Optimization Strategies to Elevate Your Ad Campaigns

Imagine getting better results from your ads at better rates. That’s what campaign optimization can bring you. It helps you strengthen a marketing asset instead of building one from scratch. If you’ve ever run a campaign, you’ve already been involved in optimization! (Hint: it happens at the last stage of the cyclical process.)

But is campaign optimization really worth putting all that effort? Definitely! Campaign optimization is the heart and soul of progress. By not focusing on it, you may be leaving a lot of money on the table. So, keep reading to learn more about this essential element of campaign strategy and how you can make it work for you.

What is Online Ad Optimization?

Online ad optimization refers to the processes and practices by which you improve the outcome of your advertisements. Even though it’s not exclusively applied online, campaign optimization is mainly used in digital marketing because of the wealth of data available. However, even though it’s called ad optimization, you don’t necessarily have to keep your efforts within the confines of what’s visually available to the audience. The impact and effectiveness of an ad are based on many moving parts. As part of your goal of achieving better results from your ads, you may have to explore avenues where you don’t actually change anything about the advertisement itself.

Why Does Ad Optimization Matter?

Optimizing an existing advertisement is important because it’s an established part of the campaign. If you have not previously put any real effort into campaign optimization, we strongly suggest that you do so for these reasons.

It can mean a lot of extra cash without a lot of effort.
You get first-hand insights and data to determine the direction of your campaign optimization.
It can help you lower your ad spending while still yielding the same results.

Now, is it possible to attain success without campaign optimization? Definitely! However, this doesn’t mean you’re making the most out of your budget. Besides, why settle for good when you can do downright excellent?

Types of Digital Ad Campaign Optimization Strategies

There’s more than one way to go about optimization. All campaigns have many moving parts; in fact, even those that do not touch the ad can have a significant effect on its content. This has given rise to the many types of campaign optimization. The most appropriate options will depend on what the data is telling you. To give you ideas on where you can start, keep reading. We’ll cover the different types of campaign optimization and some of the ways that you can implement them.

Ad Creative Optimization

The visual is what captures the attention of the audience, so it makes sense to introduce changes here. Campaign optimization can mean:

Changing the concept altogether: You can alter what you want to highlight in your campaign optimization efforts. Let’s say you’re creating ads for a hotel. Instead of highlighting the scenic views, maybe you can get a better reaction by featuring the hotel’s restaurant.
Switching from one type of visual to another: For example, instead of just an image, perhaps you could use a GIF.
Change fonts and colors: Play with different elements in the visuals and see what resonates with your audience the most.

Copy Optimization

For campaign optimization that focuses on the text, you don’t always have to do a complete overhaul. Trust us, even your biggest fans are not necessarily reading everything you have to say all the time. So, consider these campaign optimization tweaks for your copy:

Just change the headline: Most people don’t read past the headline, so even with this change, you can get way better results.
Switch the framing: If the message isn’t resonating with the audience, go back to the customer avatar to better align your campaign optimization efforts.
Refine the call to action: If the current CTA isn’t moving things along, then perhaps a different one will.

But if the data calls for a complete overhaul, don’t be afraid to do it!

Audience Targeting Optimization

With campaign optimization, it’s not always the advertisement itself that’s the problem. Perhaps the message is great, but it’s not reaching the right audience. Here are a few ideas on how to target the right people:

Fine-tune the demographics: Perhaps your target audience is way too large, so you’re not getting the impact that you want.
Dive deeper into behavior targeting: Look into basing your targeting on past purchases, browsing activities and preferences to better resonate with the audience.
Contextual targeting: For your campaign optimization, native advertising can do wonders since you’re presenting ads that are relevant to the user when they browse.

Landing Page Optimization

If the ads are great and you’re still not getting a healthy ROI, then it’s time to focus your campaign optimization efforts on the landing page. Here, you can just apply the same principles that you used in the advertisement itself. You can consider:

Improving the headline;
Introducing more images on the page;
Creating a stronger CTA.

If it can be applied to an ad’s campaign optimization, it will most likely work in the case of landing page optimization as well. Most importantly, there should be no other button that a user can click that will cause them to fall out of the funnel. The potential losses from this mistake are huge, so be sure to remember this when optimizing your campaign.

