Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Adobe Media Optimizer
Operational Readiness Playbook
Created by: Scott Rigby and David Contreras
Date: June 2015
Playbook Objective
The objective of this document is to get your business operationally ready for the
implementation and deployment of Adobe Media Optimizer. This will help you and your
organisation – as a new Adobe Media Optimizer user – to drive maximum value from your
investment in Adobe technology.
Although we have seen many projects succeed, others have faltered due to a lack of internal
investment in the business to ensure they are operationally ready to adopt this new technology.
This playbook will help guide you to avoid some of the common areas we have identified as
missing in less successful implementations.
The recommendations and best practices in Adobe playbooks are ideally intended to be applied
to your business in parallel to your technology solution deployment, to ensure that by the time
you go live with your solution your business is best positioned to realise value from your
investment.
Adobe playbooks use a common digital governance structure focusing on the key areas of
leadership, strategy, people, product and process to deliver a robust approach to readying your
business whether you are deploying one Adobe solution or multiple.
This playbook should be read by:
Chief Marketing Officer
Head of Digital, Head of Strategy, Head of Marketing, Head of Customer Insights
Head of Digital Advertising, Search Lead, Display Lead, Social Lead, Digital Channel Analyst
Solution Architect, Head of Implementation, Digital Implementation Leads
Program Manager, Project Manager, Business Analyst
Contents
1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 7
1.1 About Adobe Media Optimizer ......................................................................................7
1.1.1 Adobe Media Optimizer Capabilities ......................................................................8
1.1.2 Adobe Media Optimizer For Search .......................................................................8
1.1.3 Adobe Media Optimizer For Social .........................................................................9
1.1.4 Adobe Media Optimizer For Display Advertising ....................................................9
1.2 About This Playbook ...................................................................................................10
2 LEADERSHIP......................................................................................................... 11
2.1 Sponsorship ................................................................................................................11
2.2 Buy-In .........................................................................................................................12
2.3 Communication ...........................................................................................................13
2.3.1 Communication Management ..............................................................................13
2.3.2 Recommended Communications Process And Principles ....................................13
2.3.3 Setting Communication Goals ..............................................................................14
2.3.4 Recommendations On A Communication Approach ............................................15
2.4 Accountability ..............................................................................................................16
2.4.1 Steering Committee .............................................................................................17
2.4.2 Common Roles And Responsibilities Within A Steering Committee .....................17
2.4.3 Setting Up A Working Group ................................................................................20
3 STRATEGY ............................................................................................................ 20
3.1 Adobe Media Optimizer Maturity Model ......................................................................20
3.1.1 Key Dimensions Of Media Optimisation ...............................................................22
3.2 Focus ..........................................................................................................................23
3.2.1 Digital Strategy ....................................................................................................23
3.2.2 KPI Strategy.........................................................................................................26
3.3 Alignment ....................................................................................................................27
3.3.1 Plan And Execute Search, Display And Social .....................................................28
3.3.2 Integrating Marketing Channels ...........................................................................29
3.4 Innovation ...................................................................................................................30
4 PEOPLE ................................................................................................................. 30
4.1 Expertise .....................................................................................................................30
4.2 Structure .....................................................................................................................31
4.2.1 Structure Types ...................................................................................................31
4.2.2 Project Based Recommended Organisational Structure ......................................32
4.2.3 Business Recommended Organisational Structure ..............................................33
4.2.4 Roles And Responsibilities...................................................................................34
4.3 Resources...................................................................................................................40
4.3.1 Resource Model ...................................................................................................40
4.4 Community..................................................................................................................41
4.5 Culture ........................................................................................................................42
5 PROCESS .............................................................................................................. 43
5.1 Deployment.................................................................................................................43
5.1.1 Implementation Methodology ...............................................................................43
5.1.2 Key Stakeholders Involved During The Implementation .......................................46
5.1.3 Workflow To Create A Digital Advertising Campaign ............................................47
5.2 Usage .........................................................................................................................47
5.2.1 Administration ......................................................................................................48
5.3 Sustainability ...............................................................................................................50
5.3.1 Maintaining A Single View Of Customers .............................................................50
5.3.2 Process To Adopt Traditional Or Emerging Channels ..........................................50
5.3.3 Track And Upgrade ..............................................................................................51
5.3.4 Optimise And Report For Success .......................................................................51
5.3.5 View Alert Details .................................................................................................51
5.4 Adobe Media Optimizer Best Practices .......................................................................51
5.4.1 The Portfolio Theory Approach ............................................................................51
5.4.2 Best Practice For Portfolios ..................................................................................54
5.4.3 Best Practices To Choose Relevant Keywords ....................................................55
5.4.4 Best Practices To Create Ad copy .......................................................................57
5.4.5 Best Practices For Social Campaigns Structure Strategies ..................................59
5.4.6 Best Practices To Create Effective Social Network Ads .......................................60
6 TECHNOLOGY AND PRODUCT ........................................................................... 61
6.1 Solution Fit ..................................................................................................................62
6.1.1 Solution Architecture ............................................................................................62
6.2 Integrations .................................................................................................................64
6.2.1 Marketing Cloud Integration .................................................................................65
6.2.2 Common Third-Party Integrations ........................................................................66
6.3 Democratisation ..........................................................................................................68
6.3.1 Automation ..........................................................................................................69
6.4 Leveraging Your Investment (The Big Picture) ............................................................70
7 CHECKLIST ........................................................................................................... 72
8 ADOBE MEDIA OPTIMISER PRODUCT MATURITY ACTIVITIES ....................... 74
9 ADOBE CONSULTING OPERATIONAL MATURITY REVIEW............................. 75
10 ADOBE MEDIA OPTIMIZER GLOSSARY OF TERMS ...................................... 75
11 ADOBE MEDIA OPTIMIZER TEMPLATES ........................................................ 80
11.1 Digital Advertising Framework.....................................................................................80
11.2 Campaign Brief Template ...........................................................................................81
11.3 Deep Dive Insights Request Template: .......................................................................85
1 Introduction
1.1 About Adobe Media Optimizer
Market dynamics are continually changing based on competitive, seasonal and budgetary
variables. This is why marketers need an accurate view of campaign performance to forecast
and plan how to react to these variables to influence and drive the business forward.
Adobe Media Optimizer delivers a comprehensive paid campaign optimisation solution with the
most sophisticated and accurate performance modelling system in the industry, giving
marketers the confidence that their business decisions are based on accurate predictions.
With Adobe Media Optimizer, your organisation will be able to accurately predict which
scenarios will shift customers from awareness to purchase, know when to modify budgets
across channels, collect data to gain visibility and understanding of your consumers, get a
complete view of your campaign performance across search, display and social activities to
arrive at deeper and more relevant insights into how customers are interacting with your brand
and ultimately, learn more, see more and do more with every dollar in your budget.
1.1.1 Adobe Media Optimizer Capabilities
Adobe Media Optimizer, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, includes audience management
capabilities that are integrated with other Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions, like Adobe
Analytics, giving advertisers seamless access to rich first-party data for audience targeting in
display campaigns. It also offers a dynamic tag management system, reducing the reliance on
an advertiser’s IT team for site tagging. Audience management capabilities make it easier for
advertisers to deliver a relevant and consistent message in display, on their Web siteWeb site
(through Adobe Target) and across digital channels.
There are three versions of Adobe Media Optimizer, tailored to your digital marketing needs:
1.1.2 Adobe Media Optimizer For Search
Simulate and quickly act upon the best and most profitable options in your search marketing
strategy. Adobe Media Optimizer offers the most comprehensive campaign optimisation through
industry-leading forecast models, scalable campaign automation and integration with Adobe
Analytics. Adobe Media Optimizer builds trust in traffic and cost data consistency with search
engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) by automatically synchronising any changes that were
Performance management
• Algorithms drive campaign performance, not just keywords
• Campaign simulations deliver accurate performance predictions
Integrated analytics
• Engagement and conversion metrics for optimisation.
• Seamless bi-derectional data flow
Retail optimisation
• Simplified retail campaigns at scale
• Search, product listings ads and display creative driven from a single feed
Search management
• Search product listings, ads and mobile campaign management
• Industry leading mobile bid adjustments to boost ROI
Display management
• Managed performance for retargeing and prospecting campaigns
• Dynamic creative optimisation based on audience segments
Social ad management
• Ad buying on Facebook and Twitter
• Auto-splitting and hyper-targeting
• Integrated listening data to discover traffic opportunities
Audience management
• Paid channel audience segments activated to any content delivery system
• Data integration from any online or offline source
applied outside of the system. Data retrievals also automatically backfill any significant
variances.
Portfolio bidding and budget recommendations earn trust through transparency and proven
projections. Forecasts and simulations prove their reliability
through transparent model accuracy trends finding optimal
returns for each search engine marketing channel and
campaign.
Adobe Media Optimizer permits a robust data integration with
Adobe Analytics allowing advertisers see conversion metrics
alongside search engine marketing metrics in either use
interface. Engagement metrics from Adobe Analytics, such
as time spent on site, page views and bounce rates are
adopted into the Adobe Media Optimizer tail keyword
models, improving accuracy.
