Move your display campaigns to programmatic advertising

Has your digital marketing agency opened up the power of programmatic advertising for your business? Here at Bluewave, we are experts at this cutting edge method of using data and machine learning to better target your ads towards people who are in your exact target market, and ready to buy right now.

Large brands have already moved a significant percentage of their spend across to programmatic advertising in 2018, and 2019 will see that move go as high as 80% of all display spend.

Why have they chosen to do this? From our experience, programmatic advertising gives ten times better control to advertisers and publishers over their ad placements and targeting when compared to standard methods.

 

Why are they doing this?

Traditional digital advertising has a few issues that programmatic advertising can overcome. The Google display network does a great job of buying advertising space on your behalf on individual websites, and also provides targeting to make sure these ads get in front of your intended audience.

This is far better than the early days of the web, where people had to setup each of these deals individually. Programmatic advertising takes this into overdrive, pinpointing exactly what audiences to target, dependent upon browser algorithms generated through demographic, geographic, psychographic and time data points. Programmatic advertising allows audiences to be automatically bought, and allows you to show them to the right consumer with the right message, in the proper context. It can save thousands per month in wasted ad clicks.

 

How does programmatic advertising work?

Programmatic advertising places your ads through a massive online auction system, where websites and advertisers bid in real time to get the best price and most precise targeting for the placement of your ads. Similar to items bid on, bought and sold via eBay, programmatic advertising seamlessly bids on, buys and sells ad space to advertisers using acquired knowledge about the advertiser’s target market, and makes optimisation changes on the fly to improve performance.

What to Look For In a Programmatic Agency

When you look to engage with an agency to run a programmatic campaign, it is important to find an agency who can work with you to define a clear strategy for each campaign. It is good to know the objectives of each campaign (leads, ecommerce sales, opt ins to a mailing list), have clearly designed creative’s to meet this strategy that will resonate with the target audience. You also need to ensure that you have landing pages in place that match and work with your ads to achieve these objectives.

There is also a variety of creative’s to consider. You are not just buying display placements on advertiser’s websites. You can also buy place ads on YouTube videos, Facebook in-stream advertisements, and mobile ads, catch up TV, digital radio and every other form of advertising available online.

The choice of advertising platforms and creative’s that you develop is guided by knowing in advance the audience that you are targeting. A good digital agency can work with you to identify and target these audiences, showing you what the potential of each audience may be, the potential costs and also which platforms are most effective at engaging them.

 

It All Starts With Audience Focus

When we look to start a programmatic campaign, the first step is to define a number of different audiences for each campaign, and then develop creative’s for each. For example, you may have a remarketing list, a lookalike list for people that have purchased the product before, and then people within certain demographic and interest categories. We will trial at least 2 different calls to action of each audience, and make sure we have display ads, videos and audio assets if required, dependent on the channels we are going to advertise on.

These buyer personas that you develop then go onto inform different landing pages that you create, as well as different marketing automation sequences that you can bring into play.

 

Build Out Your Creative Mix

For an effective programmatic advertising campaign, it is ideal to have a mix of each creative. Not just the different sizes for each medium, but also static and animated versions of display ads, or multiple video creative’s for AdWords. This allows A/B and multivariate testing of each message, so we can quickly evolve your campaign to only show the ads that are getting the best engagement and ROI.

This is a great way to gather intelligence on your unique audience, and provide valuable feedback and information which you can use to improve all future digital advertising campaigns.

 

The Secret is Ongoing Monitoring and Optimisation

The most impressive element of programmatic advertising for an agency is the massive amount of analytics and data that is available for each and every ad that your run. This is the primary reason to move your display advertising spend across to programmatic advertising. We recommend daily maintenance and monitoring of your programmatic campaigns, and this is our methodology when we run campaigns for our clients.

Keeping a close eye on the actual performance of your ads will help you quickly remove the ads that are not performing well, conserving funds and diverting your budget towards the ads that are working best.

It is this ongoing optimisation, with proactive suggestions and feedback that we provide for our clients, enabling them to drive massive returns from their programmatic spend.

Are you thinking of giving programmatic advertising a go in 2019? Give us a call or fill in an enquiry form to see how your display advertising spend could work so much harder.

January 4, 2019 Digital Marketing, Display, Programmatic Comments Off on Move your display campaigns to programmatic advertising

Conversion Bidding for Display Campaigns

Earlier in December Google announced that we can now use conversion based bidding for Display Network campaigns. The Google Display network is one of the most misused and under utilised of the whole Google Ads ecosystem. Luckily for our clients, here at Bluewave we have been using the Display Network for over a decade to strategically enhance and compliment the search marketing that conduct via AdWords and other PPC networks.

So many advertisers have all campaigns set to “Search Network campaigns with Display Expansion” rather than having separate search and display campaigns. This always leads to display campaign data being mixed with search campaigns, making results hard to assess for business owners that manage their own accounts, or inexperienced account managers. It also leads to issues like call extensions being shown on display ads, which quite often results in a lot of clicks being made that do not result in phone calls or website visits.

 

We recommend running completely separate search and display campaigns, as allows you to optimise traffic from both networks separately, and get the best results from each.

Once you have distinct search and display campaigns, then we recommend trialling conversion-based bidding for display campaigns called “Pay for conversions”.

With this new bidding option, you are charged when visitors convert from the ads rather than clicks or ad impressions.

This is already available for search campaigns, where you can set it up to pay by conversion at a Target CPA (cost per acquisition) in the Bidding section of campaign settings. This does require that meaningful conversions are being used(such as a purchase or lead) and that you have already generated some leads using manual settings (see the thresholds below), so the machine learning that fuels these auto bidding rules has some data to work with. Once this has been setup, Google provides the following example of display CPA bidding, “Let’s say your target CPA is $10, and you drove 30 conversions over the weekend. You’ll pay exactly $300, with an actual CPA of $10.”

Pay for conversions uses the same machine learning as CPC payments. Google has stated that you’ll never pay above your target cost per action.”, however in practice for the accounts that we have worked on some guidance in placements and ad copy is still needed. What they will do is have a red hot try at generating as many conversions as possible at that target CPA.

What do you need to turn this on?
Currently, this conversion based bidding for Display has some high requirements for conversions needed before this can be turned on. Your Google Ads account needs more than 100 conversions in the past 30 days to be eligible for pay for conversions. In addition to this, the time between click and conversion must be shorter than 7 days for at least 90 percent of those conversions.

There are a few restrictions, and this strategy is most appropriate for campaigns that have a high volume of display traffic, and also campaigns that have similar margins of sale. The upper limit for target CPA is also $200, so for high priced industries the machine learning may struggle.

Also, for people that have Adwords tied closely to their CRM or call reporting, this strategy does not work for conversions imported from calls or Salesforce or for cross-device conversions. Also , it won’t work with shared budgets.

If you are spending too much on Display with little result, or are not sure if your campaigns are mixing Search and Display traffic then contact us for a friendly chat and see how we can make display campaigns work for your business.

December 29, 2018 Digital Marketing, Display Comments Off on Conversion Bidding for Display Campaigns

Bluewave Online Marketing is based in Melbourne, and provides expert digital marketing campaigns to businesses of all sizes, both in Australia and across the world.

Over the past 18 years we have helped hundreds of businesses, large and small, with innovative and cutting edge online marketing strategies that drive low cost sales and leads.

Please contact us for a no obligation chat about just how we can help you grow your business and dominate your industry.