Have you ever taken a long road trip in your own car? Did you just hit the road, crossing your fingers that your car would be just fine for the several-thousand mile journey without checking to see if it needed an oil change, a tire rotation or a fuel filter replacement? It’s more likely you gave it a proper tune-up to ensure you’d be able to hit your destination smoothly and efficiently. The same goes for your holiday campaigns. Before you set out to drive those Q4 conversions, you need to make sure everything under the hood is optimized for the best performance. Here are seven analyses we recommend advertisers run as they prepare for their holiday campaigns.
- Site traffic analysis: Understanding how much you can expect your site traffic to increase in Q4 is critical to determine the necessary budget for your advertising efforts to maximize your returns. Compare year-over-year (YOY) monthly traffic to calculate total annual traffic growth, as well as recent monthly traffic trends to identify seasonality and recent growth trends.
- Audience analysis: Discover “who” your users are. Leverage demographic audiences provided by various data vendors to identify the characteristics of users that index highly when compared against the general population. This analysis can be preformed for users served impressions, users that visit your site or, even more specifically, users that converted. Knowing these top-indexing segments can help tailor your overall marketing strategy, as well as target those specific segments to power performance for your prospecting campaigns.
- Pricing analysis: Monitor how CPMs fluctuate throughout Q4 as closely as possible. If you see a spike in prices during certain times, consider raising the maximum bid so that you’re not missing out on valuable impression opportunities.
- Publisher site analysis: Which publishers are best for driving conversions? Compile a lists of sites where impressions have served, including metrics such as impression count, CPM, clicks and conversions. Use this list to identify high-performing sites that you should consider for accessing more premium inventory via the private marketplace. Use more recent campaign publisher performance data to reflect the current marketplace, however, if historical site data is available, identify site trends to better predict the demand and CPM during the Q4 period.
- Device and channel analysis: See how recent consumer behavior differs by day of week, time of day, device and channel. Make sure you have access to all channels—social, mobile, display and video—in order to maximize your reach and ensure you’re not missing out on performance.
- Site interaction analysis: Examine how users interact with your site, such as how long they’re on it before converting and what sub-pages they visit and in which order, in order to optimize to which types of creative and messaging to serve to different users on your site. This can increase engagement and lead to better performance.
- Geo-targeting: Compare performance across geographies (such regions, states and zip codes) to identify populations for which to increase targeting, budget or show localized messaging through a variety of channels.
[author type=”registered” username=”Renee Engelhardt”]
[author type=”registered” username=”VarshaVenugopal”]