Attend an upcoming Ad Exchange training webinar

If you're interested in gaining more expertise with DoubleClick Ad Exchange to improve your buyer experience, be sure to join our upcoming webinars. We offer online eLearning and certification, along with pre-recorded webinars. Register in the Ad Exchange Help Center (sign-in required).

Introduction to AdX Policy – 11/13
Join our live webinar to learn a general overview of Ad Exchange policies, the enforcement process, along with live Q&A. We'll also provide a list of policy resources to reference after the event.

What’s new with RTB? – 12/4
Come learn about what's changed in the past six months with Real-time bidder, as well as the great features that are coming out. The product management and engineering team will walk you through all the changes that have occurred and how you can take advantage of them to improve your use of RTB.

Pre-recorded webinar: Overview and trafficking
Watch this webinar to learn about setting up private deals with ad exchanges, what's needed to get started, and steps to launch. We recommend this webinar for users who want to learn more about accessing available inventory and direct deals.

• Watch

What's New with AdX? – Detect & Correct and REST API Updates – 10/23
Come learn about what new updates have been made to AdX, as well as the great features that are coming out. The product management and other cross-functional teams will walk you through policy updates and how you can take advantage of them to improve your use of AdX.

When you register for these webinars in our Help Center, be sure to read our latest product updates, too.

We've designed Ad Exchange training to arm you with the tools you need to optimize with Ad Exchange. If you're new to the Ad Exchange, these webinars are a great place to start.

Posted by Asha Balendran, DoubleClick Ad Exchange Product Trainer

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Join us for "Digital Dialogues: Making Mobile Work with HTML5" - 10/24 @ 10am PT

Following the recent launch of our Mobile White Paper, “Unlocking the HTML5 Opportunity: What’s the Holdup?”, this week we’re continuing the conversation around unlocking the mobile opportunity with a Digital Dialogues Hangout-on-Air.

There's no question that people are spending more time across screens, and the opportunity to reach them there is huge. Advertisers, media and creative agencies are still trying to figure out the best way to leverage mobile in their campaigns, optimize for it and build engaging multi-screen creatives. Publishers continue to strategize on ways to deliver and monetize engaging cross-screen consumer experiences.

Join us for a conversation on how technologies and solutions like HTML5 can make cross-screen creative and mobile advertising more accessible for the industry.

Speakers:

• Zach Chapman, VP of Digital Sales, ESPN.com
• Matt Cooper, Founder of Addroid
• Sissie Hsiao, Group Product Manager, Google

What: Digital Dialogues Hangout on Air: Making Mobile Work with HTML5

When: Thursday, 10/24 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET

Where: Think With Google G+ page.

RSVP here.

While you’re waiting, here’s some background reading:

• “Build Creative Campaigns Across Screens” -- Pete Crofut’s fourth iMedia article in his series “How Technology Makes Creative More intelligent”.
• “Unlocking the HTML5 Opportunity: What’s the Holdup?” -- DoubleClick/Illuminas Research White Paper and infographics

We hope you’ll be able to join us!

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing

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Piston boosts ROAS by 51%, conversions by 50% for retail client using inventory-aware campaigns

A few months ago, we announced improvements to our inventory-aware campaigns feature, which automatically creates and optimizes a retailer’s search campaigns, based on updates made to their Google Merchant Center product feed. Since then, we’ve seen some impressive results across the board, showing that inventory-managed keywords more than doubled return on ad spend for heavy users(1).

Today, we wanted to highlight one of our success stories around this feature. The following story comes from Piston -- a bicoastal digital agency in the US, who helped their retail client maintain a “stylish profile” by keeping their campaigns relevant using inventory-aware campaigns.

After working around the clock to keep up with ever-changing product descriptions, prices, and landing pages during a busy holiday season, Piston turned to inventory-aware campaigns to scale their campaign management across their retail client’s 8,000+ products.

“When we’re looking for a solution, the key questions we ask are: can this save us time, can this save us money, and does it have features that can really help us impact our bottom line? And with DoubleClick inventory-aware campaigns, the answer was always ‘Yes’.” says Jennifer Johnstone, Senior Performance Marketing Strategist at Piston. “Inventory-aware campaigns allow us to save time from manually managing product inventory, enable us to spend our dollars on more efficient product level keywords, and help us drive more revenue than manual campaign builds.”

