How to Restructure Your Campaigns Using Online Purchase Tracking

In today's online market, every ad campaign needs to be perfectly tailored to suit the tastes and needs of your target market. Overly generalized messages that target everyone are the wrong strategy; now it can make audiences feel like the ad isn't for them because it doesn't specifically suit their profile.

Instead, shoppers respond best to ads that present products and services in relation to their pain points and goals. They respond even better to ads that correspond to their spot in the buyer's journey or even previous purchases. Instapage gets to the heart of the benefits of integrating both tracking and advertising:

The more ad tracking data you collect, the more you'll learn about your audience, and the more you can tailor your messaging, offers, channels, and more, to better serve them.

This is essential for creating better ad campaigns and, ultimately, better brand recognition and achieving your revenue goals. Online purchase tracking is one avenue for personalizing and restructuring your ads. In this article, we'll explore what online purchase tracking is and how to use it to build better campaigns.

Advertising Attribution

Advertising attribution is the process of determining which tactics or advertisement elements are the primary contributing factor to converting a lead into a customer. 

For example, someone watching a meal planning ad on their streaming service may click on that retargeted ad because it has a recipe they're interested in, while another viewer might click that same ad because they've seen ads from your company 10 times.

Knowing why each shopper engages with an ad is almost as important as the engagement itself. When you know why different portions of your target market are clicking on ads, opening email newsletters, or making a purchase from a specific landing page, you can make more of your ads contain those crucial persuasive elements. 

The more streamlined you can make the conversion process, the better: that means fewer clicks, fewer lost leads, less expenses, and ultimately more customers that enjoyed their journey. If you're focused on ad attribution, there are two main metrics to keep in mind:

• Return on Invest (ROI): Ads that drive engagement get more clicks per given number of views, and a higher proportion of those clicks lead to purchases. 
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), which is a complement to ROI that specifically focuses on advertising costs.

At Strategus, we're hard at work making ad attribution a true science. If you're trying to make your ads significantly more clickable, you need specific, actionable insights about which elements to change and how to change them. Our Attribution Suite can break down which ads are getting the most clicks and identify shared elements that are driving the increased engagement.

Then, our Encore Omnichannel platform sequentially retargets viewers so they interact with the ads that best fit their position in the buyer's journey and which have been the most engaging for audiences that are similar. Using both allows you to simultaneously retarget viewers and measure what actions they take as a result of viewing your CTV and OTT ads until you have a completely streamlined journey from the first view to completed checkout.

The role of online purchase tracking

Our Attribution Suite focuses on eight functionalities. One of those is online purchase attribution, or determining if a customer made a purchase as a direct or indirect result of watching an ad. For many of your campaigns, the goal is to increase the number of purchases of a specific product and/or increasing your total customer base.

When you can follow your shoppers in aggregate, you are better able to measure their purchasing behaviors and trace it back to a specific ad or ad element to see if it was a factor in their buying decision. Once you have your answer, you have a cheat sheet for creating ads that have the best chance of leading either to a direct in-store purchase or a purchase through online sellers and distributors like Amazon.

online purchase tracking and campaign optimization

If you take a deeper look at the process of online purchase tracking, there is even more value beyond directly knowing whether an ad contributes to a customer's purchase. You can use the information to improve your current campaigns and see a significant uptick in purchases. Three of the most important benefits of optimizing your ad campaigns through online purchase tracking are:

1. Creating Better Advertisements

First, you can create advertisements that are full of the elements that made your previous ads so successful. By combining or emphasizing these elements, you can reach more buyers and test new ad formats to streamline the buyer's journey. 

When your ads are engaging because you researched and designed each component with engagement in mind, you'll see better conversion rates. But if your ads just barely miss the mark, your audiences won't respond by clicking or making purchases.

2. Optimizing Your Targeting

Not every ad will work for everyone you want to have as a customer. You still need to target ads to different groups of viewers and create unique ads that best speak to them. You can use your research to create stronger ads for each subgroup in your audience and then use retargeting technology to make your online campaigns as effective as possible.

3. Optimizing Your Messaging

Good tracking can help you troubleshoot and solve problems, not just increase your wins. By tracking viewers from start to finish, you can identify ads that fail to convert. Then you can identify why they're failing and make sure those elements don't reappear and drag down your campaigns. Use low conversion rates as an opportunity to test out different messaging styles until things improve.

restructure your campaigns with support from strategus

OTT and CTV advertising platforms give you the opportunity to work with far more refined analytics than in linear television campaigns, but only if you have the right tools. At Strategus, we specialize in creating ad attribution and marketing software tools that let you get to the heart of why your campaigns are or aren't working so you can optimize them. Contact us today to learn more about our software suite, or browse our blog for more strategies.