50 Direct Response Advertising Tips to Power Outstanding Social ...

April 2015

Advertising Automation

DIRECT RESPONSE

OUTSTANDING SOCIAL

ADVERTISING TIPS

to power

AND MOBILE CAMPAIGNS

Nanigans | Advertising Automation 2

50 Direct Response Advertising Tips to Power Outstanding Social & Mobile Campaigns

Performance marketing

is all about efficiency.

How can you increase scale while maximizing budget and campaign impact every step of the way?

Direct response advertisers live and die by performance, and between launching global campaigns and monitoring results in real-time,

there’s no time to waste. That’s why, with an eye on efficiency, we’ve compiled 50 quick and practical tips to move the needle in your next direct response ad campaign.

From creative and targeting to optimization and reporting, these tips are organized by campaign elements to make it easy to integrate them into your daily workflow.

Your campaign performance depends on it, so let’s get started.

What do we know about direct response advertising, anyway?

Nanigans develops advertising automation software that empowers performance marketing teams to take control of their digital advertising in-house. Since 2010, Nanigans has been chosen by the world’s largest direct response advertisers at ecommerce, gaming, and other internet and mobile companies such as eBay, Wayfair, and Zynga. Offered as Software as a Service, Nanigans’ end-to-end software features programmatic media buying, predictive revenue optimization, and real-time business intelligence across today’s most valuable social and mobile channels.



CREATIVENothing else matters if your ad doesn’t catch

your customer’s eye first.

1Real people respond to real things. Try testing ad creative featuring real-life situations, people, and objects to connect with your audience and drive higher click-through rates (CTRs). Showing compelling imagery your customers can relate to will go far in attracting clicks.

2Using bright, eye-catching colors in your ad creative can work magic for grabbing people’s attention and directing focus to your ad’s message. The web and world of mobile apps are a busy place, so making sure your ads stand out is critical.

3If your conversion rate is low but your CTR is high, ask yourself these two questions: What aspect of your creative is pulling people in and grabbing their attention? What about your landing page is discouraging conversions after the click?

4Acquiring new users on mobile for your app or game? Including an actual smartphone and an in-app screenshot can boost conversions, as people will know exactly what to expect after the click. Video can be an even more engaging way to give users a preview of your app.

5To ensure people take action on your ad, test including graphical call-to-action (CTA) buttons directly within your image creative. Try different colors and button styles to identify top performers. Couple this tactic with any CTA options built into the ad unit to find out what resonates best with your audience.



REPORTINGAnalyzing real-time and lifetime performance arms you with the data you need to scale and succeed.

6Analysis of campaigns and audiences in real-time is the backbone of direct response advertising. A customizable multidimensional reporting tool is a must. Avoid a one-size-fits-all interface at all costs. Software like Nanigans offers advertisers infinite customizability through flexible filtering and 100+ reporting attributes.

7While Excel is powerful, it was never built for media buyers. Avoid the manual import/export cycle and version control headaches with a full-featured pivot table-style reporting interface. For example, Nanigans enables you to drill down into granular performance data to identify what’s driving your success. Right from the reporting view, you can then seamlessly take action—like pausing your worst performing ads or putting more budget behind your best.

8While real-time monitoring is important, so is lifetime. Sophisticated advertising automation software enables you to conduct a cohort analysis to clearly identify patterns across the lifecycle of a customer or user. Visualizing the ROI driven by your ads among a specific audience segment one, five, or 30 days down the line can reveal previously unknown opportunities for scale.

9Don’t settle for vanity reporting metrics that are not aligned with your business goals. Instead, measure what matters to your business. Customize and report on truly actionable data. Calculate unique metrics using custom formulas that can fully integrate with your internal systems and tools.

10Collaboration is key. Once you’ve created the perfect reporting view, share it with your team to analyze campaign performance. In Nanigans, you can quickly save a customized report view and make it accessible to your colleagues.



TARGETINGFind the right audience at the right

place and time.

11Start with what you know about your best customers, and find more of them. Do you have a list of your existing best customers, top purchasers, or most engaged app users? On Facebook, upload this list of top customers from your CRM as a Custom Audience to generate a Lookalike Audience made up of people who share similar characteristics. This can be a powerful strategy to reach untapped high-value audiences, and is the right place to begin informing your targeting strategy.

12Even the best creative won’t be effective for direct response campaigns if it isn’t relevantly targeted. Facebook offers some of the industry’s most advanced audience targeting; from location and demographics to interests and behavior, always be experimenting with targeting parameters to find your best customers.

13Struggling with scale or saturation in your targeting? Try bidding slightly higher to reach more valuable audiences. With the right measurement in place, you should feel confident you’ll reach the best customers in your audience.