1.1.3 Adobe Media Optimizer For Social
Adobe Media Optimizer offers seamless audience management coupled with a bulk ad creation
process and a preview environment for safe editing prior to launching ads. Powered by Adobe’s
advanced modelling algorithms, campaigns can meet the demands of a changing social
environment. In addition, the ability to align search, display and social allows advertisers to
understand how audiences are engaging with ads in each channel and determine the most
efficient media mix.
1.1.4 Adobe Media Optimizer For Display Advertising
Intelligently retarget your most valuable customers by optimising display ad campaigns to meet
your goals. Adobe Media Optimizer uses unified campaign tracking and reporting, real-time
bidding, impression-level decision-making abilities, attribution reporting and simulations and
integration with the top ad exchanges to help you meet display objectives. Adobe Media
Optimizer allows advertisers to reach their retargeting and high-value audiences in real time and
at scale across the Web to drive conversions.
Adobe Media Optimizer is a cross-channel ad platform that optimises campaigns according to
an advertiser’s objective across display, search and social channels, with attribution reporting
for visibility into which display or online advertising campaigns are driving conversions.
Tip
The tail keyword models in
Adobe Media Optimizer may
lead to an average 16%
improvement in ROI and
15% increase in revenue-
generating keywords.
1.2 About This Playbook
This document follows a structure that will help you understand the key focus areas to nurture
the implementation of Adobe Media Optimizer. This structure is based the digital governance
framework, which creates the appropriate business environment for digital to succeed. It
includes:
• Leadership—Executive buy-in and support for the implementation and adoption.
• Strategy—Clarity and alignment around key business goals for evaluating digital
performance.
• People—Resources, expertise and the appropriate team structure to run Adobe Media
Optimizer effectively.
• Process—Procedures, project management and workflows for deploying and using
Adobe Media Optimizer effectively.
• Product—Solution fit, common integration and automation.
What’s different about digital? Everything.
Adobe Digital Governance Framework
Leadership
Stakeholder Buy-In, Single Executive Sponsor, Defined Program of work & Budget,
Insight Driven Culture.
People
Culture shift, new skills, strategic in-sourcing, diverse talent and skillset.
Strategy - Aligned to business goals, common goals and KPIs, communicated to business.
Process
‘Always-on marketing’, testing and next-best offer. A single source of truth. Digital and traditional merge.
Product (Technology)
Deploy the right technology to deliver the best customer experience.
Leadership
Stakeholder buy-in, single executive sponsor, defined program of work and Budget, insight-driven culture.
2 Leadership
Leadership is critical — it provides the foundation for successful digital transformation.
C-Suite involvement is needed to drive a digital transformation program, budget and outcome.
Your role as the project sponsor is to contribute with a strong understanding of how Adobe
Media Optimizer and digital in general will transform the business. Position yourself as the
subject matter expert and functional leader in a hands-on mode.
A common trait you will find in successful digital teams is that they are owned and managed by
people who are prepared to make the necessary investments in talent, equipment and training.
Leaders are skilled at extracting optimal performance from team members and developing
strategies that take full advantage of their unique talents.
Leadership consists of four subcomponents: sponsorship, buy-in, communication and
accountability.
2.1 Sponsorship
Having an effective executive sponsor will help the project achieve maximum success. To be
truly effective, this internal executive sponsor should have enough seniority and influence within
the business to get buy-in from other stakeholders across the organisation. Having a high level
of self-interest in the project success and a passion for digital transformation and truly believing
in how Adobe Media Optimizer is going to transform the business are also critical.
An effective executive sponsor should guarantee the implementation of Adobe Media Optimizer
stays in line with the corporate strategy, protecting it from conflicting initiatives or internal politics
and helping address any limiting factors, such as resource or budget constraints.
The Four P's of Execute Sponsorship
Source: Dykes, Brent. 2011. Web Analytics Action Hero. Adobe Press.
2.2 Buy-In
Achieving management buy-in across your leadership team is also key. Having multiple change
agents to drive adoption will help you drive adoption easier and faster. The responsibility for the
implementation and deployment of Adobe Media Optimizer needs to be shared by the entire
leadership team.
It is then the executive sponsor’s responsibility to win over the executive team by sharing
examples that prove the value of Adobe Media Optimizer and digital in general. Typically this
focuses on delivering a better customer experience and subsequent benefits to the business.
When implementing digital projects such as Adobe Media Optimizer, leaders will be responsible
for monitoring different departments and teams owning different parts of digital marketing
initiatives, it is critical then to make sure that all groups share a common strategy to achieve
common goals. Having an internal roadshow to win support from executives will help raise
awareness towards aligning all teams and obtaining the necessary resources for an optimal
implementation.
Prioritisation
To be successful, Adobe Audience Manager needs to be aligned with key business goals. The executive sponsor should provide crucial direction to the team, ensuring the implementation is always in line with the corporate strategy and top priorities.
Protection
The executive sponsor will play an important role in protecting you, the digital strategy and the implementation from other conflicting initiatives or corporate politics.
Problem solving
Using their influence within the organisation, the executive sponsor should step in to remove any problems that may impede the success of the implementation, such as resource or budget constraints.
Promotion
The executive sponsor will play a key role in championing the benefits of Adobe Audience Manager, holding people accountable, and promoting digital wins within the organisation, especially among other executives.
2.3 Communication
To get the organisation on board, it is always a good idea to share the vision and repeatedly
reinforce the reason why your company is investing in Adobe Media Optimizer technology by
articulating both the customer benefits and business benefits. Sharing documentation such as
success case studies of digital implementations will help you validate why and how this
investment will take the organisation to a new level. If you want the organisation to embrace
digital transformation, it is important to let employees know it is a priority.
2.3.1 Communication Management
A communication strategy can lay out the foundation and framework for communicating
initiatives and objectives across business and technology teams. It can also help by:
• Providing guidance and a framework for effective communications within, and outside of,
the project.
• Ensuring that proper protocols are always followed when preparing and delivering
communication.
• Providing precise and concise project communications at the right time.
• Involving all necessary stakeholders and maintaining regular contact to keep
transparency in all transactions.
• Having clear communication channels with well-defined roles and responsibilities.
• Clarifying doubts, overcoming challenges and averting risks that affect the project.
• Building trust and developing open relationships between the parties.
• Promoting openness and transparency.
2.3.2 Recommended Communications Process And Principles
You can build your communication strategy around the following key principles:
• Communication is critical to effect change: Ongoing and timely communication is a
fundamental requirement to inform and respond to stakeholders about the change; its
impact on them and its outcomes; to enable feedback; to manage expectations; to
ensure a smooth change transition; and to support uptake and continual improvement.
• Communication delivery is local: Communication from the local area will mean that
messages are relayed in a language that is relevant to the audience. Engagement with
local communicators across the business and technology will increase the effectiveness
of the communication.
• Communication is consistent and repetitive: With a common approach across the
program, stakeholders will come to expect communication through specific methods
(channels), with given formats (look) and timing. Repeating key messages through
multiple channels will increase the amount of information that is absorbed.
• Communication is linked to the project objectives: By linking the communication to
the objectives it provides a context and reasoning behind change. Repeatedly providing
these links will serve as reminders as to the wider benefits of the project.
2.3.3 Setting Communication Goals
All communication developed and distributed throughout the project is intended to achieve the
following goals:
• Stakeholders and project team members are aware and informed:
o Stakeholders and project team members should receive timely information about
what is happening (e.g. why, when and how and what it means to them). This
information starts at a generic level (which is repeated throughout the project
lifecycle) and becomes more detailed, specific and targeted to the audience and
as the program or project progresses. This information enables stakeholders to
think about, understand and be prepared for change and plan for future streams
of work.
• Stakeholders and project team members are engaged:
o Opportunities are created and communicated to key stakeholders to support
them in exploring, becoming involved in and committing to a new way of doing
things, for example:
Different stakeholders and project team members will move through and
transition at different rates and times.
Communication will aim to gain key stakeholders and project team
members’ commitment through implementation.
Strategies and implementation roadmaps can be developed to manage
stakeholders and project team members who are resistant to the change
throughout the transition.
o Communication is two-way, with stakeholder input and feedback sought and
valued at all stages.
o Stakeholders and project team members expectations are managed:
The aim of communication is to provide set expectations of strategic
initiatives, program or project scope, associated constraints, risks and
dependencies to explain why this may differ from expectations (in
targeted messages) and to provide ongoing updates on expected and
actual outcomes.
o Support the acquisition of skills and knowledge:
Training is backed up by supporting communication to reinforce the
training and provide opportunities to share knowledge.
2.3.4 Recommendations On A Communication Approach
An approach to communication management for the program or project may include:
• Communications Analysis:
o Conduct an effective stakeholder analysis:
Stakeholder analysis is developed at the project board, user group,
project team and stakeholder levels.
