Savvy Performance Marketers Make Bank When They Scale Their Ad Partnerships

But just adding partners isn’t going to work voodoo magic on an advertiser’s cost per install. Performance marketers need to constantly test their vendors to juice efficiency – and that’s a heavy lift, said Alex Keisner, global director of programmatic and performance specialists at Twitter.

“Testing is definitely a pain point, and it always will be,” he said. “It’s up the platforms to make themselves as easy to use as possible so marketers with limited bandwidth can use them to grow their business. It’s got to be worth the return on effort for the marketer.”

The trick for marketers is to be judicious about what’s being tested and how. It’s easy to “get distracted by all of the knobs and dials at your disposal,” Keisner said, but optimization only makes sense after there are best practices in place. Take big swings before incremental tweaks and don’t “overengineer things,” he said.

“Leave the more nuanced, minor optimizations for later,” Keisner said. “Even the most sophisticated marketers can only test so many variables, so test the big ones first.”

Twitter, for example, used to advise advertisers to set up as many campaigns as possible – 200 or 300 in some cases – to try and figure out which specific segments to target. “But we’ve found over time that advertisers perform better when they take a top-down approach and instead ask something like, ‘What are the big things I want to learn?’” Keisner said.

Having established a baseline for testing partners and tactics, though, the best performance-focused marketers are open to experimentation, comfortable with failure and always ready to lather, rinse, repeat.

N3twork, for instance, uses an in-house tool called Draper that automates the production of video creative. N3twork creates 50 different videos a week, runs tests on each and every one and then puts a ton of budget behind the best-performing ones.

“If we don’t rotate creative aggressively, we’ll end up showing the same ads over and over again to our target audience,” Seufert said. “A lot of other companies that make games like ours face the same problem.”

Most marketers aren’t on that level with their creative yet, though. They spend a ton of time testing their ad network partners but underuse creative as a performance lever, despite the fact that good creative can drive results. The quality of creative is responsible for almost half (49%) of a brand’s sales lift, according to Nielsen, and 75% of brand impression, per Ipsos.

“Performance marketers are so data-driven and focused on driving action that creative can get overlooked,” Keisner said, “but it’s something that needs to be tested and considered, just as much as anything else.”

This post was syndicated from Ad Exchanger.