Many of the missed opportunities within creative optimization arise from oversight. With so many campaigns running, and with so many creatives a part of those campaigns, it can be easy to underutilize a creative, completely forget it, or to run a creative for far too long.
The best way to prevent these missed opportunities is by having a clear visualization of what is happening across your creatives. By visualizing the data, user acquisition managers and creative analysts can surface insights that hide inside of pivot tables and basic BI reporting - enabling you to clearly see the trends in campaign performance.
Here we’ll dive into how to use visualizations in a creative analytics dashboard so you can identify trends in your campaigns before they become missed opportunities.
Choosing our KPI
First, we begin building the high-level view of our creative performance by choosing the core KPI we want to optimize for. This is fully customizable, based on what you want to solve for, your industry, and your genre. For our example, if we want to better understand which elements are driving high engagement in our creatives and replicate that success across all our campaigns, we’ll build our visualization with the core KPI of CTR.
Grouping to get a high level view
The next step is using labels (or tags) to group our creatives. You can group according to whatever makes the most sense for you, whether that’s by concept, type, or any other quality you view as important and are testing for. These groups take the many creatives across our campaigns and condense them into sets, letting us more easily measure and manipulate them.
For this example, we’ll label by color. Taking our creatives grouped by color and using CTR will allow us to see which of our creatives of a certain color received the most engagement over time. From here, we can also include other elements that provide context (like total creatives and media spend). This is our high-level view.
We can see here that creatives of a particular color, cyan, have significantly more engagement than another color, magenta .
We now want to ensure that this conclusion is valid.
Diving into external factors
To do this, we need to dive into the nitty gritty of our creatives’ CTR according to the external factors that affect it. This will allow us to find out if what we saw in our high-level view will hold true or if there is an external influence skewing our findings. For this example, we’ll use media spend - a common external factor that skews creative campaigns if there is an anomaly.
Looking at our creatives through this lens allows us to judge whether the CTR is correlated with the way we’ve grouped them (the color of our creatives) and if this is an opportunity we’ve missed to further optimize our creative campaigns.
In this example, we can now confirm this difference is not a result of media spend anomalies or any significant change in spend.
Confirming the trends
Next, we check to see that this trend is consistent across countries and platforms over time.
To do this, we drill down and compare media spend with the additional parameters of country and platform We can use what we see here to confirm the data from our high-level view.
If there is no anomalous behavior, we can use the data from media spend to further help us isolate trends and missed opportunities. In our example, we previously saw that cyan creatives drive more engagement and magenta less. Now we can confirm there is no anomalous spend behavior skewing our findings across platforms and countries. In fact, we see a further opportunity to increase cyan usage in Australia and New Zealand where it’s driving great engagement.
We have now confirmed our trend and can avoid those missed opportunities.
Taking action
For the underperforming color, we can decrease the spend on campaigns that use green creatives or remove them outright and replace them with the creatives we know could work better. For the over-performing color, cyan, we can use that color in future campaigns to boost engagement. This process is also useful for future creative briefs and requests as a learning opportunity for your designers, helping to make your next set of creatives data-driven and informed.
The final overview
While we can use nearly any combination of metrics, KPIs, and creative groupings to review our campaign’s performance, we always want to include a final visualization in our dashboard that will allow us to take closer look inside of each of our labels and campaigns.
This will enable us to see an overview of what each label and campaign contains, allowing us to quickly comb through these groups. From here we can see if we mislabelled a creative, how many creatives of a certain kind are in a group, and if a campaign is utilizing the correct spread of creative types. This helps us prevent common oversight and make sure we’re not missing any other opportunities.
Creative analysis made easier with visualizations
Good creative analysis and optimization is all about identifying those areas in your creative campaigns where there are inefficiencies. These insights can further hone your campaigns for greater impact and engagement.
In order to find these insights, understanding your campaigns clearly and efficiently is a must. Visualizations enable you to do just that. Luna Views enables you create these visualizations with effective and clear dashboards and widgets, offering a view into your campaigns to avoid missed opportunities and find trends. Book a demo to learn how Luna Views can help you.
