Ok, so your client finally approved your media plan, and you’ve trafficked all your ads. You feel a huge weight lifted off your shoulders because everything went according to plan. Sorry to break it to you, but there is actually still much work to be done.

In this post, we will go over a few ways you can optimize your digital media to ensure a successful campaign. It’s time to take out your dusty TI-83 calculators, and embrace your inner statistician, because we are going to take a dive into the world of analytics.

First, ensure that you have Google Analytics installed on your landing page. It’s free and provides you with invaluable information such as returning visits, audience composition, browsing behavior, and many more; all of which will aid you in your optimization process. 

Secondly, check what kind of tracking capabilities are available to you via your ad serving provider. The most basic tracking metrics in digital advertising are impressions, clicks, and click-through rates; however, additional solutions could be offered such as post-engagement, and conversion tracking, all of which will vary from provider to provider.

When all that is said and done, it’s now time to get to work.

The most commonly used KPI to measure performance is the click-through rate; which can be sliced and diced in many different ways such as by publisher, placement, device, and size.

Consider the following scenario:

In the table above, the ‘News Website’ is outperforming the ‘Lifestyle Website’ by 6%. What kind of optimizations can we perform to improve the overall media?

In this instance, one option is to optimize out of the ‘Lifestyle Website’ completely and reallocate the remaining budget into the ‘News Website’. It’s such a drastic measure however, especially if you know where your audience is and want to maintain presence on both site categories.

Another option is to traverse deeper and optimize at a performance and size level.

We can see that the Front Page 160x600, and the Personal Finance 300x600 placement sizes are lagging behind their siblings. We can optimize these two placement sizes, towards the 970x250 and 728x90 counterparts, which is the most efficient optimization given the information available. Check back again in a few days to see the effect of the optimization, and reevaluate the media.

While, click-throughs are good optimization metrics, they only provide surface-level information. You must also consider post-click behavior in your evaluation; particularly how users behave on your website after clicking your ads. This is where Google Analytics come in, and it’s important to understand how to use it in conjunction with the basic KPIs to improve your analysis of your media.

So, let us take a deeper dive into the numbers in addition to the previous metrics.

Earlier we had decided to optimize out of the italicized placements in the ‘Lifestyle Website’. But based on the new information of Time Spent, and Returning Users; were our decisions earlier still valid?

From a click-through perspective, yes it was a good decision; but when you consider the on-site data, it is more efficient to keep Personal Finance 300x600 as is, while still optimizing out of the Front Page 160x600. This is because the Personal Finance 300x600 placement provides you with more engaged and returning users; while optimizing out of the Front Page 160x600 will net you better performance across all 3 metrics.

As a marketing agency, we have performed many optimizations at various levels in effort to produce better outcomes for our clients and our campaigns. One of the most prominent optimizations performed recently, was focusing on users within the ‘Green Living/Sustainability’ category for one of our campaigns. This wouldn’t have been possible without Google Analytics, which can provide you with your website’s audience composition.

There are countless amounts of metrics available in the today’s digital space that allows for determining campaign success.  It’s particularly important to understand which ones are relevant to you, based on your goals. And although the endless amounts of metrics may feel overwhelming at times; they are the very defining features of digital marketing, which is the only marketing medium that can provide you with both instantaneous quantitative, and qualitative feedback.

In the next post, we will go over how to use time and space complexity to plan media. So be sure to brush up on quantum computing.