According to Zenith's Programmatic Marketing Forecasts, 65% of all money spent on advertising in digital media in 2019 will be traded programmatically. Occupying a majority of your overall marketing budget, it would be wise to maximize the effect of your programmatic advertising spending.
As a leading MarTech solution provider in China, DeepZero | iPinYou has developed a series of smart products, powered by machine learning algorithms and a professional operation team, which have been used and validated by more than 2,000 brands. In this article, our senior operation director proposes an exploration framework for optimal budget allocation in programmatic advertising.
We divided campaigns into 5 stages based on E-commerce festivals or sales season, take a 20-day campaign as an example
Stage 1, Strategy testing for 4 days with a 5% budget
It all starts with gathering useful data on campaigns. With a limited budget, the optimizer will only introduce basic variables like geography, creatives, dayparting, audiences’ attributes, and media for testing the campaign strategy. Operators will split campaigns into different groups and run them during different times of the day in different locations on different media.
Stage 2 Optimize and warm up for 3 days with a 15% budget
Once we have tested for basic variables individually, cross-variables analysis is then used to further optimize the campaign strategy step by step. Optimizer will start with creatives optimization by using sequential messaging across various categories and formats to screen creatives according to their effectiveness. Once the most effective creatives are identified, audiences’ attributes, geographic, and dayparting will be added for cross-analysis. Meanwhile, ad frequency is tightly controlled across all media platforms. The performance of each platform is monitored based on the ROI performance of each. The final step is to add retargeting tactics and evaluate click rates.
Stage 3 Campaign rollout period for 3 days with 40-50% budget
With insights into the first two periods, creatives, days, demographics, and media that are garnering the maximum engagement, it is time to mix and match between strategies and spend nearly half of your budget. Mind that at least 40% of your budget should be spent in this period to reach your campaign goal.
Stage 4 Review campaign for 3 days with a 5% budget
After an outbreak period of a campaign, it is important to take your time to reflect and avoid campaign gaps. Our platform offers 200+ dimensions targeting granular statistics and 70+ dimensions real-time reports including click-through rate, viewability, traffic, and engagement rates. Use this data to understand which audiences’ attributes work best for your brand and which media has better performance. The best strategy is summarized during this time.
Stage 5 Continuous optimization period for 7 days with 25-30% budget.
In the last few days of a campaign, besides practicing the best strategies, creatives are still being optimized. Meanwhile, Look-alike modeling is used for finding new clients who behave pretty similar to your current customers in this period. Consumers with similar behavior and attributes to clients who buy your products most often will be categorized in the external database to display optimized ads.
