Jan 17 2023
Platform, Thought Leadership

The Year of ROAS: How Media Optimization Enhances Sales

By: Laurent Colard, SVP, Product

Maximizing return on ad spend, or ROAS, can be found at the top of every marketer’s list of priorities. To achieve this, today’s advertisers require a more complete view of their investments across all media channels, utilizing quality data that produces the most accurate insights on audiences. Optimizations against these audiences that move with both speed and precision reduce wasted ad dollars, leading to reach of more engaged audiences (at the right time and place), while cutting back on inefficiencies. 

Surprisingly, much of media planning and optimization still relies on manual processes that have been around for decades, even though advertising technology has dramatically transformed the way this can be done. The types of datasets advertisers now have access to require more sophisticated ways of putting them to good use. This results in inefficient processes to leverage available data, suboptimal investment decisions that are reliant solely on human judgment, and disconnected teams planning with disparate data and tools. Traditional manual processes slow  advertisers from quickly analyzing “what-if” planning scenarios based on their currency and outcome measurement, eliminating the opportunity to implement pre-, mid- and post-campaign optimization. 

Optimizing and eliminating inefficient processes starts with consolidating the number of systems an advertiser utilizes throughout a campaign’s lifecycle. When automation is added and friction is removed, advertisers can algorithmically plan, monitor and optimize media plans through all stages of the campaign lifecycle. These tools aggregate all campaign and measurement data and provide optimization recommendations designed to maximize outcomes throughout the campaign, within an advertiser’s budget parameters and constraints. 

The results? Automated workflows that enable decisions at the speed of business, predictive algorithms that create the best media plan for tomorrow, and effective investment optimizations that factor in all available data inputs.

The value presented by leveraging these smarter and more efficient optimizations can fall into two categories:

  • Workflow efficiencies: By centralizing all media investments and measurement reporting in one platform and receiving automated recommendations, teams save significant time logging in to analyze outputs across various systems and manually determining how to optimize investments.
  • Better Outcomes: By optimizing performance based on advanced algorithms designed to maximize outcomes within budgets and constraints, each dollar spent on media will be more effective and deliver a greater return on investment for advertising.

Audience behaviors have changed drastically in the past several years. This means the way media investments are planned, measured and optimized need to change drastically as well. Big data has changed everything we know and created amazing opportunities, but only when used the right way. Leaning into this and adopting the types of tools, software solutions and platforms that encompass more pieces of the puzzle is key to maximum return on ad spend.

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