2023-02-16 | Case study | Insights
This brand operates in multiple countries across Europe and beyond, with brick-and-mortar stores and an online shop offering cosmetics, healthcare products, household products, and health food and drinks. For this project, Digitl partnered with the brand's media agency as part of Digitl's commitment to work with media management agencies to support media strategy & planning, buying, measuring & reporting processes.
As the programmatic way of media targeting and buying is the most accurate and efficient not least because of its ability to control the amount of contact based on a number of techniques for user tracking and identifiers, the media agency focused on programmatic activation for the company’s activities. To fully use the programmatic capabilities, the agency was looking for methods (to the extent possible with GDPR and the settings available) to deeply analyze how people behaved after being exposed to the campaigns and gain higher control over exposure to prevent media waste and to re-invest potential cost of user overexposure beyond the efficiency point in additional campaign reach to ultimately increase the ROAS of their campaigns. As the media agency already fully understood and used the analyzing capabilities and settings in Display & Video 360, the question that was addressed with Digitl concerned options for the in-depth analysis beyond the scope of Display & Video 360 in order to activate the results in Display & Video 360 and approach campaign optimization even more thoroughly and holistically.Discovered potential uplift in ROAS by frequency adjustments for display campaigns
This project implementation started with a thorough analysis of all available data and activation options across tools and departments, resulting in an understanding of user behavior within the framework of the technical and regulatory options, as well as the ability to deliver ads and optimize the number of contacts and interactions in a more informed manner to the extent possible under GDPR and with current settings available.
The analysis consisted of two parts, with the results of both together forming the data-driven basis for campaign optimization strategy - user campaign flow reconstruction and analysis as well as efficiency analysis generating a ROAS report per path length.
As the Display & Video 360 campaigns of the client use Placements hosted in Campaign Manager 360 and the Display & Video 360 advertiser connected to the respective Campaign Manager 360 advertiser shares cost information with Campaign Manager 360, two Campaign Manager 360 reporting types were used for data analysis: “Path to Conversion” to analyze the details about all attributed conversions and “Standard” to retrieve Display & Video 360 campaign and impression cost data and assign it to the attributed conversions and combine all needed details to answer the research question. The data between the two reports were matched using the Placement ID.
Digitl retrieved details about all attributed conversions such as interaction type, interaction number, and revenue using Campaign Manager 360. In the first step of the analysis, the available data was retrieved and prepared in Google Cloud BigQuery. Based on the conversion ID and its preceding interactions, all conversion paths related to the campaign activities were reconstructed. With the help of descriptive analysis, including box plots and histogram charts, the distribution for the number of interactions was explored to answer the research question that was detailed out by Digitl’s team.
In the next step, the user campaign flow analysis was extended by an efficiency calculation measured by ROAS. For this purpose, impression and cost data for the Display & Video 360 campaigns were retrieved using Campaign Manager 360, exported to Google Cloud BigQuery, and matched with the conversion path data.
A scatter graph was used to demonstrate the relationship between the avg. ROAS and the path length in a visual way. The elbow criterion was applied to identify the “cutoff point” for the user path length - a common heuristic in mathematical optimization to choose a point where diminishing returns are no longer worth the additional cost.
The results of the analysis were used to gain frequency management insights for optimization measures in Display & Video 360. Digitl discovered an exemplary potential for an increase of the ROAS of up to 23% for display campaigns that could be potentially achieved by changes in two settings in Display & Video 360 campaigns: frequency cap combined with Activity-based audiences set up for exclusion purposes based on the number of contacts with campaigns.