Launch Campaign, Measure and then….

I have worked on a lot of online campaigns, majority of the times the campaign is launched, and then the analytics team typically starts reporting on the KPIs (Key performance indicators) on a weekly or bi-weekly or monthly level.

The key question is what does the strategy or the marketing team does after getting the results. The marketing team should look at the reports carefully at the most granular level (placement or creative) for display campaign and then start optimizing based on the results. Sometimes combination of metrics needs to be taken into account for example the cost, engagement rate, interaction rate, conversion rate etc.

It is very important that the optimization takes place sooner rather than later. The optimization process should be establish and then followed week over week. I have seen that this is very important for campaigns whose key success metrics are ROAS or ROI. As the campaign manager is trying to generate highest revenue for each dollar spent.
If the campaign’s purpose is to increase the branding/engagement then it is important that the placements driving higher Click-through or Interaction rate should be served higher impressions. The relevant publishing sites should be used. The capability of Ad networks like Ad.com, Specific Media, and Context Web should be fully utilized to get lower priced media and target the relevant consumer targets.

Some portals like Yahoo! are also able to use Behavioral Targeted placements to better target the consumers to help increase the brand awareness and also increase the conversion rates.

The key is to start optimizing sooner rather than later..

The case of "WASTED" impressions

In my earlier posts, I have talked about optimizing the media in various forms like - Frequency, Creative Optimizer. There are more ways to optimize - Geographically, day parting, week of the day etc.

But the big question is WHY OPTIMIZE? A media buyer would say - I was given a budget of $10 MM and I bought the most effective media. Well, the buyer bought the media which he/she thought would be most effective but what happened in reality?

If the media is reaching out the consumers at a frequency of 15 and optimal is 10, then 5 impressions per unique user are wasted. Now, in terms of $ if the average cost per 5 impressions is $.01 (assuming $2 CPM) then we are wasting $.01 per consumer. If the campaign is reaching 50 MM unique individuals, then the loss is $500,000.

Yes, $500,000 in wasted impressions - money used to reach out to consumers who have already seen your ad 10 times.

So, as per my previous posts there are many advertisers who if not paying attention to frequency are wasting impressions and increasing their cost per acquisition. Personally, I believe this was/is the case with Vonage, Netflix, Zecco, Sarah Marshall (the movie which is about to be released).

In the online world, cookies should be used to identify if this is an existing customer or not and then try to up-sell or cross-sell their products.

Similar math can be done to estimate the wasted impressions based on day parting (what time of the day does your market segment most active), day of the week, Geographically etc.

Another example is engagement, move impressions out of placements which have a lower consumer engagement (click-through for online, phone call rate for DRTV etc). Move the impression to places where there is higher engagement. Make the most out of your marketing $, it is money which could be used for a new product launch or your next big campaign like holiday campaign in Q4.

It is very important to do a mix-media modeling if you are using various channels (Out of home - Cabs, Billboards, buses, trains, Online, Search, TV) to find out the overlap of consumers within each of these channels. This could be hard but hitting the same consumer again and again from all channels - NOT A VERY GOOD IDEA :). In simple terms - all the media buyers for various channels should talk before planning, estimate reach and frequency, if possible research the day parts and then launch the campaign.

Creative Optimizer

If we think about large advertisers - advertising over a billion impressions per month, optimization would be very hard or next to impossible. Possibly, there would be over 1,000 live placements and if there is more than 1 creative...GOOD LUCK with that.

But thanks to DART's DoubleClick Creative Optimizer you can set the the metric you want to optimize on - Click-through rate, conversion rate, revenue etc. What the optimizer does is that it dynamically moves the impressions to the creative which is delivering higher click-through rate, conversion rate or revenue...and the great thing about it is that it works at placement level. So, if on one particular placement creative A is performing better - it will get more impressions and if on another placement creative B is performing better - it will get higher impressions. One more good thing about this is that you can set a minimal threshold, example serve a minimum of 10% of total impression for each creative.

However, there are some drawbacks with every good system, one of the biggest that I have noticed is that you cannot start with a set creative split. It always starts with an even split. So, if you have 2 creatives it starts with a 50/50 split.

But hey, optimizing at creative and placement level and that too AUTOMATED, I will take it any day.