5 ad operations disasters

Running an efficient ad operations group is difficult at best. It gets much worse if you allow yourself to fall victim to one of several common disasters. Before we discuss how to steer clear of these storms, we'll do a quick recap of the current ad operations environment.

I always find it's important for publishers to distinguish between the problems that are unique to their ad operations group and those that are inherent throughout the entire industry. Every publisher has to deal with the following difficulties:

1.   Taking an order all the way from "quote to cash" (RFP to invoice) is relatively inefficient and involves more steps than it should.

2.       Ad operations are often run with a "patchwork" of applications, instead of a single, integrated solution.

3.       Ad server envy. Most publishers look at theirs and worry that the one down the street must be better.

4.       Internet ad inventory is difficult to predict, manage and report on, because each publisher has a unique traffic and targeting profile

5.       Third-party ad serving is making a mess of reporting and invoicing for all publishers.

Late creative complicates the delivery of ad campaigns.

If this sounds like your company, congratulations! You are dealing with the same common problems as everyone else. Why? This is due to the relative immaturity of the applications and processes that run this part of the business. By applying improvisation, workarounds and custom solutions that are specific to their needs, most publishers manage to create solutions that allow them to conduct business with some semblance of order.

But this common environment is just the tip of the iceberg, and publishers have to take care to navigate carefully. Otherwise, they run the risk of experiencing disasters of titanic proportions.

Top 3 Tips to Optimize Your Retargeting Campaigns

Retargeting is picking up steam in the PPC world, and with good reason. While display campaigns get lower click-through rates than search on average (.5% and 4% respectively), retargeting ads allow the innate branding opportunity found in display advertising to expand to targeting transactional users who are more likely to convert. This is especially helpful for the 67% of folks who abandon their shopping carts – people who have already expressed interest in your product, but for whatever reason, didn’t convert.

We previously shared some best practices for running a remarketing campaign. This post focuses on what to do with a remarketing campaign once it succeeds – or fails – and how to ensure long-term customer engagement, retention, and repeat purchases.

Optimizing a Successful Remarketing Campaign

For the purposes of this post, we define a successful remarketing campaign as one in which a user becomes a customer within the timeframe of the campaign. Here are three things to do to keep performance high in your successful remarketing campaign:

1. Keep them as customers by adapting the campaign to similar products

The very nature of remarketing campaigns is following a transactional prospect until they convert on your product. Retaining a user as a client means adapting the offering to suit their needs. If a client just purchased a Nikon D3100 Digital SLR camera, they don’t need to see an ad of the same product, or another camera following them around. This could cause buyer remorse at the feature/functionality level, or make the client believe they could get a better price if they had waited on making the purchase. If they see a compatible lens or memory card promoted, they will be much more likely to convert. Google performed a beta-study of its dynamic remarketing product, and users found there was a “2X increase in conversions and 60% reduction in CPA.” which proves the relevance of product suggestions among the converted.

2. Don’t keep following them around with the same ask

One of the reasons sales folks get a bad reputation is the bad seeds who bombard prospects with the same ask, but no new information. Keeping a converted client on a remarketing campaign without updating the ask conveys one of two terrible things about your brand: you don’t know your customers, or you don’t care about your customers. The first few weeks are when you want to have flawless service associated with a purchase. Make sure your clients know how much you value their business by not making redundant asks.

3. Brand affinity is important

It is important your brand maintains a level of selectivity in where it promotes itself. When a successful remarketing campaign concludes, it is important to assess whether the client opportunity can be expanded on the domain it was initially captured on, or whether another domain would have better success. While remarketing is a fairly automatic process, it is important the purchase history makes sense to the user, even if on a subconscious level.

Optimizing Retargeting Ads that Failed

For the purposes of this post, we define remarketing failure as a campaign that failed to convert the user to a customer in the allotted time of the campaign. Here are three ways to fix a failing retargeting campaign.

1. Assess how long the campaign ran. Did you annoy them away?

Similar to the successful campaign that continued following a user around with the same product, bombarding a user who shows passing interest in your product will not turn them into a customer. If anything, they will turn against your brand, and likely go to a competitor for the product you could have provided them. To avoid this remarketing faux pas, ensure frequency capping is enabled on all campaigns, and the length of campaigns falls within industry standard. This can range from one to three months, with up to three views of the ad per day. That said, there will always be exceptions to every rule, which is why each remarketing campaign should be strategically put together with a clear idea of the runway available to capture a customer, as well as the sensitivity to advertising in your industry. (Note that Larry believes the fear of annoying your customer is overstated, since retargeting ads convert much better than regular display ads even accounting for fatigue; see below.)

