All About Platform Audits and Bidding Automation

Delve Goes Deeper: Retail Marketing

Deepen your understanding of marketing tactics to improve conversion and lifetime customer value. 

This is the fourth post in our Retail Marketing series, dedicated to helping brands improve their marketing ROI and accelerate revenue growth by identifying and converting their most profitable audience segments.

Today we’ll DELVE deeper into Platform Audits and Bidding Automation, two marketing tactics that help to improve conversion and lifetime customer value.

Platform Audits

A platform audit takes inventory of all of your MarTech and AdTech platforms across all customer touchpoints. At its most basic, the process “ensures that all platforms are individually collecting and outputting data in the expected manner and, collectively, working together in a way that captures maximum value from platform investments,” says Rob Enriques, Global Head of Innovation at DELVE. Doing so is fundamental to unlocking any downstream marketing efficiency efforts, he says.

The savings come from identifying (and eliminating) technology platforms and services that are irrelevant, too expensive, or underutilized. This important step helps marketers identify areas where they can free up budget for reallocation to other marketing mix tactics. Busy marketing departments often accumulate a variety of SaaS platform subscriptions over time and annual technology infrastructure reviews can help marketing leaders rationalize and justify which tools they truly need. 

Simplifying the MarTech stack also helps lead to simplified data integration, analytics and reporting—which helps the marketing teams better understand the data they have and spot campaign inefficiencies that can be improved to save money and stretch their budget.

Bidding Automation

Another area where marketers can find big efficiency gains is in their CPC bid strategy. Bid adjustments are opportunities to optimize targeting by increasing or decreasing bids in certain situations. Automating this process can deliver big gains. Why? Because the ability to make thousands of granular bid adjustments at scale can significantly reduce wasted ad spend and improve campaign performance.

With automated bidding, you can create bid adjustments based on factors like: search device, search location, time of day or week, and demographic attributes. You can also make bid adjustments for certain audiences, such as remarketing lists for search ads or in-market audiences. For example, Google Ads leverages machine learning and historical data in your account to assess the performance of your campaigns, ads, and keywords. With Google Ads, you can select the right bidding strategy based on specific business goals, such as: target ROAS, target CPA, maximizing conversions, or enhanced cost per click (eCPC).

Similar approaches can be applied using other programmatic ad platforms outside of Google. The key is to ensure that you are taking advantage of automated bidding to optimize how much you’re paying to acquire click traffic based on the anticipated value of the lead. Again, this can drive significant efficiency gains in CPA and ROAS.

The beauty of automation is that it is able to make constant changes to your bids based on the latest data insights to avoid marketing waste.

In our next article in this series, we’ll DELVE deeper into Audience Suppression, a tactic marketers can leverage to make their data work smarter.

Ready to take your ads, and your business, to the next level? Get in touch with the DELVE team today.