Marketing leaders today have to get bullish about the kinds of sophisticated advanced analytics tools we choose and use—because each month that passes could represent lost revenue if we’re not making data-informed decisions based on accurate cross-channel data using the latest analytics approaches.
With the COVID-19 pandemic impacting businesses everywhere, there is added urgency to be confident in the campaign and spend decisions we’re making both now and as we look toward recovery. Two of those recent and big decisions have been around adjusting ad spend and messaging:
- 70% of media buyers quickly adjusted or paused their planned ad spend between March and June, with a plan to increase spending in May and June, but not rebound to original plan.
- 63% of advertisers from March through June, are shifting messaging away from performance marketing and toward brand marketing.
[IAB Coronavirus Ad Spend Impact: Buy-side]
So, with reduced spend and the shift to brand advertising, the next challenge for marketers is to tackle how to squeeze the most out of what they do have in play. Again, the solution can be found in the data.
Recently, Ken Gardner, Founder and CEO at conDati, presented a webinar that tapped this exact topic, showcasing how you can transform your digital ad data into intelligence that can be actioned and activated easily (and often) for higher revenue lift.
In this blog, I’ll cover Ken’s presentation highlights, showing the specific steps we can take to lift revenue out of places we didn’t know existed.
How companies unintentionally limit themselves
Below are the most common digital advertising practices conDati is seeing that can keep companies from unrealized revenue. Each of the examples represents opportunities to shift ad spend and maximize revenue potential.
- Brand campaigns with little to no changes made since they were set up –
Without continual monitoring and improvement of campaigns you get bumped from prime positions. Competitors, search trend changes, seasonality, search algorithm changes and stagnant ad copy are all factors. - Limited or no use of targeting mechanisms offered through Google, Facebook, Bing etc. -
When you don’t take advantage of audience, demographic and ad schedule targeting within ad platform tools you end up paying for clicks that don’t convert. This spend is better reallocated to attracting more of your ideal customers. - Marketers assuming that campaigns are saturated –
This is an easy assumption to make when you add more budget to a campaign, and it doesn’t yield additional returns. What you are likely not looking at are the microsegments within that campaign and how reallocating spend within those microsegments can result in higher returns without even spending additional money.
New insights to claim “unrealized” revenue
In his webinar, Ken showcased how an online retailer leveraged conDati RevenueLift™ (an AI-driven marketing platform for campaign decisioning and predictive analytics) to drive an impressive 13% lift in e-commerce revenue over a historically low holiday period. More specifically, he did a deep dive on the use of the RevenueLift Optimizer on the customers brand campaign in Google Ads for a 7% lift.
"Essentially what RevenueLift Optimizer is doing is looking at saturation levels across all the micro segments of your campaign and precisely identifying every pocket of opportunity available to you within that campaign."
—Ken Gardner, Founder & CEO, conDati
The RevenueLift Optimizer uses algorithms to look at diminishing marginal returns and statistical significance of conversion rates—then identifies and recommends high-potential microsegments that will return lift. It does this by analyzing and comparing targeting variables such as demographic, geographic, timing, creative, and device across the campaigns selected. Looking at saturation levels for each and every one. Often, the combinations of possibilities are in the 10s to 100s of thousands—far too many for a practitioner to manage and action on a regular basis without the advantage of AI. What may appear to be a saturated campaign now becomes a treasure trove of revenue opportunity. The heatmap to the right illustrates one example of age, gender and income combinations across 51 campaigns. The darker the green, the more revenue potential within that microsegment.
Discovered revenue through the power of AI
Using this process, the eTailer highlighted in the webinar saw 7% lift over one month for their brand campaign, resulting in a daily campaign revenue increase of $1,300 which adds up to a tidy sum for this company when aggregated across a whole year. And remember, this is just for one of their campaigns. These results were achieved by making weekly bid adjustments. The customer was able to download a CSV file from within the conDati platform, then upload the file into the Google Ads UI to implement the changes within minutes.
"There are big opportunities for companies to get between 20 and 50% additional yield from paid search advertising using the targeting analytics in RevenueLift Optimizer.
—Ken Gardner, Founder & CEO, conDati
Prepare now for a fast marketing rebound post-COVID-19
As marketers, we’re all thinking about how to set ourselves up post-COVID for a quick revenue rebound. Thankfully we are in a position to plan ahead and start exploring options – do you go back to the way things were before or take this opportunity to step things up?
If you are curious how AI can power prescriptive bid optimization recommendations for your organization, we’d love to talk to you. Schedule a demo of RevenueLift™ Optimizer today.
To watch the full 28-minute webinar “Squeeze More Revenue Out of Your Brand Campaigns: conDati Shows You How” highlighted in this blog, access it here.
