• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 6, 2014

VivaKi's Search Hub, a marketing support service that collaborates with the agency's teams and its clients to manage and optimize search programs, uses tools that increase campaign efficiency. Among them is DoubleClick Search.

During the 2013 Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping days, the team tapped into the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite to drive performance for a major unnamed retail advertiser that saw conversion rise by 360% and costs fall by 27%. The team saved 90 minutes per day through automation.

The increase was partially a result of the start of the holiday season, but greatly strengthened by the optimization of the automated DoubleClick Search bid strategy," said Timothy Lackhouse, VivaKi Search Hub team lead for bid strategies. "Eight months ago when Google launched a more comprehensive feature we began seeing more ways to control the automated bidding algorithm and gained more insight."

The changes contributed to the increase in conversions and decrease in cost per order, Lackhouse said.

DoubleClick isn't the only tool automating processes at VivaKi Search. The Publicis Groupe search division relies on automation to drive efficiency in other areas too. The agency began building out its backend infrastructure about two years ago to accommodate the shift, but VivaKi VP of Search Operations Tamara Knight said the most significant change is an increase in data-driven automated systems that have begun to pull information from a variety of sources across a brand's enterprise.

VivaKi's system identifies available and out-of-stock products to optimize search campaigns. If the item is out of stock, the platform will serve a similar in-stock product search ad, explains Knight. It also feeds third-party data into its central system and uses the data to inform its planning and strategy development as well as insights and recommendations. The data helps to further automate VivaKi's platform. That's just the beginning.

Advertising systems have infiltrated the manufacturing supply chain. Pulling in a variety of data from a clients' product inventory system and other data feeds to manage search advertising will soon become the norm in how agencies manage search campaigns.

As for the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite, the VivaKi Search Hub managed to automate bids, based on real-time conversion data, to respond quickly to market changes. The VivaKi Search Hub team worked closely with counterparts at Google to implement new bid strategies. The agency ran target cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bid strategies for more than 150 campaigns and 4,000 ad groups in less than an hour.