Most marketers would agree that tracking and optimizing to the real value of conversion metrics is both a big challenge and big opportunity. Finding a way to pass margins in real-time or incorporate multiple metrics into a bidding strategy can be extremely difficult to execute and even more difficult to automate.
Custom metrics allow you to dictate the importance of various metrics to your overall account, but they don’t help with your optimization efforts. Until now…
A new Skai Portfolio OptimizerTM policy, Bid to Custom Metrics, can automate bid optimizations based on custom metrics you create in Skai. This allows for greater control of campaigns in a portfolio and the potential to include more campaigns in a portfolio.
Below are three common use cases where custom metrics can help accurately represent the real value of various actions to your business.
Multiple Conversion Types
Custom metrics offer a way to layer additional information into your data and weight events to reflect how valuable they are to your business. A common example is the need to optimize for both orders and email signups despite orders being more valuable.
With custom metrics, you can write an equation to place more weight on the order event but still optimize for both. If orders are 10x more valuable than an email registration, your custom metric would look like this:
(orders*1) + (email signups*.1)
Variable Margins
Skai’s Bid to Custom Metrics policy also enables you to account for margins at the campaign level. If your business sells dishwashers and spatulas, there is likely a large difference in the profit margins for these two items. In this example, you would want to invest more in the dishwasher campaign as it is likely to make the biggest impact on your bottom line.
If you are unable to pass margins via your conversion pixel or conversion file, you can create a custom metric that will reflect the varying margins across campaigns. Custom metrics with weights applied at the campaign level reflect each campaign’s margins.
Let’s assume that the margin for dishwashers is 60% and the margin for spatulas is 10%. Knowing this, the following custom metrics could be used at the campaign level:
Revenue and Branding Goals
If your business goals include branding and sales aspects, custom metrics can be used to create equations that reflect the value of traffic to your site as well as your revenue. The Bid to Custom Metrics policy then bids on a combination of revenue and clicks.
The equation below shows that you are willing to pay $1 for every 1,000 visitors to your site in addition to optimizing for revenue.
(Revenue*1)+(Clicks*0.001)
Hopefully these examples give you some ideas of how you can leverage custom metrics to optimize to your business goals!