35 Tips to Maximize the Performance of your Digital Advertising Campaign

Purplegator’s Bob Bentz, author of Relevance Raises Response: How to Engage and Acquire with Mobile Marketing, provides methods for improving the effectiveness of your mobile and digital advertising. 

Are your mobile and digital display advertising campaigns not meeting your lofty expectations? Here’s some ways that you can continue to increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and improve your ROI.

Digital Advertising Campaign Optimization

Optimizing campaigns means optimizing the reach of the messages to the appropriate target market that is most likely to engage with the advertising. By using the data provided by the agency or from our third party data providers, we have nearly unlimited ways to segment a marketer’s target audience. 

Our ability to improve your results is derived from the following sources:

• 1st party data from agency
• 2nd party data acquired by the agency or us
• 3rd party data from independent providers
• Device ID Matching — using a prospect list to match the individual to his/her mobile or desktop device
• Geolocation — the primary geographic targeting area
• Geofencing — a subset of the geolocation
• Geotargeting — identifying the demographics and interests of residents
• Geo Conquesting — pinpoint selection of mobile & desktop devices to target down to the address level. 
• Artificial Intelligence — analysis of consumer intent, primarily via voice search

Again, Relevance Raises Response.

Here’s how you can increase the performance of your display advertising programs:

Increase Unique Clicks

• Frequency Capping — Limit the number of exposures per mobile or desktop ID to 7.
• Guarantee that the above the fold ratio of ads is at least 67%.
• Run your ads on premium, well-known sites that achieve higher click/tap through rates. The quality of the sites where your ads are seen does matter.
• Best Performing Creative — Once you have statistically accurate data, you can enhance your click through rate by serving the better performing ads more often. It’s a simple concept, but you’d be surprised how many advertisers don’t bother doing this.
• Use a “Custom Intent” strategy that identifies people who are actively searching for specific keywords on  Google and then target them with display ads. 
• Contextual Advertising — Also called “native advertising,” this strategy involves placement of your advertisement adjacent to content that is reflective of your advertising. 
• Geo Conquesting — Targeting specific address locations and identifying the devices that are there. This works assuming that the location has an intrinsic correlation with the subject matter. 
• Creative — Develop ads that consumers WANT to click or tap on. Give them a reason to click or tap and use an effective Call to Action (CTA) button.
• Remarketing — Remarketing ads see an increase of 4.5x greater than first-time seen banner ads.
• Use unique, creative videos and cinemagraphs that show tap through rates that are 2.54x greater than ordinary banner ads. 

Gator Clips demo: https://youtu.be/BeeOZVn-1_Y

Cinemagraphs demo: https://youtu.be/g6qF0dVyv5I 

Increase Impressions

• An impression in the overnight hours is just as valuable to your agencies (and maybe more valuable) than one during regular working hours, but it is usually significantly cheaper. If you aren’t a retailer or direct response company with limited hours of operation, there’s no need to act like one. Take advantage of cheaper inventory.
• Ditto. Buy weekend inventory. It’s cheaper.
• Use multiple providers and work with the one that is providing you with the most beneficial CPM at that given moment.
• Don’t be afraid to switch providers midway through the campaign. Meet weekly with your staff or agency to review campaigns and make continual enhancements to programs.
• CPMs are the most important aspect of increasing impressions. Just remember, however, that all impressions are not created equal. A video view, for example, is surely going to be more valuable than seeing a banner, yet they both count as 1 impression!

Maximizing Geo-Targeting Performance

• Utilize multiple social media and desktop and in-app platforms.
• Use various third party data sources for targeting.
• Employ negative keywords — Negative keywords are keywords that prevent your ads from being displayed when certain word phrases are searched. Using negative keywords helps Google avoid serving ads to consumers whose search intent is not your campaign’s intent. For example, if we were doing a smoking cessation campaign, a search for “smoking ribs” would not be a person we would want to target. Hence, we would add a negative keyword phrase of “ribs.”
• Lookalike Targeting — We will identify consumers who have clicked through your ads and place them in a database, then find a lookalike audience (consumers similar to them) to target with the same advertisements. 
• Household Extensions — Since we know the IP addresses of the household as the same, one could assume the other residents have similar personas so we extend the ads to those individuals who may be using different devices, but at the same location.
• Business Extensions — This works the same as Household Extensions, only it is for a business.
• Audience Insight Reports — Third party data that matches back to mobile and desktop devices is used to further delineate geo-spatial data to create pools of consumers that look like others.

Decreasing Repeats

• Limit frequency to 7 (or whatever you request) per mobile and desktop ID.
• Combining known mobile and desktop devices to aggregate frequency.
• Target residents of a larger geographic area when that makes sense.
• Identify consumers who may not be residents of the geolocation, but are in the targeted region at this time. 

About the Author

Bob Bentz is president of mobile-first marketing agency, Purplegator. He is also the author of Relevance Raises Response: How to Engage and Acquire with Mobile Marketing. Bentz is an adjunct professor at West Virginia University. He hopes that one day everybody in the mobile marketing industry will call them “taps” instead of clicks.