14Make sure you’ve turned on retargeting. Consider leveraging Facebook Exchange (FBX) in conjunction with native Facebook API advertising to retarget prospective customers on an impression-level basis. A Nanigans study found that after being retargeted through FBX, customers entering the remarketing pool through native Facebook audience targeting netted 89% more in sales revenue than those who entered the remarketing pool through non-Facebook channels.

15Get granular by retargeting customers based not only on the pages they visit on your website, but also on their behavior on those pages. For example, using behavior rules in Nanigans, you can reengage people based on specific actions, such as adding an item to their cart on your ecommerce site or completing a tutorial in your game.



OPTIMIZATIONPerformance is everything, so make sure your

campaigns are firing on all cylinders.

16Statistical significance is key. Before you make any optimization adjustments, ensure you have enough data to make an informed and honest judgment. For example, new ads with fewer than 100 clicks might not have had enough time to gain any traction in the marketplace to prove themselves.

17Don’t let one bad ad poison your entire campaign. Pause down poorly performing ads before they impact your bottom line. Ads with substantial spend but no conversions, or a very high cost per action (CPA) are prime targets to be paused. If an ad’s CPA is more than 25% higher than your goal, it’s likely hindering overall performance and it’s time to pull it down.

18Optimize beyond the click. In Nanigans, employ revenue optimization to find your highest-value customers. Why should you pay the same price for someone who spends nothing on your website or in your app vs. someone who may spend hundreds of dollars over time? Go beyond the click.

19When optimizing for revenue or yield, relax some of your other campaign cost restrictions such as your stop loss or maximum bids. With Nanigans, for example, bids will automatically decrease if yield goals aren’t being met, so additional cost controls can be utilized as a safety net.

20Audit your ads. If you have a high number of ads running with varying degrees of performance success, conduct an optimization audit to single out your most effective ads. Consider cutting through the noise and focusing on your top 10 ads delivering the greatest return on investment.



MEASUREMENTMeasure and track every aspect of your campaign

to uncover opportunities for improvement.

21Measure beyond the click. Implement pixels at various stages of the conversion process to get a complete picture of how your ads are performing after the click. By measuring at specific milestones like “Add to Cart,” you can better optimize campaigns toward your ROI goals.

22On mobile, it’s critical to understand post-install behavior. Ensure you can track and measure in-app user activity, unlocking a trove of data to inform campaign strategy. When you measure data beyond the install, you can build a full picture of customer lifetime value and close the loop on attribution.

23Choose platforms that enable you to measure and track campaigns on a user-level basis, rather than on an ad-level. By doing so, direct response advertisers have the power to focus efforts on people-based marketing in our cross-channel and cross-device world of consumer behavior.

24For effective conversion tracking, leverage what you already know about your typical customer’s behavior. If they generally come back and make purchases four days after their first site visit, don’t set a three-day attribution window. A seven-day window will net stronger data to fuel campaign optimization.

25Don’t just set up measurement and move on. Once your campaign is launched, conduct a quick data sync audit to ensure all tracking events are aligned. If event and revenue data isn’t being measured and passed properly, optimization may suffer—so it’s best to iron out any tracking issues as soon as possible.



MOBILEFind and engage your audience where they’re

spending more time every day.

26Promoting a mobile app? Then app install ads are your secret weapon. Available on nearly every social advertising channel, they are tailor-made for triggering downloads. With powerful targeting and optimization behind these ad products, you can ensure you’re not just acquiring more users,

but the best ones.

27Getting a complete picture of customer behavior is vital. If someone downloads your ecommerce app from a mobile ad, but later signs in on desktop to make a purchase—can you properly attribute that sale? Invest in platforms like Nanigans with user-level cross-channel tracking.

28Looking to reengage current app users? By retargeting existing mobile app users with mobile reengagement ads, you can drive more repeat sessions or in-app purchases from your top customers. Use your first party data to show users ads with hyper-relevant content to remind them why they installed your app in the first place.

29Take advantage of the unique targeting opportunities unlocked with mobile devices. Serve different ads based on precise location, device operating system, or even WiFi connectivity. The more relevant you can make your ad to an individual’s environment, the better.

30Think beyond native social advertising and consider leveraging mobile ad exchanges like MoPub to reach people in other mobile apps. Real-time bidded (RTB) ad exchanges introduce bidding efficiency gains for marketers, with granular insight at the impression level vs. the audience level.



BUDGETINGKeep an eye on ROI to maximize your

ad spend budget.

31Don’t spread your budget too thin. Ensure you don’t have too many active ads in the marketplace at any one time. Running too many ads with too little spend per ad can quickly blow through your daily budget, limiting return on ad spend and hindering the ability to scale performance.

