The Search Agency saves times and discovers insights at scale with executive reporting from DoubleClick Search

The search marketing landscape can change quickly and marketers need tools that can adapt just as fast - to understand immediate opportunities, and react if necessary. Late last year, we announced executive reporting from DoubleClick Search to give marketers the ability to see their campaign performance quickly, across their entire business or in any specific view. Today, we’d like to highlight how a top digital agency has found success with our tools to increase efficiency and get a better handle on their business.

With hundreds of clients around the globe, The Search Agency’s leaders were finding it increasingly hard to keep an eye on the health of their business. Keen to quickly understand the performance while eliminating time-consuming monthly and quarterly reporting tasks, they adopted executive reporting from DoubleClick Search to help oversee company’s interests.

The team needed a way to get the big picture—fast. They also had to have details such as monthly and quarterly reports of all the agency’s business, aggregated for industries or individual clients, with in-depth costs by month, quarter or device.

“That kind of detail is essential for day-to-day work, but also for quick KPIs,” says Wiratunga. “If I’m walking into a board room with my department leads about a certain client or if I get called into a meeting with 15 minutes to prep, I need a way to see—on the fly—exactly what’s happening with an account and all of its issues.” 

After implementing executive reporting, Wiratunga was able to save multiple hours each month and quarter by eliminating repetitive reporting tasks for his team, and focusing them instead on more strategic work. He was also able to prepare for client escalations on short notice as needed. To get the full scoop on The Search Agency’s success, read the full customer story here.

The Layouts Series 2.0 - Elevate your digital campaign: Millmaine trades up from static banner ads to rich media

This week, we’ve covered how to use Studio Layouts to give yourself more space for brainstorming while still being able to build HTML5 and engaging Lightbox and YouTube Mastheads with ease. Today we’ll focus on how you can elevate even your static image ads to rich media with Layouts.

Building rich media ads in Flash is complex, translating from Flash to HTML5 is even more complex, and the whole process can leave agencies throwing their hands in the air and reverting back to static image ads. DoubleClick Studio Layouts provide an opportunity to elevate your standard banner ads and trade up from static images to rich media, without the added cost and production time. 

Millmaine jumps from static image to HTML5 rich media in one hour.

Millmaine Entertainment Marketing typically created digital campaigns for their client, the National Gallery of Australia, that primarily involved standard ad units. According to Gerard Rowan, Creative Director at Millmaine, “normally, we would just run some static images, but I had been researching the possibilities of DoubleClick Studio and when I came across Layouts, it seemed like an easy way to implement a rich media campaign.”

Millmaine used the HTML5 Featured Video Layout to create a unit that reused the National Gallery’s existing TV commercial in a display ad, giving them more reach across the web. To promote the "Gold and the Incas" exhibit specifically, they built an ad that evoked scenes from the ancient Incan civilization intercut with shots of the actual exhibit.

Rowan says the process of creating the campaign with Layouts was “nice and quick”. In fact, he had the ads up and running within one hour. “With DoubleClick Studio Layouts, it was a matter of swapping out some of the elements, such as the background image and the call-to-action button, and then supplying a link to the YouTube video for our television commercial.”

The choice paid off. More than 84,000 people viewed it in one day, and 3,230 clicked through to learn more. In the end, more than a quarter million people saw the ad, which was used for a home page takeover of the main newspaper in Australia’s capital city, The Canberra Times. 

Rowan concluded, “We don’t usually have days and weeks to turn jobs around. More often we have a few hours. So we are looking for quick and effective solutions like DoubleClick Studio Layouts, which give us the potential to build more rich media content so we can do more exciting web ads for our clients.”

Learn more about Studio Layouts here, and get started today by visiting the Layouts tab in your DoubleClick Studio Account.

Posted by Becky Chappell, DoubleClick Product Marketing

The Layouts Series 2.0 - "Long-tail" display doesn’t have to mean boring ads: LG livestreams smartphone launch across the web

Yesterday’s blog post focused on how to easily build HTML5 ads using Studio Layouts. Today, we’ll discuss the various types of engaging ad units you can build with Studio Layouts.

While we recommend that you use Studio Layouts to build out your long-tail of ad units for your display campaign, that doesn’t mean that all of those units have to be bland banners. Studio Layouts offers a rich selection of IAB rising star and Engagement ad formats that let you make your creative ideas shine through interactive units that engage viewers.

LG livestreams using a Layout.

Take LG as an example -- in late 2013, LG faced the impending product launch of their new G2 smartphone, and they needed to convince a huge, global audience of the benefits of the device. Their launch centered around the unveiling of their phone at a big event in New York City, but they wanted to reach even more viewers who couldn’t attend in person. 

According to Danny Kim, Digital Marketing Manager with LG Mobile Communications in Seoul, Korea, “The launch campaign was focused on product awareness and branding. So the most important metrics were impressions, reach, and engagement.”

To achieve these goals, LG’s creative team used Studio Layouts to build a Lightbox Engagement ad unit that could livestream the video from their event across the web. By syndicating their video content through the live-stream, LG received “almost 10 million playbacks during the live-streamed show, which is a huge number for a product launch...the results were a pleasant surprise,” says Kim.

