As marketers prepare for the holiday season, Adswerve has put together a guide on some opportunities and considerations when it comes to running campaigns effectively in Display & Video 360 (DV360). Detailed in this post covers everything from new product features to take advantage of to best practices and new opportunities within the platform, but every marketer should start with laying the groundwork first by setting business objectives and setting goals appropriately.
1. Set Goals and Objectives
In programmatic digital advertising, planning and preparing for promotional campaigns and evergreen campaigns requires different strategies and approaches due to their distinct goals, timing and audience engagement needs.
Incorporating both types of campaigns into your programmatic strategy is crucial for overall success. Promotional campaigns drive immediate results during key moments, while evergreen campaigns ensure that your brand remains top-of-mind all year round. A well-rounded plan involves leveraging promotions for short-term boosts and maintaining evergreen efforts to support ongoing brand visibility and engagement.
Promotional Campaigns
Promotional campaigns are typically short-term efforts designed to drive immediate actions, such as sales, registrations or holiday-specific engagement. They often coincide with key events like the holiday season, product launches or limited-time offers.
Key Focus Areas for Promotional Campaigns:
- Structure:
- Distinguish promotional campaigns from evergreen campaigns by building separate campaigns in DV360 so budgets and goals can align appropriately with the objective.
- Goal Setting:
- Define clear short-term objectives such as increasing conversions, sales or lead generation.
- Establish measurable KPIs (e.g., conversion rate, cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS).
- Audience Targeting:
- Use highly segmented audiences, focusing on in-market consumers, seasonal shoppers or users showing recent intent to purchase.
- ProTip: Use combined audiences to build audience strategies ahead of the campaign and custom intent/affinity audiences for competitor conquesting.
- Implement remarketing strategies to reach users who have previously interacted with your brand but haven’t converted.
- Depending on the media buy type (auction vs. reservations), reserved inventory often allows marketers to leverage additional audience partners at no additional cost with publishers or Supply-
Side Platforms (SSPs). Check with partners for off-the-shelf audience segments or if you are willing to pay the additional costs, see if the partner offers custom audience segments for your campaign.
- Timing and Budgeting:
- Schedule campaigns around high-traffic periods, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday or other relevant seasonal events.
- Allocate larger budgets for peak moments to capitalize on increased consumer activity.
- Prepare for a shorter, more intense flight period by ensuring enough budget flexibility for quick adjustments.
- Ad Formats:
- Focus on high-impact, action-driven formats like display banners, video ads (e.g., YouTube) and CTV ads that create urgency.
- Use countdowns, limited-time offers and clear calls to action (CTAs) to drive immediate conversions.
- Test dynamic creative optimization (DCO) to automatically update product offerings and pricing based on real-time inventory.
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- Ad Formats:
- Focus on high-impact, action-driven formats like display banners, video ads (e.g., YouTube) and CTV ads that create urgency.
- Use countdowns, limited-time offers and clear calls to action (CTAs) to drive immediate conversions.
- Test dynamic creative optimization (DCO) to automatically update product offerings and pricing based on real-time inventory.
- Measurement and Real-Time Adjustments:
- Utilize real-time reporting tools to monitor campaign performance and adjust bids, budgets or targeting to maximize impact during key moments.
- ProTip: Set IO settings to “No Objective” for connected TV (CTV) and the Line Item settings to bid towards “Maximize Conversions” on the line item. Since CTV is generally an awareness strategy, it’s important to use “No Objective” in the IO settings to unlock lower funnel bidding strategies. With CTV cross-device measurement, bid towards one floodlight to keep the focus on your primary goal.
2. Plan for the Holiday Season and Maximize CTV Opportunities
Netflix offers unique opportunities for brands to tap into highly engaged audiences. By leveraging Netflix’s CTV inventory, advertisers can gain access to premium content, exclusive ad placements and a captive viewership, allowing them to make a strong impact during critical moments, such as the holiday season.
Netflix’s holiday programming, including original films and family-friendly content, attracts millions of viewers eager to immerse themselves in festive entertainment. By placing ads in or around this content, advertisers can capture audience attention when they are most emotionally engaged and open to brand messaging. Aligning your campaign with popular holiday films also fosters a positive association, as viewers link the excitement of holiday entertainment with your products or services.