The stakeholder analysis will focus on all parties (e.g. users,
management, executives or third parties) required to achieve the desired
outcomes and any parties impacted by the change to ensure full
coverage.
o Categorise stakeholders into specific audiences (communication channels).
o Identify the information requirements of all parties; ensure communication
channels in place; track required message delivery; and establish distribution
lists by subject area:
Have regular meetings. There should be regular meetings organised at
various levels within the project to ensure that there is regular
communication.
Where program or project team meetings do not meet communication
requirements (for example, where cross-area representation is required
for specific project deliverables) use these sparingly:
One-on-one meetings may be required to obtain specific input and
deliver important formal and informal messages (as required).
Project share drive to maintain the main reference point for
overview of the program or project with links to documentation for
wide dissemination and feedback.
A common wiki or alternate online knowledge management solution to
provide access to all parties and used by some to provide a workspace.
Project electronic newsletter or companywide communications to provide
regular news and updates about upcoming events and outcomes
delivered by email.
E-mail may be used for targeted, individual or group communication with
a specific purpose.
Information distribution and reporting with standard templates for
communicating regular information such as project status reports,
meeting minutes and other reports will be used to ensure communication
is consistent and repeatable.
2.4 Accountability
Your organisation is investing in Adobe Media Optimizer and top executives are expecting
results. For this to happen, it is the leaders’ and senior stakeholders’ jobs to hold themselves
and their people accountable — employees, teams, partners and most importantly him or
herself. Start with changing the perception that accountability is about punishment and hard
discipline. It should really be about learning and improvement.
To define accountability, you can create a project charter. This document states that a project
exists, why it is important, who is involved, its timeframes, the expected outcomes and the
resources needed for it to be successful. It also gives you written authority to begin work.
2.4.1 Steering Committee
Setting up a group of high-level stakeholders and experts will help you achieve the four
subcomponents of leadership and at the same time set direction to the project. This steering
committee can also help by:
• Prioritising initiatives.
• Reviewing business cases for new initiatives.
• Lobbying for the necessary time, personnel and budget.
• Ensuring quality in decision-making.
• Encouraging a collaborative work environment.
• Monitoring progress towards goals.
• Controlling scope and resolving conflicts.
2.4.2 Common Roles And Responsibilities Within A Steering Committee
The following high-level roles and responsibilities are based on industry standard practices for a
steering committee.
Role(s) Responsibility
Business or
Technology
Sponsor
The sponsor is ultimately accountable for the outcome of the program or project and is
responsible for securing spending authority and resources for the program or project.
Responsibilities
• Vocal and visible champion.
• Legitimises and lends credibility to the strategic goals and objectives.
• Is the escalation point for changes and issues outside the agreed tolerances?
• Assists with stakeholder engagement where required.
Business
Executives
The executive’s role is to ensure that the program or project is focused on achieving its
objectives and delivering an outcome that will achieve the forecast benefits, gives value for
money, ensures a cost-conscious approach and balances the demands of the business.
Responsibilities
• Design and appoint the program or project management teams.
• Oversee the development of the business case, ensuring corporate strategic
alignment.
• Monitor and control the progress at a strategic level, in particular reviewing the
business case regularly.
• Escalate issues and risks.
• Escalation point for issues and risks, and ensure that any risks associated with the
business case are identified, assessed and controlled.
• Make decisions on escalated issues, with particular focus on continued business
justification.
• Ensure overall business assurance and ensure that it remains on target to deliver
products that will achieve the expected business benefits.
Business
Owner
This role represents the interests of all those who will use the product, including operations
and maintenance, those for whom the product will achieve an objective or those who will use
the product to deliver the benefits and value drivers.
Responsibilities
• Provide the quality expectations and define acceptance criteria.
• Ensure that the desired outcome is specified.
• Ensure that end products will deliver the desired outcomes and meet user
requirements.
• Ensure that the expected benefits are realised.
• Provide a statement of actual versus forecast benefits at the benefits reviews.
• Resolve user requirements and conflicts.
Technical
Owner
This role represents the interests of those designing, developing, facilitating, procuring and
implementing the product. This role is accountable for the quality of products delivered by
suppliers and is responsible for the technical integrity of the program or project.
Responsibilities
• Assess and confirm the viability of the approach.
• Ensure that proposals for designing and developing the products are realistic.
• Advise on the selection of design, development and acceptance methods.
• Ensure quality procedures are used correctly so that products adhere to requirements.
Assurance
Owner
Assurance covers the primary stakeholder interests of the business, technical staff, end-users
and suppliers.
Responsibilities
• The right people are planned to be involved in quality inspection at the correct points
in the product’s development.
• Staff are properly trained in the quality methods.
• The quality methods are being correctly followed.
• Quality control follow-up actions are dealt with correctly.
• An acceptable solution is being developed.
• The scope of the program or project is not changing unnoticed.
• Internal and external communications are working.
• Applicable standards are being used.
• The needs of specialist interests (for example, security) are being observed.
Business assurance responsibilities
• Assist developing the business case and benefits review plan.
• Review the business case for compliance with corporate standards.
• Verify the business case against external events.
• Check that the business case is being adhered to throughout the program or project
• Check that the program or project remains aligned to the corporate strategy and
continues to provide value for money.
User assurance responsibilities
• Ensure that the specification of the user’s needs is accurate, complete and
unambiguous.
• Assess whether the solution will meet the user’s needs and is progressing towards
that target.
• Advise on the impact of potential changes from the user’s point of view.
• Ensure that the quality activities relating to products at all stages has appropriate user
representation.
• Ensure that quality control procedures are used correctly to ensure that products meet
user requirements.
Supplier assurance responsibilities
• Review the product descriptions (features and capabilities) and align to delivery.
• Advise on the selection of the development strategy, design and methods.
• Ensure that any supplier and operating standards defined for the program or project
are met and used to good effect.
• Advise on potential changes and their impact on the correctness, completeness and
integrity of products against their product description from a supplier perspective.
• Assess whether quality control procedures are used correctly so that products adhere
to requirements.
Program /
Project Manager
The program or project manager has the authority to run the day-to-day operations with the
prime responsibility of ensuring the end result produces the required products within the
specified tolerances of time, cost, quality, scope, risk and benefits.
Responsibilities
• Effective project management requires that the project management team, as a
whole, possesses and applies knowledge in several areas:
• Project management itself.
• Business and industry domain knowledge specific to the project.
• Technology knowledge required by the project.
• Interpersonal and communication skills.
• The project management framework consists of five key activity groups: initiation,
planning, execution, monitoring and control, and closure.
• These are the processes or activities for managing the project and they are
different from the project life cycle.
• The project life cycle activities are generally sequential while project
management activities are performed as below because project
management activities may overlap and repeat along the timeline depending
on the risk (for example, the controlling activities may lead back to planning
to revise the project plan as a result of changes).
2.4.3 Setting Up A Working Group
Having a working group (with subject matter experts) working below a steering committee will
help achieve specified goals. In your Adobe Media Optimizer implementation, this working
group includes the practitioner leads executing the project. They would meet more regularly and
report upwards to the steering group.
The working group should have a weekly discussion where issues and risks are addressed and
the status, progress and approach of the project are discussed.
3 Strategy
Gaining a clear vision of what it takes to be able to assess and measure your media
optimisation efforts is critical to becoming a high-performing business. Strategy is divided into
three main areas: Focus, alignment and innovation.
“74% of business executives say their company has a business strategy.
Only 15% believe that their company has the skills and capabilities to
execute on that strategy.”
Forrester: Accelerating your digital business, 2013
3.1 Adobe Media Optimizer Maturity Model
Nowadays, a great number of businesses are expanding their
marketing portfolio and investing more into digital channels
such as search engines, display ads and social media
networks. These organisations might be achieving acceptable
results, but they might also be navigating in darkness by not
having a clear roadmap on how their ‘state of the art’ is and
how to evolve into better competency levels.
Tip
Check the self-assessment
tool to assess your
organisation’s cross-
channel campaign
management maturity.
Take a first step and assess the media optimisation maturity state of your organisation by
applying the maturity model developed by Adobe. This model outlines key media optimisation
components and includes best practices across dimensions based on the experience of Adobe
Media Optimizer experts, consultants and conversations with Adobe customers. This model also
includes insights from industry analyst research by cross-channel marketing specialists.
DIMENSIONS MATURITY LEVEL
Tracking/
Metrics
Simple
impression or
click tracking
Leveraging
specific KPIs
to drive
efficient
campaigns
Tagging on
critical pages
aligned with
campaign
related KPIs
All content,
campaigns
and devices
are providing
consumer
insights
Leveraging all
content,
campaigns
and devices –
online and
offline KPIs
Data
Management
Limited data
management
strategy
Aligning
campaign and
business
metrics to
gather insights
Aligning multiple
online data
sources with
campaign data
Aligning
multiple online
data sources
with campaign
data. Some
offline data
integration
Aligning
multiple data
sources to
create unified
customer
profile (online
and offline)
Segmentation Keyword
targeting
Limited
segmentation,
likely to be re-
targeting
Using audience
segment profiles
to
informadvertising
and offers
Audience
segment
profiles to
inform
advertising
and offers, to
align brand
and Disaster
Recovery.
