How can you use advance advertising reports?

Advance Reports Are For Losers. Yes, I said it, advance reports are for losers. Those advertisers who are obsessed with acquiring or building advance media or performance reports either have no clue what they're doing or are just giving in to the latest hype. Technology providers continue to roll out new advance reports as additional dimensions of competition, features that will distinguish them from other technology providers, though these reports provide little if any true incremental value to advertisers. The only reporting metrics an effective advertiser will ever need to review are cost, impressions, clicks, and conversion (CPA and CPC can be easily derived). Any other metric is statistical noise that will only distract you from what is really important, acquiring and retaining customers.

Quite often I will be asked to help an advertiser or agency scope out some new advance report that combines their data in a way that has never been done before. Invariably I will ask the client why, what's the purpose of this report. The answer, 80% of the time, comes from the belief that the new report will help them optimize the performance of their campaigns. Those advertisers for whatever reason believe in the notion of audience consistency, the idea that at any given point in time the audience of a website is relatively homogenous and behaviorally consistent with all other points in time. This notion is the bedrock of current online media buying and the guiding light behind audience aggregation. However, a close look at the empirical performance of any online advertising campaign will completely disprove this belief. If you run the same campaign, with the exact same ads, on the same site for the same length of time at two different periods you will see two completely different rates of performance. The audience of a website, their affinity, behavior, and propensity to convert is extremely fickle and changes from day to day without warning or visible cause. Using an advance report to optimize your online advertising campaign is like driving along a winding mountain road while looking out the rear window. In short, it's a recipe for failure.

Advertisers need to be forward looking when it comes to designing their advertising campaigns and leave history to the historians. Stop shuffling those silly spreadsheets that nobody can understand. Focus on what you know about a user, an individual, and not what you know about an entire site. Individual behavior doesn't change much. What a person likes and wants stays relatively consistent across time even though the sites they visit don't. Get rid of the practice of audience aggregation and denounce the notion of audience consistency. Target ads to users based on their expressed behaviors and make sure those ads are as relevant as possible, something that I’ve preached about tirelessly in the past. Focus on the inputs to your advertising campaigns because those are what decide its faith.

Campaign optimization should be about changing the target profiles of your campaign, adjusting the individual users who you are targeting, or adding more behavioral data to your current profiles. It should be about trying new creative variations with your profiles to get a better understanding of what resonates. If the performance isn’t what you would like then get more profile data. Build and nurture a better understanding of your prospects and manage your relationship with them. Technologically this is no simple task but then winning at online display advertising may never be simple. Labels: ,