Vijay is the Director of Product at StackAdapt, working collaboratively with internal teams to design, build, and launch solutions to help our customers thrive.
Sometimes your campaigns are not delivering how you had anticipated, and you need to make optimizations to improve performance, while still in-flight. But knowing where to start can be a little overwhelming. Perhaps your initial bid or goal target wasn’t quite right—different factors such as scale, domains, and supply sources can have an impact. So how much should you adjust your KPI targets to remain competitive? You could implement many changes to your campaign to help improve its performance and pacing, but it can be hard to determine which changes are most valuable.
As a member of the product team at StackAdapt, I work to explore these challenges and see how we can help. In the process, we developed one of my favourite StackAdapt features, the Suggestions Hub.
How You Can Optimize Your Campaigns Quickly, Correctly and at Scale
The Suggestions Hub crunches through data to recommend campaign optimizations to improve performance and delivery based on the bid type and goal you’ve defined for your campaign. Select a campaign, pick a metric, and the platform will provide you with ideas on how to improve its performance. Once you know what to optimize, and if you’re happy with the recommendation, you can make changes with a simple click of a button. The Suggestions Hub can help you familiarize yourself with the optimization process, aiding you in identifying how to isolate what to optimize towards to achieve your KPIs.
What’s at work behind the scenes? The platform is continually analyzing your campaigns to identify which attributes may be contributing to underperformance. The Suggestions Hub captures all outliers so that you can review and take action on them. For example, if you were optimizing to deliver clicks and a domain you’d served impressions on had below-average performance, the Suggestions Hub would immediately flag that domain. Within the tool, you could review the recommendation to add the domain to an exclusion list, thereby improving your eCPC performance.
Why Consider the Suggestions Hub for Your Campaign
- A Great Starting Point for Optimizations
The Suggestions Hub is a great starting point if you aren’t sure where to optimize first. We always advise having your campaign run live to gather some learnings, after which you can check the Suggestions Hub to see what valuable campaign improvements it’s identified. A campaign needs to run for at least a day for the Suggestions Hub to start making recommendations.
You can browse the suggestions, and a change won’t be made until you hit “apply,” giving you the control to pick and choose the tips that best support your campaign strategy. We recommend making one optimization per day per metric, so you have time to observe their effects to know what is or isn’t working.
- Try Something New
Instead of repeatedly performing the same rote optimizations on each of your campaigns, the Suggestions Hub can identify valuable improvements you may not have thought about. So try an optimization you haven’t before, and see the results!
Here’s an example of the tool in action. If you were running a display campaign using a CPM bid and click-through rate (CTR) was important to you, the Suggestions Hub might notice you don’t have a bid goal setup and recommend you add a CTR goal.
- Remove the Guesswork
Leverage specific optimization suggestions. If the Suggestions Hub recommends your campaign can be optimized by lowering your CPC bid, it also provides a suggested value for the bid. No need to guess what the best bid value is. Less guesswork means you can make improvements to multiple campaigns quicker than if you needed to research on your own. And the reduced manual campaign optimization effort helps to save you time in your workday. Our algorithm crunches data in real-time, so the advice is always timely and relevant.
Getting Started
The Suggestions Hub is an excellent way to start identifying optimization opportunities more easily and efficiently. Not only will you benefit from straightforward recommendations to help keep your campaigns performing exceptionally well, but you’ll be able to learn from each suggestion, helping you level up your programmatic skill set.
Want to run exceptional programmatic campaigns? Request a demo to learn more about StackAdapt.
