Data has become the driving force behind every interaction between individuals and businesses. Publishers are constantly seeking ways to unlock the potential of their data and make it actionable in real terms. However, the challenge lies in the multitude of vendors, solutions, and platforms collecting data, each with its own set of privacy concerns and regulations.
The Rise of Multi-Channel Advertising Campaigns
As publishers strive to maintain and sustain revenues, they have embraced online display advertising to supplement traditional print revenues. Many have also diversified into other media types like radio/tv or extended their advertising reach beyond their own networks and audiences. To be the one-stop-shop for advertisers, publishers often offer campaigns that include a variety of media types and outlets, such as:
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- Print products
- Websites/apps
- Off-publisher network channels like Facebook and audience networks/exchanges
The Challenge of Measuring Campaign Performance
While offering a single all-encompassing advertising campaign is appealing for both publishers and advertisers, the challenge lies in determining the optimal combination of channels, targeting, and creatives to produce the best results. To understand this, publishers need to measure and compare campaign results against expected benchmarks for specific advertiser types, campaign types, and creatives. However, with data spread across multiple platforms, gaining a comprehensive understanding of reach and engagement becomes a daunting task.
Aggregating and Normalizing Data
Naviga is working with early adopters to tackle this challenge by aggregating and normalizing delivery data from various sources, making it accessible to sales teams and potentially, advertisers. At a glance, a user can see what is happening with a campaign, including:
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- Views
- Engagement across channels
- Performance of different creatives
By storing campaign performance data on reach, views, and engagement, measured using key metrics like delivery network, audience demographics, device type, and more, Naviga will offer a deeper level of scrutiny. Campaigns can be measured and compared against benchmarks, allowing for suggestions on changes to creatives or targeting criteria to improve delivery.
The Future of Campaign Optimization: AI-Driven Recommendations
As the system collects more data, the next step is to build a model that can make recommendations on initial campaign creation and suggest amendments as campaigns deliver. In time, the option to have the targeting and optimization fully automated will be explored. This would ensure optimal delivery at all times.
This will likely involve a two-stage process:
- In the first stage, salespersons can prompt the tool to get updates and recommendations, generating personalized emails to advertisers with performance updates and suggestions. Example emails that could be generated:
“Your campaign is doing well; its view time and CTR are better than the average we see for businesses like yours. We recommend refreshing your creative as it has not changed for 4 weeks.”
“Your campaign is performing adequately, but it is lower than we would like as it is below the average we see compared to businesses like yours. We recommend we review the targeting or a refresh in creative. When are you free to discuss these ideas?”
2. The second stage would involve dashboard views of campaigns that highlight their delivery risks. In the initial deployment, a user would make the decision to accept the recommendations and alter the campaigns to maximize effectiveness. As the models analyze increased data, the goal would be to automate the process, so that campaigns are continually being optimized for the advertiser.
The Role of AI in Campaign Management
The explosion of AI insights opens new possibilities to automate recommendations for optimizing campaigns. Initially, the AI tool would suggest email content and recommendations for salespersons to tweak and send. As the system learns and improves, this process could potentially be fully automated.
Conclusion
The journey towards AI-driven campaign management starts with bringing data together. Naviga’s Campaign Centre is taking the first steps in this direction, drastically improving the way publishers and advertisers approach advertising campaigns. By harnessing the power of data and AI, Naviga’s innovative approach aims to optimize campaign performance, deliver better results for advertisers, and ultimately, drive revenue growth for publishers as audience and advertiser demand evolves.