Rich audience
segmentation
used for
targeting
campaigns
and content
across all
advertising
BASIC MEASURED
INTEGRATED OPTIMISED
PREDICTIVE
Attribution None Limited insight
to channel
influence on
performance
Utilising
attribution to
understand
customer touch
points,
leveraging to
define
optimisation
Utilising
attribution to
understand
multiple
customer
touch points,
leveraging to
define
optimisation.
Beginning to
include offline.
Understands
how each
channel is
driving value
to campaigns
and impact of
brand
influence on
results
Media Mix Single channel Limited media
mix
Broader mix
defined by past
campaign
performance
Using
advanced
modelling
systems to
determine
online mix
Using
advanced
modelling
systems to
determine
online and off-
line mix
Analytics/
Execution
Limited
understanding
and
management
or external
agency or
vendor
reliance
Understanding
of campaign
performance
Deep
understanding of
campaign
performance,
channels
working together
Deep
understanding
of campaign
performance
driving aligned
campaign
Advancing
forecast
modelling to
drive
campaign
execution and
campaigns are
aligned
Consumer
Experience
Ad copy and
landing page
generally
match
Ad copy and
landing page
optimisation in
practice
Content
optimisation
alignment with
campaign
optimisation
used in some
situations
Content
optimisation
alignment with
campaign
optimisation
used in most
situations
Consistent
message
across
campaign,
content and
devices
3.1.1 Key Dimensions Of Media Optimisation
The media optimisation maturity model comprises best practices within seven dimensions:
Click on this link to assess your organisation’s media optimisation maturity model.
3.2 Focus
Focus means understanding and focusing on the organisation’s key business goals and
strategic initiatives to achieve objectives. It is also important to prioritise these goals as well as
their scope and timing for completion. As business competitive environments change it’s also
important to review your business strategy and goals on a quarterly or bi-annual basis to ensure
they remain relevant to the current environment.
3.2.1 Digital Strategy
One of the biggest digital challenges organisations face is being able to define what they are
trying to achieve through digital channels. In many cases, corporate Web siteWeb sites aren’t
owned by a single manager leading to a mix of different or, even worse, competing interests and
purposes. This causes a mixture of counterproductive results.
Tra
ckin
g a
nd
metr
ics Understand what
data your organisation is using to make decisions and how it is gathered.
Data
managem
ent Assess the plan
and processes of handling critical data to make decisions.
Segm
enta
tion How are you
leveraging analytics or data management platforms to understand and target core audiences?
Att
ribution Monitor how
individual marketing touchpoints are interacting to drive the desired key result of advertising campaigns.
Media
Mix What are the
processes to define the most efficient media mix to achieve digital marketing goals. A
naly
tics a
nd
execution Ability to determine
the most efficient strategy to deliver and optimise your advertising campaigns.
Consum
er
experi
ence How your
organisation is ensuring that all aspects of a consumer journey are aligned and offer a consistent message.
A clear digital strategy enables your digital team to align its activities to the key priorities of your
business and succeed as an integral part of your organisation. A key point to consider is that
your digital strategy should always be aligned to the overall business goals of the organisation.
A Suggested Digital Strategy Framework
These are steps you can follow to craft your digital strategy:
• Identify all of the key stakeholder groups that have input into your company’s digital
approach.
• Gather key business objectives from each group separately.
• Merge the goals into a set of four to five key objectives.
• Based on your understanding of the corporate strategy, prioritise and rank the list of
goals.
• In a group meeting, review and refine the goals with key stakeholders. If needed, involve
a neutral third party to mediate potential disagreements.
• Based on stakeholder feedback, finalise the business objectives and define KPIs to
measure these.
• Share an overview of the agreed upon digital strategy with key stakeholders.
Key terminology
3.2.1.1 Enterprise Key Business Goals:
• Strategic business goals and objectives.
• Aligned across the business at an enterprise level.
• Tied to increased revenue (or decreased costs).
• Can include medium to long term vision of the company.
Examples: Increase revenue (by 5%), expand product line (new line of business), improve
customer satisfaction (by 5%).
3.2.1.2 Digital Goals:
• Strategic business goals and objectives for your digital channel.
• Identifies how the digital channel will contribute to achieving the enterprise goals.
• There can be more than one digital goal for each enterprise goals.
Examples: Increase online sales (by 5%), increase online audience (by 10%), increase online
customer satisfaction (by 5%).
3.2.1.3 Initiatives:
• Strategic digital goals.
• Actionable projects.
• Relates to digital channel as a whole.
Examples: Create mobile content, increase new visitors, create content partnerships with
specialised bloggers.
3.2.1.4 Tactics:
• Specific actionable online business requirements.
• Gaps in achieving online initiative and goals.
• Achievable end goal.
Examples: Measure cross channel conversion rates, measure email delivery and engagement,
measure application form abandonment and report mobile usage.
3.2.1.5 Key Performance Indicator:
Key metric to evaluate business success of digital activities.
Example (Business Objectives and Metrics)
Business Objective Metrics
1. $500M in sales through digital channels Revenue
2. Increase brand awareness Visitors
3. Drive deeper and enduring customer
relationships
Log ins
Digital Strategy Framework
3.2.2 KPI Strategy
Focus also includes defining the key performance
indicators (KPIs). In digital, these indicators can be
metrics such as online revenue or applications,
along with associated targets for those metrics (for
example, increase application rate by 30%).
A common mistake when setting KPIs is selecting
random metrics from an industry-related list and
expecting they will fit and perform towards achieving
Tip
When creating your KPI’s remember
the acronym S.M.A.R.T.
Performance indicators must be:
Specific: to precisely define the goal
and it’s expected outcome.
Measurable: to be able to
understand what success means.
Assignable: to individuals or teams
Realistic: and yet challenging to
drive great results.
Time-based: built to drive results fast
yet realistic
your unique business goals. Make sure you always start with understanding your business
goals before selecting appropriate KPI’s. As you deploy your digital properties using Adobe
Media Optimizer you will be able to use these KPIs to understand the impact changes in
content, design and architecture have had on your business.
What are Key Performance Indicators?
When implementing Adobe Media Optimizer, ensure that your KPIs are measured. Don’t waste
time on non-strategic measures. Ask yourself this: if your CEO was stuck on an island and you
could tell him only three things about your business so he would know the business was
healthy, what would you tell him? If you said the average time spent on a page was one minute
30 seconds that tells him nothing.
If you tell him your campaign generated two million visits to the Web site and the average
revenue generated from a specific channel was $2, that is something he will understand as a
true measure of business success. There is so much opportunity to measure initiatives and
improve on them based on four or five metrics that you can keep yourself busy for months or
even years. Don’t fret about measuring every little last detail, you’ll drive yourself crazy and you
won’t be supporting your business goals.
“Companies with greater digital capabilities were able to convert sales at a
rate 2.5 times greater than companies at the lower level did.”
McKinsey & Co. March 2015
3.3 Alignment
Organisations are dynamic: Business strategy changes; leadership changes; Web sites and
communications in general are redesigned; the market landscape changes; services and new
What they are:
• Quantifiable, measurable and actionable
• Measure factors that are critical to the success of the organisation
• Tied to business goals and targets
• Limited to 5 to 8 key metrics • Applied consistently throughout
the company
What they are not:
• Metrics that are vague or unclear • “Nice-to-knows” or metrics that
are not actionable • Reports (e.g., top search
engines, top keywords) • Exhaustive set of metrics • Refutable
products are introduced; marketing campaigns are launched; new channels appear; and new
competitors are born. All these changes make it difficult for leaders to ensure alignment
between the company’s current strategy and the implementation of digital solutions.
To make sure there is a proper alignment between your Adobe Media Optimizer implementation
and your digital strategy your measurement strategy needs to be dynamic and adjust as
changes occur within your business. Having a member from the digital team sitting in the
steering committee can ensure that the team knows what is happening within the business and
any possible changes in priorities. The following are key factors that need to be considered:
3.3.1 Plan And Execute Search, Display And Social
When conceiving your advertising portfolio for your digital channels consider what the optimum
tactics are to increase the chances of achieving the results you are expecting. A way to
accomplish this is by understanding how to configure different campaigns sets, ads, portfolios,
messages, creative artworks and call-to-actions across your advertising channels to support the
flow in your customer’s lifecycle.
The above is a general matrix with recommendations on how to execute advertising tactics in
Adobe Media Optimizer and enable further opportunities for engagement and conversion.
3.3.2 Integrating Marketing Channels
Digital marketing channels do not work optimally in isolation, nor do buyers use a single channel
to educate and consume the products and services they want. It is recommended to broaden
the reach of your advertising efforts by leveraging existing, or new, channels to increase positive
behaviours and generate engagement with your audiences.
It is likely that your organisation has ongoing investments in marketing tactics when it adopts
Adobe Media Optimiser. This is why it is important to ensure your digital landscape is truly
aligned by assessing your organisation’s channel efficiency, ROI and that you are using all
artillery available to serve your clients competitively.
