What actions can I take to optimize my advertising campaigns?

Customers who have experience with digital advertising are likely familiar with these common scenarios any ad platform can present: 

• Uneven spend/serving distribution across accounts 
• Uncertainty around what budgets to set for advertising campaigns 
• Frequently maxing out daily budget, or underspending on their advertising budgets  

To help overcome some of these challenges, our Ad Operations team is dedicated to making continuous optimizations to drive quality account engagement for your advertising campaigns. This includes time-of-day optimizations, frequency capping, optimizing placements, making audience recommendations, and a variety of other human and machine-aided customizations designed to meet your advertising goals.

In addition to the adjustments our Ad Operations and your Customer Success Manager can help implement, here are some steps you can take within the Terminus Ad Experiences product to optimize your advertising campaigns for efficient spend and maximum coverage across your target accounts.

Scenario 1: Some accounts are receiving the majority of impressions/spend

In addition to accounts that are under-serving, there may also be accounts in your campaigns that most of your spend and serving are being allocated to. 

To identify these accounts, open the campaign details page and sort your account table by accounts with the highest spend; these should also be accounts that have received the highest amount of impressions.

As a best practice, we recommend that customers try to group companies of similar sizes (re: number of employees), into separate campaigns. This typically leads to more even budget and impression distribution across your target account list.

However, there are cases where, due to data availability and targeting selections, some accounts may still end up having a much larger spend than others. In this scenario, the best option is to manually turn high-spend accounts off and target them in a separate campaign, either grouped with similarly-sized companies, or in a one-to-one approach. This way, you can more closely monitor and control spend and serving to these accounts without having to turn off targeting completely. 

To do this, click on the ellipsis next to the account you wish to exclude, and hit "exclude account". 

Scenario 2: You are maxing out your daily budget on a regular basis

Within a Terminus tactic, you can also monitor spend and serving at the campaign-level. To access this information, navigate to the “Account Performance” section of the Campaign Details Page.

Here, you can easily see how your tactic is trending in areas such as daily spend, impressions, and clicks. In some cases, you may notice that your graph trendlines appear to “flatline” on a regular basis, in correlation with your daily budget setting. 

In this scenario, it is likely that you have not allocated enough budget to effectively reach your target accounts, based on daily engagement levels. This is usually due to an uneven distribution between the number of accounts you are targeting and total audience reach, and the daily budgets you have set. In this case, you could:

• Increase your daily budgets incrementally and monitor spending patterns from there.
  • Because spend is dependent on so many varying factors, (number of accounts being targeted, types of companies, size of companies, personas being targeted, ad creatives, etc.), it is hard for us to give precise estimates on budgeting before a campaign is launched. Since customers have the freedom to adjust daily and overall budgets at their will, our recommendation is to monitor spending patterns for your unique audiences to help set baselines and expectations for future budgeting. Additionally, your Customer Success Manager and our Ad Operations team can help make more accurate budgeting recommendations for your campaigns once they have been running for ~2 weeks (reach out to them for more information). To learn more about budgeting options in Ad Experiences, check out this article.
• Turn off accounts you are overspending on, or accounts that have already received a significant amount of impressions. 

Scenario 3: You are not hitting your daily budget consistently

Similar to the last scenario, you may notice that your tactic appears to be underspending, in relation to the daily budgets you have set.

If this is the case, there are a few things to consider:

• Because the Terminus Ad Experiences product offers very granular account-level targeting options, and because our Ad Operations team optimizes for quality engagement AND maximum coverage, it is possible that your daily budget expectations won’t align with our ability to actually serve to your audience. If you need further recommendations on campaign budgeting, you can consult with your Customer Success Manager.
• This may also be a scenario where you look into expanding your original audience targeting selections if your serving and spending do not align with your advertising goals.
• Ensure you’ve included all recommended size variations for your ads. Having these sizes available in each campaign is one factor that can help ensure you see the highest engagement (clicks, CTR), and the most serving inventory across our advertising networks. 
• If you see a sudden drop in spend, check to see how many accounts are currently “included” in the campaign. Changes to your original audience rules, for example, could result in accounts moving to an “excluded” status en masse, and could directly affect how much you are spending. If this pattern is not correlated to changes in your audience, please reach out to support through the Terminus Support Portal to assist further. 
  

As always, our team is always happy to discuss your individual advertising objectives and make adjustments to meet your targets. Please reach out to your Client Strategy Manager if you have any additional questions regarding these recommendations.