You've set up brand new ad campaigns across search and social and maybe even display, TV and DOOH. Now what?

Optimisation.

Marketers are obsessed with performance; as they should be. And optimisation of these campaigns is a crucial step in ensuring that your budget is working as hard as possible. But knowing when and where to start when optimising these campaigns, can be tricky and once you have that figured out, how do you go about optimising your optimisation strategy.

Let's talk about some simple tips that you and your team can take away immediately to help you lay out a plan for optimisation.

Patience is an optimisation tool.

It can be tempting to constantly tweak your campaigns and take a look at performance day-by-day but over optimising means that you're not allowing performance to stabilise.

One low performing day, does not mean your campaigns are poor. There are lots of other external and environmental factors which contribute to the purchase behaviour of consumers. Have patience and leave your campaigns to run. Give them time to work and then keep an eye out for patterns and trends. Only then, make changes based on the patterns you see.

A lot of your digital campaigns are also probably driven primarily by machine learning and algorithms. By going into your account and tweaking things too often, you are not allowing the platforms to learn enough or capture enough data for them to work and optimise efficiently.

Scale up not across.

Budget optimisation can be difficult but did you know that increasing budgets in your existing campaigns is often more effective than adding more campaigns?

Once again, platform algorithms spend significant time learning and optimising. By constantly adding new campaigns, you could be disrupting this learning and the results of your existing campaigns.

The only exception to this would be if you were to invest extra spend in testing; whether this be testing new creative concepts or different campaign types and messaging.

In the majority of cases, think about how you could distribute any increase in budget across your current, well performing campaigns, instead of building brand new ones.

Challenge your creative.

Without even realising it, you're probably biased towards you own creative. Because it's been created by you and your brand, you may think it's the best it can be but we would urge you to open up to the possibility of something new, creatively.

Even within the luxury space, taking risks with UGC style content or something that might be seen as "off-brand" can open doors to new audiences and bring improved results. Sometimes the "ugly ads" perform the best.

It's all about testing. And when you're conducting these tests, take your own bias out of the equation and look purely at the data.

We'd always recommend having a buffer within your marketing budget to allow for creative tests.

Look outside of platform analytics.

Now, we're not saying ignore platform analytics completely. It is of course very useful to see how individual campaigns are running when making comparisons and testing. However, if you are looking to make bigger, cross channel optimisation across your entire digital strategy, we would also recommend using a 3rd party attribution tool which allows you to see a more complete picture of how all your channels are contributing to revenue.

For Revenue Growth Agency clients, this is almost always Northbeam.

As you can see from the example below, if we just looked at data within the native platforms, we would be pulling spend from Facebook and investing it into Google Ads. However, Facebook is actually far more valuable when you look at the blended Northbeam data.

Optimisation is hard.

Keeping on top of optimisations is hard. It's an ongoing job which is never done. There are always tweaks to be made.

But the key takeaway should be to let your campaigns do their thing (for a decent period of time) before you go in and start tinkering away. And remember some data does lie. So make sure you are seeing the bigger picture from outside the platform managers.