Floodlight activities are shared across DS and DFA at the Advertiser level. If you use both of these tools, this gives you a single process for tracking conversions for display and search and prevents your conversions from being counted twice. Conversions from Floodlight activities report in DS in aggregated form as your actions and transactions. For more granular reporting, you can segment your conversions by Floodlight data in the interface or download a report on the individual conversions.
Previously, Floodlight activities could only be managed within the DFA interface. DoubleClick Search now allows you to create Floodlight activities with basic settings and the Floodlight activity groups that contain them, so you likely won’t need to go to DFA.
Floodlight instructions allow you to control how your Floodlight activities are reported in DS. With this latest update, you’re now able to create and edit Floodlight instructions easily in the DS interface.
We’ve created an in-depth Getting Started with Floodlight Guide to help you with all the details of managing Floodlight features in DS. If you plan on creating or editing Floodlight activities in DS, be sure to review this guide, but let’s look at some of the highlights of these features now.
Access Floodlight Management in DS
If you have the correct user permissions, you’ll be able to access your Floodlight instructions, Floodlight groups and Floodlight activities for an Advertiser from the Advertiser Settings section in DS.
From these tabs, you’ll be able to create, delete, and edit Floodlight instructions, groups, and activities.
Manage Floodlight groups and activities
Creating a new activity in DS will automatically create an activity in DFA with basic settings for tracking search conversions. If you’d like to use more advanced Floodlight settings, such as counting method or cache busting method, you can still change those settings in the DFA interface.
Within the Floodlight activities tab, the actual Floodlight tag (1x1 pixel of code) is generated. This is the code you’ll place on the website page you want to track.
The type of conversions that are tracked (actions or transactions) is determined at the activity group level. Be sure to know your Floodlight groups and the types of conversion activities these groups track. You can view this information from the Floodlight activities groups tab.
Manage Floodlight instructions
You can also manage how the data from your Floodlight activities is reported in DS through Floodlight instructions.
A Floodlight instruction allows you to control the way data from a given Floodlight activity is reported in DS without changing the actual activity. Instructions can be set to apply to all activities, a specific group, or a single activity.
There are several different types of instructions that let you do currency conversion, rate replacement, include only specific tags, and more. One common use case is to only include specific activities in your DS reporting through the inclusion status instruction. Since Floodlight activities are shared across DFA and DS, there may be some pages on your site you’d like to track for a display initiative, but don’t want those tags included in your DS reporting.
For example, An auto company has several hundred Floodlight activities on DFA, but is only interested in reporting on their activities from their Request a quote activity group for DoubleClick Search. The company can set up a Floodlight instruction to include the Floodlight activity group that contains the related Request a quote Floodlight activities. DFA will continue to report on all Floodlight activities for the advertiser, but DoubleClick Search will only report on the Request a quote Floodlight activity group.
Learn more about the different Floodlight instructions and how to manage them in the DS Help Center.
What happens to the Floodlight activities I already created in DFA?
Activities and groups already created in DFA will automatically appear in your DS account for you to manage. Additionally, new Floodlight activities created through DS will appear in DFA.
Still want to learn more?
Check out our Getting Started with Floodlight guide in the Help Center.
Happy conversion tracking!
Posted by the DoubleClick Search team
