Vlad Zhovtenko, CEO, RedTrack
US digital advertising spending will grow 19% and overtake traditional advertising spending by the end of 2019. With it, one of the main ad sellers remains Amazon. It has kept on being an industry leader through creation and development its line of advertising solutions. With it, advertisers have got a 13% QoQ growth in sales and impressions . At the same time, applying Amazon PPC turned into 30% click growth for health care sector, 25% for technology and 24% for retail compared to last year.
These subtotals give every reason to believe that ecommerce brands will significantly increase their digital spending next year. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean positive changes, especially for SMBs.
The first reason is regulatory changes in online advertising. This year Apple hit the market by tightening its anti-tracking policies and integrating cookie-blocking technology into Safari.
Another reason is a heavily increased routine workload caused by traffic volume growth. Our internal research shows that with traffic growth and no additional investments in human resources, SMBs marketing teams’ effectiveness often decrease. The team has to cope with a much larger volume of repetitive and routine tasks. This leads to team’s focus diffusion and insufficient concentration on strategic and creative ideas.
Big companies can easily handle the changes, while SMBs often experience significant difficulties due to lack of financial resources and inability to hire new people.
Ad tracking automation
It’s obvious that to live up to their own expectations, ecommerce businesses of all sizes should use creative approaches to overcome looming challenges. One of the most efficient way to do it today is to adopt ad automation practices. But before you get it, there are 3 important steps to take.
1. Get a solid understanding of what ad automation can bring to your e-commerce business
It has been argued that ad automation is more suitable for corporations, while smaller players better concentrate on sales growth first. But the fact is that high volumes of traffic and sales can turn into a real nightmare for ecommerce companies by overloading personnel with routine tasks and keeping them from addressing important creative needs. Superficial advertising analytics and fragmented business processes destroy the system and can not only ruin the workflow of all the team but affect company’s financial condition.
On the other hand, automation shouldn’t be considered as a must-have tool for any ecommerce company. A business should have a clear understanding of ad-automation technology so they can set realistic goals
The main advantages of digital advertising automation are efficiency, scale, and low costs. The expected measurable results mainly relate to higher CTR and lower CPC for ad campaigns. On top of that, algorithms take a significant number of repetitive tasks on themselves, giving more time to invest in strategy and creative task. At competent approach it saves a great amount of time, money and recruiting resources.
2. Focus on the specific automation type
Companies usually start thinking about automation in times of intense growth or when preparing for growth. The more channels they handle, the more difficult it becomes to maintain focus and keep pace. In either event, automation will have a significant impact on the whole marketing chain, e.g. lead generation, lead scoring, customer segmentation, customer lifecycles, analytics processes, and etc.
The main point here is that automation also requires preparation. There’s no way algorithms can automate the whole advertising process while managers have no ground to assign creative tasks to machines. Positive advertising automation requires a balance between organic human interaction and efficient machines interventions. So, first comes prioritization.
With extensions and software currently available on the market, companies can automate the following tasks in their workflow:
- Bid management
- Ad testing
- Budget Updates
- Ad Tracking
- Ad optimization
- Reporting
- Fraud prevention
- Data analytics automation
Determine which actions take up too much of your time and match it with the relevant offers available on the market.
3. Know what you’re buying
Ad automation helps companies to run successful digital advertising campaigns with minimal human assistance. While some take ad automation solutions for trendy machine-learning technology, the fact is true ad automation features have nothing in common with artificial Intelligence.
They are basically sets of rules that can be created with just several lines of complex code. A user sets KPI that the ad campaign should reach and specifies which automatic actions should be taken when this happens or what should be done if KPIs are not met. Actions can include traffic redistribution, a campaign pause or a full campaign stop.
Purchasing reliable software will be a more economical solution than developing your own. It’s always difficult to predict if tools will deliver the expected value at a long distance. Some of them may be adjusted to particular business models, volumes, and operations. Some just pass high-priced AI-based features off as automation.
So, before choosing, make sure you know exactly what you want to automate and what kind of result you aim to get.
RedTrack provides technology for tracking, managing and analyzing online advertising.