In a world shaped by digital, customer interactions define a brand’s success. For marketers, this can be a significant challenge. While digital advertising is growing rapidly, it is grappling with wasted spends, leaked revenues, and ineffective targeting and tracking of the operators (advertisers and publishers) in the ecosystem. Studies indicate that the total waste in the advertising ecosystem ranges from 2% to 4% of the overall campaign spend.

Advertisers and publishers can ensure better ROI for their campaigns by analyzing spend allocations at each step of the advertising campaign cycle to curb revenue leakage. Marketers can drive deeper customer engagement through relevant customer insights. To supercharge that cycle, they need a campaign strategy built on a strong enterprise marketing technology platform - one that accelerates innovation with analytics. This will help track marketing campaigns and regulate how they perform at each step with respect to dips and raises in sales.

Advanced analytics helps uncover hidden patterns and insights in campaigns when data is organized and analyzed to maximize speed-to-market. Often, the speed at which publishers get advertising performance data and its subsequent analysis, delays the ‘time-to-analyze’ and ‘time-to-optimize’ an advertising campaign.

Easy-to-use tools that aggregate, analyze, and dispense real-time data contribute enormously to smooth and efficient business operations.

Advertising analytics for campaign optimization

The base of advertising analytics is data visualization and analytics software. It analyzes relevant data to uncover hidden insights for better decision-making, and to determine how advertising activities interact with the actions and purchases. Advertising analytics measures the ROI at each step, bringing relevant insights to digital advertising’s most important activities. These insights help tweak the combinations to achieve optimal returns. It also allows media companies, publishers, advertisers, and brands to have a single view of various advertising campaign metrics through flexible reports.

To measure the efficacy of an advertising campaign, the analytics tool analyzes the campaign on certain traits like advertising attributes, targeting of the prospects, advertising performance against the promised reach, and advertising engagement with respect to number of clicks, among others. Once this data is collected and consolidated based on the predefined metrics across all the advertising platforms, the same is analyzed using analytical filters. Analysis of this data helps the advertisers derive rich insights on campaign performance (See Figure 1).

Advertising analytics helps sell, serve, target and report the performance of online advertisements. And, by using different input parameters like advertisement type, operating systems, audience demographics, inventory, impressions, conversions, view rates, gaze time, etc. from all operators, a marketer has access to rich and insights-laden reports such as campaign summary report, traffic summary report, engagement report, and insights on publisher versus advertiser campaign effectiveness.

Advertisement metrics applied with analyzed data provides a holistic view on the campaign as it covers inventory delivered, click-through rates, conversion rates and impression or action-completion rates. These insights facilitate the marketer to make the required adjustments in the advertising campaign in real-time.

Advertising analytical tool also measures the cause-and-effect relationship between the advertiser and the publisher. It captures the interactions across various channels precisely to analyze engagement and traffic insights, thus enabling real-time distribution of marketing resources from one activity to another.

The benefits of analyzing, optimizing, and responding to the insights derived by a marketer through advertising analytics are (See Figure 2):

1. Consolidation of dispersed data: Aggregate Ad performance data from multiple sources.
2. Capability to take measurable actions: Advertising analytics tool carries out the quantitative analysis, powered by Business Intelligence (BI), of planned Ad campaign against its actual performance. This not only reduces the dependency on data scientists, but also enhances efficiency as well as effectiveness of the campaign.
3. Analysis of campaign-driven user actions: This tool also provides insights about how a campaign performed; what sources gave the maximum clicks; what content brought most traffic, etc.
4. Ability to know and react to market trends: This tool also uncovers market trends that shapes users’ online behavior, thereby empowering a marketer with the knowledge of what, when, and where to target (their advertisements).
5. Insights-driven campaign planning and optimization: Insights-driven campaigns empower the marketer to make desired changes in the attributes after analyzing its impact on campaign performance.
6. Optimizing inventory performance: By getting insights about which time slot drives more traffic to an advertisement and when there is no traffic at all, a marketer can accordingly move the advertisement. Doing so optimizes the inventory, which can then run other relevant campaigns.
7. Capitalizing on buyer behavior: This tool also analyzes the behavior of people, and based on that, the marketer presents relevant ads to the user, which generates favorable responses.
8. Revaluating campaign strategy to drive maximum benefits: The marketer can tweak the campaign continuously according to the received insights.

Advertising analytics, thus, provides deep insights about the right target for a campaign, and user profiles and behavior for better targeting of an online ad in a campaign. These insights enhance the performance of the campaign in relation to the budget as it decreases the speed-to-market of a campaign. Moreover, by tracking and adjusting various parameters in a campaign after taking valuable insights, the tool also helps a marketer improve the ad performance, which amplifies the results of advertising dollars spent.

Those who optimize the dollar spent on advertising effectively by making the required adjustments in the advertising campaign will sustain and grow their revenues in digital advertising.

Anees Khan - Global Head - Media & Communications, Business Process Services, Wipro Ltd

An industry veteran of over 18 years, Anees has rich experience in the Information Technology and Information Technology Enabled Services industry spanning across sales, account management, transition, and operations for global clients. At Wipro, he has handled multiple responsibilities in diverse businesses. His portfolio includes New Age Media customers across the areas of Advertising, Search, Marketing and PR. Anees can be reached at anees.khan@wipro.com.