Top Five Reasons to Use DoubleClick Search

1 - Manage across multiple engine accounts from one interface

DS allows multiple accounts to be managed from one interface, so you can report on and optimise your AdWords, Bing, Baidu and Yahoo Japan accounts from one place! This has revolutionised the way we can manage accounts as it means we can add, pause or activate parts of the accounts from one place. We can also add negative keywords, make bid adjustments, automate bid strategies (more on this in point two), create landing page tests to name just a few of the time saving features. This takes away the time we have to spend switching between interfaces to make decisions and changes and allows us to focus on more strategic changes.

2 - Automated, more complex bidding strategies

We love an insightful bidding strategy at Periscopix, and DS allows strategies to be implemented across accounts in a simple, manageable format. An example of a basic strategy is to set a rule to scan all your campaigns for keywords with a low average position and a strong performance in the last 7 days. Then, have the rule label these keywords as ‘emerging high performers’ and increase their bids by 10%. The dynamic labelling allows us to keep a track of the emerging high performing keywords across the accounts (that’s right, optimisation for Bing too!), whilst the automatic bid increase helps us maximise those keywords week on week! Another example of this is to set a rule to change your bids according to conversion rate. By collecting your keywords into a specific group based on their performance you can use formulas to automatically make bid adjustments based on their conversion rate. For example, increase the bid by the relative percentage that the keyword is achieving above account average conversion rate. Bids can be updated every two hours and you can have multiple rules running for various strategies. Love it!

3 - Faster, robust administration and reporting

It’s simple to make changes outside of your bid strategies too with the use of formula columns, rules and labels. A top feature of mine is the dynamic labelling option mentioned in point two, which doesn’t have to be used to make changes but can track account movements. Also, reports are updated every fifteen minutes and can even be set to include net profits. You can import your spend outside media costs to get total profits and set up executive reports for each level of detail required. The executive reports can provide a snapshot of the account performance or more detail as you need it. You can also import data from other external variables to include in your reports, for example to show your net profit. They look great and update automatically so no more downloading to excel and getting stuck into pivot charts! Below is an example of a basic executive report:

4 - Data sharing across the DoubleClick stack

Data sharing from DS to DoubleClick Campaign & Bid Manager provides an opportunity to set up advanced attribution reports that you can customise to your model preferences. You can also opt to import natural search data into DS which can add to your attribution and data analysis if that floats your boat! This can be useful to see the paths people take to convert between paid and natural, and see if tweaks need to be made to your SEO strategy.

5 - Inventory Management campaigns

It’s simple to create high ROI inventory search campaigns through your Google Merchant feed. Previously, creating highly targeted keywords per product needed a lot of development time, and was a long and painful setup process. DS has changed the game by providing this awesome feature whereby you can link your feed and create your campaigns within the interface. This creates large scale campaigns very quickly and allows keywords and ads to be highly targeted to each product you sell. The ads update automatically through the feed so you can display the exact price of the product, and if it goes out of stock it will automatically pause and reactivate when back in stock. This saves loads of management time as it’s all automated, allowing more time for strategic input on bids, ad copy and more! Setup is quick and painless as long as you have a quality data feed, whilst management is very efficient with the aid of the above points. My colleague Rob is releasing a blog on inventory campaigns through DS soon so watch this space!

Anything else?

One last point that I just couldn’t leave out is budget management reports. These reports can help you pace through the month and plan for those busy periods. This is very useful as it allows you to track spend through each account in one place, and make quick budget changes if needed. (I had to squeeze an additional point in there as it’s so awesome!).

That sums up my favourite features from DS right now, there are so many more benefits to using the platform which we will be blogging on in the coming months.

The headline for DS is that it allows more management control on a large scale, whilst saving time on the laborious tasks that deliver less value against the time they take. It’s a one stop shop for anyone managing search campaigns at scale and I would highly recommend reading up on it more. If you have any questions do leave a comment or get in touch.

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