Tracking Organic Searches with DoubleClick Natural Search

Today we released a new natural search tracking product, DoubleClick Natural Search, which offers insight into the effectiveness of your search engine optimization efforts in driving click throughs and conversions to your site.

Because this report is integrated with the rest of the DoubleClick advertiser platform, you can track how natural search, also known as organic search, is performing against your paid search and display campaigns.

This launch represents yet another way we’re focused on providing agencies and advertisers a comprehensive view of campaign performance across search and display.

Key insights from DoubleClick Natural Search

• What organic searches are driving traffic and conversions to your website?
• What new keywords should I include in your paid search campaigns that you haven’t yet considered?
• How are your paid search and search engine optimization efforts are working together to meet your meet marketing goals?
• And also how they work in concert with your display campaigns

Details on natural searches
With this report you get granular detail on organic searches for supported search engines -- Google, Yahoo, MSN (including Bing), Ask.com and AOL.

The following reporting fields are available in DoubleClick Natural Search:

• Natural Search Term
• Landing Page
• Search Engine
• Country Domain
• Query String
• A variety of Search Engine Properties such as images, videos, news
• Natural Search Visits
• Conversion metrics associated with Spotlight tags (DoubleClick’s standard conversion tracking tag)

DoubleClick Natural Search requires an activation process and also that you be on DoubleClick Search as well. If you’re interested in getting this solution, contact your account manager or contact us.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

New Dashboard Feature in DART Search

On February 16, we introduced a new dashboard feature available as a beta release in DART Search. This latest feature is just one of the ways we are making DART Search easier to use and even more effective for managing your search campaigns.

The dashboard provides a snapshot of performance across the search campaigns you are running through DART Search. Budget monitoring, tracking performance trends and message alerts are now easily accessible in the dashboard tab.

Read more about this new feature in the DART Search Dashboard section of the Help Center. (login required)

Posted by Pamela Eng

Ad Level Reporting in DART Search

We all know that copy is an important element in managing paid search campaigns. It’s no longer just about getting your keywords in the top positions or having 20 different bid strategies. It’s important to make smart decisions on your messaging to get the right customers and create a positive experience after the click happens. Wouldn’t it be great to see the performance of a keyword along with the ad that actually contributed to the conversion? Well now with our new Ad/Keyword Segmentation Report you can understand which pairing of keyword and copy returns the best results and further refine your ad groups.

Speak to your DART Search TAM to learn more about this report. You can find it by navigating to Search Related reports in DART Search and then choose Ad/Keyword Segmentation Report. Now that you know it’s available, be sure to look out for upcoming tips and tricks on how to better take advantage of this report.

Posted by Natalie Brecher

David Fall Re-Elected to SEMPO's Board of Directors

Congratulations to our very own David Fall, vice president of product management, search technology, for his second term on SEMPO's Board of Directors! David will be serving as Treasurer and Co-Chair of the Metrics and Standards Committee this year, and plans to continue to play an active role over the next two years.

DoubleClick's participation on the Board provides opportunities to contribute in discussions about better advancement of search advertising, streamlining the process, and educating and informing the search community at-large.

Posted by Natalie Brecher

Free Advice for Search Engine Marketers

I read a blog post recently that gives advice to advertisers looking for an SEM. The blogger insists that in today's world an SEM firm must have a solid background in global equity markets and hedge funds. The article states, in so many words, that a minimum requirement for an SEM should be that it has a former Wall Street executive on staff.

Now, I've got a bit of advice for all of you SEMs out there. Before you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire a VP from Wall Street, consider the following free advice:

• Know your advertiser's objectives. Does the advertiser want to increase brand awareness? Does the advertiser have an ROI objective? Does the advertiser have a set budget, or is the sky the limit as long as the ROI target is being reached? Finding clarity regarding goals and objectives with your client is essential to building a successful online marketing program.
• Break campaigns into focused Ad Groups. Make sure that the ads in each Ad Group are appropriately paired with the keywords. Start with the advice provided by your search engine representatives, and adjust from there, based on performance and ingenuity.
• Develop and maintain relevant ad copy and landing pages. Bid management is only one factor among several which affect ad ranking. Build compelling, relevant copy that attracts consumers to click on your ads. Keep the content up-to-date. Test copy variations in distinct Ad Groups and compare performance. Make sure that the landing pages are relevant to the copy and to the keywords.
• Use the Geo-Targeting tools provided by the search engines. Make sure the ads are appropriately targeted towards geographic regions. Don't waste budget targeting ads towards geographic regions which don't match your target audience.
• Use match types intelligently. Explore broad, phrase, and exact match types. For each keyword, test the various match type options. Some keyword/match type combinations may result in too many clicks that don't convert well for you -- identify these combinations and eliminate them from your program. Also use negative keywords to filter out irrelevant matches.
• Study the interaction between keywords and conversions. Just because a consumer searches for "flight to Vegas" doesn't mean he or she will book a flight to Las Vegas. The consumer may end up purchasing a bus ticket to Yonkers. Know the profit margins associated with the various conversion types so that you can set CPA or ROAS goals accordingly. If there are wide variances in profit margin in your product mix, make sure you are using a bid management system that allows you to assign goals based on the conversions as well as the keywords.
• Make sure you are using a tracking, reporting, and bid management tool with a data accuracy policy. You need good data to make good decisions. Your technology provider should give you timely and accurate click and cost data, taken directly from the search engines. Make sure your technology provider does not use unreliable referrer data for bid management calculations.