Additionally, by using Studio Layouts to build this ad, LG was able to complete the development process in record time. The QA process was accomplished in six hours and the tags trafficked in less than one day. Without Layouts, this process could take multiple days to complete, so using the Layouts template cut the turnaround time by more than 80%. 

What cool formats are available?

Studio Layouts currently offers six different formats of Lightbox Engagement ads, including Featured video and video gallery, as well as a masthead version of the image gallery, carousel and background masthead. (Engagement ads are Google Display Network’s proprietary ad format that measures user engagement via a required 2-second hover before the ad expands.) 

You can also build full YouTube Mastheads with Studio Layouts; we’ve turned our most common YouTube Masthead formats - Background, Carousel, Featured Video, and Image Gallery -- into Layouts so that you can easily create these units without the long review timelines that often accompany hand-coded YouTube Mastheads. 

To get started with Layouts, simply click on the Layouts tab in the top-level navigation bar in your DoubleClick Studio account. Learn more>>

Posted by Becky Chappell, DoubleClick Product Marketing

The Layouts Series 2.0 - Mobile, made accessible: Bask Digital creates HTML5 ads in minutes instead of hours

Yesterday we explained how you can use Studio Layouts to open up more time in your project schedule for the brainstorming and creative ideation for your campaigns. Today, we’ll specifically take a look at a customer who used Studio Layouts to gain access to HTML5 creative. 

Bask Digital discovers HTML5 Layouts

HTML5 ads can be tricky to build, but HTML5 Studio Layouts let you take the same assets from your flash ads, plug them into the HTML5 Layout, and create HTML5 ads in minutes. For Bask Digital, a California-based web and social media shop for political campaigns, this ease-of-use enabled them to incorporate HTML5 ads into their campaigns for the first time at a large scale.

Previously, managing partner Jonas Kleiner used to spend hours creating HTML5 ads from scratch, compressing videos and tinkering with the code. The whole process was very complex and the steep learning curve meant that training his design team to code HTML5 ads was not a realistic option.

Once Kleiner learned about Studio Layouts, he found that he and his team were able to build HTML5 ads in 15-30 minutes, compared to the hours it used to take them to hand code everything. 

“We just have to create a background image, embed a YouTube video, and it’s done. And then we have all the tracking and tabbing available, just like with other Doubleclick Rich Media ads,” says Kleiner. “HTML5 Layouts brings the campaign down to the core of design. Rather than using effects, you need to create a really good image, and then use the power of good graphic design to drive eyeballs.” 

Using Studio Layouts, Kleiner and his team at BASK have been able to incorporate HTML5 into their campaigns, where it otherwise would not have been feasible. 

What HTML5 Studio Layouts are available?

There are currently nine different HTML5 formats available in Studio Layouts, including 3D image gallery, scroll box, slideshow, swipe gallery, video and image gallery, GDN Lightbox Featured Video, YouTube video wall and a featured video format. You can view demos of all of these formats here. 

In the near future, we’ll be launching our first in-app Layouts (HTML5 ad units that can work within mobile and tablet applications) as well as additional HTML5 formats for mobile web. 

To get started with Layouts, simply click on the Layouts tab in the top-level navigation bar in your DoubleClick Studio account. Learn more>>

Posted by Becky Chappell, DoubleClick Product Marketing

The Layouts Series 2.0 - Making time for innovation: How to spend more time brainstorming your creative idea

We began “The Layout Series” in Aug. 2013 with the initial launch of DoubleClick Studio Layouts. This week, we’ll continue the theme with “The Layouts Series 2.0,” providing updates about the product and why it matters to you.

We have never talked to a creative who doesn’t want more time to brainstorm and innovate. The quick turnarounds for digital campaigns mean that you already have limited time to get your big ideas on paper. But your brainstorming time is also eaten up by the time it takes to build all the supplemental ad units needed to flesh out a campaign.

Today, your project timeline might look something like this:

When half of the project timeline has to be devoted to building out all the ads to match the media buy, your brainstorming and design time gets cornered into shorter periods at the beginning of the project.

We built DoubleClick Studio Layouts with this reality in mind. Studio Layouts help creative agencies and production shops condense the time it takes to build out that long-tail of standard units for a campaign, so that you have more time to come up with a great idea at the outset of the project. 

With Studio Layouts, your project timelines can now look more like this:

If you can build the long-tail of your ad units in half the time, you can make space at the beginning of the project for more brainstorming and design time, giving you the chance to come up with really innovative ideas. 

Once you’ve built your “big, bad” creative units and sold your idea into your client, take the creative assets from those primary units, upload them to the Studio Layouts filler tool, preview and publish. Instead of spending an hour or two hand-coding each additional ad unit, select from one of 21 different formats (26 different sizes) and build each ad in 5-10 minutes. 

