Consultant's View - Data-Driven Marketing in Uncertain Times: How to execute campaigns in Display & Video 360 (DV360) during uncertain times

With uncertain times impacting consumer behaviour and how marketers and practitioners execute their programmatic media campaigns, we provide a practical ‘How to guide’ for Display & Video 360 (DV360) to drive your organisation’s strategy so you can stay connected with your customers and prospects.

Ensure you and your team stay up-to-date with the state of the market and what is happening ‘at the coal face’ with your customers and front line staff, monitor your campaigns closely through Display & Video 360 (DV360) & Campaign Manager (CM) reporting, so you can apply a data-driven mindset in your decision making. There are a number of resources available (including the FiveStones blog) to assist you in protecting your brand and maximising your advertising spend in Display & Video 360 (DV360) during uncertain times.

During uncertain times, it’s more important than ever to closely track how your campaigns are performing and expected to perform. DV360’s Planning Tool can provide this level of visibility so there is a degree of predictability in your forecasting prior to campaign spend. To add display and video products to your plan and forecast their reach:

There are a number of benefits for using an automated bidding strategy, however, these benefits are amplified during uncertain times. Most importantly, by leveraging an automated bidding strategy, which can be enabled from the details page of any new or existing Insertion Order or Line Item, you save time in making manual bidding adjustments and more accurately pacing your campaign budgets.

In fact, a Think With Google case study shows automated (Smart) bidding can improve campaign performance by delivering up to 89% more conversions at a 32% lower cost per conversion, with Display & Video 360 (DV360) continuously learning how to improve your Line Item’s bidding algorithm. With constantly changing market conditions, having these changes made by an algorithm will allow you to focus on ‘mission-critical’ tasks.

Within DV360, under settings > alert configuration you can set up a range of alerts to empower you with the information you need to manage your campaigns effectively and identify changes quickly if required during changing market conditions.

According to figures from Marketing Week, more than three-quarters (77%) of brands say brand safety is a key priority with 80% using a series of solutions to ensure their ads appear in brand safe environments. The graph below provides an indication of the typical tactics that brands are currently using to implement brand safety measures.

Given that circumstances can be unique in uncertain times, it provides unique opportunities to target your customers with Dynamic Creative. With Google announcing in January that cookies will be phased out and blocked in Chrome by 2022, many advertisers have already started leveraging the power of custom messaging through their programmatic buys.

One of the most common types of custom messaging is setting up time-based Dynamic Creative for different times of day. While usage may be dependent on your product, industry and customers, food delivery is an example of where custom messaging can be effective in the current uncertain climate.

According to a 2018 Australian Case Study of Uber Eats from Google, contextual creative resulted in a massive 190% increase in CTR and using dynamic banners resulted in a 99% reduction in manual work as well as a 4 x improvement in operational efficiency.

During the current uncertain times this opportunity has only amplified. According to Statista, many countries in APAC have increased home delivery post COVID-19 including South Korea (42%), Thailand (42%), China (37%), Hong Kong (36%), Singapore (35%), Taiwan (33%), Philippines (13%) and Indonesia (8%).

Importantly, does your organisation have budgets allocated from other marketing activities that were put on-hold or may not go ahead such as sporting event sponsorship? This is an opportunity to shift and leverage contextual targeting to reach your audience where they are currently spending their time online.