Setting Up Effective Campaigns To Get Results

If you want to set up effective campaigns that get results, AdRoll is here to support you. Before you launch your campaign you need to first decide who you want to target. The scope of your campaign can be either general or specific.

Campaign Audiences of All Sizes

To create effective campaigns, you have to think about the customer journey. Your customer journey is the path that visitors take to move from discovery (first visit) to customer (conversion).

• Discovery: Your visitor first discovers your website.
• Interest: Your visitor browses or returns to your website again, increasing their level of interest.
• Intent: Your visitor demonstrates an intent to buy. For example, by downloading a whitepaper or placing items in their cart.
• Conversion: Your visitor completes their purchase, converting into a customer.
• Repeat: Your customer becomes a repeat (i.e. loyal) buyer.

A general campaign applies to a broad audience at a number of different stages, while a specific campaign focuses on moving users from one specific stage to another.

Your ability to focus your campaign depends on website traffic. If your total audience size is between 1,000 - 10,000 monthly unique visitors (MUV), keep the scope of your campaign more general. We recommend running specific campaigns only if you have 10,000 or more MUV.

The Trade-Off

General campaigns increase interest and intent across your whole audience. These campaigns tend to have a wider reach than campaigns with more specific goals. However, if you have the recommended audience size and want to drive a specific action, focus your campaign on reaching people most relevant to your specific goal. These campaigns tend to reach fewer people than general campaigns.

Campaign Settings

Bid strategy

You can specify a goal for your campaign which AdRoll will use to automatically optimize your bids which impressions we prioritize and how aggressively we bid on each.

A goal could be to maximize the total number of Conversions, Clicks, or Impressions. Alternatively, you can set a specific cost-per-acquisition (CPA), cost-per-click (CPC), or cost-per-1,000-impressions (CPM) target. Learn more about bid strategies

Tips to increase reach

• Increase target audience size: We can’t reach your visitors if they’re not part of your target audience.
• Increase the size of your target audience.
• Create more target audiences.
• Upload your email lists to reconnect with people who haven’t visited your website recently. Learn more about leveraging your existing email lists.
• Avoid restrictions: Remove or reduce restrictions on your campaign such as geotargets, network, or IP exclusions.
• Diversify your ad sizes: Include all of the recommended web ad sizes and all Native ad sizes in your campaign to expand your reach on available web inventory. If you're running a Facebook campaign, make sure you include all available Facebook and Instagram ad sizes. Learn more about our ad guidelines.
• Increase budget: If you have high website traffic, your budget may be restricting the number of visitors we are able to reach. Learn more about setting your budget.

Tips to optimize for a specific goal

• Define your audience: Define specific audiences to better cater your ads to a visitor's interest level and stage of the customer journey. Some ways to define an audience include:
  • Categories viewed
  • Product viewed
  • Pages viewed
  • Actions taken (e.g. placing items in a cart)
• Exclude converters: If your goal is to drive new revenue, make sure that you’re not serving impressions to recent customers. Learn more about conversion audiences.

However, excluding customers who have completed a purchase isn't always the right move. If your goal is to increase customer loyalty, you can target people who have already completed a purchase. For example, create messaging to offer a discount on their next purchase.

• Lower cookie duration: BidIQ automatically notes the last time someone was on your website, but lowering your cookie duration imposes a hard limit on how long a visitor cookie remains active in your audience. For example, if you know that your sales cycle is generally 10 days you can lower your cookie duration to reflect that.
• Set geotargets: If you only serve certain locations, set geotargets to focus your efforts on places that matter.

Learn more about how to build effective campaigns. Get started and drive growth for your business and request a demo today.

Last updated on September 20th, 2023.