The diagram above depicts four basic steps your organisation should follow to enable channel
efficiency:
Integrating marketing channels
Step 1: Design
Gain a deep understanding of how your existing marketing channels are structured. Assess if
the tactics are adequate for each channel and be open to embracing unutilised channels. Also
examine the competitive landscape and analyse what other organisations in your industries —
and other industries — are doing and how they are doing it.
Step 2: Assign
Once you have a robust overview of the marketing possibilities, distribute and allocate your
tactics and ideas to serve the most relevant phases of the consumer lifecycle — check the
digital advertising framework to enable the most commonly used digital advertising channels. At
this stage you are not required to narrow down the list of possibilities. We encourage you to
write down as many ideas as possible including what the creative, channel, content and support
resources which might be needed to achieve them.
Step 3: Plan
The planning phase is the appropriate moment to scope and prioritise tasks in the short,
medium and long term. Create an action plan to allocate resources strategically and start
achieving results.
Step 4: Feedback
Assess and measure performance in accordance with your KPI strategy and start the process
again.
3.4 Innovation
Once your organisation is consistently delivering relevant marketing messages across multiple
channels you will be ready to continue gaining competitive advantage by finding the means to
expand the possibilities and generate greater value to your stakeholders. Gather a team of
visionary innovators and use the data collected from your ongoing campaigns and digital tactics
and empower them to generate new creative ways to improve your customer’s lifecycle.
4 People
4.1 Expertise
Expertise refers to the different skills required by your organisation’s digital and technical staff,
business users and senior executives. Not every group will need the same skills, but an overall
understanding of how a digital strategy and Adobe Media Optimizer will help the organisation is
fundamental.
Investing in training is a key activity when implementing new technologies. Make sure you have
training programs not only for on boarding new staff, but also for current employees so they can
continue developing their expertise over time.
Adobe offers a wide range of courses that can help you with your Adobe Media Optimizer
implementation. These courses are available in multiple formats and are designed to suit your
needs — at a regional training centre, online as virtual learning or on-site at your company.
To see all Adobe Media Optimizer courses go to Adobe Media Optimizer Course Catalog.
4.2 Structure
A well designed organisational structure will give you and your staff clear guidelines about how
the organisation is put together, who they have to report and delegate to and how information
flows across different levels. Defining an organisational structure, including roles and
responsibilities, before starting with your Adobe Media Optimizer implementation will also
ensure the project runs efficiently.
4.2.1 Structure Types
Below is a common list of organisational structures we see in digital organisations.
Dispersed: This structure is typically an early
stage, organic and reactive response to initial
staffing and resourcing requirements arising in
local or specific departments. While this works
well initially, it has limited strategic scalability and
can prove problematic in coordinating a top-down
strategic vision for the long term structure and
direction of digital capability, particularly within a
large and diverse organisation.
Centralised: Digital marketing roles and
capability are centralised into a single area or
team. This is typically characterised by a reporting
structure through to one head of digital, e-
business or e-commerce.
Hub and Spoke: A combination of both, typically
whereby digital marketing expertise is split - some
positioned at the centre looking across the whole
organisation and some sat within divisions or
departments often acting as a connection point
between the CoE and local non-digital teams.
‘Dandelion’ structure: Organisations which have
a hub and spoke approach, but across multiple
units or divisions. This is usually found in larger
corporations that are operationally divided around
key audiences (B2B and B2C, for example) that
might centralise some key digital capability across
the entire corporation, but also could have some
hub and spoke arrangements in each of the key
divisions.
‘Honeycomb’ structure: One additional structure
is the holistic, or ‘honeycomb’, structure, where
each employee is empowered with capability. This
structure might be interpreted as the equivalent of
a fully integrated digital capability where digital
expertise and skills are the domain of a broad
range of people and roles throughout the
organisation. In this scenario no specialist digital
roles exist and no single role has digital capability
as its sole remit.
4.2.2 Project Based Recommended Organisational Structure
4.2.3 Business Recommended Organisational Structure
Organisations commonly use a centralised model for digital implementations. In this structure,
all of the digital resources are centralised into a single area or team often with a reporting
structure through to one head of digital, e-business or e-commerce. This is a generic example of
an organisational structure and hiring recommendation:
Creative Team Project Reporting Structure
Technical Team Project Reporting Structure
Business Owner
Project Director
Project Manager
Technical Lead Creative Lead
Technical
Team
Creative
Team
Consultants Digital
Managers
Designers Back-up
Developers
Developer
Leads
Consultants
The main advantages of having a centralised model are:
• Consistency and control: consistent methods, procedures and terminology.
• Governance and focus: unified commercial entity, strategy and budgets; ease of
securing senior management buy-in to digital marketing strategy and projects; and
consistent standards, greater efficiency in the allocation of resources and ease of project
prioritisation across the organisation.
• Scalability and support: the application of digital expertise to support the wider
business; and clarity on where to go for support and advice.
4.2.4 Roles And Responsibilities
4.2.4.1 In A Centralised Model
Here are the suggested responsibilities for each of the roles described above.
Director of Digital
• Director of digital analytics, marketing analysis, CRM or business intelligence.
• Position of authority to influence others.
• Key point of contact for executives, business owners and analysts.
• Focuses on corporate-level issues, but maintains visibility into regional or business unit
issues.
Hiring phase 1 (0-6 Months)
Hiring phase 2 (6 - 12 Months)
Hiring phase 3 (12 – 18 Months)
• Works closely with the executive sponsor to drive value from analytics across the
organisation.
• Drives cultural change and product adoption within the organisation via user education
and other interactions.
• Manages a core team and commercial relationships with analytics vendors.
Head of Strategy
• Drives and owns the digital strategy roadmap.
• Coordinates ongoing strategy workshops with stakeholders.
• Ensures the business is continually focused and aligned with business objectives.
• Determines the priority of new implementation projects.
• Drives the digital steering committee, not just a “Web analytics” steering committee.
• Manages the business analysts and project management resources.
Head of Optimisation
• Owns the testing roadmap.
• Drives the personalisation targeting strategy.
• Works collaboratively with the senior analytics team on supporting analytics optimisation
actions through testing.
• Manages the testing resources.
• Manages ongoing relationships with testing product vendors.
• Coordinates with the head of implementation on testing implementation needs.
Head of Analytics
• Focused on overall digital performance with Web analytics being the barometer of that
performance.
• Runs regular, recurring meetings (weekly or monthly) to stakeholders on digital channel
performance.
• Establishes enterprise-wide standards.
• Manages ongoing relationships with analytics vendors.
Head of Implementation
• Owns the analytics solutions design architecture.
• Key point of contact for technical aspects of Web analytics for one or more business
units.
• Works collaboratively with the core team on enhancements.
• Manages the implementation resources.
• Manages ongoing relationships with internal integration teams.
Business Requirements Specialist
• Defines prioritised projects.
• Runs workshops to gather business analytics implementation reporting requirements.
• Develops the business requirements document for each project.
• Gathers business sign-off.
• Works collaboratively with the core team on requirements gathering enhancements and
documenting the process.
• Acts as project manager.
Targeting Lead
• Drives the testing roadmap.
• Owns the key and complex, testing campaign initiatives.
• Key point of contact for testing technical aspects.
• Owns the testing deployment and QA process and manages ongoing data accuracy.
• Mentors the testing specialists.
Digital Analyst Lead
• Focused on measuring business unit key performance indicators (KPIs) and optimising
business units online.
• Owns the analytical reporting requests log.
• Single point of contact for end-users within business units and understands end users’
changing needs.
• Validates data collection for business units.
• Meets with business unit reporting owners and the core team on a regular basis
(monthly).
• Informs the core team of business unit activity and champions its needs to the core
team.
• Coordinates QA efforts and manages ongoing data accuracy.
Digital Implementation Lead
• Drives the testing roadmap.
• Owns the key and complex implementation initiatives.
• Key point of contact for technical aspects.
• Owns the testing, deployment and QA process.
• Mentors the implementation resources.
• Owns the testing deployment and QA process.
• Maintains a library of implementation documentation and shares knowledge within the
organisation.
• Active, not passive, participants in the deployment enhancement process.
Content Strategist
• Drives the content strategy.
• Owns the content delivery roadmap.
• Manages the content delivery team.
Technical Requirements Specialist
• Defines prioritised projects.
• Runs workshops to gather technical requirements and identify risks.
• Develops the technical documents and deployment plan for each project.
• Gathers sign-off.
• Works collaboratively with the core team on requirements gathering enhancements and
documenting the process.
Targeting Specialist
• Owns the testing and targeting campaign initiatives.
• Gathers the individual campaign objectives and requirements.
• Coordinates implementation campaign needs with the targeting lead.
• Key point of contact for individual campaigns.
• Delivers the individual campaign reporting and analytical insight.
Digital Analyst Specialist
• Gathers analysis requirements from the business.
• Delivers reporting requirements, including analysis, insight and actions.
• Presents analysis back to the report owner.
Digital Implementation Specialist
• Drives individual implementation projects.
