Interest Layered Prospecting

How to build interest based campaigns using data intelligence from consumr.ai

Introduction

This is the first and the most transparent and puristic of all the campaigns that consumr.ai offers. Audience platforms may have a lot of targeting features for the convenience of advertisers, but they all function on a fundamental that forms a base for all targeting. One such base that is common for all the audience platforms is, “Interest”. While some of the smaller platforms like Snapchat may have interest as one type of cohort (besides demography), Meta on the other hand flexes its muscles with the widest variety of cohorts besides interests and demography like, behavior, stages of life, income and work related insights.

This type of campaign focuses on leveraging the base targeting cohort and creating campaigns that are activatable on different media platforms. What makes it so special is the fact that these plans are based on consumer intelligence drawn from insights that are created by consumr.ai. Refer to our articles on various insights that consumr.ai can create and you will know that the system has a unique capability of creating insights by unpacking first party data anonymously, using third party cohorts, lab URLs, app URLs, search keywords and terms and a lot more.

In this article we will cover how to create campaigns that are purely interest based and how to activate them.

How to get there?

There are 2 ways that you can start building a campaign:

From an insight

When you create a new report or reopen an existing report (refer to our articles on how to create an audience report or reopen an existing report), you will see an action button “Create a campaign” at the bottom of the report. Click it to go to the campaign.

Through Action Zone:

When you are on the insight page, you can go to the Organization drop-down, select the organization, portfolio and then click on “Activate Insights”.

You will go to the actioning area. To the right of the page, you will see a button called “New Campaign”. Click it to get started.

When do you choose this option?

This option is ideal when you want to try and find new consumers and not rely on your 1st party audiences. This is an ideal campaign

Starting with a new campaign

You are on the campaigns page, to the right top corner you will see a button called ”new campaign”. Once you click on it, a modal pops up where you can select the platform you want to build a campaign for. Since we're building an interest-layered prospecting campaign for an audience platform, you can either select Meta, Snapchat, Pinterest, or TikTok. Once you select the platform, you will see the types of campaigns that you can create. Interest layered prospecting is a type of campaign that is available for all audience platforms within consumr.ai. Then, go ahead and select the radio button that says interest layered prospecting. You can only select one type of campaign at a time. After selecting, click on the button called “Setup”.

Setting up a campaign

Setting up a campaign is a part of the workflow where you start adding intelligence derived from the insights and use them as inputs to chalk out a draft of a plan, once activated will set the campaign in the right direction. You can also see that now the modal changes into 2 sections vertically. To the left you have the entire campaign creation workflow listed down in stages. To the right, based on the stage you are on you will see forms with relevant fields that are either prepopulated with recommendations or blank (which means that it requires manual input).

Plan Presets

Presets of a plan are groups of fields that allow you to select an insight to draw intelligence from. There are two ways that you can do so.

By entering an input:

It's not easy to remember the name of an insight that you created a few days ago, or even a few hours ago. What is easier to remember is the input that you want to derive intelligence from. If you go through our articles on how to create insights, you would know that a user will need to select an input like, a first party audience (look alike) or a third party audience like an interest. The insight section uses these inputs to draw intelligence from and create a report. If you do not remember the name of the report/insight, then you can simply enter the input by checking the check box “ search using audience".

There are two things that can happen once you check this box and then enter an input,

1. The third drop-down that says "select insight" will filter out all the insights that were created using the input you entered.

2. If there is no insight that has been created in the last 15 days, it will give you a button to create an insight first.

consumr.ai’s intelligent engine will not ask you to do anything else. It will run the insight in the background and select it in the third drop-down automatically, once it is ready.

By selecting an insight

If there is an insight that already exists, and if you remember the name, then life becomes much faster for you. You can uncheck the "search using audience" checkbox and open the "select insight" drop-down to search what you are looking for.

The field decides the name of your campaign. If you do not activate it, it will save the draft with this campaign name. Alternatively, if you activate it on a media platform, this campaign name will become the name of the campaign on the media platform. consumr.ai’s engine auto names your campaign based on the inputs that you have selected. If you do not wish to continue with the name the system has selected for you and you have your own taxonomy that you need to insert, you will need to click the edit button to the right of the text box and type the name you want.

