It’s been almost nine years since I joined IREP(One of the top Japanese performance ad agencies) and learned about performance ad advertising next month. Over the last nine years, many parts of such advertising (eg Google, Yahoo! Japan, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) have used automated optimization (for reduction of operational man-hours and improvement of advertising performance) according to the development of technology. Until the early 2010s, for example, automated bidding tools such as Efficient Frontier, Marin, Kenshoo, and Adobe Search Center literally only automatically set and optimized bid settings for ads, but in the late 2010s ads Budget allocation, keyword maintenance, ad creative, etc. can now be optimized automatically.

I also think that it is important to enjoy this technological evolution and raise the level of performance advertising by many stages, and I am proud that I and SOPHOLA, Inc have solid strengths in the technology field. .. (All the awards received so far are also thanks to the strengths.) However, when I hear or see the statuses of digital ad agencies recently, something like the “basic rules or schemes of operations” created by seniors in the industry seems to be missed in many cases. So, today I would like to share 5 things that are especially important here.

1. Auditing
It is important to carefully listen to the advertiser’s business model, KGI / KPI, marketing issues, etc. one by one, and confirm whether it is a good solution by implementing performance ads in the first place. I often hear that the information provided to the current and previous advertising agencies is passed on without updating, and the ads are run. I think now that the excellent seniors of my IREP era had been able to do this auditing more carefully.

2. Infrastructure
It is also extremely important to review user behavior tracking and measurement environment (eg analysis tags, advertising tags) inside and outside the site so that evaluation of advertising effectiveness and targeting measures can be done properly. It’s not a fancy thing at all, but it seems that there are cases where you can just replace the account of the previous agency and start advertising campaigns without reviewing it. For instance, even when it is a multiple-product e-commerce website, I often see that the product price data is not tracked with such advertising tags…

3. Data check
Sometimes you don’t see your ad or analysis tool account data daily or weekly. Much of the automated optimization of media and 3rd party tools only helps us to move faster than we can do by hand in a certain direction (based on goals, constraints, reference data, etc.). Therefore, it is essential to take a closer look at the data and check daily to see if there are any mistakes in the direction and if there are any points that need to be corrected. In an era when people used to do it by hand, data checking was a must, so it was a lot easier to notice this. However, now that I feel like people are leaving it to the tools / technology, I feel that the data check is neglected.

4. Reporting
If tools and technologies do a lot of daily measures (operations) and data checks are not done in detail every day, advertisers will feel like receiving a weekly and monthly report of a list of data without much thoughts and measures. I think that the old advertising media buyers couldn’t make a nice PowerPoint presentation, but they looked at the figures more closely and thought about various measures and proposed them to the clients.

5. Account maintenance
It is one of the basic things which start from the initial account structure to maintenance such as daily keywords, creatives, and placements. Even with the latest technologies and tools like things I mentioned in 3, it doesn’t add the best keyword set for a completely new approach or a latest marketing campaign in a timely manner. I can say the same thing to advertising creatives (ad copies, banners, videos) too. If you use technology while doing the troublesome things that only humans can do every day, the results will improve dramatically. (based on my experience)

By the way, it’s a complete digression, but what hasn’t changed in the past and present is that there are many “blind faiths in information and methods provided by the ad platforms.” (I feel that the 3rd party side is critically viewed in a relatively good sense.) For those who are always skeptical about the current method and are looking for room for improvement, I’m with you. I mean I really sympathize with you even if we take different approaches, which makes me feel like with you:)

When I was writing this blog post, I remembered the faces of IREP’s seniors and felt nostalgic:)

Masaki “Mark” Iino
Founder & CEO
SOPHOLA, IncPS: I also remembered that I couldn’t swim well in Hawaii, so next year I will go back to the basics and study how to swim. lol