32Use automated optimization of budgets to save time. Using Nanigans software, you can activate Optimized Budgeting, which ensures only the ads and audiences for which there is a sufficient level of data confidence are allowed to spend more.

33Match budget to behavior. Instead of splitting your weekly budget equally across seven days, consider the behavior of people in your target audience. Are they more likely to download your app over the weekend? Or purchase from your site during the workday? Test varying budget caps on different days to get the most out of your ad spend.

34Patience is a virtue. Don’t worry if you don’t hit your daily budget on the first day of launching a new campaign. Hitting spend goals and key performance indicators consistently takes time. Be realistic about your daily budgets and be diligent about tweaking campaigns when necessary and you’ll be meeting your budget goals in no time.

35When setting up your campaign budgets, establish constraints to automatically pause or activate ads once they’ve crossed a set threshold (e.g. daily spend). By keeping budgets separate—from desktop and mobile to acquisition and retargeting—you can more easily organize efforts based on your specific strategy.



REACHGive your ads an opportunity to perform with an

audience size that’s aligned with your goals.

36Leverage Lookalike modeling first. Have you exhausted your highest performing audiences? Expand your reach by creating Lookalike Audiences to find other people who share similarities with your best customers or users.

37If you’re on mobile and looking to extend the reach of your ads, consider activating the Facebook Audience Network to enable delivery of your Facebook ads within a wide range of mobile apps—beyond the Facebook app itself.

38Remember the difference between reach and impressions. Especially when bidding on a cost-per-impression (CPM) basis, remember that impressions are the number of times your ad is served, while reach is the number of unique people who receive impressions of your ad. One individual may receive multiple impressions of the same ad, depending on your campaign strategy.

39Understand how bidding strategies impact reach. On Facebook, your choice of bid type can also act as an additional layer of audience targeting, refining your campaign’s effective reach. For example, when you bid on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, Facebook will serve your ad to a subset of your target audience that’s made up of people more likely than other users to click on compelling ads.

40Avoid ad fatigue like the plague. You may need to expand your campaign’s reach if you’ve been targeting the same audiences for too long. Once ad fatigue sets in, consider ways to change course to reach untapped groups of potential customers.



LANDING PAGESThe post-click experience will

make-or-break your conversions.

41Align your landing page and ad creative to ensure a smooth path to conversion. From seeing the ad to making a purchase or submitting a form, customers should never be surprised after the click.

42When designing a landing page, try using the blink test. Anyone coming to your website should be able to understand what you’re offering after just 3-5 seconds. If the message is muddled, refocus on the one action that’s most important.

43Make it easy for your prospects to understand the value you offer. Providing succinct benefits, supporting statistics, and customer testimonials can go far in generating new leads.

44If form information is required for conversion, lower the barrier to entry on your landing pages by keeping these short and sweet. Carefully consider the most important information you need from prospects and don’t deter potential leads with an excessively long form.

45Offer more post-conversion. Make the most of your “thank you” page by offering customers additional resources or other relevant offers after they submit information on your landing page. It’s a prime opportunity to further engage new prospects.



STRATEGYMaking the strategic decision to manage direct response

advertising in-house offers the strongest foundation for success.

46The world’s largest direct response advertisers are taking control of their digital advertising, bringing it in-house! Save on third-party managed services costs, improve performance with greater speed and agility, and own your valuable first-party data to maximize ROI.

47Do you know where your budget is truly being spent? If you’re working with outsourced managed services providers, demand transparency every step of the way with full visibility into costs, bids, and optimization decisioning logic. Ad platforms that mask costs or layer on fees only hurt your bottom line.

48As mobile explodes in popularity and people bounce between platforms, always consider a holistic cross-device approach when outlining campaign strategy. Meet your customers where they’re already spending more and more time every day—on mobile devices.

49Don’t restrict your advertising efforts to any one channel. Multichannel ad automation software like Nanigans enables end-to-end cross-channel campaign management to maximize ROI and find your best customers no matter where they are.

50When you make performance marketing a core in-house competency, you unlock scale and efficiency that’s impossible when outsourcing campaign management. Building internal expertise pays off big over time, but don’t just take our word for it. Learn how top performance marketers built their in-house teams and profited from the benefits.

http://www.nanigans.com/tag/anatomy-of-a-growth-marketer/

http://www.nanigans.com/tag/anatomy-of-a-growth-marketer/



BONUS TIP!

Always, always, always be testing. Direct response advertising is all about figuring out what works and scaling your success. How you define success is unique to your business, so take the best practices in this guide and make them work for you.

Ready to take control of your direct response advertising?

Nanigans software enables in-house performance marketers to manage, measure, and optimize their online advertising across today’s most valuable social and mobile channels.

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