Plan

This dropdown looks like a simple selection; however, it is one of the most important selections that you are going to make with reference to your campaign.

There are two types of plans that you can create:

Standard Plan:

You select this option when you want to create a performance-driven campaign that has a mix of interest-based targeting split into three adsets. These interests are clustered basedon efficiency scores. You also select this option when you do not have multiple creatives built for different types of interest categories that you are targeting.

Thematic Plan

You select this type of plan when you want to split interests based on themes. For example, if consumr.ai picks interests that are composed of 10 interests related to Sports, 10 interests related to fashion, and 10 interests related to automobile, then it will auto-cluster them based on these three themes. It is not necessary that there will only be three ad sets in this case. It can be more than three. The advantage of having this kind of plan is that it allows your creative team to build creatives based on these themes and involve your product in them. This is also ideal for brands and agencies that have in-house creative teams.

This is the last option in the setup. It gives the user an option to choose how broad or precise the plan needs to be. It will always be defaulted to balanced. However, if you need a plan that is more niche, in other words, based on uniqueness score, then you select the niche option. If you select broad, it will purely be based on the reach scores. Balanced means a composition of reach scores and uniqueness scores, which is called, “efficiency scores”.

Now that you're done setting up the campaign, you can proceed to the targeting section by clicking the button at the bottom of this modal named, “Targeting”.

Targeting

This is the next section in the flow, which allows you to review or change the core targeting parameters based on which your interest-based plan will be created. When you come to this section, you will see that there are two parts: “Core targeting parameters” and “Targeting filters”.

Core targeting parameters

This section is prefilled, based on the learnings from the insight you selected from the setup page. The user has the option to change these recommendations, however we strongly advise against it. This is because all the recommendations are purely based on data that consumr.ai analyzes and builds the plan on.

Gender and age range are well-known and simple demographic parameters that most marketers are aware of.

However, recommended cohorts are global cohorts that the consumr.ai’s engine produces. These cohorts can interpret cohorts coming in from any audience platform. For example, Meta may have an interest called Cars, but Snapchat may have the same cohort named as “Automobiles”. Consumr.ai’s intelligence contextually identifies and maps them into a global cohort bank that is proprietary to ProfitWheel.

Please do not misunderstand this cohort to be the final targeting parameters. This dropdown will pick up the top 10 to 15 cohorts based on the intelligence from the insights and pass it on to pick out the best targeting interests from the platform you want to build the plan for and the market you want to activate it in. You can also remove all the cohorts from the plan, but then it will be an open targeting campaign, something we do not recommend.

Targeting Filters

They are called targeting filters because, if they are selected, they will have an impact on the reach of the campaign. Hence, you will see that none of these filters are prefilled or recommended. We only advise users to select any one of these filters if they need to condense down their audience, where the audiences are highly relevant but may or may not have a very high reach capacity.

Not all these filters are available for all the platforms that consumr.ai services. When you open the drop down, you will see all the applicable options that you can choose from.

Cities: This dropdown will feature all the cities within the market. On the top right corner of this drop down, you will see an icon for recommendation. Clicking it, the system will automatically recommend between 10 to 15 cities that can be added as a filter. Use this option only when you have geographical constraints with your product.

Browsers & Devices: When you open this dropdown, it is divided into two parts. One for the browsers and the other for the devices. You have the option of selecting the browsers and devices that you want to target.

Habits: This dropdown will have a list of habits that you will see in a behavior insight report.

Education and Work : This drop down will have a list of all educational qualifications as per Meta. This filter will not be available for any other platform but Meta.

Stages of Life: This option gives you a list of different stages of life your audiences are in.

To know about each of these filters in detail, please refer to the article on behavior insight report.

Towards the right of this form, you will see an indicator in red and green. Based on the selections in the form, this indicator will advise you whether the reach of your selection is enough to produce a potent plan or not. If the arrow above the indicator points to the red section, it means that the reach score is not enough. On the other hand, if it's on the green section, you're good to go.

