I love you, Doubleclick

Right, I’ve said it. I love Doubleclick (AKA DS3, DART). I don’t know if it loves me back but mutual adoration isn’t necessary, such is my level of obsession.

This is why.

1. Real time data.

For Google data, the numbers are 20 minutes out of date, but 20 minutes is pretty damn real time to me. The little boxes glow green when the data is refreshing which gives the whole system a very ‘Matrix’y geeky feel. It means we can compare today’s hourly data to yesterdays hourly data to measure day on day performance – all before the day is through!

2. Scheduled edits

I have written a blog on scheduled edits because I love them SO MUCH. In my case, my client runs a lot of offers, which need to change over at midnight. This means some keywords and adverts need pausing, some find and replace needs to happen and some new ads need to go live, all at around midnight when I am (hopefully) not in the office any more. Scheduled edits allow you to plan waaaaay in advance and avoid the stress of ‘can you please change the offers over in the next 3 minutes’.

3. Custom floodlight columns

Once you have all your sales tags (floodlight tags) set up, you can use these to create custom columns in Doubleclick. (Adwords now offers this by the way). For example, my client offers two sets of services, one for individuals and one for businesses. By using Doubleclick custom columns, I can view the ‘consumer data’ and ‘business data’ all at the same time (clicks, impressions, CTR, average CPC, average position and cost, as well as consumer / business CPA, conversion rate and number of sales). MAGIC.

4. Bulk edits

Pausing/resuming, changing CPC bids – all of this can be done in bulk within Doubleclick. Again, I know you can do this in Adwords as well, however Doublelick allows you to use ‘bulk sheets’ so you can export the account to .csv, make all your changes offline and then upload your bulk sheet back into Doubleclick. I do still use Adwords Editor for builds and some bulk edits, but Doubleclick saves the chopping and changing between platforms.

5. Ease of use

Doubleclick is not hard to use. It’s very easy to navigate (easier than Adwords, I think. It uses the same layout but looks a bit brighter and more spaced out) and it’s very obvious if you’re making a change as opposed to just ‘browsing’. There’s no risk of accidently cocking everything up without realising.

Now, there’s always a twist to any ‘perfect’ love story. My only issue – the only betrayal from my beloved Doubleclick – is the lack of ‘dimensions’ options. You can’t see hourly data, or the location split like you can in Adwords. The problem is, Adwords conversion tracking inflates our sales metrics by about 30% so we can’t correctly monitor these dimensions in Adwords and make optimisations based on these – we NEED this to be available in Doubleclick so we can have consistency in the sales data were viewing and the account features we’re optimising as a result.

Pretty please, Doubleclick?