Ad Intelligence and how can it help boost your Ads Performance

There is a continuous proliferation of advertising channels to market to customers. Google Shopping, Amazon, Walmart, and Target are popular advertising channels that are each pushing to win advertising dollars. Others like Facebook, LinkedIn, eBay, Best Buy, Home Depot, Houzz, and others are also going after the same dollars. This is challenging for online retailers to stay on top of and maximize value.

Ad campaigns help increase brand awareness. Running an ad campaign is usually an automatic process. Ad performance data is collected, and optimized ad campaigns are created based on performance data generated by the respective ad platform. However, the reporting metrics shared by the ad platforms alone are not sufficient for an advertiser to optimize ads.

What is Ad Intelligence?

Advertising intelligence provides detailed insights into the advertising of any online business in near real-time.  In other words, it’s a platform that provides unprecedented visibility on how and where your competitors spend ad money. It offers multi-dimensional data that you can utilize to gain visibility on your ad campaign performance across various regions, time zones, and devices.

The advertising intelligence solution tracks your strategic keywords and helps you answer questions as listed below. It is very difficult to answer these questions from data provided by ad hosting platforms alone.

• Major competitors in your competitive landscape
• Competitors’ advertising activity
• Competitors’ products, prices, and reviews and ratings
• The ins and outs of competitors across regions, times, and devices
• Your ad rank position and its changes over time

1. Regional Competitive Dynamics

You gain in-depth knowledge about your ad’s competitive landscape, your major competitors at a national, regional, and metro level, and your keywords appearance by region. You can leverage this data to improve your ad campaign performance by making sure what’s happening on the search engine result page (SERP) matches your ad strategy goals and developing location-based ad campaigns to maximize your return on ad spend (ROAS).

For example, the graph below shows the regional level coverage of top advertisers by keyword impressions. This analysis was done for wine and liquor keywords to boost the ad impact with regional ad intelligence

In the graph, Total Wine has very low visibility in the Ohio region. The data shows the fluctuating ad impressions by region, and the areas where they can improve. Regional ad intelligence will let you know where you have low visibility so you can devise a new plan to increase your impressions in that region.

2. Hourly Competition

The platform is scheduled to run every four hours. This provides you near-real-time data about your ad rank position and identifies the most competitive time of day for you to advertise and vice-versa. You can leverage the real-time insights to gain a high return on investment by reconsidering the allocation of ad spend on the least competitive hours.

The analysis shows the breakdown by the advertiser by ad time and region. Total Wine & More has ads almost evenly spread between the three hours in all the regions except Ohio, where they have no ads during these times. This could be an area of opportunity for them to run ads during the least competitive of these times in Ohio. Instacart looks to be focusing all its ads at one time in the Virginia region (7 AM) and Ohio region (3 PM). So, a company like Instacart could possibly improve its ad visibility by focusing their ad spend during the 11 AM timeframe in Virginia rather than 7 AM.

3. Cross-Device Visibility

Today, customers use a variety of platforms — mobile, desktop, tablets, smart devices, wearables, and much more — to shop, browse, and explore the internet. You need to consider where you can reach your customers and how you can do it across various platforms. Targeting customers on mobile phones is different than targeting customers on desktops, and consumers will be on different devices at different times of the day. Advertising intelligence helps you with cross-device targeting. It is crucial and should be a part of every advertising strategy. Also, it helps you to deliver consumer-specific ads through different channels or apps.

To Summarize