I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. Search marketing is complex, but that's not a good excuse to abandon common sense.

Good Luck and Happy Holidays.

Posted by Karl Meyer

MSN, DoubleClick and SPOCK

Here's one more example of DoubleClick's unparalleled level of integration with the search engines. MSN has just issued an online collaboration tool called SPOCK, which is exclusively for the purpose of facilitating communication between MSN and DoubleClick. Based on Microsoft's Sharepoint application, SPOCK will facilitate sharing of information about the AdCenter API, product releases, new features, and the like. It allows DoubleClick employees to ask questions and discuss client issues. DoubleClick is the first company to which MSN is making this type of customized application available.

Posted by Dave Fall

DART Search Product Enhancements

We are pleased to announce the release of the latest version of DART Search on Saturday, July 14th, 2007. In this release, we will upgrade DART Search with the following new features:

Yahoo Geo-Targeting in DART Search

DART Search users can now use geo-targeting at the campaign level for Yahoo. This feature allows you to target prospective customers in the geographic locations that your company supports. By default, your geo-targeting preference is set to display ads to your entire market, which is the country or multi-country region in which you are advertising. Yahoo Geo-Targeting lets users take control of their targeting with three distinct types of geo-targeting:

• Your entire market
• Your State, Territory, or Province
• Your City or Surrounding Area

Additional Reporting Columns

We added the following columns to the DART Search Account, Campaign, Group, Type, and Category reports:

• Cost Per Action Fee
• Cost Per Order Fee
• Average Position

Along with the features outlined above the DART Search team has made great strides enhancing the UI speed, Data Processing capabilities and the Scalability of DART Search.

Posted by Dave Fall

It's More than Bid Management, of Course

Eric Enge recently published an article called "Are Bid Management Tools Still Useful?" on ClickZ Search Engine Watch. The article reviews a session at the recent Search Engine Expo conference about whether or not bid management is dead. According to Enge, "The panelists ultimately agreed that bid management is a useful tool, but that in today's advertising environment you need to do much more in addition to what the bid management tool can do."

We couldn't agree more. That's why we continue to make DART Search a comprehensive search management platform. Bid management is a core component, certainly, but there's much more to our product. Here are a few of the features in DART Search in addition to automated bid management:

Geographic Targeting -- Currently supported for Google (Yahoo! support is coming soon).

Budget Management & Reporting -- Get budget alerts via email, change multiple budgets at once automatically, and monitor your spend versus your budget. Fully supported for Google, Yahoo, MSN. Also, ask your DoubleClick representative about the daily offline Google Budget Cap Alert Report.

Match Types -- Supported for Google, Yahoo! and MSN. This gives you another dimension to work with as you drive the most relevant traffic to your site.

Content Targeting -- A great way to drive traffic to your site is to advertise on Google's AdSense network. DART Search offers full support for AdSense via Content Targeting. Site Targeting is also available -- it's currently in beta.

Ad Trafficking & Synching -- Via the APIs of the major search engines, DART Search allows you create multiple ads per Ad Group and have the ads automatically trafficked to the search engines. We also synchronize each ad nightly to ensure the status of your ads (live, paused, etc.) is accurately reflected in the interface.

Yahoo! Ad Quality Score -- To help you manage your ads on Yahoo's new relevancy-based platform, we collect and display the quality score for each Yahoo ad managed via DART Search.

Google Quality Based Bidding -- DART Search collects Google's quality minimum bids every day to help you keep your programs live.

De-duplication with Display Advertising -- Paid search marketing is one piece of your larger online media mix. It's important that your conversions be attributed to the appropriate ads. If you are using DART for Advertisers for your display advertising, your conversions are automatically deduplicated -- the ad (search or display) with the last click "wins" the attribution.

Click Fraud Monitoring -- DART Search collects the daily count of clicks directly from the search engines. DART Search also counts every click that it redirects. These are called "visits" to distinguish them from search engine clicks. DART Search reporting allows you to compare visits to clicks directly so that you can estimate how many fraudulent clicks are removed by the search engines.

There's much more to search marketing than bid management. That's why there's much more to DART Search, too.

Posted by Karl Meyer

Automated Bid Management De-Mystified

Keyword bidding on pay-per-click search engines is extremely complex.
The Bid Management module in DART Search removes the complexity from keyword bidding by bidding on keywords automatically, based on a straightforward set of rules that you provide.

We've recently published a comprehensive overview of our bid management technology, called DART Search Bid Management Overview. It's available to current clients in our award winning Knowledge Base. The overview describes the types of rules available, how the rules interact, and how frequently bidding takes place. It also addresses when and how you should manually intervene with automated bidding.

So, not only have we taken the complexity out of bid management, we've also taken the mystery out of our technology.

Contact your DART Search Technical Account Manager if you have any additional questions.

Posted by Dave Fall

Click Fraud

Click fraud is a type of internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad's link.

Online advertisers have been inundated with the term “click fraud”. Articles continue to try and help advertisers understand the level of fraud online as a percentage of total online advertising, but few talk to what they are doing to combat this growing problem.

DART Search leverages the multi-level click filtration of the search engines and imports their numbers directly into it own reporting, giving our users a clear advantage in fighting "click fraud".

Posted by Dave Fall