n this article, we list the 5 Steps on How to Optimise your Digital Advertising Campaigns.

Step 1 – Targeting Strategy

To begin with, it is important to have your campaign set up with individual strategies for age, demographics, interests, behaviours, or any other target criteria you are using. This is so that each parameter can be tracked individually and you can optimise them in and out depending on the performance.

Make sure that your targeting strategies are in-line with the campaign brief provided by your client so that you can give them insights on the things which are most important to them.

Step 2 – Advertising Research

Simultaneously derive insights from qualitative market research based on the product you are advertising and the consumers you intend to target.

Additional information from market research in relation to the product and the psychographics of the audience will broaden the targeting funnel which will further assist in serving better results.

For example, Sparcmedia ran a campaign for a chain of family health clinics in Brisbane who were trying to promote an offering for skin cancer awareness. Through qualitative research, we found that Brisbane had an audience segment of students from Japan who were highly conscious about skin cancer due to the high rate of skin cancer in Japan.

Armed with this market knowledge we tested a strategy, utilising a small amount of the client’s budget to target Japanese students. This strategy was a success and resulted in increased conversions for the campaign, with an eCPA much lower than other strategies.

Step 3 – Advertising Insights

Start observing key activities such as the impact of the time of day, the day of week, placements and performance of URL/sites as they play an important role.

You should also be tracking consumer reaction towards each component of the advertising campaign. For example, if you have five creatives in circulation, instead of bundling the engagement rate and seeing the overall for all five, have them split out so that you can understand which executions get greater levels of engagement. Pause the ones that are less effective and focus spend on the 2-3 which have the greatest success. This will ensure that you get a greater engagement rate overall, plus get insights on the types of creative which your audience responds to.

Once the campaign is up and running analyse it for a period of two weeks before making adjustments. You need to ensure that the optimisations you are making are based on a statistically relevant level of data.

Step 4 – Optimise

After two weeks, optimise the campaign towards the parameters mentioned in Step 3

The process of optimisation can include:

• Higher bidding or allocating more budgets towards the URL’s that generate higher engagement (CTR, views, conversions.)
• Pausing the under performing line-items.
• Bidding higher at the most active hour of the day that is providing maximum engagement.
• Increase spends towards the best performing strategies (gender/age/interests)

Optimise spend on a daily basis until the campaign ends.

Step 5 – Analyse 

When the campaign has finished, analyse the results and deliver post-campaign insights that will help the clients grow their business with effective decision-making. Useful insights include: Information around the engaged audience in comparison to the targeted audience, information on which creatives performed and why, information on which strategies performed and why. Wherever possible, overlay this with market data.

Instead of patting yourself on the back for a great click through rate or for the number of sales you achieved, start understanding why you got that result, because when you know that, it will be easier for you to replicate the result again and again on an ongoing basis.