Leveraging Marketing Analytics Benefits for Strategic Ad Spend

Marketing analytics is the practice of using technology, applications, and methods to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. The practice can also measure the impact of individual marketing initiatives or efforts, such as advertising campaigns, emails, content, and social media posts. Essentially, marketing analytics analyzes, tracks, and measures the performance of overall campaigns and efforts according to predefined metrics. For instance, a company can use sales revenue attributed to an advertising campaign about a promotion to measure its performance.

With many organizations using a mix of traditional and digital media, marketing analytics methods and tools have been able to combine performance data across multiple advertising sources. This performance data provides marketing analytics benefits related to not only assessing the effectiveness of current efforts but also providing insights about future decisions. Integrated performance data that is easily accessible from a single tool can provide both macro and micro views, allowing marketers to make strategic decisions on advertising spend based on a larger picture.

Summary of Marketing Analytics Benefits

Besides providing marketers and executives with an overall picture of campaign performance, marketing analytics provides the following advantages:

  • Perform A/B tests on various creative elements, such as copy and content, call to actions, images, and designs.
  • Pinpoint what types of creative messages are working and which ones are not. This can also be identified according to different audiences or market segments.
  • Identify trends among various promotional campaigns, promotional programs, products/services, media consumption behaviors, and audience or market sentiments.
  • Provide data on the return on investment (ROI) for specific campaigns and individual marketing efforts, such as webinars and live events.
  • Measure growth trends and changes in audience behaviors, such as shifts towards responding to email and social media versus print or television advertising.
  • Help predict the results of future campaigns or individual marketing efforts.
  • Identify areas for improvement or market opportunities.
  • Help shape overall marketing strategies and determine when shifts in strategies are necessary.
  • Monitor consumer behaviors and responsiveness.

Identifying and Using the Right Tools

To reap the rewards of marketing analytics benefits, each company or organization often has to experiment with different tools and methods to get it “right.” Outlining the organization’s goals, what needs to be measured, and why, can provide a solid blueprint for finding the optimal tools. Some analytics tools have free versions or features for marketers to try out before upgrading to paid versions. For instance, Moz’s keyword tool has a free version that lets copywriters and content strategists perform basic keyword research for blog posts and other forms of digital content. The Pro or paid version expands available features to advanced SEO research and tracking.

Other tools like HubSpot and Domo reveal trends and performance across various digital channels, such as web and landing pages, emails, and online content. From a centralized dashboard, marketers can view overall performance trends for blog posts, email campaigns, and landing pages. Performance metrics are also available for individual pieces of content, web pages, and emails. Comparisons can be made according to specific periods, such as year-to-year, month-to-month, rolling 90-day or quarterly stretches. Tools like HubSpot can provide complete content management or customer management systems, integrating both current and potential customer contact information.

Analytics tools, such as SEMRush, can provide marketers with comprehensive comparisons between leading competitors. Companies can see how internal web pages and advertising campaigns are ranking in relation to competitors that may be targeting the same keywords and similar audiences. Comparison tools can also help identify content or keyword opportunities that marketers may have previously overlooked.

Regardless of the set of tools a company chooses, there are a variety of ways to approach the objective of leveraging marketing analytics benefits. While some companies choose to handle everything in-house, many organizations use the services of digital advertising and analytics partners, like Digilant to help maximize ROIs on advertising budgets. Since Digilant specializes in omnichannel marketing and analytics and is made up of veteran specialists, we can lend institutional knowledge and critical and unbiased perspective of advertising performance to in-house teams.

Digilant can complete audits of digital advertising efforts and build custom analytics dashboards to connect and visualize advertising data in a single view. Reports and visualizations can easily be shared and interpreted by your team and key stakeholders and can save you precious time and resources by eliminating manual work and the need for expensive data storage, preparation, and visualization tools. 

Now is the time to start reaping the rewards of marketing analytics benefits. To get a complete view of your current marketing and advertising initiatives and to identify opportunities to get more out of your advertising investments, contact us today.

Programmatic Advertising Explained: A Beginner’s Guide for Brands

Placing ads in the best place, at the best price, to the best audience is the crux of digital advertising. Creative and personalized messaging are also critically important. But if your ad never is seen by the intended audience, you can quickly fall into the trap of poor performance. For brands, programmatic advertising has quickly become one of the most efficient solutions to driving performance without the risk of wasted spend. In 2020, programmatic is estimated to make up 69% of all digital media spend, and it’s expected to continue to rise in 2021.

To help you start benefiting from more efficient and better-performing advertising campaigns, you can find programmatic advertising explained in the sections below.

What is programmatic advertising?

Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of digital advertising inventory. 

How does programmatic advertising work?

  1. A visitor lands on a website, and the website owner/publisher communicates with a Supply-Side Partner (SSP) to list ad inventory up for sale.
  2. SSP provides inventory and site visitor information to a Demand Side Partner (DSP) to make ad inventory available for advertisers to bid on. 
  3. Advertisers automatically place bids on ad inventory based on a predetermined budget.
  4. The highest bidder wins the ad
  5. The ad creative is served to the visitor on the website

All in .100 seconds.

