Digital Marketing Optimisation: Part 2 - Acquisition

In this series of articles I am looking at the subject of digital marketing optimisation. At its core optimisation is a combination of philosophy, process, data and technology. You have to want to optimise and you have to be able to go through the “test, learn and adjust” cycles quickly enough to make a difference. Last time I outlined the approach to breaking down the digital marketing process into its main components of acquisition, conversion and retention and looking at the optimisation challenges within each of these areas. This week I look a deeper look at the first of these processes: acquisition.

Campaign optimisation is probably the most established optimisation practice. Acquisition marketing has been the corner stone of digital marketing for many years and a number of us can probably remember the mantra of the dot-com days when all the focus was on “eyeballs” and getting as many of them to the site as possible, often with little regards to what happened when they got there. Things have moved on a bit since then. Thankfully we now take a more sophisticated approach to measuring and optimising our acquisition marketing efforts. However, I think that there is still a way to go as campaign optimisation is a multi-level problem and once you have cracked one level then it’s time to move on to the next.

I think campaign optimisation operates on three levels:

  • In-channel optimisation
  • Cross-channel optimisation
  • Multi-channel optimisation

In-channel optimisation

This is the process of optimisation within a single digital marketing channel (ie PPC search, display advertising etc) and is in effect what we have been doing for years. Over that time we have become more sophisticated and we have seen the development of solid processes and the deployment of analytics and technology to help automate the optimisation processes. Within PPC search for example, there have been bid management tools around for years and a whole industry discipline has grown up around the optimisation of PPC and organic search marketing activity.

We have also seen the technology evolve to the extent where campaigns can be optimised in almost real time through automated algorithmic approaches like of SearchRev in the case of PPC marketing or DART Adapt for display advertising. We’re almost at the point of “fire and forget” where once the initial deployment has been made and the system is calibrated, little manual intervention is really required.

That’s all great, as long as you are optimising against the tight thing and that you’re correctly attributing value to the right behaviours. A good case in point again is PPC search marketing. Classically PPC optimisation is done at the keyword level looking at the clicks that generated the conversions and adjusting bid-management strategies accordingly. However, we know that in a lot of cases it takes multiple touch points to generate a conversion, and so value needs to be attributed all along the acquisition value chain rather than just against what happened at the end.

Cross-channel optimisation

“In-channel” optimisation is relatively straightforward. It usually involves a single piece of technology and the data to drive the optimisation process is generally sitting in one place. The problem is that marketers rarely market using a single digital channel. They use a combination of different channels often at the same time to achieve their goals. Display advertising may be used for generating awareness; search marketing may be used for generating response and so on. Each of these channels might be optimised in their own right but what about the impacts of one digital channel on another?

A classic example of this was when one of my clients went through a process of optimising their search marketing and display marketing independently from each other. They came to the conclusion that their display advertising wasn’t working hard enough for them, whereas their search marketing was. They switched investment out of display marketing into more search marketing and then promptly saw their search volumes drop. Up until this point they hadn’t appreciated how much display advertising was driving search volumes because they were optimising within the channel and in the case of display they were optimising against the wrong thing. They hurriedly reverted to their previous approach and saw search volumes recover. But they were none the wiser. They knew there’s a relationship between search and display (and their other channels) but they didn’t know how to optimise it and that was because their data was all over the place.

The key to cross-channel optimisation is data integration. It’s necessary to have the different channels activity and responses in the same database. This might be achieved by using a single campaign management system, by deploying a universal tag or by integrating the data in a separate system. Either way, once the data is in the same database, it’s possible to look at the effect of different channels on each other and on conversions and then to be able to optimise accordingly.

Multi-channel optimisation

Increasingly digital or online marketing doesn’t sit in glorious isolation from an organisation’s other marketing efforts. It’s a multi-channel world and businesses are looking to integrate their online and offline marketing strategies and tactics. So the problem becomes broader. It’s not just about how do I optimise my search marketing, or how do I manage all my digital channels, it’s about how do I optimise the total marketing mix? Online and offline? Search, display, TC, radio, print – the lot? This is the strategic marketing optimisation problem that companies are beginning to wrestle with. Again one of the main challenges is data integration.

Online and offline marketing data generally have quite different characteristics which means that it’s not necessarily easy to integrate them. Online marketing data is usually at the cookie level, tracking an individual user (or more precisely, an individual device). Offline marketing data is usually at the “market” level ie starting at a country or a regional level and down to individual stations, publications and so on. User level data and market level data can be difficult to marry up and relate to each other. With the development of geographical profiling from IP addresses it is getting easier but the analysis techniques will then also be different and are more likely to resemble the inferential modelling techniques of offline marketing rather than the “direct cause and effect” techniques used in the online world.

So, campaign optimisation is a multi-tiered problem. It’s like going on a hike up a mountain. When you get to the top of one summit, another one comes into view and on you go. If you’ve just about got your search engine marketing cracked, it’s time to move on to the next problem!

Next time I’ll be taking a look at conversion optimisation. Till then…

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