In this day and age, advertising isn’t reaching its full potential if it’s not informed by data and backed by technology. This is even more so for online advertising professionals.

 

Gone are the days of creating campaigns, crossing your fingers and hoping they do their job. Today, to successfully compete in the increasingly crowded online advertising space, both marketers and creative teams are expected to adopt a data-backed, real-time mindset in their approach to campaign planning and execution.

 

Fortunately, rapid developments in information and advertising technology are helping marketers achieve true online advertising success with ease while saving time, resources and money.

 

Here are six key areas to focus on when taking your online advertising to the next level.

 

Performance

 

There was a time when the funniest, most beautiful, or most thought-provoking ad was the one that saw the light of day. The funny thing about that time was that the people who decided which ad was funny or beautiful were not the people it was supposed to connect with.

 

Today, advertisers are swapping what may look like a shiny new ad with ads that work. In this new frontier, the ads that win are those that truly move the needle by selling products, inspiring action, or connecting with fans in proven ways.

 

Agility

 

When social media first became popular for advertising, the words “real time” were made a permanent part of our vocabulary. It used to be very challenging to brief, create, and deploy ads in a tight time frame. But technology has changed that.

 

Today, marketers have the advantage of lean, agile, creative teams who can create and finalize ads in a tight timeframe. Not only that, but the changing workforce and the availability of more freelance and contract workers mean marketers can get a number of takes on any one creative project – all in less time, which means everything in the process can happen faster.

 

Automation

 

The addition of automation capabilities in advertising has been one of the most game-changing technologies the industry has ever seen. Now, instead of manually buying and serving media, the process can be automated, meaning it follows predetermined rules and learns from every outcome to make the next interaction smarter.

 

Automation is a complex technology, but its effect is simple. Paired with big data, automated services make marketing more efficient (which means less money spent on resources), and it allows you to better target and serve the people you need to get in front of.

 

Personalization

 

Along with automation comes an incredible benefit for the consumers who your ads are targeting – personalization. The ability to learn and adapt means that ads don’t just change over time. They get better, smarter, and better targeted.

 

What this means for you is that you’ll need several versions of your ad campaigns. One for Sally in Omaha who has your product sitting in her cart on your website, and one for John in Cleveland who hasn’t heard of you – but is in the market for what you offer. Having a personalized ad for each of your audiences will only make your ads work harder for you.

 

Scalability

 

Ad fatigue can set in as early as three days into a campaign, and this has detrimental effects on the campaign’s ROI. This means online advertisers have to maintain a healthy pool of available ad creatives for regular swapping out of old ones.

 

The high volume and refresh rate demands of online advertising mean marketers now face the challenge of having to create sufficient ad creatives to keep campaigns performing at optimal levels.

 

Creative Optimization

 

Up till recent times, campaign optimization tactics have always only focused on the non-creative components like targeting, budget, schedule, etc. While most advertisers know that the ad creative plays a significant role in a campaign’s success, there hasn’t been any consolidated effort in ensuring this vital aspect is optimized alongside the other metrics.

 

Recognizing this gap, we’ve created the world’s only technique to measure and optimize online creative performance with the AI-powered COR (Creative Optimal Rate) methodology. Each campaign’s COR score takes into consideration the three most important aspects of creative performance – volume, quality, and refresh.

 

By monitoring your COR score, you will know whether you need to make adjustments to your number of active ads, choose ads that have higher predicted performance or swap out old ads more often, at any given time.

 

With online audiences getting more discerning, and more competing advertisers moving their budgets to the online space, it’s imperative that you adopt a smarter approach to your online advertising strategy.