Wavo Blog: This series shares information that’s most relevant to music marketers around the globe.

Context

Wavo uses campaign benchmarking to make music marketing a more predictable investment. We set benchmarks using past campaign data and current market trends to ensure that our predictions are as accurate as possible. However, despite the careful planning that goes into setting our targets, sometimes campaigns will underperform. When a campaign is under pacing its forecasted goal, we analyze the data to understand what is driving underperformance and determine what optimizations need to be implemented.

Execution

The learning phase represents the first twenty percent of a campaign’s budget. During this period, we hold off on executing any changes while we allow the platform’s machine learning to search for the most cost-effective ways to distribute ads. Once we emerge from the learning phase and costs are stabilized, we can then make data-informed optimizations. There are 4 main factors that then shape what adjustments are needed to improve performance: audiences, creatives, platforms and secondary metrics.

Audiences

A campaign’s CPM, or Cost Per Thousand Impressions, is indicative of how competitively advertisers are bidding to reach that audience. In a recorded music context, this value is impacted by variables such as an artist’s popularity and the size of their fanbase on a given platform, as well as seasonality and geographical considerations. Generally speaking, the more niche an audience is, the more expensive the CPM will be. The inverse is often true as well; the broader an audience is, the cheaper it's CPM will be. If a campaign’s CPM is more expensive than our benchmark and is thus driving costs up, we’ll often optimize away from niche audiences or add more targeting to broaden the reach and bring costs down. In addition, a high frequency can also be an indicator of audience oversaturation. Once an audience’s frequency rises above two, pausing the audience may help avoid ad fatigue amongst those who are being targeted, and therefore increase the number of results driven.

Creatives

A campaign’s Result Rate represents the percentage of impressions that convert to a key result. If a campaign is reporting a lower Result Rate than was benchmarked, a weak creative could explain this lack of interest. An optimization that we often look to make is to pause any creatives that feature lower Result Rates. That is one reason why we recommend including several unique creatives from the outset of a campaign. If there is only one or all are underperforming, sometimes clients will look to add a new, stronger creative– preferably one that follows our creative best practices. If the current creative(s) look strong, this could be an indication we are not reaching the most interested audiences for the artist, and that we should adjust targeting to connect with more niche audiences.

Platforms

The granularity with which we can view data varies based on the platform, so optimization strategies differ depending on where you are advertising. On YouTube, we can view individual keyword performance. Instead of pausing the entire Keywords audience, we can optimize toward the strongest performing terms. This isn’t the case on platforms like Spotify, which doesn’t share the results of individual targeting items. 

On Facebook/Instagram, we have the ability to target a large number of different ad sets, which can each house collections of first party data or prospective audiences. When we observe underperformance, this grants us the flexibility of usually having upwards of five ad sets from which we can choose to pause or otherwise reduce budget to. This same design holds true for other platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter. 

Secondary Metrics

Beyond CPM and Result Rate, we will often look to secondary metrics to guide our optimizations. Is an audience not driving Views cost-effectively, but creating Clicks or Engagements? Is an audience seeing slightly higher costs than anticipated but a high sound-on or completion rate? Most importantly– are we focused on our marketing objective at the expense of our overarching business objectives? When making optimizations, it is important to contextualize these decisions in a way that holistically considers the campaign’s marketing goal. What does this look like? This means ensuring that first-party core fans intent audiences have the chance to serve, even if they are expensive due to their smaller size, as they are the audiences who generally contribute the most towards a client’s business objective. This means allocating budget to the platforms most aligned with a client’s needs. Ultimately, this means not only analyzing the data most relevant to our benchmarks but referencing the campaign’s big picture, high-level goals in order to not ‘miss the point’ of digital advertising. These are considerations we always take into account at Wavo. 

Key Takeaways

Optimizations are a key tool used by digital marketers to improve campaign’s performance mid-flight. When an expensive CPM is driving a campaign’s costs up, we will optimize away from the most niche audiences or broaden our targeting. When a campaign is reporting a lower-than-anticipated Result Rate, we will pause the creative(s) with the weakest Result Rates or look to add additional creatives.

Following a campaign’s completion, we review the optimizations made over the course of its flight to teach us how to plan for future campaigns, whether that is to adjust our targeting or avoid certain creative formats. Taking this data-centric approach to goal setting enables Wavo to identify tangible insights that inform both mid-flight campaign optimizations and future targeting strategies. This measurability allows us to interpret trends and establish best practices that help to maximize ROAS. 

Written by Hayley Foote, Media Analyst Specialist at Wavo

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