With the year 2022 hitting its halfway mark, marketers are further accelerating their strategic roadmap to keep pace with the yearly business goals to stay ahead of the curve. The relevance of leveraging innovative automation has come to the forefront as the ideal solution to reduce a marketing team’s time spent on menial tasks. 76% of global ad tech companies that utilized marketing automation generated a return on their investment within the first year of its adoption and 74% of marketers believe that automation helps them save time.
Automated workflows are created by setting certain rules and parameters based on a company’s needs. This can be performed and managed by marketers without requiring them to do the constant heavy lifting of manual repetitive work. As a result, it empowers them to devote more time and energy on additional valuable tasks, helping them inch closer towards their targets with more efficiency. On an average, a marketing team has to look into 10,000 offers (10 sources each with 10 sub-publishers), meaning there are over a million combinations to check – an amount that is only achievable with automation.
To understand the value add of automation, let’s take a typical workflow in performance marketing- allowing only certain publishers for specific offers, as an example of how this works. To automate this, marketers need access to a tracking platform that allows them to set rules that can automate taking specific actions based on certain conditions as well as the criteria as to when it should be executed. Usually such changes to their workflow automation would rely on a marketer’s extensive knowledge of operations. However, automation enables them to make optimized decisions even if other decision makers are absent or working on other tasks such as relationship management, trying to get more offers and budgets, or upselling.
Automating an end-to-end workflow of manual actions ranging from what campaigns partners are running on the platform to setting the optimization criteria, could altogether open a whole new horizon of higher efficiency and productivity. With this in mind, here are seven ways automation workflows can help save a marketing team’s valuable time and help their business grow. It is imperative for performance marketing partners to have access to these automation features for maintaining optimal operations.
Publisher approval
This translates to having the ability to automatically approve certain publishers for specific offers and push your offers to publishers. When pushing for some offers to new publishers (And now knowing how they will perform), marketers should consider setting up rules to approve them on certain test offers. Whenever they are approved, marketers can also set daily click caps for that publisher. They can approve new publishers on a set of offers, automatically set a click cap for each new publisher and can also add different settings for each new publisher.
Set margins per publisher
While testing new publishers marketers should consider keeping margins optimized while testing performance. They should use automation to set margins for new and existing publishers.
Setting KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
Marketers should set KPI automation rules on the offer level, publisher level and sub-publisher level for optimization. Let’s say that you don’t reach at least one conversion per 10,000 clicks, in that case you may want to stop traffic from the respective sub-publishers. This is valuable to marketers because of the volume of combinations that must be checked. Given that the average partner has thousands of offers: hundreds of sources and sub-sources, this already accounts for a million combinations to be checked – making it humanly impossible to look at every single one and identify which work.
When it comes to campaign optimization, marketers can automatically take action on the offer, publisher and sub-publisher level. Many advertisers set KPIs for their campaigns such as tutorial completion. They can automatically turn off sources which don’t reach these set KPIs.
Automate your fraud prevention
Click spam and bots pose a significant problem within the mobile marketing ecosystem. By setting the right criteria for indications of fraud such as click volumes, CR, CTIT and other, marketers can automatically protect their campaigns. They can also take action based on insights from their advertiser. If they get a postback alerting them that users were identified as click spam and blocked, they can take the action by pausing those publishers automatically without having to click a single button.
Link scanners: Stop sending traffic to broken links
Marketers can use link scanners to check if the users are actually being redirected to the app store. The benefits to automating this process is that their links will constantly be checked to ensure it is not sending users to ‘dead’ tracking links and losing revenue as a result. Automation can also help marketers when links are unsuccessful. When links do not reach the store, they can automatically stop sending traffic, or pausing offers to take other actions relevant to their workflow.
Keep your publisher updated (block and pause traffic)
A dynamic marketing platform can make changes based on new advertiser information in real time. For example if the campaign is experiencing tracking issues for some reason, marketers can set a rule to pause the campaign or pause the publisher and inform them at the same time until the issue is resolved.
Approve same offers from different advertisers/network(s)
If a marketer is running an offer directly from the advertiser, may not want to run it from another network with a lower payout. Another use case could be that a marketer may not want to run offers which have a high number of redirects. A marketing platform that allows for such automations can empower marketers to make such high impact decisions and actions within seconds leaving them time to focus on more value creating tasks.
With the current economic uncertainty, value creation and cost optimization are core to every business’s strategy. Both of these can be well achieved through automation, making it the key to success in marketing today. The timing is perfect to invest in automation. It will continue to generate value on a marketing team’s time and operational efficiency to help a brand’s marketing scale through 2022 and beyond.
Article is authored by Yogeeta Chainani, CEO of Swaarm.
