Optimization Best Practices, Part One: Preemptive Plan Will Dictate Performance Potential
You’re ready to launch your campaign. You've ticked off important items on your digital checklist: targeted audience? Check. Established KPI? Check. Set flight dates, designed creative messaging, and picked your channels? Check, check, check.
But hold on, there's more to be done before you can sit back and watch the data roll in.
Optimization is the secret sauce to unlocking the full potential of your campaign. And using data-driven insights and making strategic adjustments, you can supercharge your targeting, increase conversions, boost ROI, and achieve impactful results.
However, for optimizations to be insightful, impactful and drive informed marketing decisions, they need to built on a firm foundation.
In today's fast-paced digital world, adapting and optimizing campaigns is essential for effectively engaging your desired audience. But before you can start tweaking and analyzing metrics, you need a strong starting point.
It all begins with planning. Just like an athlete's performance depends on their training before a big game, the success of your campaign is greatly influenced by the decisions you make during the planning phase. To have something to optimize towards, you must examine your goals and turn them into measurable KPIs (such as CPC, CPA, CTR, conversions, etc.) during the planning process. It's similar to choosing a targeting strategy for your campaign. If you skip the groundwork and research, you're essentially taking a shot in the dark and casting too wide a net.
Here are some questions advertising teams should ask themselves during the planning stage:
Does the business goal align with the chosen digital objective?
Do the targeting tactics support the digital objective?
Have you selected the right key performance indicator to measure success?
Is there a benchmark for campaign performance based on past campaigns?
These factors have a significant impact on your campaign's performance and determine how effectively you can optimize it.
Once you have a well-defined plan in place and a clear understanding of the parameters for measuring success, only then is it time to leverage data-driven optimizations to maximize efficiency and effectiveness.
While the allure of diving headfirst into the data-based optimizations may be strong, it would be unwise to underestimate the importance of the planning phase. Without a solid foundation rooted in a thoughtful plan, the optimizations you make will ultimately reflect the shortcomings of an inadequate strategy. Therefore, it is crucial to resist the temptation to bypass planning and instead ensure that your data-driven optimizations are built upon a solid and well-informed framework.
Coming Up in Part Two: Data-Driven Optimization Strategies to Drive Performance