Ad Optimization Strategies to Elevate Your Ad Campaigns
Successful ad optimization hinges on the strategic use of data. Without data about ad performance and campaign results, there is no lighthouse pointing the way.
As online advertising becomes more saturated and competitive, brands and advertisers are using more ad formats, channels, and targeting tactics. Managing these components across numerous platforms with the goal of ad optimization is the key to improving return on ad spend (ROAS) and campaign performance over time.
Juggling these campaigns, however, often leaves us swimming in a sea of data. While abundant, this data is not always enlightening. Ad optimization in 2024 faces significant challenges, especially with attribution becoming increasingly complex. According to performance marketing experts, many of the current measurement methodologies fall short. They either can’t merge different data sources effectively or fail to provide fast, actionable insights for ad optimization.
To understand this complex situation and how to overcome it, let’s begin with a definition of ad optimization.
What is Ad Optimization?
Ad optimization is about making your ads work better. How? By assessing the performance of ads, making changes to improve them, and testing them continually to pinpoint the best approach for your campaign’s goals and audience.
Ad optimization is essential for pay-per-click (PPC) ads, as it enables you to improve ROAS, and get more from your ad budget. Whether you want to drive more traffic to your website, generate more conversions, or improve ad monetization, then ad optimization can help.
To tap into the rich insights needed for optimizing your ads, data integration isn’t just helpful – it’s a must.
Here are some important challenges that come up in ad optimization and how to overcome them:
Channels and Formats Keep Expanding
The marketing landscape keeps evolving, and so must your strategies. TikTok, for example, continues to shine as a digital hotspot with a range of ad format options, keeping marketers agile and inventive.
Outbrain native ads come in numerous formats, including Clip video, Click to Watch video, and Carousel Native. These provide advertisers with a rich creative base from which to connect with audiences on the open internet, outside of social media networks. Effective ad optimization requires fast and efficient content creation, to test and iterate toward improved results. Online and AI-based video creation tools are rising to the challenge, enabling marketers to create professional-level design videos and promote them across channels with ease.
Complex Ad Campaigns Require Sharp Analysis
Digital ad campaigns are made up of several distinct elements. Marketers should analyze everything from microcopy to visual assets, and try to quantify the effectiveness of each variation. Analysis tools that integrate with widely-used marketing platforms provide deeper analysis with customized spreadsheets, allowing you to fine-tune your ad optimization strategies through comparative analysis.
For instance, Supermetrics integrates with Outbrain to gather, visualize, and analyze campaign performance in custom spreadsheets. This allows you to create mashups of ad performance analysis with deep on-page metrics, such as scroll depth.
Navigating Single-platform Data Limitations
When your insights are platform-specific, you’re only getting part of the story. True ad optimization requires a comprehensive view of ad performance across various campaigns and channels.
Still, tracking the changes in their performance can get tricky when each platform keeps its own data separate. For instance, you might see a Story ad on Instagram doing really well, but you won’t see how it compares to your Pinterest ads, which could be doing even better.
Jumping from one platform to another to gather this data might cause you to miss important insights. You need a way to look at all the data side by side, even though each platform has its own way of measuring success. To truly understand what’s working, you should look beyond methods like how Facebook counts clicks compared to Google Analytics.
Most ad platforms just show you the basic stuff, such as how many people clicked to your page or bought something right away. They don’t consider the smaller, yet critical steps people take, known as “micro-conversions,” which can tell you a lot about the return you’re getting on your ad spend. And they often ignore the bigger picture, for example, how valuable a customer is over time.
By using a special dashboard created with a business analytics tool like Sisense, you can pull all your marketing data together in one place. This lets you see everything on one screen and compare what’s happening across channels accurately, so you can be sure you are making the right comparisons.
Unified Customer Journeys Inform Ad Optimization
Looking at the small steps, or micro-conversions, that customers take, you can pinpoint valuable insights by connecting all interactions into a single, clear customer journey. However, this can be challenging, especially when trying to add offline conversions to the mix. To get a full picture, you must merge various types of data, including CRM records, geotagging information, zip codes, and in-store sales, and see how they all relate to your ads.
Take, for example, your Google search ads. They might show high sales conversions in your dashboard, suggesting they are more valuable than your X ads with lower conversion rates. But when you review the broader set of data, the story may change. You could discover that buyers from Google often return what they buy or don’t make repeat purchases. Meanwhile, a large number of people coming from X might sign up for your newsletter and buy again after you retarget them on Facebook.
If you overlook things like a roadside banner promoting your Cyber Monday deals, you could miss out on how these efforts contribute to long-term metrics like Lifetime Value (LTV) or Average Order Value (AOV). By bringing data from your ads and CRM together, you get to understand the role that every ad and content piece plays, and determine the most effective channel at each step in the marketing funnel.
Ad Optimization is Crucial. Start Now.
As a marketer, you are living in a digital ecosystem that is more diverse than ever before. In such an environment, isolated data sets are no longer enough. Integrating marketing data gives you a detail-rich view of micro-conversions together with the big-picture perspective of customer journeys. This a challenging yet exciting time for ad optimization that demands a multi-lens approach. If you can create that integrated view, you will be positioned to make informed, strategic optimization moves that boost your campaigns’ success.
