What actions can I take to optimize my advertising campaigns?

Customers who have experience with digital advertising are likely familiar with these common scenarios any ad platform can present: 

• Low audience reach and spending/serving
• Uneven spend/serving distribution across accounts 
• Uncertainty around what budgets to set for advertising campaigns 
• Frequently maxing out daily budget, or underspending on their advertising budgets  

To help overcome some of these challenges, our Ad Operations team is dedicated to making continuous optimizations to drive quality account engagement for your advertising campaigns. This includes time-of-day optimizations, frequency capping, optimizing placements, making audience recommendations, and a variety of other human and machine-aided customizations designed to meet your advertising goals.

In addition to the adjustments our Ad Operations and your Customer Success Manager can help implement, here are some steps you can take within the Terminus Ad Experiences product to optimize your advertising campaigns for efficient spend and maximum coverage across your target accounts.

Scenario 1: Some accounts are not receiving impressions/spend

Within Terminus Ad Experiences, customers should be regularly evaluating how many of their target accounts are being reached with impressions, and diagnosing any noticeable engagement and spend patterns across their target account list. 

The easiest way to do this is to utilize the account table within the Tactic Details page:

In the table, start by doing a reverse sort on either the Spend or Impressions columns to show accounts that you are spending the least on and/or are receiving the lowest amount of impressions; (since Terminus media spend is based on impressions served, these columns should be closely correlated).

In this view, you may uncover a scenario similar to the one seen here:

As you can see, there are several accounts in this view that have not received any impressions to-date, and who also have very low reach. Here are some suggested steps you can take in this scenario:

• Reach will depend on the size of the accounts you are targeting, your audience targeting selections, and what data is available from our data providers. Anything with less than a few dozen cookies worth of reach is unlikely to receive significant impressions, and may not be worth targeting through a cookie-based display channel. You can manually turn these accounts off via the “On/Off” column, or try targeting them through a different channel, like LinkedIn Sponsored Content.
• For low reach accounts, you should also review the “Expansion” column. If you are targeting at the “Seniority” or “Department” levels, those selections could be too limiting, based on the size of the account and the other factors mentioned above. In this scenario, you could:
• Move low reach accounts to a separate tactic and expand targeting selections to “Whole Company” or more departments.
• Use the “Edit Tactic” link in Tactic Settings to change your “Expand to Whole Company” selection to “Yes”, (meaning you would include cookies from your target departments, as well as other departments), and/or add additional, relevant department selections. For more information on how to do this, check out this article. 

• There may also be some higher reach accounts that aren’t receiving as many impressions/spending as expected. For these accounts, it’s important to keep in mind that high reach doesn't always result in spending money. Our ability to serve ads to your target accounts is directly correlated with how active those cookies are online, so serving can fluctuate, even for larger accounts.
  • This could also be due to inefficient budget distribution among accounts, as discussed in the scenarios below. 

Scenario 2: Some accounts are receiving the majority of impressions/spend

In addition to accounts that are under-serving, there may also be accounts in your tactics that most of your spend and serving are being allocated to. 

To identify these accounts, sort your account table by accounts with the highest spend; these should also be accounts that have received the highest amount of impressions, and are likely also accounts with the highest reach.

As a best practice, we recommend that customers try to group companies of similar sizes (re: number of employees), into separate tactics. This typically leads to more even budget and impression distribution across your target account list.

However, there are cases where, due to data availability and targeting selections, some accounts may still end up having a much larger reach than others. In this scenario, there are a few steps you can take:

• Manually turn high-reach accounts off and target them in a separate tactic, either grouped with similarly-sized companies, or in a one-to-one approach. This way, you can more closely monitor and control spend and serving to these accounts without having to turn off targeting completely. 
• Work with your Customer Success Manager to adjust the per-account spending limit for the tactic. This feature allows you to change the default spending limits across any one account in your tactic, (currently set at $500 per account for all newly-launched customer tactics), to help ensure that you are not over-spending on any one account, and to keep budget distribution more even across your entire account list. 

Scenario 3: You are maxing out your daily budget on a regular basis

Within a Terminus tactic, you can also monitor spend and serving at the tactic-level. To access this information, navigate to the “Account Performance” section of the Tactic Details page.

Here, you can easily see how your tactic is trending in areas such as daily spend, impressions, and clicks. In some cases, you may notice that your graph trendlines appear to “flatline” on a regular basis, in correlation with your daily budget setting. 

In this scenario, it is likely that you have not allocated enough budget to effectively reach your target accounts, based on daily engagement levels. This is usually due to an uneven distribution between the number of accounts you are targeting and total audience reach, and the daily budgets you have set. In this case, you could:

• Increase your daily budgets incrementally and monitor spending patterns from there.
  • Because spend is dependent on so many varying factors, (number of accounts being target, types of companies, size of companies, personas being targeted, ad creatives, etc.), it is hard for us to give precise estimates on budgeting before a tactic is launched. Since customers have the freedom to adjust daily and overall budgets at their will, our recommendation is to monitor spending patterns for your unique audiences to help set baselines and expectations for future budgeting. Additionally, your Customer Success Manager and our Ad Operations team can help make more accurate budgeting recommendations for your tactics once they have been running for ~2 weeks (reach out to them for more information). To learn more about budgeting options in Ad Experiences, check out this article.
• Adjust the per-account-spend limit for the tactic.
• Turn off accounts you are overspending on, or accounts that have already received a significant amount of impressions. 

Scenario 4: You are not hitting your daily budget consistently

Similar to the last scenario, you may notice that your tactic appears to be underspending, in relation to the daily budgets you have set.

If this is the case, there are a few things to consider:

• Because the Terminus Ad Experiences product offers very granular account-level targeting options, and because our Ad Operations team optimizes for quality engagement AND maximum coverage, it is possible that your daily budget expectations won’t align with our ability to actually serve to your audience. If you need further recommendations on tactic budgeting, you can consult with your Customer Success Manager.
• This may also be a scenario where you look into expanding your original audience targeting selections if your serving and spending do not align with your advertising goals.
• Ensure you’ve included all recommended size variations for your ads. Having these sizes available in each tactic is one factor that can help ensure you see the highest engagement (clicks, CTR), and the most serving inventory across our advertising networks. 
• If you see a sudden drop in spend, check to see how many accounts are currently “Active” in the tactic. Changes to your original audience rules, for example, could result in accounts moving to an “inactive” status en masse, and could directly affect how much you are spending. If you have implemented a per account spending cap (as mentioned previously), you should also check to see if accounts have stopped spending due to reaching that limit. If this pattern is not correlated to changes in your audience, please reach out to support through the Terminus Support Portal to assist further. 
  

As always, our team is always happy to discuss your individual advertising objectives and make adjustments to meet your targets. Please reach out to your Client Strategy Manager if you have any additional questions regarding these recommendations.