3 Reasons Why You Should Optimize Your Campaign’s Creative (And Not Just Targeting + Delivery)

By : Alex Collmer

6/17/20

So you put in the upfront work: you perfected the assets with the help of your creators, you determined your targeted audience based on your carefully crafted buyer personas, and you set your bid and budget to help give your campaign a competitive edge on each respective platform. Now that your ads have been running for a week or two, it’s time to optimize. It’s only natural to jump into the platform(s) to dig into the various media metrics and start thinking about what levers you can pull to start the optimization process. But there’s only one problem. That approach entirely skips over-optimizing a huge part of your campaign: the creative assets. Let’s talk about why that’s problematic. 

1. You already know who your target audience is, and what the platform best practices are

As a data-driven marketer, you likely put extensive thought into the buyer personas that helped determine your campaign targeting. Of course, some platforms make it easier than others to directly reach that audience, and small tweaks might nudge the needle, but those changes aren’t likely to make a huge impact in optimization. It’s also probable that you researched best practices for sizing, CTAs, and more for each platform. Your images are the appropriate size, you utilized language suitable for each respective platform, and you know which platforms require a softer approach than others. There’s only so much optimization you can do for those factors.

2. Creative is inherently more complicated, and difficult to draw conclusions on (especially without AI level data)

Now, think back: did you put that much thought into the creative assets themselves? Did you research what colors evoke the emotions you’re aiming for your audience to feel? Did you look into the role that logo placement plays into a brand awareness campaign vs. a lead generation campaign? Not only are your creative assets the more attention-grabbing part of your ads, but there are also so many opportunities for optimization for your creative as compared to the available media levers.

3. Optimizing creative can result in up to +2x increase in CTR & VTR

Still need convincing? Look at the data. One VidMob customer doubled their view-through rate in product launch videos through creative optimization, noting that higher color contrast is correlated with increased viewer retention. Another customer determined through creative optimization that featuring colorful citrus fruits in their advertising drove a 37% increase in results. Our data shows us that these creative optimizations can not only improve CTR & VTR, but also result in a 2-5x increase in ROAS in some cases.

So where should you start with creative optimization? There’s plenty of great advice out there on optimizing ad creative, so you truly don’t need to reinvent the wheel. BUT, having creative specific data to help drive your decision making will go a long way in identifying what it is that’s helping or hurting your chances of driving the engagement you’re aiming for. As Artificial Intelligence continues to change the way that brands develop and analyze creative, there are numerous tools at your disposal to help guide your creative optimization. Not only will it aid in analyzing and optimizing your current creative assets, but the knowledge you gain will be invaluable as your campaigns continue to evolve and scale.

Want more detailed data on optimizing your targeting vs your creative, AND what the potential metric improvement could be like when you invest in both? VidMob’s eBook on Maximizing Marketing ROI is full of the advice you need and the numbers you’re looking for to prove it’s worth the effort.