If you work agency-side, you’ve likely had to navigate the hoops required to advertise tricky content categories like firearms, Cannabis, Housing, or Politics. The latter of which has been ticking-up for many of us, as you’d expect, given where we are in the election cycle.
Some of these categories are flat-out rejected by large ad platforms, Google Ads for example, won’t let you advertise firearms or booze. Housing, politics, and employment are “limited” or “restricted”, but can get approval in many cases, the ad targeting options might just be lacking. The best bet is to hunt down specific ad networks that have pre-approved publishers pooled together to advertise an otherwise restricted or prohibited type of business. Think of it as a library of solutions, just to keep on hand. While you’re at it, find a digital out of home source, or maybe a niche native platform.
The trick is that research takes time, as everything does. It’s difficult to stay on top of, without feeling like you’re wasteful with half of a day, but it’s normally worth a small, consistent effort.
Whenever we talk about creative refreshes and making sure ad creative isn’t getting stale, the client hears, “new promotions”. That’s not necessary, most of the time. New promotions are great, but in keeping your creative fresh, it’s more about the context, colors, and CTAs in your designs. Even a new promotion needs a different look and feel, changing “10% off” to “15% off” is relatively meaningless if your design doesn’t change. Especially with a small audience, keep your creative fresh.
Similar to developing landing pages for paid ad traffic, the cost of getting multiple designs for testing and creative refreshes is minimal if you simply consider this during the initial development phase. Changing text, background images, CTAs, even button colors, are all easily done if you request those pieces all at once. It’s often the difference between adding an hour to your initial development time, or spending several hours for the same designs as “round two” at a later date.
Time and time again, we benefit from taking a few minutes to consider how best to reach a client with their own paid ads. It sounds wasteful, but we’re talking about pennies a day. On a $12 CPM, which is higher than necessary to ensure quality placement and context, you can show an ad 4 times per day to each of 10 people, at a cost of $14.40 per month. If your client is engaged, or perhaps wondering if their ads are actually reaching people online, it’s worth $10 or $20 a month to show your client their ads “in the wild”.
Consider a frequency cap, of course, and ad pulsing or only running on a couple days per week can help to minimize waste while ensuring adequate reach. When a client discussion starts with them proclaiming that they see their ads all over the place, you’re off to a good start. Digital ads can feel like smoke and mirrors to some clients; we know what they can do, and we take it upon ourselves to truly drive value, but don’t assume that your clients understand all of that, nor that they inherently trust in it.
Paid Search and Facebook (Meta) ads have been atop the list of useful tactics for a while. Viewability is of zero concern with those tactics, and SEM would even have us ignoring ad impressions all together. As you venture into exchange inventory across the web for image and video placements, viewability is something that you should be monitoring. In case someone reading this has the question, IAB deems an ad “viewable” if at least 50% of it is in view for at least 1 second.
We don’t normally suggest 3rd party verification for viewability, nor brand safety, but there are settings, targeting options, and reports available to monitor and control the quality of inventory coming through your DSP buys. It’s important to understand the different targeting options, where you can target or block inventory known to be (a) above the fold, or (b) below the fold, keeping in mind that a lot of placements haven’t been confirmed one way or the other. Targeting only placements known to be ATF will be expensive and limited in scale, but blocking placements known to be below the fold is a safe place to start.
Not all ad impressions are alike, the same way that not all clicks are alike. Once again, proper tracking and clean data are critical. Some of this is also gut feel, where an experienced media buyer can lend insight into the quality of your buy, what options are available to control that quality, and what specific changes would mean to your KPIs and overall performance. Also, don’t completely count placements out just because they’re below the fold, it’s about cost-effectiveness, more than face value.
We’ve recently been revisiting the value that we associate to conversion events like phone calls or form completions. Clients with online purchase events are easily handled, once the technical work is done. For most clients though, associating a value to each conversion event can be exceedingly difficult to get right.
Consider this little problem from a different perspective; it’s less important that you know exactly what a conversion is worth, and more important that you know what each conversion is worth in relation to the other conversions. We often use a scale of 1 to 100. In that scale, with your most valuable conversion being worth “100”, and the other conversions falling somewhere in that scale? Maybe a phone call is worth 1/2 what an online form is worth, and you might ignore calls that come from branded SEM traffic as those are a unique circumstance. Maybe calls over 2 or 3 minutes are worth 100, while shorter calls are worth less. You might also have things like newsletter sign-ups, coupons or white paper downloads, or even sessions over a certain duration. Those little things can be helpful to feed back to ad platforms as signals to help guide ad campaigns, but you’ll need to use them properly or you’ll drive yourself off the rails.
Value is only part of the equation, of course. Attribution modeling is a different topic but exactly what you’re attributing is just as important.
Paid Search is easily covered these days, albeit often by inexperienced, well-meaning staffers as an entry into digital ad management. Beyond that, do your chops extend beyond Google Ads and into the real DSP realm? Can you execute storyboard (sequential images depicted to each user) or high-end video campaigns, like full episode CTV/OTT? Does your digital game extend to streaming audio or digital billboards, interior signage, and other Out of Home placements?
What about localized, specialized, scalable campaigns? Can you handle 1,000 individual franchise campaigns with varying budgets and reporting needs? Do you have the capacity to launch, pace, track, and report on 1,000 paid ad campaigns?
Are you integrating GA4 data in your ad performance reporting, monitoring for bad clicks and verifying conversion information? Can you integrate offline call and conversion data with your performance reports, or at least monitor for up-ticks in untracked conversions? Is your data consolidated and automated for ease of use, made available and depicted properly for each client?
Beyond simply fulfilling an ad buy, are you refreshing creative appropriately and looking for areas of optimization, day-parts, or geo/demo segments worth pruning or focusing on directly? Do you fulfill an order, or are you pushing your clients to move budget among channels and targets to maximize overall performance?
Perhaps most importantly, do you have someone to whom you can turn and ask questions like this?
