Optimizing Your Campaign

Why it matters

Ongoing changes to your campaign means it will generate more, better results.

Someone should be looking at your campaign’s performance every day to identify opportunities to make changes – moving media investment away from placements, creatives, and audiences that aren’t working into placements, creatives, and audiences that are working.

Activities include either looking at your dashboard (or going into the media platform dashboards if you don’t have your own dashboard) to evaluate costs, key performance indicators (such as your cost per click, click through rate, conversion rate, and cost per conversion), and total volume (number of desired actions taken) to identify what is working, what is not working, and what needs more testing. Changes are then made to campaign activity to shift investment to increase performance and decrease costs.

Effective optimization leads to the achievement, and potential surpassing, of your defined marketing goals.

How it works

Campaign optimizations happen automatically through goal-based campaign settings and media algorithms, as well as manually through interpretation and mining of data for insights. It’s important not to rely on media algorithms alone to optimize your campaign.

To develop insight into how to optimize your campaign, review your performance reports and ask yourself the following questions:

Are we achieving our marketing goals?
What is driving performance? Is it specific channels, placements, or creative assets?
Can we shift inventory (impressions, clicks) away from placements/creatives that aren’t performing into placements/creatives that are?
Are some audiences performing differently than others? Can we/should we shift inventory to the audiences that are driving the strongest results?

How long it takes

The amount of time it takes depends on how big your campaign is. Activity should be monitored daily with analysis being conducted at least weekly.

Do it in a day

Campaigns should be checked on each day and with any needed changes being made as soon as possible.

Pro Tip

Don’t focus on performance metrics to the exclusion of overall volume (the total number of desired actions being taken).

You might have an ad group with a very high Click Through Rate and a very low Cost Per Click, but it’s only generating a handful of desired actions. Another ad group might have a lower Click Through Rate and higher Cost Per Click, but it’s generating thousands of desired actions. The ad group generating the higher volume of desired actions is performing “better” because it’s helping achieve your marketing goal. Both ad groups work collectively to deliver cost-effective results (performance metrics + overall volume).

Outputs

Daily monitoring and tweaking
Weekly analysis and strategic optimizations