The secret to successful ad operations

imediaconnection.com

Away from the parties and the two-hour lunches that have made advertising famous, one will find utilitarian ad operations, the segment of the industry which ensures that ad campaigns run and achieve their targets.

Though ad operations might not have the same appeal as the rest of the ad industry, the work managed by ad operations is necessary to guarantee that the ad campaigns run and achieve their targets.

In pre-internet advertising, ad operations, often called traffic, ensured that the media had all of the materials from their advertisers/agency partners and all deadlines were met.

Today, with so many moving parts in digital marketing, from multiple creative executions targeted according to region, language, market segments, interest, etc., coupled with immense amounts of data -- advertiser KPI/post-install event (for apps) data, demographic data, behavioral data, client CRM data, traffic data, and more -- ad operations needs to continuously monitor campaigns.

Once the campaign has been planned and the insertion orders are signed, ad operations takes over, ensuring that the creative elements are ready for the campaign to launch, which can be anywhere from 30 minutes to 24 hours after the insertion order was signed.

So your campaign is live. Here's what marketers and agencies can do to enable ad operations to maximize the performance of their digital marketing campaign:

Share relevant KPIs/post-install events (for app campaigns) with your partners
For competitive reasons, many marketers are reluctant to share sensitive client data, even with their agency partners. I understand this concern because your agency account executive or media planner might be working with your competitor in six months. However, the only way your digital/mobile campaigns can be optimized is against your own business critical data. So if a marketer knows that a user who accesses their app three times per week or more is the customer with the greatest Lifetime Value, then this information must be shared, so that the campaign can be optimized to find prospective customers who will visit your app three or more times per week. Without this information, it's like expecting someone to pass a test while hiding the book, notes, and study materials. In this day and age, with marketers all investing in business intelligence and competitive analysis, your competitors probably already know which post-install events can predict a profitable customer for your (and their) app.

Provide retention reports on a frequent basis
When running a mobile marketing or user acquisition campaign, the only two data elements your partner running the campaign will have are clicks and downloads/installs. While those data points are important, they won't provide a complete picture. According to research from Compuware, most downloaded apps are only used once after they're downloaded. Therefore, it's important to provide those who are running your app or digital marketing campaigns with usage data found in retention reports -- like time spent engaging with the app and the number of times users accessed your app -- so that your mobile and digital campaigns can be optimized to generate more users who will use your app and become profitable customers.

In addition, campaigns will generate the best ROI when retention reports are provided on a regular basis -- no less frequently than once a week -- so that campaigns can be continuously optimized. For example, one source of traffic -- let's call it Source One -- might be generating a significant amount of clicks and a high click-to-download conversion, making that publisher look optimal for your campaign. But the retention report might show that 98 percent of those users never access your app after the initial installation. Another source of traffic -- let's call it Source Two -- might be generating a much lower click and click-to-download conversion, but 40 percent of those users have accessed your app after the initial installation, and 10 percent are accessing your app three or more times per week. According to the data available to the partner running your campaign, Source One appears to be a much better source of traffic than Source Two. Only with access to the retention report can one see that Source Two is delivering more profitable users and a better ROI based on analysis of post-install events found in the retention report.

I understand the hesitation to share sensitive marketer data with your partners, particularly when you know that they're also working with your competitors. But the likelihood that your data will be unique (to your competitor) is pretty small in an era where competitive intelligence is inexpensive to obtain and relatively easy to do.

For the last few years, data has become the new black in digital marketing. In this sense, ad operations is no different. To ensure that your campaigns are running as effectively as they can, it's necessary to provide your vendor ad operations team with as much feedback on campaign performance as quickly as possible. In the absence of campaign performance data, ad operations can only optimize campaigns based on clicks, and as we've learned over the last decade, clicks aren't necessarily the best performance metric.

In the same way that your employees and co-workers need feedback in order to improve team performance, your vendor ad operations team needs feedback in the form of campaign performance metrics to optimize campaign performance.