Hi there,

Announcement Of The Week:

The Reach and Frequency™ program has been recruiting and training aspiring marketers on how to get started in programmatic media. 

We go over fundamentals, strategy and planning, hands-on experience in a DSP (like the Trade Desk) and we sprinkle Linkedin and Resume workshops on the way including mock interviews with other expert in the field. 

We have a handful of juniors looking for internship and placement, each with unique talent and gifts!

Email us at [email protected] for more interest in the above OR for any recruiting and staffing support! 

Tip Of The Week: 

Pre-Holiday Checklist For Your Programmatic Campaigns

Things are going to be crazy busy this week (and every week(s) before a holiday).
As a programmatic ninja, there are going to be a lot going on including, new creatives upload, new strategy launch, calls/check-ins with clients, internal teams, you name it…. 

Some agencies and companies also require some to be “on call” on a holiday! Like in the middle of your thanksgiving dinner, you have to log in because “you are on call”?!? Like Whut?!?

Let me just that is absolutely BS!!!…..

And yet, you are still 100 % accountable for performance on your programmatic campaigns. Having learned over the years, I’d like to share this quick checklist to offer some peace of mind so that you can take off, as you deserve, to enjoy some quality time with family and friends.

Here are 7 things to do to ensure your campaigns are set before a holiday weekend:

1. Budget checks:

☐ Check your spend amount at the campaign and at the adgroup level. The point is to make sure you will not under- or over-spend during the 3-4 days weekend. 

2. Pacing: 

☐ This is where you make sure your pacing is on or ahead of the end date. This is where you check for the pacing setting but also where you may need to calculate manually if you should adjust daily budgets, if applicable.

3. Fight dates: 

This is so easy but you have no idea how many situations have been created because an end date was not updated. Check start and end dates for all:

☐ Placements, ads, creatives if in CM 360 or other adservers

☐ Campaigns, insertions orders, line items/adgroups

☐ Creative assets including third party tags

☐ Tracking Tags or pixels 

4.  Creatives messaging:

☐ This is specifically relevant for promotions or eCommerce push. If you have creatives starting on the actual holiday, you will need to triple check the dates and make sure any old creatives are scheduled to expire. 

5. Tactics:

☐ If you haven’t in the last 3 weeks, this is a friendly reminder to check on your tactics/ adgroups/ line items targeting to ensure they are still set up correctly. We may have made some conservative or aggressive optimization to test. We may need to adjust based on Holiday’s competitiveness.

6. Frequency Capping:

☐ This is also a good opportunity to check on your frequency! Depending on your advertisers’ industry, you may need to adjust this as well.

7. Performance Check:

☐ From a quick glance, check performance according to your primary KPIs – Take note of where we stand before the holiday.

☐ For my overachiever, as you are checking on performance, pull 1-3 insight points to email to account management teams and clients.  This is the best way to offer peace of mind to your clients and team, and it will help avoid those “on-call” messages while you’re biting into that sweet potatoes pie.

☐ A pre-holiday email to internal and external teams can look like this:

i. Quick note to express gratitude in this season and to confirm the following:

1. 1. Campaign budget and pacing are running as scheduled and we are 70% through the campaign and 80% of the budget has been exhausted as planned.
   2. Costs are competitive during the holidays but we’ve adjusted bid and frequency to remain as competitive as possible while remaining competitive in auction
   3. Our optimizations have been focusing on [KPIs x] and we are averaging y 
   4. New creative messages have been scheduled to start and old creatives will expire on end date.

💡 Here are a couple bonus tips:

1. Retargeting Tactic specific to holidays messages
Depending on your campaigns’ goal and strategy, if you are running a special message this holiday season, whether it is specific to Black Friday or Cyber Monday, You should implement in a separate adgroup, a retargeting tactic specific to the holiday message.
i.e.: 

☐  Message “Open a New Savings Account and Free Toaster” 

☐  Landing page: “ Open an account on Black Friday and get this awesome toaster wifi enabled and all the good stuff” 

☐  Retargeting: All audience visiting specific landing page at higher frequency (remember to exclud the ones that already open an account or current members). 

☐  Bonus of the Bonus: a Lookalike tactic based on this specific retargeting

This bonus tactic(s) will increase performance, depending on your advertiser an goal, and if set up correctly. 

2. Automated Reporting:

☐  Schedule daily reports to help keep track of pacing and performance! Most of us have smart phones where the report can load and you can easily see how things are performing 

☐  New tactics launching on a Holiday can be in a report!! You can schedule a one time report to come the day of with the creative/ad and date dimension added!

☐  Keep the report light! Be sure to schedule a report to pull metrics like impressions, clicks, and Spend, and adding your creative or adgroup dimension – The purpose of this is to see that things are running 

In this season of gratitude, we want to say thank you for your support and encouragement! We’ve learned that gratitude is a daily exercise and for this reason, we are extra thankful!

 

 – Hélène and the HPC Team – 

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About Helene Parker Consulting LLC, we offer programmatic media activation training and workshops. Here are some example of training topics you could offer your team!

Our mission is to help 1,000 individuals with little to no experience in marketing to become programmatic media traders and planner with The Reach and Frequency™ Program (share with a friend or co-worker and offer them 20% off with code newsletter20).

We are always looking for a referral or simply happy to chat the latest and greatest so don’t hesitate to book a call 😬

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