What is the common denominator behind Lancôme, Equifax, Microsoft, and Domino’s Pizza? Each one has partnered with Quantcast to run successful advertising campaigns. Our case studies offer a series of real-world stories from these and other customers who have used our ad tech platform to power their marketing strategies, leveraging our real-time audience insights and programmatic ad solutions to deliver fantastic results. Representing a range of industries from retail to financial services to tech, these all-star advertisers have achieved a competitive edge in their markets. So what’s the secret to their success? Whether an agency, publisher, or brand, they have successfully identified their desired audience, know how and when to reach them, and understand what messaging will resonate with them and secure their business. 

To help you drive your own customer success, we’re sharing our top 6 tips for creating a successful advertising campaign:

1. Start with defining success. 

A successful campaign starts with defining success for the overall business objective, the goals for the KPIs, and how that will be measured. Make sure those intentions align from the beginning and set expectations for what is achievable. Since the overall business objectives determine the specific campaign objectives, you first need to establish what outcome you want to achieve. Whether you want to reach new customers, grow brand awareness, or increase customer lifetime value, measurable targets allow you to set up a more effective campaign. 

2. Understand your audience and what you want to accomplish with them. 

If, for instance, you want to drive more sales, you need to make sure you are reaching the right audience that is in market with the right messaging showcasing your products, and at the right time in their consumer journey. The Quantcast Platform provides real-time, actionable insights on browsing interests, purchase behaviors, domain affinity, occupations, devices, demographics, and more, empowering marketers to optimize towards the best outcome for every ad. 

3. Maximize your audience reach. 

Marketers need to use the real-time data to their advantage and be open to finding new audiences and then adapting the campaign. For instance, using our planner tool, you can discover whether your desired audience tends to convert on desktop, and if so, add more desktop sizes to your campaign. Or you might think that you are running a niche geolocation campaign, then discover that people are converting outside of your current range; you can then use that data to increase performance.

4. Engage the entire media ecosystem. 

It’s important to think beyond the media and audience reach and consider a broader range of factors, such as the creative messaging, site landing page, and user flow when it comes to running a successful campaign. Make sure that your messaging is strategic and that you leverage data to inform the ad. Quancast’s insights can provide valuable information to help inform your creative decisions. Determine what you know about your audience, then think about what action you want them to take. If you want to drive sales, include a strong call to action like a “shop now” button or a promotional offer for new customers. If your goal is higher-level awareness and education, offer prospects a chance to “learn more” and include branding images. 

By tying all the pieces together from reaching the right audiences to creative messaging and the landing page, the campaign will resonate better with your intended audience and yield better results. Quantcast can get your ad in front of the right audience, but you only have a few seconds to grab their attention and convey your message so make your message count.  

5. Trust in machine learning instead of overengineering the AI. 

Our AI and machine learning engine operates on live data to learn real-time audience behavior patterns. Ara powers the Quantcast Platform’s unique capabilities–advanced audience analytics, real-time predictive modeling, and autonomous campaign execution–and so we recommend taking advantage of the technology. Instead of getting into the nitty-gritty and adjusting levers in the settings to limit your scale, wait and see what results you get first. You might assume, for instance, that your audience is only located in specific geos and thus build the campaign that way, when in reality, you may be missing out on potential customers that Ara has identified because they fall out of the campaign settings. Let the machine learning do the heavy lifting and then adjust the campaign as you go based on the data-backed learnings. This also gives valuable time back to your teams and clients so they can focus on strategy and applying those learnings.

6. Take a test-and-learn approach to stay ahead of the curve. 

On the flip side, while the campaign has the ability to run autonomously, you don’t want to set it and forget it. With a balanced hands-on approach, you can use the data trends to maximize your results. Ara uses advanced machine learning algorithms to react to ever-changing consumer behavior and market trends, which means that marketers can also respond in real time. If you see that sales are spiking and the audience is resonating with the ads, that’s a good opportunity to expand your audience reach or increase your media budget to not leave revenue on the table. Similarly, if you notice your audience is increasing their mobile presence, test adding more mobile sizes. Use the real-time data to your advantage and pick up on these trends before competitors.

By following these 6 tips, marketers can amplify their results. Whether you are a brand, agency, or publisher, partnering with Quantcast can help you to unlock new audience growth opportunities and data-backed campaign optimizations, driving increased sales as a result. Our clients’ incredible success stories, highlighted in the Advertising All Stars ebook, offer an inside look into their challenges, our collaborative solutions, and their exceptional business results, like Lancôme’s 6.2% increase in brand and product awareness and Microsoft’s 50% increase in revenue in one quarter alone. These successful campaigns all have similar themes: they had clear goals, used machine learning to hone in on their desired audience, and leveraged the data learnings to drive even stronger results.

If you’d like to plan your own successful ad campaign using the Quantcast Advertising Platform, try it out now.