Good marketing entails making good decisions. Good decisions demand access to quality, relevant data. Quality, relevant data is valid, reliable and appropriate to the situation you are assessing.
Obvious? Perhaps. Easy? Not so fast.
It is the access and use of marketing data that makes digital marketing so alluring. But while the "countable" nature of digital marketing enables us to measure ad views, clicks and conversions and derive a host of metrics, this does not directly translate to accountability.
To be truly accountable, the data upon which you base decisions must also be actionable. Ultimately, it does us little good to count things unless we can use that information to optimize our campaigns. It is this simple premise that drives much of the value of third party (or "buy-side") ad serving. More than simply a vehicle for delivering your ads to publishers, third party ad serving plays a central role in unifying your counting methodology, thus providing mechanisms for acting on that data across your campaigns. And nowhere is that more visible than within the process of creative optimization.
Creative optimization, or assigning the best performing creative to run more frequently throughout your campaign, appears relatively simple at first glance. View your reports, identify which creative executions work best, and run them more frequently. But as most of you know, it isn't that easy. Creative and media teams are plagued by questions such as: How soon can I begin to optimize my creative? How can I optimize more quickly? What are delayed conversions and what do they mean to my optimization? Do I need to worry about "banner burnout"?
The good news is that these questions all have answers that can be reached using metrics typically provided by third party ad serving reporting data. And, even better, these results can be acted upon in real and meaningful ways that will immediately impact your campaign performance. Here are three recommendations for making more effective and accurate creative optimization decisions.
Knowing when to optimize
How many times have you heard this: It's all about timing. Well, it is. Timing is critical to making creative optimization decisions for a couple of reasons. Optimizing creative before there is enough data can lead to poor weighting decisions. Your worst performing ads could be receiving the highest weights based on "chance" conversions, while your best performers haven't yet gotten enough impressions to prove themselves. On the other hand, waiting too long means losing out on impressions that could have been served using your best ads; resulting in lost conversions and revenue.
The way to handle this scenario is to optimize each creative treatment as soon as it has enough statistically valid data to determine its performance relative to other treatments. But how do we know when we can confidently make that decision? The only way to truly know when to optimize is by looking at both impression and conversion data, as is provided by third party ad serving data, and determining if a banner has enough data to evaluate it accurately. If you are deciding when to optimize based on having run an ad for some length of time or some number of impressions, you're likely optimizing either too early or too late and leaving real value on the table.
Optimizing at the placement level
Because different publishers and different placements attract different audiences, your top performing ads on one placement may be your worst performing on another. Nonetheless, many advertisers and agencies still evaluate creative in aggregate across all buys and placements. While initially logical and certainly easy, these result in a generalized count that probably means you're making suboptimal creative decisions.
One of reasons that this approach remains in use, however, is that it can be tedious and time intensive to measure creative performance for each placement for each publisher separately. Once again, this data is readily available from third party ad servers, some of which even have automated tools for evaluating and weighting each creative at the placement level. From these ad serving reports and analysis tools, optimal creative weightings can be determined and applied to each placement.
Considering delayed conversions when making optimization decisions
Delayed conversions are an interesting phenomenon that advertisers often overlook when evaluating creative performance. Essentially, a delayed conversion occurs whenever a user sees or clicks an ad, but doesn't convert until later. When optimizing creative, this phenomenon can obscure reported counts, and often deceive marketers into making poor decisions.
Advertisers often times notice that when they add new creative, they don't perform as well as the old ones. For an advertiser who has spent much time and money developing the new creative, yet is concerned with maximizing their return on digital marketing dollars, this presents an interesting dilemma whether to pull the new creative or not.
The fact is that new ad creative is often evaluated on uneven ground because of delayed conversions, and will almost always initially look worse when compared to existing creative. A new creative treatment hasn't run long enough to have its own delayed conversions trickling in from past weeks. Yet again, most third party ad servers can provide the data necessary to understand this dynamic and help agencies and advertisers make better decisions and deliver better value from their campaigns.
In summary
Data validity, data specificity and data inclusivity. All of these are critical to accurate and effective creative optimization. Certainly, this is only one type of the many kinds of digital marketing decisions you will face. Yet, the lessons within creative optimization transcend just this one set of tasks. Leverage your ad serving platform to ensure you are making decisions based upon a valid set of data, data that is specific to the placement level and data that fully represents the performance of your marketing. These simple guides have the power to turn your good digital marketing into great digital marketing.
Karl Siebrecht senior vice president and general manager of Atlas, a provider of digital marketing technologies and expertise, and an operating unit of aQuantive, Inc. Go here for more information on creative optimization and to download a free research paper on the topic.