• Coordinates with internal and external development resources on implementation
requirements.
• Creates the individual project technical specification documents.
• Provides assistance with deployment and testing.
• May be assigned to a specific business unit.
Content Producer
• Maintain communication among cross-functional teams.
• Owns the process for creating, enforcing and managing the content production plan.
• Collaborate with all departments to define and manage goals, scope, specific
deliverables and scheduling needs.
• Aggregate and distil input from all areas of the organisation and develop the best
approach for incorporating feedback into project executions.
• Contribute to strategic thinking around content models that adapt, scale and expand
over time and distribution platforms.
Project Manager
• Outsourced initially and then established as a FTE.
• Responsible for costing, estimating and planning projects.
• Prepares project initiation documentation (PID).
Responsible for ensuring best value is obtained for the project, including from the supplier base
and use of internal and external resources.
• Maintaining and completing project KPIs.
• Writing detailed and summarised project progress reports.
• Identifying, costing and processing any contract variations.
• Tracking activities against the detailed project plans.
Creative And UX Designer
• Conceptualise and create design content for all campaign testing and targeting
experiences.
• Test concepts, perform task and user analysis and assist with user acceptance testing.
• Develop prototypes that succinctly illustrate hierarchy and navigation.
• Strategise and drive interactive product development from site map to launch.
• Create compelling online consumer experiences that drive business results.
• Possess knowledge of prototyping and wireframe creation tools.
Channel Analyst
• Specialises in a particular channel: SEO, SEM, display, social, affiliate, etc.
• Understands online strategy and how this breaks down into multi-channel Web
marketing elements.
• Expert knowledge of key analytics tools and the ability to set up advanced tracking and
reporting mechanisms and capture key metrics.
• Monitor and analyse Web-related data “across the board” and analyse key metrics.
• Understand how different elements of Web strategy relate to and complement each
other (e.g. organic search engine optimisation, social media PPC) and create metrics to
monitor and measure this.
• Real-time, daily and weekly campaign performance reporting. Presentation of key data
and conclusions to management.
Mobile Implementation Analyst
• Drives individual implementation projects around mobile.
• Coordinates with internal and external development resources on implementation
requirements.
• Creates the individual project technical specification documents.
• Provides assistance on deployment and testing.
• May be assigned to a specific business unit.
Mobile Content Specialist
• Maintain communication among cross-functional teams.
• Own the process for creating, enforcing and managing the content production plan for
mobile.
• Collaborate with all departments to define and manage goals, scope, specific
deliverables and scheduling needs.
• Aggregate and distil input from all areas of the organisation and develop the best
approach for incorporating feedback into project execution.
• Contribute to strategic thinking around content models that adapt, scale and expand
over time and distribution platforms.
4.2.4.2 Key Teams And Roles
Business users: Product owners and input providers
• Provide overall business strategy and goals for products.
• Develop key messaging and customer segmentation strategy for online sales.
• Not involved in day-to-day management of the Web site.
Marketing: Brand awareness and site management
• Develop strategy for product marketing across all channels, including Adobe.com.
• Drives day-to-day site marketing (content changes, testing, etc.) activities.
• Provides market research and analytic support for site management.
• Partners with sales to deliver online revenue.
Sales: Online revenue and e-commerce business strategy
• Owns strategy and execution for all e-commerce related aspects of the site.
• Develops growth plans and delivers them to business objectives.
• Partners with marketing on delivering online revenue.
IT: Implementation and delivery
• Delivery support to site strategies and objectives.
• Develop technical strategies to deliver business vision.
• Partners with marketing product owners to enhance platform frameworks with new
templates, components and capabilities.
4.3 Resources
You will need to decide the right balance and allocation of internal staff and external
consultants. This will be determined by your organisation’s previous experience with digital
implementations – less experienced organisations may require more help from consultants.
Internally speaking, your organisation will need to implement a talent strategy to determine how
to best hire and retain digital and analytic talent.
“Having the right talent and sufficient resources on your digital team is
crucial to your long-term, data-driven success.” Brent Dykes - Adobe
4.3.1 Resource Model
To get the most out of Adobe Media Optimizer, and to deliver a better digital experience to your
customers, you need to get the most out of your implementation. Investing in external resources
will help you optimise your investment, mitigate project risk and identify new opportunities.
4.3.1.1 Adobe Consulting and Partners
Organisations are facing a deficit of digital marketing expertise and Adobe consulting and
partners can play a critical role in making Adobe Media Optimizer operational within your
business by implementing it, running and operating the solution and realising value through
business optimisation. Based on your resources and project scope, working with Adobe
consulting and partners can help you in many different ways - from developing your customer
journey, creative and user experience and building your content strategy to defining your
workflow processes, training and enablement, building your page template and components,
making necessary customisations to the implementation, integrating with other technology
platforms and providing general guidance on how to use the solution.
(Roles and responsibilities, critical success factors, post implementation reviews and sales alignment)
4.4 Community
It is key to encourage the creation of a digital community within your organisation. Invest in
creating an environment where all members can learn from each other and share experiences,
ideas, best practices and campaign wins. When you have distributed analysts and business
users across different business units and countries, the digital marketing community provides
valuable support to new users as well as opportunities for more advanced users to share their
collective knowledge. This is especially important in traditional businesses where upskilling
traditional skillsets with digital ones is vital and it can be a useful forum in which to educate the
traditionally minded people within your business. Communities can be fostered in a number of
different ways, such as a simple email distribution list, internal wiki, corporate chat groups and
workshops.
4.5 Culture
Adopting marketing technologies influences a great number business processes and changes
the nature of how teams work to achieve common goals. Despite the fact that your organisation
has invested in Adobe Media Optimizer, some leaders and employees may still have doubts
about the benefits of the solution. They probably do not fully understand what display
advertising, analytics, automation, content management, user experience and other
components of digital bring to the table. This is common in a business world that is still adapting
and changing to digital.
The first step is to have a clear vision for your culture as well as having the right mindset to shift
activities and thinking within your digital organisation. Second, involve key stakeholders and
share that vision of that future across the organisation. One of the main reasons why
organisations fear change is because they have little or no information about where the change
is taking them. Third, invest in individuals who embrace opportunities and who are the right
cultural fit. These people will find it easy to work in teams and emerge in more complex problem
solving situations.
Additionally, C-Level executives can leverage two basic steps to embed a new way of thinking
into business operations regardless of the scale of the organisation. These steps fall into two
categories:
The formal levers: These are adoption and adaptation of processes and structures
such as leadership policies, role definitions and people processes to support
digitalisation. These stakeholders will be responsible for the introduction of new digital
channels into traditional operations.
The informal levers: These relate to the key behaviours, role models and networks that
help employees develop a mindset aligned to the cultural structure of your organisation.
The following are the common traits in a digital organisation1:
1 Adopted from: Strategy&, 2013, ‘Building a Digital Culture: How to meet the challenge of multichannel digitalization’, p. 10.
5 Process
In this section of the document, you will find the information
to effectively deploy and use Adobe Media Optimizer.
There are four main types of processes: deployment,
usage, sustainability and change management.
5.1 Deployment
Adobe’s expert teams work hand-in-hand with you
throughout the Adobe Media Optimizer implementation
process. Implementation is a multi-phased process which
includes a number of steps such as API connection setup,
report template setup and data validation to ensure accuracy. The transition from
implementation to launch is designed to be seamless as the teams work together to help your
organisation define and develop the qualitative and quantitative metrics to measure the success
of your accounts. The following is an outline of the implementation process, which will vary
depending on your organisational needs and additional scoping.
5.1.1 Implementation Methodology
Customers and demand
•Pulls ideas from the market
•Driven by demand
Organisation
•Flat hierarchy
•Rapid decision making
•Result and product orientation
•Empowers employees to find ways to achieve goals
Work environment
•Understand needs of digital customers
•Driven by innovation, improvement and overcoming constraints
•Cross-functional teams
•Rapid, unpredictable career progression
•Focus on rapid learn and launch
Tip
Depending on the service
associated with your account,
the Adobe Media Optimizer
team will conduct periodical
account monitoring to help you
leverage the usage of your
solution. Ask your account
manager for more information.
Before the implementation project kicks off, it is key to have well-defined success criteria for the
program (refer to the S.M.A.R.T KPIs outlined in the strategy section), a comprehensive change
management and communication plan and be committed to
the ongoing training Adobe will provide during the
implementation. Adobe provides optional post-deployment
resources for further upskilling in the Adobe Marketing Cloud
Solutions.
There are several phases in the implementation process.
The following steps are meant to provide a guide and are indicative of what to expect in a
standard low complexity Adobe Media Optimizer campaign project.
5.1.1.1 Initiation Phase
5.1.1.2 Planning Phase
Initiation Phase Planning Phase Execution Phase Launch Phase
Key Activities
Kick off meeting
Conversion data process defined
Optimisation metrics defined
Project scope and timings cleared
Key Participants
Customer project team
Adobe project team
Deliverables
AMO account set up and configuration
Tip
The following steps are
indicative and should not be
applied for every
implementation.
