The news is here, and the writing is up on the wall.
eMarketer reports that the digital ad spend in the U.S is expected to increase to $129.3 billion. Digital will account for 54.2% of the total ad spend.
These numbers are hardly a surprise. We are, after all, a digital-first world. And in this world, competition is fierce and the battleground, huge. Marketers thus have their share of work cut out for them to level the playing field and to stay in the eye-line of their customers at all times.
One of the trends that are dominant in the digital advertising industry is Dynamic Creative Optimization. It is much like the beating heart of digital ad campaigns that ensure laser-focused ad targeting, by making sure that the ads change according to the audience’s preferences and browsing history.
Given the rising competitive landscape, it is clear that marketers now need to pay closer attention to DCO.
The ABC of DCO (Dynamic Creative Optimization)
So, what exactly is Dynamic Creative Optimization?
In simple terms, Dynamic Creative Optimization is a display ad technology that is highly rules-driven. Using DCO, marketers can navigate the challenge of improving the performance of their display ad campaigns by moving away from the static display marketing approach.
DCO serves display ads by leveraging machine learning to choose, in real-time, the most relevant set of visual components to display and optimize the content and the creative. The objective of DCO is simple – improve ad or campaign performance, increase click-through rates, and improve conversion and sales rates.
Why does DCO matter?
- Robust geo-targeting campaigns
- Mature retargeting capabilities
- Online advertising that converts
- Flexibility over creative layout design
- Mature retargeting capabilities
Advertisers and marketing professionals have to ask tough questions. Which kind of global look and feel of an ad works best for a specific population? What kind of CTA messaging works best? How can you best localize content? The list can go on.
With DCO, it becomes easier to create geo-targeting campaigns using location touch points to serve viewers with specific advertising. It helps to serve local promotions depending on where the consumer is, boiling right down to the district in the city.
This not only serves digital purposes but also helps in drawing customers to brick and mortar stores. With DCO, you can display different products that are suited to the local taste.
When combined with a Creative Management Platform (CMP), you can create demographics specific creative variations with ease minus the hassle of having to manually produce or code individual banners.
DCO assists marketers in achieving great results for their performance-driven retargeting campaigns. DCO, as a technology, functions on a per-shopper basis and hence helps to create custom ads for each individual shopper.
Retargeting has emerged as a popular display advertising strategy as retargeted visitors are 70% more likely to convert with this initiative. However, in the age of personalization, it is not enough to simply show the last viewed product. DCO allows you to optimize many variables (unique product ID, such as an SKU, geo-location, audience segment, etc.) and score various products by studying the online buyer behavior and leveraging machine learning to discover exactly which product performs best for your customer.
Advertisers and marketers are gravitating towards data feeds to enhance their online advertising initiatives. The data feed is the content used to populate dynamic ads in real time and is a key component of DCO. DCO uses data feeds to enhance banner ads by injecting them with live analytics, creative, and real-time testing.
The end result – hyper-relevant dynamic ad displays that aid conversion.
DCO assists marketers in achieving great results for their performance-driven retargeting campaigns. DCO, as a technology, functions on a per-shopper basis and hence helps to create custom ads for each individual shopper.
Retargeting has emerged as a popular display advertising strategy as retargeted visitors are 70% more likely to convert with this initiative. However, in the age of personalization, it is not enough to simply show the last viewed product. DCO allows you to optimize many variables (unique product ID, such as an SKU, geo-location, audience segment, etc.) and score various products by studying the online buyer behavior and leveraging machine learning to discover exactly which product performs best for your customer.
Creative flexibility – isn’t this what all advertisers and marketers want? Creative flexibility to create dynamic ad templates is essential to gain more control over how the brand is experienced by the customers. Using a CMP, you can now gain access to custom-built dynamic ad templates that automatically use images and product details from your site visitor’s pixel data and delivers personalized video ads in ream-time to retarget or upsell a product. These can then be delivered in a device-agnostic manner with appropriate CTA buttons and targeted based on the behavior demonstrated by your site visitor.
By applying DCO to a creative management platform, you can create any number of variations from a single banner or video template. From button colors to images, to content, you can enhance designs and make informed creative decisions. The viewer of today is ready for greater personalization. Research shows that most online users prefer personalized advertising as compared to non-personalized.
So, what does this mean for marketers? It shows that marketers need to know the language in which they can best converse with their buyers. Persistence can often breed contempt if push and retargeting campaigns do not speak to the buyer.
In the age of ad blockers, getting the balance between relevance, personalization, and great content quality become a game changer. DCO, when used in conjunction with CMP, helps achieve this balance in a nuanced manner and it does so along with a dash of creativity by using data to inform the creative process rather than by dominating it.
