Getting to the Top With CLIMB: Buy

We have developed 5 core business principles that will help advertisers CLIMB the auction rankings and start to acquire more, and higher value, customers, with the ultimate goal of increasing business profitability. This blog is the fifth, and final, of a series, ending with Buy.

Craig Brown

The pieces of CLIMB are all built to help you in programmatic auctions, but there is still room for improvement on the media buying side. Ensuring your data is accessible for the auction is essential, but it’s not enough to win auctions on its own. A deeper understanding of how auctions and machine learning optimization algorithms actually work allows advertisers to structure their data and strategy to ensure the algorithms know the true value of each conversion and how to best win that auction.

Having started as a media buyer, this is one of the areas I will always be most passionate about. CLIMB was developed to ensure that when it comes to buying media, you’re doing it in the most sophisticated way that will propel you to a market leader.

We’ve seen this countless times: amazing media strategies are put together, only to be let down by the website or the creative not getting the message across, therefore not having a real impact on the audience.

We also see it the other way. The messaging to audience alignment is incredible, but the execution of the media buy doesn’t hit that audience or get the message to the right people, causing the campaign to fail. CLIMB finishes with Buy to make sure that each campaign you run and every bit of media you buy is as effective as possible for driving revenue for your business.

But buying is about winning. More specifically, it’s about winning auctions against your competitors to acquire the most valuable customers at the lowest possible cost, driving the best performance for the business. Therefore, you need to know: 1) the audience you’re trying to buy, 2) the value of that audience to you, 3) how to win, and 4) how much you can afford to win.

You can execute every other area of CLIMB perfectly, but if you don’t have a team that can buy media effectively in the ever-changing and evolving landscape, all that work will account for nothing. This is especially true as programmatic buying continues to increases and machine learning algorithms advance in sophistication. We’ve shown that knowing how the algorithms work and how to measure your media can really impact campaign performance on Facebook. Similarly, understanding how the algorithms work in the auction of other platforms can have a huge effect.

Google Shopping is a fantastic tool, but it’s quite blackbox, obscuring much of the visibility of the keywords that you’re appearing on and the products that you’re appearing for. At Incubeta, we’ve built scripts that allow us to strip that back and make sure we’re showing you the right product against the correct keywords for maximum impact. We implemented these scripts during our work with eBags, which led to a 300% increase in revenue on their previous shopping performance.

There’s also the past time, which is that initial media plan and understanding where you should be buying media to maximize performance against the main KPI you’re trying to achieve. This should be bespoke to the campaign rather than boiler-plated, and we have created a detailed process to ensure that all areas of CLIMB are included.

We did this for an airline company that was trying to raise awareness by penetrating their target audience. While the client wanted Facebook to be pushed, our planning approach showed that display was the better medium. The reason being that we could maximize on viewable impressions with display, and we knew the creative got the message across. Through this, we saw a 3x greater reach with display than we did on Facebook.

That really allowed us to maximize more in the penetration into the audience with our message. An independent analysis at the end of the campaign revealed that we hit 72% of the audience across the two channels, which was an impressive rate over only a 30-day campaign.

These are just a couple of examples that help bring to life what you can do from a buying standpoint and the advancement that you can pursue.

Buying will only take you so far. You need to ensure that your buying power is being fed all of the data, strong creative and messages that you have, so you can maximize on getting in front of consumers and making them take the actions you want to achieve.

We’ve reached the conclusion of our CLIMB blog series, and we hope that this has helped give you an insight into how we approach digital marketing and some of the sophistication we’re bringing to these elements.

If you have any questions about how CLIMB can help your business or the services we can offer to move you forward from a revenue and profitability perspective, please get in touch.

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