Setting up, maintaining and optimizing your campaigns can be daunting. We’ve helped over 120,000 customers make a collective average of $165 billion per year and along the way we’ve put together some best practices. Below we’ve shared those best practices for how to use ads to reach your goals across channels and all along your customer lifecycle.
After you’ve installed the AdRoll Pixel on your site, our platform will start gathering information about how customers interact with your brand. Then, we put this knowledge to work in helping you segment customers and target them with strategies specifically tailored to help you reach your goals.
Campaign creation now begins with an objective rather than a campaign type, and each objective maps to a stage of your customer lifecycle. Below are our recommendations for how to structure your campaigns against each one.
| Setting | Build Awareness (Low Intent) |
Drive Engagement (Mid Intent) |
Maximize Conversions (High Intent) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Use it to | Reach new customers and increase traffic. Introduce your brand to prospects and boost website visits from net new audiences. | Retarget audiences who showed interest. Bring back visitors who engaged with your campaigns or content, and increase traffic to your site or app. | Retarget high-intent audiences. Increase conversions based on behavior and strengthen customer loyalty. |
| Channel | Web, Connected TV | Web, Connected TV | Web, Connected TV |
| Audience | Under Targeting > Audience, choose Lookalike to find people similar to your existing customers, or Third Party Audience to target by interests, demographics, or life events. Use Contextual Categories & Keywords to reach people on content related to your brand. | Under Targeting > Audience, select Choose or Create to target website and app visitors, people who engaged with your store or product pages, and CRM contacts who have not converted. Start with segments for 1+ pages viewed and 1 product viewed. | Under Targeting > Audience, target your cart segment in one campaign, and create an additional campaign targeting only people who have visited 3+ product pages. Also consider past purchasers and frequent visitors. |
| Audience exclusions | Not applicable in most cases | Exclude people who have converted, under Bid Settings and Advanced Options > Advanced Options > Exclusions. | For each campaign, exclude people who have converted. For the campaign targeting people who have visited 3+ product pages, also exclude your cart segment. |
| Audience duration | Default | Default | Default |
| Creative best practices | Use high-level branding and lifestyle imagery to entice new customers who may not be familiar with your brand yet. | Make sure your product feed is enabled so that you can dynamically show customers the products they’ve viewed — look for the Product Feed indicator in the Ads section. Static ads should be similar to ads used to build awareness. | Use one of our dynamic ad templates to create personalized ad experiences based on your customers’ behavior. |
| Frequency cap | Default | Default | Default |
| Optimization Goal and Bid Strategy | Impressions, with Automatic Target CPM. | Clicks, with Automatically maximize CPC. | Conversions, with Automatically maximize CPA. |
| Metrics to watch | Impressions and reach, plus new site visitors | Clicks and visits, plus return visitors and add-to-cart | Conversions |
Want to learn more?
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