Earlier this year, we released the Skai Guide to Evaluating Social Advertising Technology Platforms. In this Guide, João Gonçalves, Marketing Director at Schibsted Classified Media, contributed a Marketer Perspective on the process of selecting a social ad platform and what his team was looking for in a partner. We’re excited to share an excerpt of João’s perspective on our blog to keep you “In the Loop”. If you enjoy this piece, be sure to download a copy of the full guide and the corresponding supplemental materials. Remember, you can view all the topics featured in the Skai Guide Series by visiting Kenshoo.com/Guide-Series.
When it came time for our team to review social advertising technology platforms, there were 4 keys pieces if functionality that we were looking for in a partner.
1 – Bulk creation and bulk editing tools to enlarge the scope of our testing, improving performance in a very practical way
By allowing to bulk-edit and bulk-create ads, we wanted a platform that offered great tools to help any marketer in his or her day-to-day work. This way, we’d have a simple way to perform several A/B tests and could more quickly achieve a desired level of optimization.
2 – Ability to manage a large volume of campaigns, making it easy to manage big social advertising accounts
Having the ability to manage a large volume of campaigns without having performance problems in the platform does make the difference on your day-to-day life, particularly if you work at/for a big advertiser. This capability is just as relevant by itself, as it allows you to refine your targeting accuracy in a way which would be impossible if solely human-based.
3 – Best–in-class dashboards and straightforward KPI definitions, allowing us to focus on what really matters to our business at a managerial level
In any corporation there are several levels of analysis and details. We needed an easy way to define custom metrics and dashboards so the relevant information could be accessible to different levels of decision making in our organization.
4 – Great bid policies and automated tools reduce the human work to the relevant tasks on a day-to-day basis
This is the end-result we were looking for — the ability to optimize large campaigns with a quality standard, which will optimize and leverage the potential return on your marketing investment. Normally, advertisers have a trade-off between human resources dedicated to social marketing and accurate optimization. We wanted to have less human time dedicated to maintenance activities and accurate optimization of our spend.
The key to finding the right social advertising technology partner is to determine up front what is most important to you and your business. This way, you have clear goals during the evaluation, making the process run much smoother.