Interest Refined Retargeting

Adding interest as a filter to a retargeting campaign.

Introduction

This type of campaign is designed to achieve 4 things in particular:

1. Give the advertiser more control over the Blackbox of Meta

2. Provide the ability to build a more filtered targeting within your retargeting audiences

3. Utilize budgets better by providing better recall per dollar

4. Give more transparency and control to optimize the campaign

Retargeting is a black box, even though the concept is great. Meta is in complete control of this black box technology. If these campaigns were designed to give incremental reach, but the ability to “spray and pray”, then relying on the black box completely would be a good idea. The only decision an advertiser would need to make is to look at the RoAS or the goal and pause the campaign or keep it going. Retargeting campaigns are not one of those campaigns, though. Retargeting campaigns are one of the most effective campaigns in digital media and when you are banking on them to deliver a significant portion of your digital results with millions of dollars at stake, you can’t just rely on a black box tech that is also tuned to use the budget based on CPM.

consumr.ai provides a unique solution to this problem where an advertiser can take control of it, even if it is partial. Through this campaign, advertisers will be able to use their learnings of an audience through insights and convert them into interest-based filters and add them to the retargeting campaigns. This means that you can now merge the intelligence of Meta with the intelligence of consumr.ai and deliver effective communications to a much more focused group of audience who have been window shopping on the brand’s web assets or are in-market to buy the product. The result? Better RoAS, superior budget optimization, higher brand recall.

Unfortunately, only Meta allows you to layer interest over retargeting. We will be ready to do it as soon as other platforms offer this opportunity.

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.

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 refined retargeting’ campaign for an audience platform, you can only select Meta as a platform. Once you select the platform, you will see the types of campaigns that you can create. an ‘Interest refined retargeting’ 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. Since this type of campaign focuses on layering interests over ‘Retargeting’, we will have to select a seed campaign that is a Retargeting campaign.

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.

Sometimes while searching for remarketing campaigns, you may not find any remarketing campaigns, in the dropdown. This may be because, you may not have any active remarketing campaigns running at this point. In such cases, in the dropdown ‘Seed campaign (Retargeting)’ you will see a checkbox called ‘Show Inactive Campaigns’, check it to see past campaigns that may not be active. However, you can still take a copy of their settings and set up a new campaign with your campaigns setting.

Plan Prerequisites

In this section you will enter the following:

Campaign Budget

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.

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

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.

Targeting precision

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 creating a plan by clicking the button at the bottom of this modal named, “Create a draft campaign”.

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. If there is a blue dot that shows next to the audience size it means it is a broad reach. If it is green, it is ideal. Red would mean insignificant that means No Go. Yellow/Orange would mean Niche.

In this plan, you will be able to see three cards:

Demography Selection: This will be based on the Seed campaign, that the user will be able to change if required.

Audience Selection: Based on the seed campaign and selection, it will show you any other audience that it recommends. If you want to select an audience to add, you will need to click it to select.

Interest Selection: The plan will recommend the interest filters in blue capsules. You will be able to select the user needs to add any of the interest as a filter.

Once you are done selecting the targeting. You can directly move to the activation section.

Activation settings

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.

Naming a campaign

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.

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

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.