 

With programmatic, advertisers and publishers use Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) to buy and sell digital advertising inventory across digital channels like display, social, digital out-of-home (DOOH), Connected TV (CTV), and more. DSPs make it possible for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell digital advertising using automation instead of the traditional process that requires human negotiation and buying impressions in bulk. 

Using a DSP, brands can buy impressions dynamically, on an automated, one-on-one basis. Additionally, DSPs allow for greater transparency – brands can track advertising impressions throughout digital advertising campaigns to generate insights and optimize performance. This saves brands valuable time and money while also providing greater accuracy of ad placements and audience targeting.

Saving time means you need fewer people (often media buyers and sellers) to execute your digital advertising campaigns. While programmatic advertising isn’t 100% automated, it does allow brand marketers to spend less time on execution and more time focused on building smart digital strategies. Some brands do this in-house, while others work with outside partners like media agencies or media partners that are experts in programmatic. 

Early on, programmatic channels were limited to display, social, and video. Today, more and more programmatic channels are emerging: digital out-of-home (DOOH), Connected TV (CTV), podcasts, and more. 

Why are brands turning to programmatic advertising?

1.Better Targeting

Target digital advertising campaigns based on thousands of data points, including interests, contextual, sentiment, behavior, income, location, job title, IP address, app downloads, purchase intent, CRM data, and more. Using robust sets of data to inform audience targeting, brands can serve ads to specific audiences online across all digital channels. With personalized messaging, traditional has not been possible through direct publisher buys. 

2. More Scale

Programmatic advertising allows brands to estimate reach before campaign launch and scale audiences as needed to hit desired reach and conversion goals. To scale target audiences or identify new audiences, brands can use lookalike modeling. With lookalike modeling, brands can model new audiences based on existing customers’ attributes and high intent prospects. This can be done at the start of a campaign or continuously to detect new audiences.

3. Real-Time Optimization

Brands can optimize digital advertising campaigns in real-time and throughout campaigns, which can’t be done with traditional digital ad placements. Because execution and reporting for programmatic ad campaigns are automated, brands can use performance data and insights to inform shifts in media investments towards highest performance audiences and channels.

4. Greater Return-On-Investment (ROI)

Advanced targeting capabilities and access to campaign performance data throughout campaigns help brands eliminate wasted impressions and budget. By quickly identifying poor performing audiences, tactics, or channels, brands can change course without wasting media spend. Similarly, brands can double down on audiences, tactics, and channels, driving the highest ROI.

5. Opportunities to Test and Learn

Access to real-time performance data gives brands the unique opportunity to test new marketing messaging and creative, targeting tactics and channels with lower risk than direct buys. Insights can be applied to campaigns as they are running and future marketing strategies, both online and offline. 

How Digilant is helping brands with programmatic advertising

Because brands have to make media dollars work harder than ever, they have to identify the digital advertising campaign performance drivers and detractors quickly. With the benefits of programmatic advertising explained above, we’ll now get into some real-world examples of brands doing it well.

Johnston & Murphy’s programmatic strategy

Footwear and apparel brand Johnston & Murphy wanted to capture online customer activity to better assess the influence paid media had on in-store purchase behavior. 

To do this, Johnston & Murphy turned to programmatic advertising to close the loop across channels and create a personalized customer journey online and offline. Working with Digilant, Johnston & Murphy onboarded first-party CRM data and matched it with online consumer data to get a complete view of all online and offline customer activity. This expanded view enabled Johnston & Murphy to activate current and future customers 1:1 through programmatic media channels.

The results? A 30% lift in sales for the audience exposed to media through CRM-enabled programmatic. Additionally, Johnston & Murphy has been able to attribute 2X the number of sales to programmatic initiatives with an attribution model that recognizes online and offline purchases.

PopCorners’ programmatic strategy

PopCorners wanted to raise awareness of its snack brand among health-conscious consumers in the US. To do this, PopCorners turned to Digilant to form a programmatic advertising strategy that promoted new PopCorners Flex and PopCorners Flourish products now available at specific grocers. The strategy included the following programmatic tactics:

  • Geo-targeting – to reach consumers in proximity to specific grocers
  • Demographic and Behavioral Targeting – to reach health-conscious adults, healthy snack buyers, and healthy beverage buyers.
  • Channel Optimization – to shift investments to the channels that were the best performing. For PopCorners’, the best performing channels were Facebook and Instagram.

The strategy led to a click-through rate (CTR) that was 7X the previous benchmark and helped PopCorners grow sales by 40%.

To read more programmatic success stories visit our case study library.

Are you ready to start with programmatic advertising?

Now with programmatic advertising explained, do you know how to get started? 

Finding success with programmatic advertising requires that you nail down the fundamentals of programmatic targeting tactics and performance analysis. If you are looking for guidance to get started with in-house programmatic advertising or need an outside team to take the reins, Digilant can help.

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