5.1.1.3 Execution Phase
5.1.1.4 Launch Phase
Initiation Phase Planning Phase Execution Phase Launch Phase
Key Activities
Collect data and implement data collection processes
Adobe to sync account structure with SE
Conduct initial data validation with client
Analyse data (historical and/or pre-Adobe launch data) to establish baseline
Key Participants
Customer project team
Adobe project team
Deliverables
Setup API access to search engine/Facebook accounts
Coversion data process defined -AMO pixel or analytics event data
Initiation Phase Planning Phase Execution Phase Launch Phase
Key Activities
Data collection phase. This is to stabilise the processes and ensure data accuracy
Adobe to run reports for client for final validation of the data
Finalise and confirm the optimisation goal or target
Deliverables
Begin client training seriesSetup portfolios based on client objectives
5.1.2 Key Stakeholders Involved During The Implementation
Initiation Phase Planning Phase Execution Phase Launch Phase
Key Activities
AMO to start managing bidsReporting and dashboard setup
Deliverables
Complete client trainingPortfolios launched to optimised state
Business Analyst Portfolio analysis
RTB monitoring and validation (ongoing)
Focused on meeting and exceeding client performance goals and expectations
Account Management
Communication with client
Drives business success
RTB monitoring and Validation
AdOps Owns trafficking and tracking
Campaign delivery, pacing and monitoring
Launch campaigns
Setup exchanges
Project Management (implementation team)
Provide launch and onboarding timeline
Tag implementation and training
Provide all AMO tracking and validation
5.1.3 Workflow To Create A Digital Advertising Campaign
The following chart illustrates the key factors your organisation should consider when
developing a digital advertising campaign.
In the templates section you will find a comprehensive campaign brief template you can use to
delegate the creation and implementation of new campaigns for display, social and search for
your organisation.
5.2 Usage
Ca
mp
aig
n b
rie
f
Review business model and marketing objectives
Awareness, engagement, and conversion tracking requirements
Understand growth opportunities by acquring visibility on market trends
Identify existing advertising structures
Determine segments and targets
Me
tric
sIdentify and align specific metrics for portfolio optimisation
Identify and align metrics for bid automation
Se
tup
& la
un
ch
Integrate and create campaigns for the relevant marketing channels
Setup tracking for all ads for which Adobe Media Optimizer will track conversions
Setup and launch advertising portfolios
Define bid automation rules that determine how you will bid for ads
Setup, and potentially automate, customised reports for performance monitoring
Mo
nito
r
Monitor and analyse the performance of each portfolio and bid rule by viewing alerts, performance data for each portfolio and its component campaign, customisable reports and simulations
Accommodate various strategies, budgets, objectives and other settings such as campaign and portfolio structures, add or remove portfolios, udpdate geographical and site targeting strategies
Usage is all about establishing and leveraging best practices that will help you with your overall
reporting, analysis and decision making. Understanding how your organisation uses the tool
becomes important because it will help you maximise your investment. Here are a few
questions you will need to consider:
• How will you manage time and resources spent on reporting and deep-dive analysis?
• If your analysts are going to be overloaded with reporting and analysis requests each
week, what tools and workflows you need to implement to help them prioritise those
requests?
For routine reports and business questions it may be helpful to agree on the best approach to
ensure numbers match up properly regardless of who is building the report or performing the
analysis.
5.2.1 Administration
Adobe Media Optimizer lets you define and manage the rights assigned to the various users.
These are a set of rights and restrictions that authorise or deny:
Access to certain features.
Access to certain records and reports.
Creation, modification and deletion of portfolios, campaigns and ad sets.
The following privilege matrix shows how the various permission roles are commonly set for
existing customers. The permissions apply to user profiles or user groups.
5.2.1.1 Access rights matrix
Reporting Agency account
manager
Enterprise client read
only
Home Overview X X
Alerts X X
Portfolios Portfolios home X X
Manage objectives X
Constraints X
Spend recommendation
New portfolios home X X
Portfolio Portfolio summary X X
Details
Ad variation performance X
Simulations X
Constraints impact X
Model accuracy X
Portfolio settings X
Campaign assignment X
Target spend X
Search Search engines X X
Bulksheets X
Advancedcampaign
management
X
Display Managed campaigns
Tracking campaigns
Audience
Creative assets
Social Networks X
Campaigns X
Bulksheets X
Creative assets X
Reports Reports home X X X
Basic reports X X X
Advanced reports X X X
Cross channel reports
New basic reports
Tools Conversion tags X X X
Tracking URLs X X X
Decode tracking URLs X X X
Quota
Exclude history
Keyword labels X
Change password X X X
Manage roles
Admin Manage client
Manage agency
Manage login
Transaction properties X
All Campaigns X X X
Ad groups X X X
Keywords X X X
Ad variations X X X
Placements X X X
Google extensions X X X
5.3 Sustainability
Advertisers often struggle to create a roadmap of campaign development, system upgrades and
maintenance and resource management to achieve the envisioned marketing strategy and
respective corporate goals over time. In fact, it is key to start planning as soon as the
deployment project kicks off to fully evaluate and understand how Adobe Media Optimizer will
align with the overall business strategy, how it will serve your customer’s journey, how cross-
functional channels and resources will be involved to ensure the solution is maintained, fully
used and, most importantly, scaled.
Constant contact with your account manager.
Explore the market for new opportunities.
Monitor performance and new platform requirements(e.g. social media changing ad
specs).
5.3.1 Maintaining A Single View Of Customers
Ensure your data architecture consistently collects and consolidates all customer-related data
into a single marketing view. The more demographical, transactional, behavioural and
aggregated data is gathered in centralised systems the more challenging it is to maintain its
consistency. This factor is critical as the solution evolves along with your business.
5.3.2 Process To Adopt Traditional Or Emerging Channels
Channels evolve and serve different objectives over time. In this sense, it is considerably
important to create a mechanism of channel evaluation to seamlessly report and assess existing
ones and integrate new ones with your marketing mix.
5.3.3 Track And Upgrade
There are two views of this topic. The first is related to how you document the past (campaigns,
processes and deployments) and the second is how you will ensure the people and physical
resources will be kept up to date with new technological frameworks, new trends in the market
and usage best practices.
5.3.4 Optimise And Report For Success
Maintain constant relevancy and workflow success by investing time measuring channel
success, deliverability and return on investment. Encourage the key stakeholders to have
frequent meetings on which they report on testing procedures, success metrics, challenges and
ideas.
5.3.5 View Alert Details
The alert reports show detailed information about all current or potential issues across all online
advertising accounts and portfolios (when applicable) to which you have access.
By default, the accounts tab is displayed to show the account problems alert.
1. In the main menu, click Home > Alerts.
2. (Optional) To view a different alert type, click the relevant tab.
5.4 Adobe Media Optimizer Best Practices
5.4.1 The Portfolio Theory Approach
Portfolio theory uses mathematical models to maximise the
return on a portfolio by weighing the risk and return for each
asset across numerous variables.
Adobe Media Optimizer applies portfolio theory to online
marketing to optimise performance at the portfolio level,
returning an optimal combination of bids that mathematically
target the highest return for each advertising dollar spent across an entire portfolio. Unlike rule-
based bidding approaches that consider only the effectiveness of individual keywords or ads,
portfolio theory considers all possible keyword-position combinations or ads holistically to
identify the best configuration. The portfolio approach leverages robust mathematical models to
continually maximise performance. Adobe Media Optimizer’s mathematical algorithms are
dynamic and automatically adapt to changing marketplace conditions to ensure optimal
performance even in times of high uncertainty and volatility. As a result, Adobe Media Optimizer
is able to efficiently manage large marketing campaigns with millions of keywords and ads, not
only streamlining and automating the bid process, but also delivering significantly better ROI.
5.4.1.1 How A Portfolio Approach Produces Better Results Than A Rule-Based Approach
A rule-based approach evaluates bids on a keyword-by-keyword (or ad-by-ad) basis, based on
pre-defined business rules. Each keyword or ad decision is made independently, without taking
into account its effect on the performance of the other keywords or ads in the campaign. Rule-
based approaches do not adapt to marketplace volatility or guarantee optimal results.
A portfolio-based approach, however, considers all possible bid units - or keyword-position
combinations and ads- to achieve performance objectives at a portfolio level without
constraining individual bid units. Adobe Media Optimizer builds models for each bid unit and the
bidding decisions for an individual bid unit takes into account its effect on all other bid units in
the portfolio. One keyword or ad may exceed a spend target (or go outside the bounds of
another type of target) if doing so contributes to an overall higher return, as long as the overall
rate for the portfolio is on target.
Tip
This information is useful for
advertisers with portfolios in
Adobe Media Optimizer
The following example illustrates the difference in potential returns between a rule-based
approach and the portfolio approach. In this example, the advertiser's goal is to get as many
orders as possible while spending no more than $2 per order. The advertiser has two keywords,
which each have two possible ad positions. Using a rule-based approach, the keywords "flat
screen TV" and "plasma TV" will each be bid to a position that is closest to, but does not
exceed, the targeted cost per acquisition (CPA) of $2. This ends with a final result of 25 orders.
