The holiday season presents many opportunities to buy advertising to drive sales. But what if your products are cross-category and target different customers at different times of the year? How do you make sure that each touchpoint is presented to the customer when they are likely to be most interested in buying? Display & Video 360’s Custom Bidding (DV360) solution lets you define an impression’s value based on many factors/goals that are important to your business. The tool then uses this data to build an algorithm that will optimize your bids for maximum performance toward the goal—whether it be increased brand awareness, conversion rates, or spend efficiency.
In short, DV360’s automated bid strategies uses previously scored impression data to raise and lower bids in an attempt to get ads in front of users most likely to perform a desired action. Let’s review a few common use cases and how they can increase conversions for you:
- Custom Floodlight Variables: Custom floodlight variables allow advertisers to create custom data points that can be used as targeting criteria for their ad groups. This helps advertisers connect their DV360 platform with other data sources like third-party data or CRM systems so they can target customers based on attributes like login status, page/product categories, and search keywords. For example, an advertiser may want to target customers who live in a particular zip code or have purchased a specific product within the past six months. They can then set up custom floodlight variables for these parameters and use them as targeting criteria within their ad groups.
- Floodlight Sales Revenue: Floodlight sales revenue allows advertisers to compare the performance of different campaigns by measuring each campaign’s sales revenue per click (sales/click). This metric provides useful insights into how well each campaign is performing compared to others.
- Weighted Conversions: With weighted conversions, you can apply different weights to the KPIs across your various funnels and this will allow you to bid more on the goals that are most important to you. For example, say we define a factor scale of 1–5, with 5 being the highest. Let’s say the “product view” goal is not as important to you as “purchase” and “add to cart” is somewhere in between. When we look at weighted conversions, we would assign the following values:
- Product view → bid = 2
- Add to cart → bid = 4
- Purchase → bid = 5
- Essentially, weighted conversions allow you to customize bids across your funnel based on the value of each goal to your business.
- Infrequent Conversion Activities: Another common use case is conversion activities that occur infrequently. For example, if you sell a product that’s typically purchased in one-time orders, but occasionally people purchase multiple times in a single day, it can be hard to determine how much each order should be worth. If a customer purchases a second item on their next visit, this would be considered an infrequent activity because it only happens once in a while—but it could be very valuable to know where these infrequent behaviors are occurring so that marketers can focus on optimizing them when it matters most.
- Linked Google Analytics 360: One common use case for Custom Bidding is to link your Google Analytics 360 account and DV360 account. If you do this, you can use goals created in a linked Google Analytics 360 account to apply different weights to events on the advertisers site. This can be useful because it allows you to focus your campaign efforts on specific actions that matter most to your business—like leads, clicks, or conversions. You can also use this feature to increase ROA by optimizing bids based on the type of conversion you’re trying to drive. For example, if you have an e-commerce store and have a goal set up in your Google Analytics 360 account that tracks when someone adds an item to their cart, you can use that data to bid more aggressively on those clicks because they are more likely to convert. Or if you’re an app developer, you could use Google Analytics 360 data to determine how long it takes for someone to register for your service after clicking on a button labeled “Register Now”.
- A few other use cases to explore include: drive more important categories, drive more on-screen time, increase overall revenue, improve overall LTV of customers, and increase average time on site.
In conclusion, if you want to increase ROA on ad spend this holiday season, Custom Bidding Analytics will be a great tool for you. DV360’s automated bid strategies use historical campaign data to raise and lower bids in an attempt to get ads in front of users most likely to perform a desired action.
