Vijay is the Director of Product at StackAdapt, working collaboratively with internal teams to design, build, and launch solutions to help our customers thrive.
Planning is key to every digital campaign. In the planning stage, you’ll set your campaign goals, choose the right type of programmatic format, and make sure your demand-side platform (DSP) has the desired audiences you need to launch your campaign. Part of that planning is also forecasting what the reach will look like based on these parameters.
In many cases, the best way to evaluate campaign performance is to let it run live and analyze. But what if you could gain insights into your campaign’s potential before ever launching it?
You could have stellar creative and witty copy, but if the potential reach isn’t there, your campaign may fall flat. Rather than going into a campaign with uncertainty, go in knowing that it will deliver on a specific metric. By making adjustments that set you up for success at launch time, you ensure that the campaign will run, and won’t struggle with pacing.
To help you level up your campaign planning strategies, we’ve introduced a brand new feature: Forecasting!
How to Use Forecasting
We built Forecasting so that you can be equipped with the smartest way to spend your budget. Forecasting allows you to better understand how your campaign is going to scale and perform before spending a dime. It gives you the ability to identify the highest-value opportunities, and ultimately, reach customers across an optimal media mix.
Since it’s designed to help you understand how well your campaign would perform before it’s launched, it’s best to use Forecasting in the early planning stages of your campaigns. If you know what your budget is, and have an idea of what locations and audiences you’d like to target, then you’re in the perfect position to use this planning tool.
Forecasting can help you find answers to two important pre-campaign questions:
- Can I identify the highest value audience for my target demographic?
- Will I be able to spend my budget in full and scale sufficiently with StackAdapt?
These are important questions to answer before diving into the more detailed aspects of campaign planning like creative and copy.
Forecasting is found in the Planner tab where you can add a number of forecasting parameters, like audience, geography, inventory to run on, budget, and goal. Once you’ve input some or all of these parameters, you can see estimates for size of audience pool, daily and lifetime impressions, estimated eCPM and the campaign’s likelihood to scale.
This information enables you to identify where the drop-off for your campaign may be happening, and you’ll find opportunities that might suit your campaign better. For example, you might discover that your budget will access a larger audience pool with connected TV than it would with native inventory.
Set Your Campaigns Up for Success
Forecasting provides you with data-driven insights that enable you to anticipate campaign performance prior to running live—in a way, you can pre-optimize your campaign. It’s simple to use, which makes it an easy step to add to your campaign planning.
By predicting campaign results ahead of time, you can make sure you’re planning the parameters that will help you reach the right audience, and maximize the impact of your ad dollars. And, you might just discover opportunities for ad spend that you may have not even realized were there for you.
Want to use Forecasting when planning your next campaign? Request a demo to learn more about StackAdapt.
