Smartly automatic optimization features save your time and money while decreasing the amount of manual work. Automated optimization features can help a great deal; however, the importance of also doing macro-level optimization of your audiences and ad creatives is often underestimated.
Intro to automatic optimization: How to Automate Advertising at Scale
Video: A Product Engineer's advice at Smartly Connect Stockholm, June 2017 (length 28:30)
In this video our experienced Product Engineer, Juho will take you through
- Why splitting audiences is a bad idea
- Why you should keep everything as simple as possible
- What to automate in marketing
Levels of Optimization
Macro-level: Audience optimization
What target groups you're showing your ads is the top-level optimization that provides a basis for further optimization of creatives, bids, and budgets.
Micro-level: Creative optimization
Different creatives work better for different audiences and constant A/B testing is the key to optimizing your creatives towards the best possible results. It is good to keep in mind that a creative that is performing best for one audience may not be the best creative for another audience. Keeping your creatives fresh and learning by experience what kind of creatives work for specific audience segments helps already a great deal.
Under Optimization → Ad rotation there is a handy feature Creative optimization, which helps automate testing a large number of ad creatives if you have more than 4 ad creatives in a campaign running longer than a week.
Creative split testing splits the target audience to equally-sized non-overlapping subsegment for each ad creative variation. This allows all variations to get somewhat equal delivery for similar target audiences, helping to provide an answer to the question "Which of these ad creatives work best for this specific targeting?"
Budget optimization
Predictive Budget Allocation re-allocates budgets automatically between ad sets, so that the best-performing ones get a greater share of the total budget. Budget allocation is based on the CPA of a metric of your choosing. Using Predictive Budget Allocation is recommended if you want to:
- Move budgets across ad sets, while keeping their total budget unchanged
- Have continuous optimization in campaigns lasting 3 or more days
Triggers can be used to automatically increase/decrease ad set budgets based on custom sets of conditions. Using triggers may be the best approach if you want to:
- Perform drastic budget increases/decreases, if certain conditions are met
- Automate intra-day budget changes in short campaigns
- You only have one adset and wish to automate budget changes based on performance.
Bid optimization
It is recommended to bid your true value for actions – or slightly above it – using Cost per result goal and refrain from frequent bid adjustments. There should not be the need for manual bid adjusting as the ad platform has already taken care of this with budget pacing.
In order to define the right optimization goal and bid amount, see the following support article: How much to bid?
Smartly's Bid Optimization adjusts the bids of ad sets to maximize delivery while achieving a specified CPA target. This frees you from manually monitoring and adjusting ad set bids.
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