Let’s talk about automation. Do you automate your placements? Do you consider your company automated? Most likely, this concept has a different meaning for you and me. And now I will tell you what automation means for newage.

What digital ad campaign look like?

Before talking about automation, we need to understand what we are working with now. Let’s take a look at a typical media campaign.

Let’s say we use 5 services:

• Google Ads;
• Facebook Ads;
• DV360;
• TikTok;
• direct placement.

Each of them has separate segments: cold, warm and hot audiences. We get 15 types of settings. Each segment has sub-segments with their own creatives — that’s another x3.

That’s approximately the number of data slices to consider for further campaign optimization. But the data that we would like to analyze in each of the slices is several hundred.

In general, if we multiply everything, then we get a table of several hundred thousand cells. Specialists should launch a campaign with it and then analyze it. This is a rather labor-intensive process. According to my calculations, to support such a campaign without automation, at least 2-3 specialists are needed who would devote all their working time to the campaign.

In fact, many do not have the resources for these specialists. Therefore, advertisers launch campaigns for 2-3 segments and optimize them according to basic models. Of course, the quality of the campaign suffers from this. Naturally, the quality of optimization suffers from this and budgets are not used effectively enough. Let’s see what we can do about it.

Effective Automation: Marketing VS MarTech

In digital, we work not with marketing, but with MarTech – marketing technologies. If we are talking about marketing, then we are talking about strategy, creativity, understanding of the user or client. And MarTech adds a technological part that helps us make campaigns more effective and work faster. Previously, digital was perceived as just another media channel: you made a creative, placed it to a wide or narrow audience, and that was enough. Now everyone understands that it is not so simple and there are many nuances, digital is developing with opportunities and, most importantly, the client understands that it works and will grow multiple times.

When I talk about efficiency, I don’t mean cases like “we increased conversion by 20% and made placement 40% more efficient.” I’m talking about multiplicity. We want to use even more targeting, even more settings, and analyze even more data to make advertising as effective as possible. And automation, MarTech is about efficiency.

Next, let’s talk about the priority and important automation tools at my discretion, a lot of things can and should be automated, but I chose what I consider a priority for today.

What to automate in advertising campaigns

Autoload

Autoload is essentially a template table that we can fill in with settings and parameters to import into systems like Google, Facebook, DV360, etc. The table is individual for each of them, but the template is the same for all campaigns in that service. That is, tables for Facebook and Google Ads are different, but they are suitable for any campaign on Facebook and Google, respectively.

In such a table, you can set parameters, specify a large number of targetings and settings. It’s definitely faster than through the interface. Yes, you need to figure out how it all works at first, but then you can save time on a regular basis.

Basic steps with autoload files for different systems:

1. Google ads
2. Facebook
3. Display and Video 360

According to our forecasts, the campaign that I gave as an example at the beginning, our rather smart and skillful specialists would have launched in 10 hours of work – 2 days. And having an autoload file, this could be done in 2-3 hours. 

Dynamic creatives

There are already cases of using dynamic ads in Search, dynamic creatives in Search Shopping and retargeting campaigns, and everything is more or less clear here. As for Display and Video, it’s more complicated. Surely everyone has seen ads for T-shirts with your year of birth. A person is more likely to buy a T-shirt with their month and year of birth than with a random one.

How long does it take to make such creatives? Let’s take an audience of 15-45 — that’s 30 creatives by year. Let’s add different designs, say 5 – we get 150 creatives. And if we also take different birth months, we multiply it all by 12. Imagine how much time it takes for a designer to prepare this campaign, and then add the time of a specialist to launch it, not to mention the analysis.

There are auxiliary tools. For example, Creative Studio, in which you can create a master banner (1 creative) and set the parameters by which the year and month in this creative will change, as well as the price or store address.