Access exclusive content like Netflix's holiday movie lineup in DV360 for advertising opportunities through PMP deals. Since deals can take longer than turn-key options like the open auction or inventory packages, be sure to plan accordingly!
Netflix Holiday Movies and Release Dates:
- Hot Frosty - Release Date: December 1, 2024
- Meet Me Next Christmas - December 5, 2024
- Our Little Secret - December 10, 2024
- That Christmas - December 15, 2024
- The Merry Gentlemen - December 20, 2024
- The Snow Sister - December 24, 2024
3. Explore Holiday Inventory Opportunities
As the holiday season approaches, programmatic advertisers can take advantage of DV360’s Marketplace to simplify and accelerate their campaign execution. In DV360’s “Inventory” section, you can search for pre-built holiday inventory packages. By selecting the desired format (e.g., display, video, CTV) and searching for “holiday,” you can discover pre-configured, ready-to-use inventory that requires no negotiations or custom deals. These plug-and-play packages make it easier to launch campaigns quickly and effectively, saving valuable time while ensuring high-quality placements targeted for the holiday shopping season.
If you’re looking for more control and customization, you can reach out directly to media partners for custom inventory deals. These partners may offer exclusive, high-impact placements, such as prime ad space within premium holiday content or access to unique inventory that isn’t available through open marketplaces. Preparing in advance for these negotiations ensures that you can secure the best possible placements, particularly as demand for premium inventory rises during the holiday period. Additionally, you should consider experimenting with new ad formats, such as Pause ads (which appear when viewers pause their streaming content), to drive engagement in a creative, non-disruptive way.
In tandem with securing the right inventory, make sure you refine your audience targeting to maximize campaign efficiency. You can leverage GA4 predictive and propensity audiences, which use first-party data and machine learning to identify users who are most likely to engage with or convert based on their behavior patterns. By targeting these high-value audiences, you can focus your budgets on users with a higher likelihood of purchasing or interacting with your ads to drive better performance.
Incorporating pre-built marketplace inventory and custom deals while refining audience targeting with advanced analytics allows brands to deliver highly personalized and effective campaigns. These strategies not only help you make the most of the holiday shopping window but also position you to outperform competitors in a saturated and highly competitive market.
4. Enhance YouTube Campaigns With Demand Gen
To maximize reach, consider capitalizing on ad formats like YouTube by setting up a Brand Awareness or Product & Consideration campaign where media buyers can buy ads on a CPM or CPV bid goal. YouTube formats include instream skippable, non-skippable, in-feed, and YouTube Shorts.
One of the key benefits of DV360’s Demand Gen campaign is its expanded inventory access, giving advertisers more opportunities to reach potential customers. With the latest updates, Demand Gen now includes placements in Google Discover and Gmail, significantly broadening its reach. Google Discover offers native ad placements within the personalized content feed. And Gmail ads provide direct access to users’ inboxes in a highly relevant and personal format, further increasing the chances of driving conversions. Demand Gen is ideal for conversion-focused campaigns, providing powerful tools and inventory options to drive actions like purchases, sign-ups or downloads.
New Demand Gen Features for Better Targeting and Reach
Demand Gen introduces several powerful features to enhance targeting capabilities and boost campaign performance:
- Lookalike Audiences and Audience Reach:
- Advertisers can once again take advantage of lookalike audiences in Demand Gen campaigns. Lookalike segments enable brands to reach new, relevant customers who resemble their current audience. By using first-party data as a seed audience, combined with Google’s AI, you can find potential customers with similar characteristics and behaviors, significantly expanding your reach to audiences that matter most.
- Flexible Ad Formats and Enhanced Brand Exposure:
- You can choose between running video-only ads or a combination of video and image ads within your Demand Gen campaigns. Try a combination of video and image ads to boost performance, as it helps engage users across different content consumption habits. To further enhance brand visibility, you can add companion banners to YouTube’s traditional video ads in Demand Gen campaigns, increasing the chances of user interaction and reinforcing your brand message.
