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With online shopping continuing to shine as more restrictions are put in place daily and bricks-and-mortar store visits suffer, it is important to ensure your performance marketing strategy and agency infrastructure are best placed for the digital future we are facing.
Investing in technology now is a surefire way to guarantee you are prepared for the challenges to come.
Technology such as bid management solutions allows for automation of manual, repetitive tasks, providing more accuracy and giving staff more time and flexibility to focus on strategic direction and improving overall performance.
But which key things should you look out for when it comes to performance marketing, particularly in this tech-focused future?
1. Transparency
If you don’t trust your new technology, you won’t benefit from the time-saving advantage of automation as you will be constantly questioning its decisions.
Make sure the technology offers functions and solutions that align to your strategy and give you confidence in its decision-making process. Why not ask the provider for a trial?
2. Goals
Retailers have goals they need to achieve based on overall business objectives, so it is key to ensure your provider can optimise to these.
If you have multiple objectives working alongside each other, can the bid management solution be flexible enough to provide the best outcome?
If you need to manually intervene due to external factors, can it handle these changes while still hitting your goals?
3. Complexity
There are several triggers that can affect a customer’s propensity to buy, so you need to make sure the solution can use all this information in its optimisation process.
From general seasonality factors and varied weather to stock issues and different customer locations, it is important that the tool can analyse as many factors as possible to drive maximum performance.
4. Audience
Most performance marketing strategies follow a customer-first approach, so it is important that the tool understands this and your strategy.
It needs to be able to manage audience bid adjustments across ad groups and campaigns, ensuring it understands the performance of each audience list to determine how to upweight and downweight bids to meet your goals.
5. Optimisation frequency
Regular optimisation is key to ensure performance is efficient as well as driving maximum return.
The ideal bid management tool would optimise as early in the day as possible, but also allow for changes to be made throughout the day to react to any unexpected changes in the landscape, such as competitor promotion.
6. Interface
It is important to use systems that can offer every function you could possibly need, but if this comes with a complicated interface that is hard to use it won’t save you time.
There needs to be a balance between style and substance, ensuring you have the functionality you need, while making sure the tool is clear and simple to use in order to save you time.
Forecaster: an industry-leading bid management solution
Summit recently took part in a head-to-head to demonstrate the value of implementing a trusted optimisation tool in a business.
Against an existing technology provider, Forecaster (our own performance marketing technology) generated 6% more revenue at 12% less cost for our client, allowing them to develop their online marketing proposition by becoming more efficient at driving revenue while saving cost.
When looking at technology, retailers need to think about business goals and ensure they choose a tool that gives them the functions they need to drive the most benefit.
To read our top 10 tips for choosing a bid optimisation tool from our product development director, Dr Jill Anderson, download our whitepaper here.
If you want support with adding technology to your performance marketing strategy, get in touch here: info@summitmedia.com.
Dr Jill Anderson is product development director at performance marketing specialists Summit
Over the last 10 years, Anderson has extensively researched the mechanisms behind paid search advertising, becoming an expert in the factors that govern pay-per-click and shopping performance.
Anderson now leads a team of data scientists, analysts and developers to build innovative marketing technology solutions, including Summit’s award-winning, proprietary bid management and marketing intelligence platform Forecaster.