Time-Based Optimization

How well would you sell suncream if you only sold it in the winter? This is the concept behind this type of campaign optimization. But how do you know when you should be publishing the ad? It’s always about looking at the data. Ask these questions to help you decide if time-based optimization can work for you.

Do you tend to see spikes in the data, showing when your audience best responds to your ads?
Has new information come to light on when your target market uses the platform where you’re advertising?
Is engagement generally low across the board?

Time-based campaign optimization may work for you if you answer ‘yes’ to any of these three questions. If the conditions justify changing when you run your ads, go for it!

How to Optimize Digital Advertising Campaigns and Ads: A Step-by-Step Guide

If you’ve ever run an ad campaign before, you’ll notice that the process of designing a campaign is similar to optimizing it. Implementing a campaign optimization strategy also involves research, assessment and execution. But this time, there are some additional things to consider to ensure a greater level of success. After all, you don’t want your campaign optimization measures to actually decrease the results you’re getting. In our step-by-step guide, we’ll talk you through the specifics of what you need to do and/or keep in mind. In the normal campaign creation process, campaign optimization is technically the final step. But here, you’ll see how it is another challenge in and of itself.

Step #1: Revisit Relevant Information About the Campaign

As we have mentioned, campaign optimization is at the tail end of the optimization process. At this point, we can assume that there’s a higher level of clarity because you’re already running ads. So, the first step will start right in the middle of the campaign. Pretty exciting, isn’t it? However, which important elements should you remember before you optimize ads?

Identify key performance indicators before the start of the campaign.
Analyze past campaign performance with the same objectives.
Take stock of the “environment” where you want to perform an online campaign optimization (platform policies, trending topics, etc.).

With these points taken care of, you’re ready for the next step.

Step #2: Gather Data from the Campaign That You Want to Optimize

Compared to running the first version of your ad, there’s less speculation involved with campaign optimization. Since you already have data from the control, you should take that into consideration here. What data should you be collecting here? It should include:

Ad performance based on key performance indicators;
Anything that strikes you as odd (even if it’s not part of the KPIs);
Time-based data (as in, the performance of the ad based on the time and/or day it ran);
Data from competitors (This can be effective as a benchmark!).

All these points can help you decide how to optimize an ad campaign. They will help you identify the performance from different perspectives beyond the data generated from the campaign itself.

Step #3: Make a List of Where You Can Improve the Ad

Based on the information that you have gathered for campaign optimization, where do you think you can do better? To identify this, ask the following questions.

Is there a metric where the ad fell short of the expectations?
Has the campaign met all the benchmarks but is still behind the main competitors?
Is the ad performing better or worse on certain days of the week or times of the day?

These elements should help you come up with ideas for campaign optimization. But don’t limit yourself to just these. Feel free to include points that didn’t come from answering these questions.

Step #4: Prioritize Potential Points of Optimization

You will now have a list of the many routes you can choose. What’s next? Start by prioritizing ads optimization possibilities based on the time and level of effort required, the potential impact on the ad and your capability to implement that particular change. Depending on your resources, the campaign optimization strategies you’ll consider may differ. Now, should you implement the top three or the top five? Or should you create different rankings based on their potential effect on the campaign? How you prioritize identified campaign optimization strategies is up to you. Feel free to create your own system!

Step #5: Implement the Change (or Changes!)

You’ve done the homework on campaign optimization, and it’s time to see where it gets you. Implement the changes and hope for the best! When you do, here are a few considerations:

Try to implement them one at a time: This limits the campaign optimization externalities that may increase or decrease the impact of your change.
Mind the timing: Unless the change you’re making is time-based, consider implementing optimization at the same time as the original.
Don’t make too many modifications at once: If you’re in a hurry and have to inject several campaign optimization changes at once, try to make sure they don’t counteract each other. For example, perhaps you shouldn’t change the text and the creative in one go.

Step #6: Compare the Results with the Initial Campaign

Even if you consider many factors when deciding what potential changes you can introduce as part of campaign optimization, comparing the results should still be based on the KPIs. After all, the reason you’re doing this in the first place is to improve the outcome of the advertisement. This is why it can be a good idea to optimize campaigns one at a time. If you can identify specifically what caused the increase or decrease in ad performance, you’ll be more confident about your next move. However, the macro perspective is still important. In the end, you’ll only ever see the combined effects of all campaign optimization techniques.

