An ad exchange is not a magic wand that easily and without outside involvement considers the user’s thoughts and goals, draws up a strategy, sets KPIs, develops a media plan, launches a campaign, optimizes it, and brings a finished result.
The success of a programmatic advertising strategy and the effectiveness of an advertising campaign depends on collaboration between the programmatic advertising company and the user. Once a campaign is launched, the optimization phase begins, fine-tuning performance metrics to meet the desired targets. This article explores methods to enhance the post-view indicator.
What is a Post-View and How Does It Work?
Post-view technology allows you to collect data about user activities after seeing an advertisement. The technology helps track all advertisements a user has seen over a given period and analyze his actions after viewing an advertisement. The area that a post-view can cover is quite wide – from going to a website through search results to making purchases using a call. It also allows you to match offline purchases with specific advertisements the user has seen online.
Let’s say a person is considering buying a new apartment and looking for online information about real estate prices and mortgage conditions. Sometime later, he sees an advertising banner for a new residential complex on one of the sites indicating prices per square meter.
After reading the offer, the user leaves the site. Over the next few days, he periodically sees advertisements for this complex on other sites. Two weeks later, he finally decides to buy a new apartment and enters the name of the residential complex into the search bar to go to the site.
Due to the site’s SEO optimization or contextual advertising, the transaction will be considered completed without post-view analysis. However, the fact that the user entered the name of this particular residential complex is a merit of programmatic advertising.
One of the main goals of a post-view is to calculate the number of conversions that a specific advertising campaign brings. This allows you to evaluate your investment’s effectiveness and calculate your campaign’s return on investment.
In addition, post-view analysis allows for collecting valuable information about the target audience’s behavior, which can help develop and improve programmatic advertising strategies.
For example, you can find out that a certain segment of users returns to the site not after a day, but after a week. This is a good basis for subsequent campaigns.
What Do You Need to Know About the Timing of Post-View Analysis?
There is no point in following a user for several months or a year. In such a situation, the chance that advertising brought the conversion is too small. For post-view analysis, an attribution window is installed at the start. This is when all user actions with advertising and the landing page are recorded.
The attribution window is set individually for each campaign. In furniture sales, for example, this could be a month since the client may want to see the product live in the store after interacting with the advertisement. If it is a long-term product, the customer may need time to compare different brands and choose the best one. In the FMCG category, the attribution window is usually short and does not exceed two weeks.
The attribution window is typically set to no more than seven days without considering audience, vertical, or site specifics. Tests must be conducted to determine the most suitable period for a business. This will help you see the real picture of user behavior and determine during what period targeted actions most often occur, to which conditions users respond faster and to which slower.
How Can You Influence Post-View Indicators?
To influence the post-view rate, you can test several versions of advertising materials with different calls to action or sizes. Another feature is the advertising format. For example, users click on videos more often than on static banners.
Optimizing post-view metrics can be improved by additional tools to attract audiences, such as using lookalike audiences or purchasing data from multiple DMPs (a central hub that collects organizes, and activates audience information from different sources). Lookalike audiences can include users who have added an item to their cart—they are more likely to be similar to those who will make a purchase.
Of course, optimizing post-views also presents difficulties. One of them is the inability to see conversion data currently.
Another important part of optimization is installing pixels on the advertiser’s website. This allows you to set up retargeting and track targeted actions on the site. When using a pixel, installing it on the entire site and monitoring all user actions on it is unnecessary. If the campaign aims to increase the number of purchases, then the pixel can only be installed on the cart page.
The data obtained from the CRM system (about purchases, transactions, and orders) also allows you to determine what results advertising brings.
For example, a customer may add an item to the cart but buy it in an offline store. Without data from the CRM system, the team will not be able to know that the advertising led to such a result. This can be avoided by adding targeting to users who already have an item in their cart.
Wrapping It Up
Post-view analytics is a source of information that allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of a programmatic advertising approach. This indicator provides extensive data about the performance of various channels.
However, it is important to understand that post-view must be evaluated in conjunction with post-click indicators, data on calls, and transactions, otherwise a complete picture of the work of a particular channel will not emerge. Programmatic advertising is a huge, interesting industry where you can constantly develop and generate income.
If you are thinking about launching your advertising exchange, we recommend turning to SmartHub, a provider of white-label solutions that will allow you to enter the advertising market as soon as possible.
