ADOTAS – In the traditional advertising model, advertisers were pretty much in the dark when it came to their campaigns. The Internet helped bring certain areas into light, but the black-box approach still reigns supreme. However, as online advertising is becoming increasingly data-driven, the savviest advertisers now realize it can also illuminate their ad campaigns with an entirely new light.
Each business is unique and so too are its goals. To meet these, advertisers can harness big data innovation to customize their campaigns – both pre-launch and on-the-go. With previously unavailable levels of transparency and control, they are able to truly bring their campaign into light and take an active role to drive the results they seek.
Transparency and control are different sides of the same coin. Without transparency, you can’t effectively control outcomes, and without the ability to control, you can’t fully leverage transparency.
Here is an overview of some of these emerging capabilities:
Transparency
Full transparency enables advertisers to access and view multiple aspects of their campaign and media-related performance, to receive meaningful insights based on KPI-related data, and to understand the role each channel plays in their overall marketing mix.
Audience transparency
Greater granularity in business-driven, pre-defined audience segments is expanding campaign transparency. Examples of such micro-segments include high-margin categories, users entering a site from social sites or a specific publisher, dormant customers with high lifetime AOV, etc.
As a result, a deeper level of reporting is now available, going well beyond the overall campaign view to include analytics on every micro-segment and creative variation within that segment.
Analytics & Insights
Beyond data on the performance of a campaign, segment or ad, meaningful insights based on this data are an important factor in campaign optimization. This requires professional data mining specialists who can dive deep into a campaign’s data to extract actionable insights – especially consumer behavioral data and analysis of aggregated patterns over time (for example, how different types of users convert during different hours of the day). An advertiser’s highly valuable CRM data can also be added to the mix to further sharpen the analysis.
Media transparency
Beyond standard performance metrics per media outlet such as impressions, clicks, CTR etc., there’s greater transparency around media today including statistics about domains, sub-domains, win rates, engagement, reach etc. It enables advertisers to understand the impact of their campaign in the context of a specific publication or channel.
Multi-attribution
Multi-attribution is all about providing advertisers with a complete picture of their cross-channel marketing efforts. It enables them to gain a deep understanding of the role each channel played on the path towards conversion. Projected ROI of different attribution models can also be given to help inform decision-making.
In addition, agnostic A/B testing solutions offered by multi-attribution providers give advertisers the ability to assess the incremental value of a specific campaign or channel operating within a multi-channel marketing mix.
Overall, attribution is transparency from above – an important point of view for multi-channel marketers.
Control
The ability to control multiple elements of a campaign is a central part of an increasingly advertiser-centric approach in digital advertising. It’s all about providing advertisers with tools to configure before launch and modify post launch based on the increased transparency they are exposed to.
Choosing business model of choice
In the past, advertisers either had little or no control over the business model. The ability to support several business models – whether CPC, CPA, CPM, or Cost Plus – gives advertisers real control to choose a model that best meets their goals.
Defining audience micro-segments
Advertisers typically have specific audiences that they wish to target. But whereas once they had to settle for a limited number of fixed segments based on stage in funnel, they are now able to define granular, high-value segments that can meet their specific business goals.
New levels of campaign customization
The ability to define business-driven audience segments is an important factor in an advertiser’s control of a campaign. However, to enhance ad relevancy, these segments can be given unique attributes to actually differentiate between them.
For example, if a certain category is of high value, it would make sense to design a unique theme-based creative and specific messaging that would match the products presented. Setting a high price for this segment would ensure aggressive media buying and hence greater exposure compared to segments of lesser value.
To sum up, greater transparency & control are increasingly demanded as standard by the new data-driven advertisers. By adopting newly available capabilities in this area, advertisers will be able to both build trust and deploy campaigns that achieve their goals.