Media optimisation is the single most important role of an activation expert, yet the fragmentation of media buying has made it harder than ever. Even setting up the simplest of AB tests is laborious and interpretation of results too subjective to create clear recommendations.
To ease the burden, the bigger platforms like Google and Meta do the optimisation on the advertisers behalf, performance max being the latest launch in this area. But leaving the platforms to optimise on your behalf has key flaws:
· It isn’t gaining you any competitive advantage
· You have no visibility of how they optimise
· They are optimising to benefit themselves too, making sure they call sell their own ad space.
But if you can make optimisation painless you can put control back into the advertisers, provide transparency and disproportionally win vs your competitors.
What is ad campaign optimisation?
Ad campaign optimisation tries to improve online ad performance. 'Performance' is dependent on the goals of the specific advertiser but generally it is focussed on delivering premium level conversion rates and click-through rates (CTRs) for the ads being run.
Ad optimisation is about adjusting the parameters of your campaign to increase that performance KPI. Typically this means adjusting the following:
Change your target audience: Adjust who your campaign is targeting to zero in on those people in the population most interested in your product or service.
Try new channels: Some ads perform better in different environments or places. Sometimes that can because of your creative or it could be that your product id more suited to specific environments, but adjusting where you advertise is a key part of improving your media performance.
Adjust your ad content: The headline, image, article, or video all affect how your target audience. will respond to an ad. Testing the right messages and images against different audiences can have a huge impact on performance.
The challenge of ad optimisation
There are many elements which you can optimise in a digital channel; creatives, audiences, campaign strands and formats are all elements you can switch on and off based on what is working and what isn’t. In fact, it’s the sheer number of components that makes optimisation so difficult.
Take an example:
You decide you want to optimise the people you target so you run different audiences in your campaign and measure which one click the most on your ads. You find the best performing audience and you use it in your next campaign, but this time it doesn’t perform so well.
So what went wrong? Well it could be that the creative you are using in the new campaign isn’t very good. Or it could be that the audience you are using this time doesn’t like that particular ad but a different audience might. Or it could be that something went wrong in the original test. Or it could be that the campaign you are running this time is being affected by budget, competition, seasonality or the myriad of other factors that affect a campaigns performance.
Given how commonly this situation happens, no wonder the recommendations from A/B tests aren’t used in ongoing campaign planning.
So how can we do it better?
The only way to stop this from happening is to test in every campaign and deploy the results in flight. But for many teams this isn’t feasible; it takes too long to set up, too time-sapping to monitor and often the results of a test only become clear when the campaign has finished.
This is why AudienServe has developed it’s unique in-flight testing approach. It runs hundreds of tests in every campaign and uses its machine learning algorithm to quickly understand which attributes are driving performance and shifting budget accordingly. For the first time an advertiser can see the immediate impact of optimisation on their ROI.
And unlike AB tests, we can isolate exactly what drives performance down to the specific affinities or contexts, creative attributes or channel objectives. What is learnt in one platform can be directly passed to the next channel with our walled garden mapping approach, creating a true 360 degree optimisation solution.