One quarter after adopting inventory-aware campaigns, Piston saw a 51% rise in ROAS, a 26% jump in CTR, and a 50% boost in conversion rate, compared to manually-managed campaigns. Additionally, inventory-aware campaigns allowed them to expand keyword coverage on both products and SKUs by 49% -- all while saving an estimated 38 hours over one quarter since implementation.

To get the full scoop on Piston’s success with inventory-aware campaigns, download the full customer story here. Stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog and Google+ page for even more customer success stories.

1. Google internal data, 2013

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DoubleClick Bid Manager Joins FBX, Facebook's Real-Time Bidding Exchange

Partnership has been key to Google’s success as a rising tide lifts all boats.  So we’re excited to announce a new way to help our clients succeed by working with Facebook to participate in FBX, their real-time bidding exchange. DoubleClick Bid Manager (formerly Invite Media) has been helping agencies and advertisers buy ad space on sites across the web for years.  We help clients access dozens of private and public exchanges in more than 75 countries, and continue to see double-digit quarter-over-quarter growth in spend – last quarter was our biggest ever.  We're continuing to invest significantly in our technology (you can read some of what we’ve been up to here) to help advertisers and agencies buy programmatically across all devices and formats. But we’re always looking at ways to serve our clients even better – starting in a few months, clients will be able to buy inventory on FBX via DoubleClick Bid Manager. We're looking forward to continuing our work to help our clients and partners.

-- Payam Shodjai, Senior Product Manager

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Creatives and media agencies: get trained online with DoubleClick Rich Media

Since launching our DoubleClick Rich Media Education Program, we've seen developers become more productive with ad creation and media agencies more effectively manage rich media creatives for display campaigns. But with increased adoption of HTML5 and the success of dynamic creative ad formats, we've heard from you that we need to both streamline training across products and customize it for the right user, while also adding more training content for advanced topics.

So, we've made a few changes to consolidate all training resources for each user, by role.

Rich Media and Studio training for creative agencies and developers

We've updated DoubleClick Rich Media Fundamentals eLearning & Certification to better align with Studio Certification. Focused toward creative agencies and developers, Rich Media Fundamentals eLearning provides an overview of DoubleClick Rich Media and Studio, and helps you ramp up on rich media basics at your own pace.

In Rich Media Fundamentals, you’ll learn how to:

• Build Flash and HTML5 creatives
• Publish to QA
• Use the API
• Build dynamic creatives and create/edit rules 
• Resolve common live issues

Rich Media Fundamentals includes a certification exam at the end of the course. Pass the exam and you'll get a printable certificate of completion you can use to show your proficiency.

Rich Media Fundamentals can benefit creative developers through faster creative builds, more efficient QA, and reduced turnaround times, and is a great introduction for Studio users who want to take Studio Certification to demonstrate expertise in building rich media ads.

Rich Media training for media agencies and marketers

1. We've revised DFA Academy to include a Rich Media Checklist (previously Rich Media Academy). If you're a media planner or ad trafficker, use the checklist to learn rich media during basic DFA training and be better equipped to know how rich media works in the context of display campaigns. (DFA Sign-in required) 
2. We've updated DFA Fundamentals eLearning & Certification to include an optional DoubleClick Rich Media module. Ad traffickers at a media agency might only need a higher level of training compared to a creative developer designing an ad, so we’ve added a rich media overview to DFA Fundamentals (Enroll -- DFA sign-in required) 
3. We've added a rich media live issues section to the DFA Help Center to help media agencies who manage rich media creatives in DFA to troubleshoot common issues. (DFA sign-in required)

Ready to get started? Sign up through the links above, and note any sign-in requirements.

Don’t forget to sign up to receive the latest news, product updates, features, tips, and research information from DoubleClick!

Posted by Hemmy Edge, DoubleClick Rich Media Product Trainer

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Tutorial Tuesday: Add a new dimension to your work with the Google Web Designer CSS Panel

Welcome to week three of our Google Web Designer Tutorial Tuesday series. So far, we have given you an overview of the tool’s interface and have helped you get started with animation. This week, we’re going to teach you about Google Web Designer’s CSS panel, which brings design and dimension to your creative. 

The CSS panel shows the styling for any element that you select. The panel has: 

All the basic features you need...