2. Brand disconnect: Did you break the 4th wall of user experience with a nonsensical domain?

We’ve all seen examples of this – browsing on our favorite destination site when BAM, a completely irrelevant ad smacks us in the face. Not only does this interrupt our engagement of the destination site, it makes us question what the advertiser is thinking. I likely don’t want to look at baby adverts if I’m on a sports site. Conversely, I likely don’t want to see advertisements for season tickets if I’m reading about newborn care. Even if the user showed mild interest in the product in question, it makes no sense to follow them onto non-relevant domains.

3. Are you targeting demographics that can convert, or aspire to convert?

One of the biggest puzzles advertisers attempt to solve in their campaigns is filtering out irrelevant impressions (i.e. folks who are not likely to convert/yield wasted spend). The danger of remarketing is that the default is to include all IP’s that interact with your brand, which does not factor in folks who are aspirational researchers, as opposed to transactional shoppers. There is an inherent income disparity in the Internet population, and even though most folks are on the Internet, a premium product likely only cares about those in certain income brackets or age brackets. Remarketing is behavior based, but someone who wants a dlsr camera may not be able to afford it. Bombarding a student who wants their first meaningful camera is a waste of spend. Targeting a user who is researching for their next camera with a purchase window of 30-60 days is a meaningful target.

Retargeting is an amazing tool, and has equal opportunity to succeed or fail based on strategy used in creation, execution, and follow-up on the campaign.

Email Marketing 2015 – A New Hope

Here’s what you should be concerned with in 2015 that you may have tabled behind more ‘important’ initiatives in 2014:

Your transactional mail is just as important as your marketing mail. That’s right! Transactional mail, you know that welcome message that nothing short of a ‘first date’, or the all-important password reset that let’s you use your account or make a transaction, these things have to be prioritized over the batches of 20% coupons that you’re sending. I’m guessing there are still oodles of companies out there that have no clue if their transactional and triggered messages are getting stuck behind batched campaigns. Spend the time to get it right: get the password reset out first, make sure welcome messages don’t arrive 3 or 4 days later with the information someone needs on day 1, and that receipts and confirmations that decrease calls for customer service get to where they’re going without being impeded by sales messages or newsletters.

Yep mobile is still important. If you’re not responsive all the time then half of your audience isn’t getting the same rendering experience as your other half. With the number of devices in the wild today you have to assume that your email is viewed on dozens of different mobile devices and browsers on displays stretched to extreme letterbox proportions (and curved—coming soon to a desktop near you). So the importance of ensuring a smooth experience regardless of the device or platform is paramount. Part of a mobile device’s unstated purpose is to diminish the barriers from browse to buy by deep linking to a native mobile app via a received email; if the initial rendering of the email is poor the likelihood of using an app as the next step in the customer journey is scant at best.

Inbox & Verse were unleashed by the Sith! Don’t worry, the sky isn’t falling because Google decided to reinvent email by launching Inbox, nor is IBM’s Verse going to cause CTRs and open rates to plummet. These are efficiency tools that were built in hopes that people agree to the fact that Google and IBM both know much better about how and what you want to read and experience in your inbox. When Google Tabs were launched the industry cried foul and proclaimed that the sky would fall. We’re still here. I predict that these tools will have a limited following and if their algorithms are worth their salt they will simply prove out that the most engaging brands and communications, the ones customers want to read, will remain top of mind and top of inbox. That is all.

The proof is in the pudding. Now what?! Here’s what you need to know: depending on whom you read mobile traffic accounted for 45% of all online traffic during the holidays. Nearly a quarter of all online sales were generated via mobile. And finally, more men shop on smartphones than women, this is true in my house given my wife uses my Amazon account (or orders me to use it). The fact of the matter is that every holiday season results in a wealth of data—it’s stacking up all around you, petabytes of behavioral analytics that you should leverage throughout the year. My prediction is that some of the potential, and here I stress potential, that like the force, it’s all around you, it’s really up to each and everyone one of us to use the data at our fingertips in meaningful ways. The holidays are not an event; it’s the gift that should keep on giving through out 2015 and beyond.