Richard Kahn
Advertising teams, regardless of industry or tenure, face challenges when it comes to optimizing various parts of their marketing campaign strategy. While there can be similar goals, themes, and channels for each campaign, teams may find themselves looking for ways to turn their strategy into a more effective conversion and revenue generator.
Whatever the hurdles are—from staffing, to missing the right tool, to lacking the right technology for data integration—companies still need to find ways to meet and engage their target customer as they move across various platforms. In other words, it takes a range of resources seamlessly working together to find the right audience and make campaigns successful.
With our significant experience in the marketing industry, Anura knows the challenges faced by our clients. Whether you’ve seen one or you’ve seen them all, here are some of the most common campaign performance challenges and tactics you can use to overcome them.
1. Inability to Calculate a Return on a Marketing Investment
Sure, marketers are always focused on producing enough impressions and demand for their content. However, with so many options, platforms, and channels all targeting the same eyes, the competition will only increase. This requires teams to have even more data to support their decisions and funding, in order to make their plans a reality.
Clearly, there’s far more than just counting impressions to measure the effectiveness of a marketing investment, a product, or a piece of content. For example, are the right target audiences engaging with your content? Are they informed enough to make decisions to purchase or take action?
This is why marketing teams need to be able to track the return on investment of each marketing activity in their arsenal. Armed with the right technology and data, teams can not only justify requests for additional funding in the future, but they can also form strong links between marketing activities and specific sales results.
Therefore, it’s important for teams to not only identify and collect data against metrics relevant to their campaigns, but also for them to have tools that produce information at the necessary speed and level of granularity. With the right indicators in place and aligned to your campaigns’ desired outcomes, teams can then track the effectiveness of each marketing touchpoint and use that data to back up their decisions, including those that support budget requests.
2. Wasting Time and Resources on Internal Fraud Detection
As ad fraud continues to evolve, it can be difficult to know with certainty how campaigns are performing and whether the traffic across all sources is valid. Fortunately, as ad fraud has evolved, so too have ad fraud detection tools like Anura, which provide actionable, granular, real-time data to help marketing teams fine-tune their campaigns and improve their ROI.
Ad solutions like Anura pull from extensive databases of constantly updated information to validate the accuracy of traffic and immediately flag traffic deemed “bad.” Automated and intuitive ad detection tools also free up time for your marketing teams and help you use your marketing budget more efficiently. This saves time that would otherwise be spent manually evaluating, researching, and triaging traffic back on continuous business development.
3. Hesitating to Make Modifications
After weeks or even months of planning, prep, and launch, it can be difficult to change the direction of a campaign or even cut your losses on a strategy. When is the right time to make that call, and more importantly, what data is used to make these types of decisions? Do peers, friends in the industry, customer feedback, or input from other parts of the organization influence the decision?
While there is no silver bullet to fit every situation, the one thing we all can agree upon is the need to have ample data—real-time and historical—readily available to factually evaluate the performance of your campaign. While some campaigns can take time to gain traction, in other cases, changes may need to be made to increase the conversion of your targeted audiences.
To arm your team with the needed objective data and offset subjective feedback, teams should identify a solution that captures, consolidates, and presents traffic data from across your platforms. Data can then be presented and pivoted, and teams can “drill down” to identify areas of improvement—backed by numbers—before it’s too late.
4. Losing Efficiency with Systems that Do Not Easily Integrate
It’s a given that every marketing team has its own strategies, tactics, and suite of tools to launch and manage its ad campaigns. There are also often various publisher relationships across several verticals that need to be monitored and evaluated. But how likely is it that all of these reporting systems, datasets, and tools integrate with one another, especially with something as important as ad fraud detection and monitoring campaign performance? And with spending for marketing automation tools expected to reach $25.1 billion annually by 2023, this problem is only going to get more pronounced.
This inability to integrate easily, without data manipulation or workarounds, can lead to the potential loss of key data points that teams need to make timely, efficient changes. Instead, teams should look for a solution that is robust enough to help them learn about their traffic in granular detail, provide pivot table reporting, and easily pull in data from across multiple sources to provide ad hoc reports for deeper analysis. Even better, tools like Anura’s can provide actionable, intuitive, and insightful dashboards to easily identify lagging indicators in campaigns, so teams can decide how to handle them.
5. Securing the Necessary Budget
The old adage, “It takes money to make money,” rings especially true for marketing professionals, but there’s more to it than that. The only way your marketing campaigns continue to get the resources they need to reach their target audiences over time is when you prove that your allocated budget is used wisely.
To that end, the key to not only unlocking the budget your team needs but also using each dollar efficiently is to have your strategy produce measurable results. This can be especially true for smaller organizations that do not have flexible or ample marketing spend.
In addition to proving your campaigns’ return on investment, marketing teams are now able to use a technical solution that rapidly and accurately identifies ad fraud. In doing so, teams eliminate waste from bots, block traffic from “bad” sources, streamline their existing spend, and capture rich, tailored data that can refine campaigns and support metrics tracking.
Bringing It All Together
When running a marketing campaign, it’s important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. By stepping back and thinking holistically about the different facets of your marketing strategy, learning from the lessons of others, and benefiting from innovative tools, you won’t just improve the metrics of individual campaigns, but you’ll also improve the overall success of your team over time.
Fortunately, you can find comfort in the fact that you aren’t alone in this challenge. Solutions like Anura’s can help your team automate ad fraud detection, produce rich metrics, and make informed decisions in real-time. You’ll not only overcome these challenges, but you’ll also be ready for the ones just around the corner.
Ready to dig in further and uncover signs, types, and sources of ad fraud? Download our Ad Fraud 101 ebook and learn how to keep ad fraud out of your marketing funnel.
