When working on marketing, we must understand that the whole purpose of it is to make money. For me, Marketing is “the art of making money.” Based on the American Marketing Association, it is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society. This exchange can be not only money but also information such as feedback, leads, etc. With this said, when a company decides to make marketing efforts such as ad campaigns, public relations, product optimization, events, promotions, etc, They must calculate if there is any Return on Investment (ROI). This is something that every CMO has on their mind. How much did the event make after the investment in it? How much revenue did the ad campaign drive? Or How much revenue did all marketing efforts drive vs. how much we spent?
As a digital marketer, I usually focus on generating revenue for my clients through programmatic media campaigns and SEM. In the last couple of years, I’ve been experiencing clients who want to generate revenue through digital ad investments since they have noticed that technology is making this possible. Many people who have run digital ads for them in the past don’t show them the impact in terms of money. They only showed clicks, impressions, click-through rates, and web traffic. These metrics are good but are not enough for when you want to see the impact of ads on revenue generation. For this reason, they’ve been trying to learn how to do it and hire digital marketers who can make this happen.
Digital marketers should use a marketing funnel approach based on the brand’s website when running this performance-driven campaign. They should use the KPIs we discussed, such as clicks, impressions, click-through rates, and web traffic, but they should also use conversion and conversion rates that will help measure COS, ROAs, and CPL, depending on the campaign’s goal. As a marketer, the optimal goal is a conversion that, for this example, will be equal to a sale. How can you make consumers know about your product, consider buying it, and make the purchase?
A performance-driven campaign should not create revenue only but create revenue at a positive ROI so the money invested is not wasted. To have a positive ROI or ROAS on Programmatic media will depend on how the campaign is built. The organization is key when building a display banner, video, audio campaign, etc. You must create a path on how you want customers to journey toward the purchase; in other words, what is the strategy? Usually, I use a funnel approach where I create an awareness strategy, a consideration strategy, and then a remarketing strategy that will lead consumers toward conversions to create loyalty.
The remarketing or retargeting strategy will deliver ads to people who demonstrate an interest in the brand’s product. By placing a retargeting pixel or multiple retargeting pixels on the website, I can start tracking the consumer’s behavior on the site. For example, If I sell shoes, I can place a retargeting pixel on each of our pages based on a brand. One pixel is on the Nike shoes page, one is on the Addidas page, and one is on each of the brand pages that my site has. This way, I’ll build a “pool” or a “bucket” per page and retarget them. We can also place pixels on each page of the purchase funnel: a pixel on the page of the actual shoe, another one on the “proceed to checkout” page, and another one on the “place order” page. With those pixels, we can retarget consumers on each step of the purchase funnel, and we can even use them for exclusion. When creating campaigns, exclusion parameters can be added to them. Usually, in my campaigns, I exclude everyone who has made a purchase in the last 90 days since most of my clients are hospitality businesses such as hotels, cruises, airlines, etc. For the same example I used before regarding a shoe business, I can add this type of exclusion by 30 days since it is a retail business, and they can buy more frequently than a hospitality business.
Programmatic media aims to show your ad in the perfect place at the perfect time. As I said before in past posts, to run this type of campaign, you need a DSP that will allow you to launch this campaign. These DSPs will have different tools to approach these campaigns with specifications more aligned with the brand and goals. You can select a frequency, exclusion capabilities, viewability, budget allocation, bid optimization, and more. All these specifications must be set up based on the brand’s goal and identity. You can always ask yourself or your client the types of sites they don’t want to serve ads, the negative keywords, the frequency desired, and more. This is very important because, as a marketer, you should avoid serving ads on pages that give a bad brand review or any other negative sentiment. Going back to the retargeting strategy, this is the most important since it is the one that will bring you most of the revenue so the ROAS can be guided to a sweet spot. Awareness and consideration will bring in new people, and retargeting will catch all interested people from that new traffic.
Along with programmatic media, marketers should add SEM to the mix. While programmatic media creates awareness and consideration, SEM will bring the majority of the revenue since it is a strategy that is based on searches that people do on Google or Bing. People will see an ad from the display or video campaign, and their interest starts growing, and that can lead to a search. That’s when SEM plays its role and starts driving traffic. The good thing about this is that retargeting can be triggered from organic traffic, SEM traffic, and any other traffic that the website receives. SEM and Retargeting will make all the revenue you need to drive a positive ROAS. It is important to consider the budget that will be invested in media before starting to spend. I recommend starting to budget monthly and managing it every week. For example, if this week’s demand is not high, you should start balancing spending with the ROAS. If ROAs go lower than your goal, bring down the week’s spending; if it goes up, you will have space to spend more during that week. Calculating ROAS per channel will also indicate which channel is not performing and whether it should be stopped or reevaluated.
Strategy to drive positive ROI is critical since there are companies that spend a lot of money on marketing efforts and don’t measure how much they are getting back from that spending. This can lead the company into bankruptcy. Instead of calling this a “media spend” or “marketing spend, it should be more of an “investment.“ Like any other investment, you must make sure that it is generating money back.
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