When it comes to campaign optimisation, there is something of a historical disconnect between what advertisers assume will happen to their campaigns and what actually does. In terms of actively monitoring and analysing campaign performance against a suite of metrics, and adjusting strategies accordingly, only 20% of today’s campaigns actually undergo a proper optimisation process, meaning more than three-quarters of all online campaigns may not have any support to improve them and give them the best chance of delivering to the success metrics the advertiser needs.
If campaigns are left to run without being optimised, how can anyone expect their advertising objectives to be met? Yet this is the reality for the majority of campaigns and it is often only when an advertiser starts questioning performance part-way through a campaign that reactive action is taken to optimise it and maintain the advertiser’s spend.
The repercussions of a failure to optimise can be considerable for any publisher. Without evidence that campaigns are on target to hit their goals, it will not be long before advertisers divert their spend away from under-performing publishers to those that are able to prove success.
Publishers can stem this tide by making optimisation a de facto element of their campaign management offering. In acquiring a top-to-toe grasp of the matter, publishers can lay claim to actively helping clients improve campaign performance and reduce traditional challenges such as under- and overdelivery issues. This will ensure a campaign has every chance of meeting its objectives.
Just think, if every campaign were to deliver against its objectives in this way – be it increasing awareness of a brand, product or service, or the more traditional performance metrics – advertisers would be much more likely to continue to invest budget with that publisher. Continuation of the present status quo, where only the minority of campaigns are optimised, will result not only in a reduction in short-term revenue for a publisher, as advertisers move to those publishers that can deliver what they need, but a protracted impact on longer-term revenues as publishers find themselves dropped from future media plans.
Part of the problem to date has been the view that optimisation is solely an area of concern for the advertising operations department and the often incorrect belief held by the sales team that once any campaign is live, it will be optimised to ensure it achieves its goals. However, the absence of optimisation activity at the outset is the equivalent of doing only half the job – the changing nature of online advertising, the rise of new technologies and the increasing demands by advertisers for identifiable campaign success is pushing optimisation to the forefront of ad campaign planning and everyone in the business needs to be aware and in the know. The days of non-departmental crossover are gone. The whole process now needs to be viewed holistically by both the sales and ad operations teams and built into delivery schedules as standard.
Stripping it down to pounds and pence, without acknowledgement of the role optimisation plays in bringing in the revenue, will leave sales executives unstuck. Online ad revenues are only realised once impressions are delivered. As a result, campaign optimisation has significant revenue implications for all publishers. For them to be effective in this ultra-competitive arena, and both maintain existing spend as well as attract future budgets, they need view optimisation more as a vital strategic commercial sales tool and less as a technical tactical add-on for later down the line.
There is no room for resting on one’s laurels in the online ad world. True, in the past optimisation has traditionally been manual in nature and publishers have struggled to keep up with the sheer volume of campaigns running concurrently, but with technological advancements, that no longer applies. Neither is it acceptable to only offer metrics based on performance criteria such as Click-Through Rate (CTR) or Cost Per Action (CPA). There is an inherent commercial need to ensure campaigns can also be optimised using new branding metrics, such as interaction and viewability. In this way, publishers will be able to attract and secure additional brand budgets from those advertisers for whom performance metrics have little relevance to how they actually measure campaign success.
Another facet that should not be undervalued is the way in which optimisation can help enhance and strengthen direct relations with advertisers. Any ability to optimise and hit stated goals should be a central selling point for a business and core to every discussion that sales executives have with their clients.
Taking the lead in demonstrating what actions have been taken to improve campaign performance, and the resulting beneficial impact these decisions have had, only galvanises customer confidence and gives them reassurance for the success of future campaigns.
By placing optimisation at the heart of the business and ceasing to view it as simply a tactical approach, both publishers and advertisers will begin to benefit, leaving a brighter horizon for everyone concerned and a clear path to improved performance.