Once you are confident about your targeting selections, you can go ahead and click the button at the bottom of this modal, called “create draft plan”. This will get the engine started and may take close to a minute or two for the algorithm to build a plan based on the intelligence and targeting that you have selected, for the platform and the market you want to build the plan in.

The Campaign Draft

This is the page where your efforts will bear fruit. This is where you will get the targeting interests separated between adsets.

At the top of the section, you will see the total audience size estimates that your campaign may reach out to. What you see in the screenshot is a thematic plan, hence the ad sets are named as technology, drink, entertainment, etc. Each interest is displayed in a blue capsule. This capsule can be removed by clicking the gray cross button towards the right of every capsule. It is only displayed when you hover on the capsule. There is also a provision of dragging and dropping the capsule from one ad set to another. You can exercise this option in case you find a raw interest being put in the wrong ad set. Each ad set is displayed in an individual gray-colored card. At the bottom of the card, you can see the audience size per ad set and a percentage of budget that should be allocated out of the total budget you have assigned to this campaign. You also have the provision to edit the name of the ad set by clicking the edit icon to the right of the ad set name. Once you are content with your plan, which is built totally based on data signals that are carefully processed, analyzed, and categorized, you are good to move ahead to the activation phase. This is where it gets real and we advise you to be extremely careful with what you choose, since that data will be pushed into the media platform of your choice.

At the bottom of this modal page, you can click the button “begin activation” and the activation section will appear right below the button.

Activation settings

You do not have to update the activation settings if you do not want to activate the plan on the media platform. Let us do a walkthrough of every field you have to fill in this section.

Campaign Type

There are two types of campaigns that you can activate. You can either go with a new campaign or select an existing campaign to activate these ad sets in. Select the option based on your preference. You can only select one. Users may choose a new campaign when they do not want the learnings of an existing campaign to dilute the essence of this new campaign. On the other hand, users may choose an existing campaign when they want the new ad sets to inherit the learnings of the existing asset and get them incremental results.

Name of the Campaign

Name of the campaign will be the same as what you've chosen at the beginning of the workflow. However, this option is only applicable when you select a new campaign in the previous field. This field will disappear if you select an existing campaign in the previous field.

Account

In this drop down you will see all the accounts that you have access to, based on your log in. Select an account where you want this campaign to go live.

Seed Campaign and Seed Adset

In consumr.ai, as a practice we do not want to reinvent the wheel. We also wanted the process to be extremely simple and time effective. Hence, to save the users from a lot of trouble we introduced the concept of seed campaign and adsets. In these drop downs you will see the names of all the existing campaigns and ad sets on the media platform. When you select a campaign and an adset, it will inherit all the features and parameters the way they have been set in the media platform. In other words, it will duplicate the campaign and the adset and then modify the parameters from this plan, keeping the other parameters the same. This means that parameters like interest targeting, budgets, date range will be updated, and the rest of the parameters will stay the same as the seed campaign and adset.

Campaign Budget

If you look at the draft plan below, you will find a percentage of budget that has been assigned to every adset under each ad set card. In this field, you will be asked to enter a campaign budget that will be further distributed among the adsets according to the percentage, if you have calculated it.

And the other thing that you need to note is that the campaign budget will be picked as daily or lifetime based on the seed campaign that you have selected. Hence, please be extremely careful about the seed campaign or adset you select.

We are aware that the activation process may have failure modes, so we have made sure that none of the plans that are activated on the platforms go in an active state. This means that you can still go into the media platform, say meta, and check all the parameters before you take the campaign live.

Date Range

You will get a calendar enter drop down where you can select the starting and the end date for the campaign. If you want this campaign to be always on, the end date is optional. If you do not select an end date, it would mean that you want this campaign to be always on.

Once you're done with this selection, click on the activate button at the bottom of this modal to begin the push onto the media platform.

When you click on the activation button, a new card will appear that will show you the progress of the activation process. If this process succeeds, you will see the final checkpoint go green. However, if it fails, you will get the exact reason and place where the failure occurred, so that you can rectify the error and try activating it again.