June 30, 2020
Savvy digital advertising professionals understand there’s a lot of publicly available data out there about their clients and their client’s competition. If you know where to look, now’s the time to take stock of your situation and also see what your peers are up to. We can’t control the turbulent environment we find ourselves in, but we can take this time to evaluate and set the table for what’s ahead.
For instance, we built our own scorecard to identify and fill gaps in an advertiser’s digital advertising scheme. It helps us piece together parts of their digital strategy, approximate their spend on some channels, and glimpse their online data collection infrastructure in a few short hours.
Interested in your own advertising scorecard? Get yours here.
When we onboard clients interested in running digital advertising, we use that scorecard to ask and answer questions such as:
- Have they been running Paid Search (aka PPC) advertising in the past six months?
- You can scrape this information from search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Are they paying too much or too little for traffic relative their competition?
- Also available via SERPs.
- What does the client’s ad tech stack look like compared to their competition?
- You’d be surprised what a quick “inspect element” can reveal.
- How are they activating first-party data (collected from their own domains) for use in ad programs?
- A peek in Ghostery lets us know the complexity of their data collection infrastructure.
- Are they using a data management platform (DMP) like Adobe? If so, how does that data inform advertising decisions?
- We’ve seen it where brands pay for the software and don’t even know they have access to it…a potential gold mine!
- What does their advertising creative look like? Does it cut through the market noise or just create more?
The tools we use don’t reveal the advertiser’s step-by-step playbook, or show us anything we shouldn’t have seen, but we can make some solid guesses as to what’s going on behind the digital curtain using the right tools.
If you don’t know the answers to the above questions, it might be time to drop us a line so we can score your digital advertising efforts. It’s free, so what do you have to lose?