Example media spec sheet:

Studio Layouts can save you 75% of your production time, because it’s easy to build out all the additional units you need to complete your campaign. Plus, because all the trafficking and reporting tags are baked in to each Layout, there are fewer areas where things can break, so your ads should go through QA much faster.

Use Studio Layouts to give yourself the space to innovate for your digital campaigns, by becoming more efficient with your ad production on the backend of your project. 

You can get started using Studio Layouts today - check out the Layouts tab in the top navigation bar of your DoubleClick Studio account. Learn more >> 

Posted by Becky Chappell, DoubleClick Product Marketing

A new look and feel across DoubleClick Digital Marketing

Over the past several years, we’ve been working on a gradual redesign of many Google products like Search, Maps, Gmail, and AdWords -- with the goal of offering a simple, streamlined user experience that helps you get tasks done quickly and efficiently.

Today, we’re rolling out this new look and feel across all our DoubleClick products -- another example of how we’re continuing to unify our solutions across the platform. With this update, you’ll find that all products part of DoubleClick Digital Marketing now offer more screen real estate to our tools and reports, to help you focus on your tasks at hand. This means that you’ll experience the same, easy workflows across our products -- whether you’re managing search, display, rich media, and beyond. Note that this change only affects the style of the page, and does not change any functionality of our products today.

We hope that the new design will help you better navigate through your account and focus more on your data so you continue to succeed with our tools. To stay up-to-date on new DoubleClick developments, follow us on our Google+ page.

Be a programmatic expert: learn Bid Manager with role-based training and webinars

Programmatic buying in DoubleClick Bid Manager keeps getting easier. We offer training for all levels, from new user training to advanced webinars. To help you learn faster and more efficiently, we’ve launched the new Bid Manager checklists along with two new optimization webinars.

Bid Manager checklists
Learn the basics of Bid Manager or master more advanced campaign management topics using the new Bid Manager checklists. These self-paced learning paths help you learn and master the product based on your role:

• Basics for new users: Learn the basics of a demand-side platform and apply these concepts to an advertiser's media plan in Bid Manager. This checklist includes Bid Manager Fundamentals eLearning and certification. You'll also learn how Bid Manager integrates with DoubleClick Campaign Manager & DFA6. 
• Implementation guide for administrators: Learn to set up and structure a new account, set up new users, and create new advertisers. 
• Implementation guides for campaign managers: Walk through step-by-step guidelines, tips, and best practices for setting up new campaigns. We offer checklists for campaign managers based on whether or not they use DoubleClick Campaign Manager & DFA6.

Regardless of your level of experience with real time bidding and DoubleClick Bid Manager, we have a learning track that’s right for you!

Join a webinar this spring
Continue your learning by joining a live training webinar this spring. See the schedule below and register through the Training page in the Bid Manager Help Center (sign-in required).

Bid Manager Overview for new users – 4/17

Get an overview of Bid Manager – including the basic benefits and features of demand-side platforms and how ad exchanges work. Learn the steps to setting up a new campaign in Bid Manager. We'll also cover Core Bid Manager functionality and how it works with DoubleClick Campaign Manager & DFA6, as well as how to analyze performance and optimize campaigns. Register

We also offer eLearning and Certification, available in Spanish, Portuguese-Brazilian, and more.

Optimization webinar series
Learn key features in DoubleClick Bid Manager so you can more effectively manage your programmatic campaigns.

Bids and budgets – 5/13
Learn tips on setting up bids, budgets, and frequency caps, and evaluating the performance to make optimizations. Register 

Audience buying – 5/28
Learn to use the audience targeting feature for both third-party and first-party audience targeting. We'll look at tools like the Audience Composition report, and provide best practices for your remarketing line items. Register 

These webinars are intended for Bid Manager users who have completed Fundamentals training. If you’re a Bid Manager customer but are not yet using the tool, complete the Fundamentals eLearning.

Advanced webinars

Launch your campaign – 4/23
Now that you know the basics, it's time to set your bid strategies. In this webinar, you’ll walk through turning a media plan into a live campaign in Bid Manager. We'll also cover different strategies for gaining reach and increasing ROI, as well as setting up remarketing recency. Register

Creative Approvals – 6/3
Learn more about the creative approval process and find out what you need to do if creatives aren't approved. Register

These webinars are intended for Bid Manager users who have completed Fundamentals training. If you’re a Bid Manager customer but are not yet using the tool, complete the Fundamentals eLearning.

Watch a pre-recorded webinar
We also offer recorded webinars in our Help Center, covering an Overview for new users, topics like keyword contextual targeting, creative approvals, upgrades, and more. While you’re there, be sure to read about our latest product releases.

Some sessions mention prerequisites where we recommend background knowledge. Please note these to make sure you get the most out of each session. Lastly, be aware of any regional time differences before enrolling in any of the live sessions.

Keep in mind, the Bid Manager Help Center is only available to current Bid Manager users, so you'll need to sign in with the Google account you use for Bid Manager.

Be sure to sign up for the DoubleClick Digest to get the latest DoubleClick news, research, events, and product updates.

Posted by Molly Larrison, DoubleClick Bid Manager Product Trainer