Yes, you need to spend time to understand, master, and configure. To make 10 creatives with 5 resizes, that is, 50 images, a good designer will need 16-24 working hours. With automation, it is enough to make 1 master banner and prepare the parameters that will change depending on the audience. If everyone is set up and you know the system, then a similar task with only x10-100 variations can really be done in 2-3 hours.

If you need effective creatives for your campaign, write “I need banners” to info@newage.agency. Or leave your contacts on the “Design” page.

Reporting

When it comes to automation in digital, the first thing that comes to mind is how to upload data from everywhere. But the problem is not so much how to get the data, but what kind of data to pull up and how to process it further.

I’ll tell you how reporting usually goes without automation (we also had this about 4 years ago). On Monday, the traffic manager starts uploading actual data from the systems. He visits dozens of direct platforms, collects information about different formats and targeting, looks through several advertising accounts… The manager spends the whole Monday and Tuesday on this, and only on Wednesday by lunchtime the client receives a report and the conclusion: “This hypothesis has been confirmed, but something is not working here”. That is, three days of optimization are lost, and this is significant for large campaigns.

If we want to develop and take into account our specifics, when we look at a lot of numbers, then it was quite logical to develop this direction and automate. We have developed a dashboard that collects, compares and organizes data by itself. Now the newage. manager spends not three days, but three hours preparing a report, and this time is spent not on “Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V”, but on formulating hypotheses, searching for growth points and suggestions for optimization.

To make the dashboard work, we connected uploads from tracking systems, auditors, web analytics, CRM, etc. to a single database. Somewhere we set up integrations, somewhere we agreed with the sites that they regularly send a report according to a certain template . So in dashboards for our clients, more than 500 parameters are collected:

• placement quality control and fraud protection metrics;
• data reconciliation parameters;
• campaign media metrics;
• KPI data for each segment;
• financial indicators.

If you give all this information in the form of a table, it will be too huge for a person to understand what is written and at least somehow evaluate what is happening. That’s why our dashboard automatically visualizes all of this in different views and sections.

You can see how it works and spin the dashboard template. To do this, write to dashboard@newage.agency and read the instructions in the article Dashboard newage. 2021: How to automate the work of a media agency? 

Automatic optimization

One of the most important elements in automation is that the systems themselves optimize campaigns based on our data. Marketing is not so simple that you can just shove it onto an algorithm: a person, a specialist, must understand what data to collect and feed to the system.

I find the standard optimization models that exist in Facebook and Google to be impractical, because all campaigns are different. For example, a client needs to bring a new user to a certain section of the site. Accordingly, we first need to set the correct KPI, and then feed the correct data to the system. For another client, we work through a funnel, consistently showing videos with different CTAs for different purposes.

It is important to have data to show the system: “I want to improve this particular KPI.” At this stage, artificial intelligence will help us a lot. A computer has long been able to beat a grandmaster at chess. But the chessboard has a limited number of squares and a limited number of certain pieces. And marketing is not a chessboard, it is much larger, it has an unlimited number of fields, figures, rivals and third-party circumstances. Artificial intelligence will help us, but we must limit the number of variables for it, draw a board and set clear conditions.

When we talk about this level of automation, it’s not about how quickly we can optimize campaigns. It’s about how often you can iterate.

Conclusion: what should we strive for and how I see the future of MarTech

Automation for digital is a kind of ecosystem, the number of components of which is constantly growing and will continue to grow. We have touched on four main issues, now let’s look at how they will work in conjunction.

1. A strategist or marketer prepares a campaign media plan in a certain format, according to a given template.
2. Autoload files are automatically generated from the media plan, which can be uploaded to advertising accounts.
3. Dynamic creatives are created from the same autoload files with changes for each audience. With parameters that are passed under each audience.
4. From the same media plan, the structure of the dashboard with the desired KPI is unloaded.
5. As soon as the campaign is launched, the dashboard is ready. He immediately collects information and analyzes it in the form we want.
6. When a campaign is running, we analyze what and how we work in it, optimize it, and we can loop the work using scripts and algorithms.

All this optimizes marketing and makes it more effective.