Top Tips for Optimizing Online Ad Campaigns

Optimization remains a particularly hot topic in advertising today. Technology continues to evolve to support sell-side initiatives and help publishers ensure they deliver to their advertisers' objectives, while also enabling publishers to compete more effectively and remain relevant to their clients. When thinking about optimization, I've identified five considerations publishers should be taking into account. 1.Optimization is campaign critical, not just optional… Optimization is no longer just a campaign nicety, but rather a central requirement that is expected by advertisers—whether the campaign's goal is to bolster brand recognition or performance. Proof of this fact can be found in a survey conducted by Maxifier, which highlighted that a performance campaign is optimized an average of 11 times across its duration, while a typical brand campaign is optimized only seven times. As campaign media plans are constantly being revised and budgets reallocated to those areas that are delivering the best results, frequent optimization is a necessity; publishers who do not optimize face the risk of being removed from media plans. In fact, our research showed approximately one in ten websites are dropped from campaigns due to underperformance. To avoid joining those dropped websites, and the subsequent impact on revenues, optimization is increasingly essential for every advertiser's campaign, not simply a proportion of them. 2. …but it's not always just about performance. The primary task of optimization is to ensure that the overall goals of advertisers are met. Since the arrival of online advertising, the success of digital ads has been based upon metrics such as how many people actually click on an ad. Thus, the definition of a successful campaign has long been based on direct response metrics, which, although very easy to capture and measure, do not give an accurate summary of an ad's impact (how often do YOU click on a banner ad?). With this in mind, as more brand advertisers invest in online campaigns, the metrics that they are embracing to measure success are shifting to areas such as dwell time, creative interaction, viewable impressions and reach against a specific audience. In other words, securing exposure with a target market and being seen matters much more than convincing Web users simply to click on an ad and visit an external Web page. At a recent conference, Bob Arnold, associate director, Global Digital Strategy at the Kellogg Company, commented "We don't care about clicks because there is no relationship to sales for a brand marketer." To address this change in measurement preferences and take advantage of the growing revenues being invested in online advertising, publishers need to ensure they are able to optimize around the differing needs of both performance and branding objectives. 3. Campaigns don't exist in isolation! Although campaigns may be booked independently and have different goals, ultimately they are all competing, to one extent or another, for the same inventory. As a result, making a change to improve the delivery of one campaign directly affects other campaigns. I refer to this as the "ripple effect." Throw a stone into a still pond and watch what happens to the water. Think of your inventory as that pond and the change to just one campaign as the stone. This has consequences for your advertisers and your business. Today, it is important to manage inventory holistically, not simply focusing on each campaign as a separate entity. Publishers need to understand the consequences of these changes to effectively manage and deliver to advertisers' objectives, while also ensuring they are mindful of their own overall business objectives. 4. Empower yourself with technology… Technology is central to the online advertising environment—just look at the Lumascape maps. Technology is delivering efficiencies across the board and allowing buyers and sellers to operate in the increasingly complex online advertising marketplace. Publishers, therefore, need to ditch their spreadsheets and manual approaches and look instead for solutions that can streamline workflows, support ad operations teams by freeing up time to focus more on business critical areas and deliver more effective optimization for every advertiser. In the end, this will ensure that publishers are able to support the differing needs of all their clients' campaigns and remain relevant to advertisers' goals. 5. …but don't forget to add an element of human touch. Technology is essential today but human intervention remains crucial in the optimization process to help ensure the right decisions are taken for your clients and your business. Automation can streamline processes and improve the volume of campaigns publishers can deal with, but technology can't do it all. As campaign improvements for one advertiser can negatively impact another, the human touch is required to make the ultimate decision as to whether this is a good or bad thing for the business to implement: if this negative impact is on a major advertiser, for example, it may not be worth implementing the change. Algorithms simply cannot detect and consider such important subtleties. "Programmatic" does not mean "automated," so make sure the human touch remains a key ingredient in your optimization approach, leveraging technology to support better decisions rather than completely relying on it. Online advertising is constantly growing and evolving, and best practices in the space are adapting to meet market changes every day. Even three years ago, it would have been difficult to predict that so much of the online ad tech space would be dominated by automation and, similarly, we cannot possibly predict where we will be in another three. But with that in mind, it's clear that ad campaigns are becoming more targeted, specialized and thoughtful – and technology is helping lead the way. PE Anthony Katsur is COO of Maxifier, where he is responsible for managing the growth of the company, overseeing all elements of product development and implementation, and the launching and scaling of new customers. He previously served as GM of MediaMath, where he led the TerminalOne platform, and DoubleClick, where he managed the engineering division, improved and managed real-time ad serving infrastructure, directed the software development process for enterprise software applications, and led the client services group.

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Top Tips for Optimizing Online Ad Campaigns

Anthony Katsur

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Anthony Katsur