It’s hard to give up control over every campaign detail and trust your chosen platform to perform. It’s very tempting to action every piece of targeting that digital channels offer us to pinpoint a very specific audience. It also may seem reasonable to optimize many different KPIs on each campaign to make sure your advertising spend is used effectively.
However, data from over 10,000 campaigns shows that the most successful ones have a simple and clean setup that works towards one clear objective from the start. Here’s why a simple campaign structure delivers better results.
When the targeting is too complex it limits the number of people you can reach
Layering targeting options might seem like the way to go to achieve this one-to-one conversation that digital advertising promises. However, it’s also important to consider available reach and whether or not a set up can deliver results at scale.
For example, you might want to reach a specific audience segment or reach people who use certain apps. But if you layer both you’ll find there aren’t enough customers that match that criteria and your campaign won’t be able to achieve your objective.
Complexity means the bulk of your efforts is on the wrong part of the campaign (settings vs results)
Trying to keep such tight control over your settings, that you sacrifice the results in the process. It’s similar to the issue above: if you want a guarantee on the audience (your settings) you are limiting your outcomes (your results).
It’s a fine balance that can be achieved through experience. If you ever need advice on your campaigns our dedicated account management team can help make sure you reach the right audience without compromising your results.
Understanding what you are trying to achieve gives you just one objective
This one is especially true for drive-to-store advertising, where you are asking people to move from their online activities to performing an action offline. The objective of drive-to-store campaigns is to increase store traffic (footfall uplift). That’s what you should focus on improving. And to do that you need to make sure your strategy makes sense, your reach is high, and you trust the machine learning algorithms of the platform to find the people who will go to your store.
Focusing on achieving outstanding results on other online metrics takes your optimization efforts away from your main goal and it can mean sacrificing your bottom line for proxy metrics.
When you look at two campaigns, make sure you’re comparing like for like
Benchmarking performance is essential to keep track of your ROAS, but this analysis must be aligned by campaign objective to make sure you’re comparing like for like.
For example, the CTR of a web traffic campaign cannot be compared with the CTR of a drive-to-store campaign. If you do so, you’ll have a distorted view of these campaigns’ performance, because traffic campaigns will have a higher CTR and it’s not an indicator of how well the drive-to-store campaign did.
A clear message drives direct action
It’s also important to keep your creatives and messaging simple. In drive-to-store, we are asking customers to take a big jump to the offline world, which is full of distractions and added complexity. Your message should be a clear guiding force to your store, rather than something complicated to understand.
Over time we have developed a set of ad formats specific for drive-to-store that can help you get your message across and drive action. They can be fully developed by our studio team and added to any campaign you run with us.
It may seem hard to strike this balance between simplicity and reaching the right audience, especially for those who are new to drive-to-store advertising. If you want to get started with drive-to-store and understand the variables and basics contact us to see how we can help you.
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