how to work with Ads in DFA. For those not able to attend the classroom training sessions, we also offer monthly webinars for both DFA and MediaVisor Fundamentals.

DFA Ads - Making Them Work for You - October 11 This webinar will teach you the fundamentals of setting up ads in DFA while thinking strategically about campaigns. We'll tackle questions such as "how can you set up ads as efficiently as possible?" and "how do you manage start and end dates so that the right things run at the right time?" and "how do you avoid serving too many defaults?"

Priority, Frequency Capping, Targeting and Other Ad Level Capabilities - October 18 DFA gives you the flexibility to do a lot with your ads, you just have to discover the possibilities. This webinar will teach you how to leverage things like priority, frequency capping, and targeting in order to enhance your campaigns.

Click Trackers and 1x1's - Getting it Right - October 25 Did you know that you can track site-served creatives using DFA? Do you know how to best work with sites to ensure that click trackers get implemented correctly? Well, we can teach you. Trafficking these types of ads can get tricky and we're here to show you how to get it right.

DFA for New Users - October 12 and October 26 An introduction to the fundamentals of DFA.

MediaVisor Fundamentals - October 18 An introduction to the fundamentals of MediaVisor.

To sign up for all upcoming webinars and view recordings of past webinars, visit the DoubleClick Learn Center (sign-in required). And be sure to check back with us on this blog for regular updates to our training schedule.

Posted by Amanda Gangl, DFA Product Trainer

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Introducing new DFA Reporting

We know that as online marketers your goals are to drive greater value from your advertising and to optimize future results based on the learnings from current campaigns. Campaign reporting is central to that effort, and so with this in mind, the DoubleClick for Advertisers product team has been working hard on developing some innovations to the reporting system that will impart greater insight into your role as a marketer.

Today we’re launching the new DFA Reporting system with the introduction of two features -- Report Builder and Multi-Channel Funnels -- that offer the power, flexibility and access to near real-time data required to keep up with today’s always connected, multi-device consumer.

Report Builder: In-Depth, Powerful Campaign Reporting
Report Builder, a new query-based reporting tool, allows you to build campaign reports to the exact specifications that you require. Report Builder is the gateway to reporting for all integrated products from across key DoubleClick products including DoubleClick Search and DoubleClick Rich Media.

Multi-Channel Funnels: At-a-Glance Insights on Conversions
Similar to the feature available in Google Analytics, Multi-Channel Funnels in DFA allow you to chart out greater insight into the paths your customers took from the initial interaction to the final conversion.

A collection of three reports are available to help marketers better understand what channels or mix of channels are helping to drive conversions from campaigns tracked in DFA.

• Attributed Channels outlines which channels are contributing to and resulting in conversions.
  
• Path Length reveals the number of interactions a customer had with your ads before converting.
  
• Time Lag tells you the length of time it took between the first interaction with your campaign and the last before conversion.

We’re getting great feedback from clients currently piloting the tool and will be incorporating their feedback into developing additional funnel reports. Make sure to follow the blog for latest developments on new reporting features available in DFA.

In the next couple of weeks we will be offering a free webinar to cover in greater detail the latest developments in DFA reporting. Look out for an announcement here on the blog or sign up here to be notified by email. We’ll be walking through the reports and common use cases and you’ll have an opportunity to ask questions. We hope you’ll be able to make it!

Aaron Nelson, Product Manager

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+1 Button in DoubleClick Rich Media: Attract and Showcase Social Recommendations

Last March, Google introduced the +1 button on search results and ads to make it easier for people to get recommendations from the people they trust right when they’re searching. With just a single click, the +1 button lets signed-in Google users publicly recommend content to friends and contacts. Since then, webmasters have been installing the +1 button on their pages. The button has already been installed on over a million websites across the web with over 4 billion impressions daily. These +1 recommendations tell others, “This is something to check out!”

Starting now, advertisers have the option to include the +1 button in any DoubleClick Rich Media ad. This provides advertisers with the ability to include the +1 button in our third-party rich media creatives and to control the inclusion of the +1 button at the creative level. This new option provides rich media advertisers with a simple and scalable way to increase positive and public advocacy of their brand online.

Xbox and AKQA London have worked with DoubleClick to include the +1 button in their upcoming rich media ads for the Gears of War 3 release.

Beginning in October, the +1 button will also appear across display ads served directly through Google Display Network (GDN) and in select mobile inventory. Wherever a +1 action originates, be it from Google’s search engine, in a display or mobile ad on GDN, in a DoubleClick Rich Media ad or from a web page, the +1 endorsement applies universally to a single page. Each +1 action adds to the overall +1 count for a page.

We look forward to helping advertisers accelerate social recommendations of their content by adding the +1 button to DoubleClick Rich Media ad units. For more details and best practices on including the +1 button in DoubleClick Rich Media ad units, please download our overview here. To get started with +1 in your next campaign, contact your DoubleClick Rich Media account representative.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

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Introducing Ad Exchange Direct Deals

The rise of Ad Exchanges has made it easier for buyers and sellers to connect, using technologies such as real-time bidding (RTB) to help unlock more value for every impression. Exchanges have also provided a number of efficiency benefits such as the elimination of paperwork (known as “insertion orders”) and trafficking for every transaction. Increasingly, deal types have been evolving on this platform as publishers have been making exclusive tiers of inventory available to select buyers via exchanges, a model typically known as a “private exchange”. Private exchanges can provide buyers with enhanced access to premium inventory.

While buyers and sellers have been transacting with anonymous inventory in the DoubleClick Ad Exchange auction for more than a year, it was clear that the industry was also ready for yet another evolutionary step in exchange buying. Both buyers and sellers wanted even more flexibility, control and pricing certainty for some transactions. In tandem, we’ve continued to evolve the Ad Exchange to meet these needs by rolling-out a new solution called Ad Exchange Direct Deals.

This new type of exchange deal allows buyers to access inventory from publishers at a fixed price through DoubleClick Ad Exchange. This differs from typical deals where the price is set through the auction. With Direct Deals, buyers get access to inventory on a pre-auction basis, thus getting “first look” access.

For buyers, this creates a bridge between the spot and reserve markets for display inventory. It helps buyers benefit from the high quality publisher inventory that the reserve market is known for while preserving the audience targeting power that the data-driven spot market is known for. With Direct Deals, buyers keep the efficiency of the exchange transaction, such as “insertion-orderless” buying and an ability to buy on an impression-by-impression basis, all while enjoying the pricing certainty of the directly negotiated deal. Accessing inventory through Direct Deals in combination with using brand-friendly formats like in-stream video and rich media will help advertisers execute brand campaigns against specific audiences and further unlock the branding potential of exchange-based buying.

Premium publishers, such as Washington Post and About.com, have been early testers of this feature working with leading exchange buyers such as re-targeting network, Criteo. For Criteo, this feature has meant new opportunities to connect with publishers. Jonathan Wolf, Chief Buying Officer at Criteo says, “Working directly with publishers has always been critical for Criteo, as a way to access the best inventory and deliver the highest CPMs to publishers. We are delighted to be using Direct Deals as a new way to achieve this, with all the advantages of a real-time mechanism.”

Here at Google, we are excited to introduce this new level of flexibility to Ad Exchange to help buyers improve the effectiveness of their campaigns and sellers profit from real-time display buying on their terms. DoubleClick Ad Exchange advertisers and publishers can contact their account manager to join the Direct Deals beta program.

Posted by Scott Spencer, Director of Product Management

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