Display advertising requires care. You need to monitor dozens of services and hundreds of campaigns. We have automated this process as much as possible in newage, and yet sometimes, before launching a new campaign, we postpone other tasks and may lose sight of other projects. To prevent this from happening, the Alpha team implemented a daily project review checklist. In this article, Traffic Manager newage. Denis Barabash will talk about the weaknesses of campaigns that we check every day and advise everyone to do the same.
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Each newage. traffic manager checks and analyzes their advertising campaigns daily. This is a task that the team faces at the beginning of each working day, not just before launch. This includes points that will help eliminate errors before they bring problems. If, when checking the campaign, there are questions that need to be addressed, a new task is already set.
At first, the daily check took up to an hour and a half, but over time, we automated this process, and it takes no more than half an hour. The principle by which we formed the checklist is simple: if an error occurs twice, it’s time to take it under daily control. Let’s analyze each point in more detail.
Do All Dashboards Work Correctly?
Our agency conducts all advertising campaigns on dashboards. An interactive panel is created for each client, where he can follow the progress of the campaign in real-time. Campaign optimization also goes through dashboards. Therefore, the tool must work.
Every morning we go to the dashboard of each client and check whether all indicators are displayed and whether there is data in the context of users and groups. Usually, it is enough just to make sure that everything is OK, everything works, but sometimes you have to write to the support of advertising cabinets or analytical systems if they do not transmit data correctly. Checking in daily is soothing and gives you a boost of confidence for the whole day.
You can also set up a similar dashboard in your company. Write to the mail: dashboard@newage.agency or read the instructions in the article “How to automate the work of a display ad agency”.
Are All Landing Pages OK?
This is a classic story that any digital marketer has come across: you launch an ad, it spins, but there are no conversions. Why? Because the landing page is wrong and the traffic goes nowhere.
For agencies, the situation is further complicated by the fact that clients optimize, improve and change their websites. No matter how much we ask customers to warn, problems still arise. Therefore, we no longer try to remake clients, but simply check in the morning if the landing pages work and if they match the creatives.
Once we talked with a client about the campaign, they say, it is launched, it works and everything should be fine. And in the process, we go along the client’s path to the marketplace, where they sell goods. It turned out that out of the five products promoted, four were listed as “out of stock.” On the one hand, it is the responsibility of the client to monitor the availability of goods on the site. But we want to make effective campaigns and promote real products, and therefore we provide insurance.
Do Budget And KPIs Match With Plan By Segments And Campaigns
This is one of the main items on our checklist. Analyzing KPI, we conclude the further work of advertising campaigns. Everyone understands how important it is to comply with planned budgets – our earnings and our reputation depend on it.
We had a case when a client reached a large coverage. But in fact, we purchased half of the budget, and the remaining half remained unsold. But the client expected us not to save money, but to achieve results.
There is always a risk of targeting too narrowly or too low a frequency. This is standard hypothesis testing. If some group falls behind and does not get the required volumes, we go to the client and offer solutions. It’s better to say right away, and not the day before the end of the campaign.
If earlier we checked budgets and KPIs in dashboards, now we use special scripts that track progress and send reports to managers.
Were Any Ads or Creatives Disapproved?
It happens that the campaign is spinning for a while, and then the ads are rejected without explanation. Here it is useful to set up rejection email notifications, but mail can be skipped, lost, marked as accidentally read, etc. Therefore, every day we go to advertising accounts and check if there are any rejections.
We also automate this process, we have created a script that pulls information about campaigns into a single table. True, so far this possibility is only available on Facebook, and in Display & Video 360 and Google Ads you have to check it manually.
By the way, we have the manual on how to share access to a Meta ad account.
Are There Any New Recommendations In Google Ads?
Some colleagues do not like the “recommendations” section for simple and sometimes banal advice. Indeed, a professional marketer knows best what to do with a campaign. But we still look at the recommendations and process them.
Recommendations are a kind of new look from which you can build on and improve the campaign. Sometimes good ideas come across here, they should be processed to further look for optimization options ourselves.
Plus, the client may have a question about why Google advises interesting things here, but we do not follow. You need to know what exactly the advertising office advises to reasonably answer why we make “reject” in it every three days.
Brief Note
Based on the results of all checks, the traffic manager writes a mini-report, like this:
Here is a summary of the status of the campaign, and output if there are any problems. If so, we offer solutions.
The report is also written in the campaign status file and sent to the team’s working chat in Telegram. This way all team members have a general idea of what is going on in the campaigns of their colleagues and can back each other up in case of sick leave or time off.
Conclusions
The items in the daily report are similar to the launch checklist but are adjusted for each campaign. If an error is found more than 2 times, it falls under daily control. Thanks to this, we notice errors before they become difficult. If necessary, we quickly adjust campaigns or set tasks for reworking the plan.
All this allowed us to reduce the number of errors in campaigns by 20-30%. And for a month and a half of the daily check, we found 7 new strategies for our clients, understood how to improve performance, and quickly trained new employees in the specifics of the tools.
And, of course, regular checks add peace of mind to the Project manager, and he can give operational status on the campaign to the client.
