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Often when the topic of optimizing your online advertising campaign comes up, you might think of it in terms of changing or tweaking the actual ad creative which can sometimes be costly.

Here’s three tips for campaign optimization that don’t involve creative changes to help keep things fresh and your budget in check.

Using your Analytics systems, check click and conversion metrics for:

1. Best performing sizes
Sometimes certin sizes or types of ads may perform differently than you expect. For example, box ads may be placed at the top, middle or bottom of the page on the site. If you know your ads are on the bottom, there’s a chance that the box ad may not perform as well for you as another ad unit (or vice versa). Shift impressions to the ad unit that performs the best from a combined click-through and conversion standpoint. Keep in mind not all ads units will cost the same price, so you will need to weigh that in your decision but if you notice a signficant enough difference in response rates, fewer impressions with more conversions wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

2. Best performing placement
While Run of Site or homepage placements may be cheaper, perhaps they get lost in the noise and don’t get the kind of click-through (or conversion) rates you’re seeing for more targeted placements (on the same site). Really review each placement to see if there is a difference. The more targeted the placement, the more it often costs. Maybe your ad gets great response rates without the targeting – shifting those impressions to ROS would end up stretching your dollar and your campaign as you could potentially run your ad longer. But you’ll never know unless you’re tracking individual placement responses for both click and conversion rates.

3. Frequency caps
Unless you’re sponsoring a placement, running a roadblock or have 100% share of voice, you may want to consider capping the number of times a user can see your ads. This can be particularly effective when you have ROS placements or are running on sites that get a lot of repeat visitors. Working with your agency or the site, get them to place a cap between 3-5 views per user on your ads. Over time, compare the click-through rates and see if they increase, you might be surprised at what you find. I’ve had clients who have suddenly seen their click-through rates jump enough to continue running advertisements with the site in question. You’ll want to use your analytics system to review results and you may need to play with that 3-5 range to find the number that works best for you. Frequency capping shouldn’t cost any extra money and it’s a way to improve the life span of your campaign, and potentially reach more unique eyeballs.

Some of the above mentioned optimizations are difficult to do if you have just sent one creative tag for tracking purposes. It’s important to think about all the different ad placements and sizes on each site up front and to create separate ad tags for each one before the ads are trafficked to the website.

While this creates more work up front, it will allow you to track your campaign accurtely and really learn which site, placement, size or execution is working for you. Relying only on site reporting may not give you the most accurate results as every site and ad server may track things differently. You’ll want to make sure you’re using one tool to benchmark and compare the data equally.

You’ll often notice that when looking at the data, the results vary by site. This is to be expected and as a result of minute differences in visitor profiles and behaviour. You should make sure that before making any blanket decisions you have looked at the data by site as well to make sure any performance generalizing statements you make aren’t the result of one or two sites in particular.

Understanding what works well for each site will help you run the right kind of ads to the right kind of audiences, thus increasing your clicks and your conversions, without spending huge sums of money.

Photo Credit: Woodsy Stock.Xchng

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 11:09 am and is filed under Web analytics, campaign tracking, online ad measurement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.