Advertising campaigns can be easily underestimated especially when you have a smart DSP, like DV360, by your side. Easy decision making AI and ML enabled mechanisms are streamlining every stage of the media buying process. But it is also important to realize that these sophisticated technologies won’t give you results if you have poor creatives, a weak strategy and erroneous set targeting.
We have outlined some mistakes that are commonly made by advertisers and if your campaigns are not showing results, you’re probably making one of the mistakes listed below.
Mistake 1 – Setting up campaigns & forgetting about them
Automated advertising systems can help you set up the campaigns and forget about it easily. But once the campaign is set up and live, the effort shouldn’t stop. Even if you’re leveraging auto-bidding strategies, without additional checks and balances for targeting adjustments, a campaign can fail to reach its max KPI potential. Still it’s of utmost importance to optimize the campaigns to keep them above the breakeven line and avoid spending much.
Mistake 2 – Lazy targeting
You should always include targeting because lazy targeting undermines the strongest of campaigns. Targeted ads are twice as effective as non targeted ones. For instance, geolocation targeting can turn out to be very important for geofencing and geo targeting campaigns and geo referenced businesses.
There’s no point going too broad or too narrow with your target audience. Narrowing your target audience translates to higher conversions because you are not paying for impressions that will not convert. Also, avoid setting it too narrow as your traffic would go down. If no one clicks on your ads, it’s probably because your target audience is too narrow.
Dv360 provides many unique audience opportunities including activity based audiences, custom intent and affinity audiences, similar audiences and remarketing recency suppression. They should be leveraged more within campaigns.
Mistake 3 – Line Item is not clear and concise
Setting up proper line items is key to easy optimizations. To begin, healthy line items should be consistent with the insertion order. Generally, traders will apply the settings at the IO level and think it is applicable to the Line Item level. However, if the Line Item is already present under IO, the newly applied settings will not copy to Line Item. Also, if your line items split the insertion order budget evenly, make sure each line item has enough budget, if not, cut down on the line items and focus on what’s most aligned to your audience.
Do not target too many audiences in one Line Item, or otherwise audiences will win impressions without making a huge reach impact when the ratio of audiences to budget is in favor of the audiences. Start small with just a few key audiences, pull reports to see what is working and what is not and then remove or add audiences as needed.
Finally, do not apply too many conversion pixels on one line item, it will be difficult to know which line item, targeting detail or audience is driving the best performance.
Mistake 4 – Intense frequency caps
Selecting the right frequency of impressions is considered to be one of the most crucial steps. By displaying the ads to the user too frequently you’re risking your brand’s credibility. It’s like asking users to apply ad blockers.
Prior to understanding the optimal frequency management, we recommend applying a 5x/day frequency cap per Line Item on your campaign. Lifetime frequency caps should never be implemented as an audience can always re-enter your brand’s lifecycle funnel. Similarly, weekly and monthly frequency caps can cause impressions to be unevenly spent if an audience uses too many URLs on the first day and maxes out impressions all at once.
Mistake 5 – Not consolidating Campaign Manager into DV360
This is something we always suggest clients do – consolidating Google Campaign Manager into DV 360. Media consolidation helps with audience frequency management, cost efficiencies and attribution reporting. Don’t keep your media that’s booked directly with websites in Campaign Manager. Instead, run as a Private or Guaranteed deal in DV360. YouTube running in Google Ads can also be implemented in DV360.
Want to run an effective campaign? Let Bidmath do the hard work for you! Contact us at sales@bidmath.com today!