- Product Feeds and Carousel Ads for E-commerce:
- If you have a product catalog, linking Google Merchant Center to DV360 enables you to use product feed ads or carousel ads. These formats are particularly effective for e-commerce brands, as they showcase multiple products in a dynamic and visually appealing way. Carousel ads, in particular, allow users to browse through several products in one ad unit, boosting engagement and click-through rates. This setup ensures that product-focused campaigns have the tools to drive purchases and increase revenue.
5. Implement Real-Time Optimization Strategies & Stay Agile
Fine-tuning your programmatic campaigns throughout the holiday season is critical to maximizing impact across all channels. Whether your focus is on long-term brand awareness or short-term conversions, leveraging DV360's advanced features can give you a competitive edge. Below are key recommendations for optimizing your programmatic efforts in DV360, tailored to both long and short-flight campaigns, creative testing and real-time performance adjustments.
Setup:
- Consider using “Ahead” pacing instead of “Even” for promotional campaigns on longer flights to frontload your impressions served.
- For shorter flights, consider using daily budget goals.
- Build a line item per audience or per audience group (e.g., Shoppers, Competitor Custom list, etc.).
Refresh Ad Creatives:
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- Update visuals and messaging.
- Use high-performing assets to drive engagement.
- Monitor Campaign Performance Closely:
- Use real-time analytics to track KPIs with DV360’s Instant Reporting or internal reporting methods.
- Adjust bids and budgets based on performance easily in DV360’s UI using features like Custom Metrics and “Segment By” to see more specific performance metrics to be able to make quick decisions.
- Be Prepared to Pivot:
- Monitor market conditions and shift budget from one audience to another if performance and scale allow.
- Leverage Cross-Device Measurement:
- Use one primary goal floodlight tag for tracking.
- Use “Maximize Conversions” for any conversion goals on CTV and display campaigns.
- Use “Maximize Value / Cost” for ROAS goals on CTV and display campaigns.
- For CTV campaigns geared towards awareness instead of conversion goals, set your line item to optimize towards “Maximize Completed In-View & Audible” and layer on multiple levels of frequency capping to reach the most users.
6. Enhance Performance With AI-Powered Tools
AI is transforming programmatic advertising, and Display & Video 360 (DV360) offers a few new AI-powered tools that can significantly enhance your platform experience. While many of these features are also available in Google Ads, their application in DV360 offers additional flexibility and control for programmatic media buyers.
AI-Driven Audience Targeting
An advertiser’s audience reach is sometimes limited based on the campaign core targeting selected. DV360 leverages machine learning algorithms, similar to those in Google Ads, to refine audience segmentation. These tools analyze large sets of first-party and third-party data to predict which users are most likely to engage with your ads or convert. By focusing on high-value audiences using AI-driven insights, you can make your holiday campaigns more effective and efficient. Use the Audience Expansion tool in DV360 on YouTube and CTV campaigns to find similar audiences that are likely to convert. Additionally, tap into your own first-party data by using GA4’s predictive audiences that create models for predicting traffic patterns. Predictive audience pair well Dynamic ad placements, making it a powerful performance tactic for retailers and eCommerce.
Custom Bidding Strategies
DV360’s Custom Bidding is a powerful AI tool that automatically adjusts bids in real-time based on your campaign goals. Advertisers can customize their campaign goals to maximize performance on weighing multiple floodlights for holistic measurement with goal prioritization, bidding on an advertiser’s hand-selected products or categories, or maximizing sales-driven goals. Custom Bidding provides unique control over the algorithm dictation for real-time bidding in DV360 to tailor more specific strategies to your media campaign.
Propensity Models
Bring your 1st party data (from GA4, Salesforce, HEAP, Adobe, etc) into BigQuery to develop a predictive model estimating a customer’s propensity to take actions on your site. Through the power of AI, your 1pd can become a northstar dataset that provides Google insight into who your most valuable customers are to inform bidding and targeting decisions in real-time. Don’t have a data science team in-house to prepare the propensity models for you? No problem, Adswerve can assist! Reach out to your Adswerve representative and we’ll set up an introductory conversation.
This holiday season presents several challenges for advertisers, but if you’re prepared to tap into the helpful features DV360 offers, you’ll be ready to face them. If you need additional help, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
