2023-03-03 | Case study | Insights
Active in Germany and Austria, this retail media brand delivers media services for its partnering retail shops utilizing Campaign Manager 360 (CM360), Display & Video 360 (DV360), and affiliate agencies. With omnichannel ad formats and wide-ranging topics, their industry partners can reach various target audiences throughout their customer journey.
The brand has licensed adtech solutions provided by the Google Marketing Platform to run campaigns in-house. As a result of resource constraints, it continued to work with agencies despite having the infrastructure to run campaigns internally due to lack of processes for campaign setup and execution. An additional infrastructure and automated processes needed to be designed and implemented so campaigns could be realized efficiently and scaled across the entire industry partner portfolio of the retail media brand. Therefore, the company engaged in a conversation with Digitl to collaborate on developing and installing such processes.better campaign quality compared to industry benchmarks
As part of Digitl's strategy to enable the client to run campaigns in-house, the team had to examine how the client’s teams worked and draw a full picture of their existing processes so that these could be transformed as needed. This included what units at the client’s company and external parties were involved and what their specific roles in selling, planning, executing, and reporting campaigns were.
As part of the implementation process, Digitl began with an abstract draft of the inputs and outputs of the automation project. These pillars laid the groundwork for creating the infrastructure further along the road. The automation of the campaign setup involved the interaction with various Google APIs. The Campaign Manager 360 API was leveraged to create the placements used as ad redirects in the respective campaign. These were grabbed from the Google Drive API while relevant information was collected from the Google Sheets API. This way, the various campaign assets could be first created in Campaign Manager 360 to then retrieve the needed Campaign Manager 360 details and use them for campaign configuration in Display & Video 360. The automation was done using Google Cloud Function 2nd Generation to ensure a robust architecture. Cloud Functions 2gen acted as the backend to do all data processing required for the automation. The latest generation of Cloud Functions allows Digitl to make use of longer request processing times, larger instance sizes, and to handle multiple concurrent requests with a single function instance, among other things. This makes the system easy to scale up/ down depending on the load while only paying for the resources that are being used.
In addition, thanks to the integration with Google Cloud Logging and Monitoring, handy tools on Google Cloud Platform were provided to monitor and debug the executions.
After analyzing the time it took the team to prepare and implement campaigns deployed with the automated process, the client’s team found that campaigns could now be created much faster than before when working with external partners. In turn, this resulted in shorter campaign lead times, which led to many more campaign requests, and thereby much better scaling opportunities. The quality of the campaigns was evaluated based on two metrics: viewability of the impressions and invalid traffic reported in DV360 compared to industry benchmarks for the last studied period. With internal control over campaigns, campaign quality could be improved by 47%.