Cut-up #11 // Ad Creative or Media Placement

Which is More Important When Optimizing Online Direct Response Campaigns?


Introduction
Optimization — the task of evaluating campaign results and applying one’s learnings — is an important and continuous process in online advertising. Advertisers who optimize effectively rapidly narrow in on the campaign tactics that produce the best results, so that each advertising dollar goes further. A number of companies and solutions exist to help advertisers optimize their campaigns. In direct response advertising, conventional wisdom is that three main factors — ad creative, media placement and offer — influence campaign performance. But most of the available online optimization solutions focus solely on elements of the ad creative. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, we tested the relative role of ad creative against one of the other above factors, media placement, in online direct response advertising.


The Study
In a ten-week study, we analyzed these two campaign factors to see
how each impacts conversion rates. Conversion rates are a common measure of online advertising effectiveness, used primarily in direct response advertising. A conversion is the advertising-driven action by which the advertiser defines the success of the campaign. Conversions can include a wide variety of actions, such as purchases, site registrations and email subscriptions.
We determined the impact of ad creative and media placement by measuring how much conversion rates varied when each factor was changed: the more the variation, the more impact.
• To test media placement impact, we showed identical creative in different placements and then measured the conversions that each placement generated.
• To test ad creative impact, we ran multiple ads—each with substantially different creative—on common placements and measured the number of conversions that each creative generated.


What We’ve Learned
We found that, while both are important, media placement has a much greater influence on online ad performance than creative does. Conversion rates varied much more among identical creative running on different placements than they did among different creative treatments running on common placements.



What This Means for Advertisers
• Use an optimization tool that enables you to optimize on both media placement and ad creative. Campaign management strategies that focus exclusively on creative optimization risk missing the opportunity to generate much larger performance gains through the integration of both factors. 
• First, find top-performing placements and publishers; then, test creative. The above hierarchy clearly illustrates the important role of media placement in campaign performance. Thus, when
advertising, buy media broadly to test many different genres, sites and placements. Optimize by focusing on the highest impact variables — sites and placements — early in a campaign and test
creative later. Once the best media mix is identified, optimize creative within those media placements.