Media buy campaigns: Advanced tools

In the last issue, I talked about the basics of how you can run a successful media buy campaign with a tracking platform. Even if you’ve only got the basics of tracking down, you’re ahead of a huge majority of media buyers since you’re able to control both on and off-site visitor activity with actionable data.

But after getting the hang of running a few successful campaigns and seeing the benefits of tracking, you’ll begin setting the bar even higher. To achieve a higher ROI there is only one thing that sets “advanced” media buyers apart with tracking: resourcefulness
with what they have and maximizing their platform to its fullest extent.

Using everything that it has to offer is why the “pros” are able to scale up faster than others. When you’re able to exploit the full power of tracking you have the power to be efficient when optimizing campaigns. This time around, I’m going to tell you about four advanced tools to boost conversions from your campaigns.

Campaign rules
Setting rules such as dayparting, geotargeting, OS, language, device, browser, keywords, and category will give you more control of where your traffic goes. Having the power to redirect each individual user to the most relevant offer allows a higher chance of conversion.

For example, if you have a mobile visitor that is using an Android OS and Google Chrome, you would not want them to see an offer for an Apple user. Instead you’d redirect to an Android-compatible offer. Taking advantage of the campaign rules you can set within the platform is crucial to avoid wasting traffic.

Rotate and redirect landing pages
Using landing page builders to create your own is nothing new for media buyers, but being able to rotate thousands to redirect each visitor to a relevant offer is a powerful and underused tool. Just as you can set campaign rules, you can do the same for landing pages. By using geo targeting, for example, you can see if you have one visitor from USA and another from France.

By setting a landing page rule that sends each of them to a page in their native languages. a smart link gives you the flexibility to automatically redirect them. Taking advantage of rotating landing pages again guarantees that each visitor will go to a page that fits their preferences and needs.

Set up SEO campaigns
A lot of your traffic will most likely land on your page because of a visitor hitting your campaign URL which your tracking solution gives you. When that occurs it is able to take the visitors’ information and redirect them to the offer that you want them to see. But what happens if a user doesn’t arrive to your a page from your campaign URL? Will you still be able to redirect and track users that directly arrive to your landing page? The answer is no.

Traffic that arrives organically on your landing page without hitting the campaign URL will be redirected to a blank page. If you don’t set up an SEO campaign, it will only be able to track traffic that comes from your campaign URL. Setting it up can differ in each platform but it’s a must for all media buyers since organic traffic is one of the most common ways visitors arrive to media buy offers.

Fallbacking
Fallbacking is one of the most underused features when media buyers begin to track. It is the ability to redirect traffic to an offer suitable for a specific segment of traffic that wasn’t initially targeted. In other words if you unintentionally send mobile US traffic to an offer that accepts only web UK traffic, you will want to automatically redirect this traffic to a similar offer that does accept mobile US traffic.

Setting it up on most platforms usually only takes a few steps. There is no need to set specific rules or spend hours configuring the” if ”, “what”, and “when”. Most of the time you just need to put in a fallback url in your tracking platform and it does its magic. Every click counts and “marginal losses” can add up to big ones. Setting up a fallback when your visitors could run into an error 404 gives you the safety net to never carelessly lose traffic again.

Final thoughts
Taking full advantage of what you have and understanding how it works is the ultimate key to lifting conversions. Using only the “main” features of a tracking platform will get you results but only to a certain degree.

Like most media buyers, you’ll always want to lift the bar higher and achieve a higher ROI. When launching campaigns, see where you’re losing traffic and use these tools to keep visitors on the road to conversion.