• View and edit existing CSS values
• Create new styles for a single element or multiple elements
• Add properties, classes and rules

...plus a full 3D authoring environment...

• Rotate elements in 3D with the 3D Object Rotate Tool
• Change the position of an element in 3D with the 3D Translation Tool

You can learn more about designing in 3D in the Help Center, and you can learn more about the CSS panel in our latest YouTube video. 

….and cross browser publishing

We take cross-browser support very seriously and we want to be the default choice for users building HTML5 content. For this reason, we’ve worked to ensure that Google Web Designer allows you to publish your content across a number of different browsers. While GWD’s CSS rules only show webkit browser prefixes, the tool generates additional CSS rules that make your creative compatible with IE10, Firefox and Opera in addition to webkit based browsers. Both the components and Javascript generated work with all evergreen browsers.

See you in two Tuesdays

There will be no Tutorial Tuesday post next week, as we want to give you time to catch up on everything we’ve covered so far. We’ll be back with our last Tutorial Tuesday post on 10/29, where we’ll walk through how to create interstitial and expandable ads. We have three instructional videos to help you with each type of ad, and you can view them all on the our YouTube Channel.

Share your feedback

We hope this blog series has been helpful for you. Please don’t hesitate to share your feedback with us on our user forum or our Google+ page. We’re always working to improve Google Web Designer, and your feedback counts.

Posted by Jasmine Rogers, Program Manager, Google Web Designer

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Get ready to rock the holidays with instant conversion data in DoubleClick Search

Keeping up with your retail search campaigns is no easy task. On top of monitoring sales, profits, inventory levels, and the competition, you also want to seize every opportunity during short-lived periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

At DoubleClick Search, we've been focused on delivering the speed you need to maximize performance during the holiday season. So, today we wanted to shine a light on our investments in instant conversion data and the benefits it delivers.

Meredith Spitz, Sr. Analyst with Starcom, tells us why fresh and accurate campaign metrics are important:

“Knowing how we’re performing throughout the day has allowed us to take advantage of more opportunities, instead of relying on stale data. We’ve been able to hit our goals more accurately because of instant conversion data.”

Immediate insights, 32% conversion lift in volatile search landscapes with near real-time data

Real-time data can power performance in two key ways. First, as real-time data flows into DoubleClick Search reports, your talented search team has the information they need to make campaign optimizations on the fly, and drive performance.  Up-to-the-minute insights make the difference between success and failure, while also saving time.

And when it comes to automated bid optimization, DoubleClick Search uses the same real-time data to update bids frequently - up to four times per day - using fresher data to more closely track to your goals.  

At iProspect, they’re already seeing the benefits of faster bid optimization, as shared by Account Supervisor Jessica Dearien,

“We’ve been able to test DoubleClick Search bid optimization with real-time data and we’ve already seen fantastic results. That’s even more critical moving into the high-volume shopping days of the holiday season.”

The below graphic illustrates how updating bids four times a day helps track closer to a $5 CPA goal than updating bids only once per day. Please note the $5 CPA is for example purposes only - your goal CPA will vary based on the characteristics of your business.

Our team conducted an internal study to understand just how helpful, in aggregate, changing bids more often could be.  We found that in volatile search landscapes, 4x daily bid changes improved conversion volume an average of 32% over 1x daily bid changes, while also keeping CPA slightly lower for a given CPA goal.*

*(Google internal study data)

In addition to bidding more frequently, DoubleClick Search’s bid optimization technology keeps your campaigns in top shape with capabilities like:

• Near-real-time trend detection: We use both past and current data to predict future trends.  Our bid optimization takes into account seasonality, holiday periods, and sudden spikes in demand due to offline events like weather, accounting for fluctuations in traffic around external events.

• Performance-based spend allocation: DoubleClick Search intelligently allocates budgets dynamically to various keywords, based on their performance.  It considers the opportunity cost of each keyword and allocates spend accordingly.

• Portfolio bidding for low-volume keywords: These keywords are often overlooked by manual or simple bid optimization methods, as they provide little or no data to use. However, ignoring long-tail terms can add up across the board—leaving opportunity on the table. DoubleClick Search groups similar keywords together and bids on them as a whole.

To get the most out of your search campaigns this holiday season, rely on instant conversions from DoubleClick Search for the real-time insights and optimizations that will help your team succeed.  For more information, check out our instant conversions video and bid optimization white paper.

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