Advertisers are no stranger to the necessity of delivering receptive personalized messaging on mobile. Today, this is possible through leveraging unique user behavioral and location data from mobile devices and the widely adopted use of dynamic creative optimization (DCO) technology. Here are 5 tips to leverage DCO in mobile campaigns to engage with mobile users and exceed campaign objectives:
1. Personalized advertising – remember the human connection
Increasingly sophisticated algorithms have helped to facilitate a lot of the campaign processes today, but don’t forget that at the end of the day, you need a person behind the personalized advertising! The human decisions that determine the DCO strategy cannot be overlooked. Avoid the common pitfall of expecting the algorithms to do all the work, we can trust DCO technology to determine and deliver personalized creative at scale, but the strategic planning and monitoring is still decided by humans. For example, marketers have to decide how to segment the audience to optimize the key message, either by geography or demographics. Then follow-through with a personalized message from the ad to the landing page in the click-through link via dynamic URL parameters and deep-linking apps to urge your prospects closer to conversion.
2. Be selective – don’t test everything at once!
Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) is a continuous process. Marketers must resist the urge to optimize everything at the same time. When too many elements are varied, it makes it very difficult to establish a baseline and pinpoint actionable insights. It pays to be selective when choosing the creative elements to make dynamic, and align it with your campaign objectives. When applying DCO, it’s important to follow your audience with reliable conversion tags and detecting the various user interaction rates along the campaign. With these insights, marketers can then determine the frequency rules of their ads and reserve higher frequencies at the top of their consumer conversion funnel.
3. Keep an eye on your campaign – monitor early and regularly
After determining the campaign objectives (branding, website visits, app installs, etc) advertisers should start monitoring their campaigns early on – don’t wait until the campaign is halfway over to start analyzing the results! This way you will be able to adjust your goals if they have already been met and set new objectives and aim for changes and improvements during the campaign.
4. DCO is not A/B testing
Experienced marketers are all familiar with A/B testing, but it shouldn’t be grouped into the same category with DCO. The underlying assumption with A/B testing is that one concept is better than the other and once that’s determined, it will be delivered at scale. The beauty of DCO is that when applied properly, advertisers can determine the best concept for each target audience, and it doesn’t end there! With DCO, advertisers can keep up with the changing preferences of their target audience, and be sure to deliver different but receptive brand messages to their customers. This way, advertisers can quickly vary creative elements in a meaningful way and use the optimization engine to rotate out ineffective creatives.
5. Take retargeting to a new level!
Last but not least, marketers should aim to tell a continuous brand story by retargeting the users based on their past individual interactions with the ad and applying contextual data uniquely from mobile devices. With DCO you can deliver targeted sequential messaging. For example, use multilayer sequential messaging after a user has seen a short video. For the next exposure, deliver a longer video along the same subject to be more effective and continue where you left off. Unlike desktop campaigns, when retargeting for mobile, leverage geo-location data to increase the relevancy and engagement rate so your brand message really speaks directly to the user. Some creative uses of geolocation data can go beyond just locating the nearest point of purchase, but delivering messages with geographic context based on elements like weather warnings, important landmarks, local sports team news and travel options.
This post was also published by the Mobile Advertising Watch