Step #7: Implement Other Changes as Necessary

Your campaign will only end when you stop spending on the ad. So, by extension, you’re free to continue optimizing while there’s still a budget for the campaign. You decide when you’re happy with the results. If you believe your work with campaign optimization isn’t done, then continue. You can use your existing list to start; however, if you’ve identified other points at step six, you can use those as well. Our advice is always to run the control against the changes that you introduce so that you can monitor their impact.

Best Practices in the Digital Marketing Campaign Optimization Process

Have you decided how to approach optimization for your campaign? Great! Just remember that no matter how you determine campaign optimization is best handled, these practices can take you a long way:

Make sure that the entire campaign looks great on mobile;
Don’t be afraid to learn and use tools for campaign optimization to make your job easier;
Don’t stop testing;
Keep an eye on trends that may have a significant impact on ad effectiveness right now;
Keep the user experience at the heart of your campaign optimization strategy to encourage users to engage.

And because all improvements are based on data, make sure that you review the relevant metrics regularly.

Common Advertising Monitoring and Optimization Metrics

For this, you only have to go back to the key performance indicators. When determining where and how to introduce improvements, keep an eye on these campaign optimization metrics.

Impression share: The percentage of total impressions your ad received compared to the total available impressions in the market
Clickthrough rate: The percentage of users who saw your ad and got to the next step of the funnel
Conversion rate: The percentage of users who performed the desired action for a specific part of the funnel or for the entire campaign
Cost per click: How much you pay on average every time your ad is clicked
Return on ad spend (RoAS): The profitability of your campaign, based on your revenue and total ad spend

Ideally, the more metrics that you monitor, the better. These metrics describe your ad’s effectiveness.

Tools for Marketing Campaign Optimization

In the previous subsections, you learned about the many ways that you can improve an ad. You also learned about the potential considerations in selecting which ad optimizations you should prioritize. As you can see, there’s a lot to do and consider. But time is money! Assuming a competition of nearly equal capabilities and resources for campaign optimization, it will be hard to get ahead if you’re going to rely on human talent alone. You’ll need to get as much help as you can so you can work faster and get better results. If you want to explore how to optimize marketing campaigns effortlessly, consider using these tools in your processes.

Adbeat

Do you mainly publish display ads? Then, Adbeat may be something that you want to budget for. With this tool, you can get full and comprehensive reports to help you make campaign optimization decisions. These reports are also easy to understand so that even non-experts can interpret what the graphs are trying to communicate. And how does Adbeat make this possible? It uses real-time insights from the more than eight million ads that it can access and also has built-in analysis tools. If you’re interested in including ad spy tools to monitor the competition for campaign optimization, we’ve got an article full of recommendations for you, too!

Google Analytics

Of course, you don’t always have to look outside to work out which tweaks need to be done. For campaign optimization, it helps if you have a good sense of how users interact with your website. It will tell you a lot about where you can improve your landing page conversions, ensuring that you get as many sales as possible at the last step of your campaign. So, how does Google Analytics help with campaign optimization? It allows you to assess user behavior, track website traffic, and monitor conversion data. It is also feature-packed, with audience segmentation, goal tracking and Google Ads integration.

Optimizely

Why just stick with A/B split testing? Decisions on campaign optimization must be based on statistically significant data. And, if you want to come up with the best mix of creative, text and user experience elements, your campaign optimization strategies need multivariate testing as well. This is the highlight of what Optimizely offers. But you don’t have to learn about advanced statistics to get the best outcome from your ads. This campaign optimization tool already does everything for you, so all you have to do is implement and enjoy better returns on your ad spend.

What is Advertising Campaign Optimization Going to Bring You? Better and Cheaper Ads!

Whether directly or indirectly, the ultimate goal of advertising is to bring in business. Therefore, your efforts in campaign optimization are to make this happen. We have discussed the ways in which you can achieve this and the tools that can help you make the most out of your ad budget. If you want to add native advertising to the mix, our team is happy to help you with various aspects of campaign optimization — from improving the creative to ad placement. All you need to do is take the first step. Sign up at MGID today and get access to our advanced tools, a personal manager and a department of creative specialists. Figuring out how to optimize a campaign’s performance doesn’t have to be difficult. Let us build your success together!