Power Campaign Performance with In-flight Optimization

By JP Beauchamp, Media Center of Excellence, IRI

In the new era of COVID-19, knowing your customers, their purchase behavior and which messages resonate with them has only gotten more important. Unfortunately, one of the biggest missteps advertisers still make is waiting until the end of a campaign to measure and then relying solely on clicks or engagement metrics to assess overall performance. While these proxy metrics give a rough estimate of conversions, they falsely assume that a consumer's engagement converts them into a customer. Fortunately, the right tools, data and automation are now available to help CPG marketers know exactly what is driving ad performance while the campaign is still running so they can make adjustments to maximize return on ad spend (ROAS).

Experts from advertising platform Amobee and identify platform LiveRamp joined IRI on a webinar to take a deep dive into in-flight optimization (IFO), the ability to adjust campaign elements while a campaign is still running, including how marketers can use real-time, purchase-based audience analytics with demand-side platforms to support and improve IFO. This allows marketers to not only begin to optimize their campaign tactics, such as creative messaging, target audiences, media formats and more, it   ultimately improves sales lift up to 4x, eliminating significant media waste by course-correcting campaigns while they are in-flight.

The above chart shows how in-flight optimization can drive unprecedented results.

During the webinar, IRI and Amobee shared a case study on how a brand was able to measure in near real-time what strategies were most effective in driving offline sales and how it used continuous optimization to improve overall sales lift and ROAS. IFO addresses the two campaign measurement issues mentioned earlier – proxy metrics that give a rough estimate of conversions but falsely assume that a consumer's engagement converts them into a customer; and CPG companies that don't have retail stores waiting up to 12 weeks for data vendors to send reports on how digital ads are driving purchases. IFO addresses, as mentioned earlier, proxy metrics that attempt to establish a relationship between a consumer's engagement and their conversion to a customer. In addition, CPG companies don't have retail stores waiting up to 12 weeks for data vendors to send reports on how digital ads are driving purchases.

Together, we were able to collect and ingest anonymized purchase data every two weeks for the aforementioned client, analyzing the data for insights incremental to performing segments, channels, sites and more to optimize the campaign. Results were swift, with the brand seeing a 128% increase in average daily sales and a 13.4% lift, which resulted in $1.25 million incremental revenue.

At the end of the day, you need to ask yourself one fundamental question: Are your metrics supporting your sales goals? If the answer is no, IFO may be your solution. In an environment where consumers are constantly bombarded with marketing messages, advertisers and their agencies need to focus on measuring what matters, and at a level of detail that is useful, as well as optimize quickly. In an increasingly competitive market, including in a continually changing COVID-19 world, IFO is no longer optional.

To learn more about IRI's in-flight optimization capabilities contact me at jon.beauchamp@iriworldwide.com.