Using a portfolio-based approach, the keyword "plasma TV" is bid to position one at a CPA of
$2.50 (which a rule-based system would not allow) and "flat screen TV" is bid to a lower position
at a CPA of $1. This maintains the business goal of an overall CPA of $2 but produces 30
orders.
An example outcome of the rule-based approach versus the portfolio approach.
Applying a portfolio-based approach across thousands, or millions, of keywords with even more
complex business goals can create a powerful increase in advertising revenue.
5.4.2 Best Practice For Portfolios
Use the following information as a general guide for setting up and managing your portfolios.
Keep in mind that best practices can vary according to the advertiser's business objectives, so
these guidelines may not be applicable in every case.
Use one portfolio per budget and currency: ROI calculations will not be accurate if
the portfolio includes campaigns with multiple currencies.
Use the right mix of campaigns in a portfolio: When building your portfolio structure
in accordance to your organisation’s advertising goals. Some options may include the
following:
o One portfolio with campaigns from multiple marketing channels (search
accounts, display campaigns and social media accounts) — the optimisation
capability will allocate the most money to the most effective channel.
o One portfolio per marketing channel and ad network — this configuration will
prevent a sudden shift in one marketplace from affecting bids on campaigns from
another marketplace within the same portfolio.
o Separate portfolios for search and content campaigns — this configuration will
prevent any algorithmic changes that the search engine makes to its content
network from affecting spend on search and vice versa.
o Separate portfolios for experimental activity — if you want to experiment with a
particular campaign in a portfolio, we recommend moving it into a separate
portfolio to prevent any impact on the other campaigns. Alternately, you can use
bid unit constraints to control the experimental campaign, but be careful that the
constraints do not negatively impact the performance of the other campaigns.
Include as many campaigns as possible in a portfolio: The optimisation capability
becomes more effective as the number of campaigns and ads in a portfolio increases,
because it can leverage more choices to achieve the specified target.
Make sure the collection of ads covers the breadth of your offerings: The keywords
and ads in a portfolio should semantically reflect everything you offer, so you need to
include campaigns whose collective set of keywords and ads is complete.
Create separate campaigns for search and content: For search engine accounts,
create ad groups for search networks and content networks in separate campaigns to
prevent any algorithmic changes that the search engine makes to its content network
from affecting spend on search and vice versa. It is especially important to create
separate search and content campaigns in Google AdWords because Adobe Media
Optimizer cannot optimise bids for display select (combined search and content)
campaigns. Google does not provide data from the Google display network for display
select campaigns. However, Adobe Media Optimizer can still optimise ad group-level
bids for content-only campaigns.
Create separate campaigns for regions with unique conversion rates: Use the geo
distribution report to see the geographical distribution of your site traffic and conversions.
Based on the revenue per click for each region, create separate campaigns for regions
whose conversion rates are significantly different than the others. Do not replicate tail
terms in these campaigns.
Make sure ads and landing pages are relevant: All ad copies or images must follow
the search engine, social network, or display network's guidelines and should give users
an accurate idea of what to expect when they go to your landing page. In addition, the
ad copy should follow best practices to ensure good performance and we recommend
that you test all ad copy. The optimisation capability ranks the ads for each portfolio
using the click-through rate and the revenue per click to identify the highest-performing
ads. Based on this information, the "status recommendation" column on the ads tab
includes a recommendation for whether you should keep (hold) or pause (pause) each
ad to ensure that business and optimisation objectives are met. In addition, the landing
page should provide the expected information and provide a positive user experience.
We recommend that you test different page layouts and messaging for your landing
pages to provide the best possible user experience and, as a result, improve your
conversion rates.
Optimise your budget across portfolios: When you have multiple portfolios, the
spend recommendation tool can help you to identify the optimal budget distribution
across all of them so you can maximise revenue for the entire portfolio set.
Check the Adobe Media Optimizer online help site for more information on portfolio best
practices.
5.4.3 Best Practices To Choose Relevant Keywords
Search is a pull medium that enables Internet users with the ability to connect consumers’
thoughts with relevant content through sophisticated algorithms. These algorithms are designed
to pull data relevant for the user’s query when they are in an active mind state.
In this context relevancy across your consumer’s lifecycle is key to success when building your
keyword portfolio. The following are basic steps to achieve a successful search engine portfolio
1. Finding the right keywords: Sometimes organisations struggle to enrich their keyword
portfolio. The following are some valuable sources you can use to identify opportunities:
a. Google ad planner: This tool is useful for advertisers who want to conduct their
own keyword research. It displays estimations of impressions, quality and
competitive levels (this information is good when it comes to assessing the
possible performance of the campaign).
b. Own Web site: Copy writers are good at finding the right words to communicate
and engage with your prospects. Identify the sentences, keywords and phrases
they have used to describe your services and products. On the other hand, you
might be applying search optimisation tactics you can leverage to generate
consistency across advertising channels. Your Web site, is a key resource to
identify topics and words to describe your products.
c. Competitors: Study what your competitors are doing and leverage on their
presence to put forward your message. You may be able to identify great
opportunities for competition and differentiation by analysing your competitor’s
advertising efforts
d. Brainstorm: Invite a group of people from different business units (sales,
finance, marketing, IT, etc.) to be part of a brainstorming session to identify
possible keywords your consumers might use to find you.
e. Collect feedback: Be direct with your prospects or customers and ask them how
they found you. You can achieve this through customer satisfaction surveys, from
a script in a call centre or by having an open conversation whenever you get the
chance.
f. Think outside the box: There are plenty of media listening tools to assess how
your prospects are communicating. You can leverage the power of articulated
solutions such as Adobe Social or Adobe Analytics to develop the appropriate
mechanisms to collect relevant data for your keyword portfolio.
2. Choose relevant keywords: The first step is to choose all the right keywords relevant
to your product or service and your audience. Write down all the possible search terms
your consumers would write when looking for your products or service. The following is
an example of common keywords for a credit card organisation:
Head terms Credit cards, platinum card
Brand Amex, American Express, www.amex.com.au
Brand related Amex credit card, American Express platinum
Long tail High reward credit card, platinum card with free flight
Singular, plural Credit card(s), card(s)
Misspellings Credit crd, amix credit card
5.4.4 Best Practices To Create Ad copy
In the world of search engines, the text that shows up in the sponsored result whenever a user
is searching is called “ad copy”. Internet users have limited attention span when they are
surfing the Internet looking for information which is why it is critical to draft the creative aspects
of your ad copy and campaigns optimally to maximise the chances of establishing relationships
with new clients.
The following are some recommendations on how to craft effective ad copy:
1. Anatomy of the ad copy: An ad copy unit is made up of 4 parts. Search engines have a
character limit on each of these sections of an ad copy, which is the call to action for the
user and hence should be worded well. The three visible parts of ad copy are:
The destination URL: This is the fourth element of an ad copy unit, the destination URL
behind the curtains which leads the user to a landing page. These are used because it
allows a user to be driven to a more relevant page where they can find information on
the item they are looking for.
1. Headline: This is the attention grabber line that speaks strongly about the product or service being
offered
2. Description: This is an extension of the headline. Two
lines are allowed and the messaging has to be crisp
3. Display URL: This is an excellent place to emphasize the client’s brand association with the product the user
has been searching for
Best practices
Headline:
Should be powerful as it attracts users who might be interested in your products
or services.
Depending on your product, it might be useful to include pricing here or any
queue to motivate them to take an action.
Description and body
Contains the product, service and other details (such as promotions).
It is recommended to get to the point fast and include the most relevant
information about your business.
The content in these lines should be clear enough to communicate your intent
and compelling enough to convince the user to click your ad and visit your site.
You always want to have a call to action – view, check out, order, sign up, etc.
These will increase the chances of conversion.
Relate your ad to offers or information that actually exist on the landing page to
help users complete the sales cycle. Use phrases like free shipping, easy
returns, no hassle returns, free exchanges, in-store returns and free gifts. This
will attract more people to click your ad.
Use proper grammar and punctuation. Special characters such as @,~,\, ^,>,<
are not allowed
Ad text cannot contain superlative phrases such as 'best' or '#1' unless verified
by a third party. This verification must be clearly displayed on your Web site. If an
ad claims to be the 'Best of the Web', the site must display third-party verification
of the claim.
Display URL:
This line indicates which Web site the user will visit if he or she clicks the ad.
Destination URL:
This is the actual page where users land when they click your ad.
The URL won’t appear in your ad.
Character limit
Google Yahoo MSN
Headline/Title 25 characters, including
spaces
40 characters, including
spaces
25 characters, including
spaces
Description/Body 2 lines of up to 35
characters each, including
spaces
1 line of up to 70 characters
including spaces and end
punctuation
1 line of up to 70
characters including
spaces
Display URL 35 characters, including
spaces
35 characters, including
spaces
35 characters, including
spaces
Destination URL Up to 1024 characters Up to 1024 characters Up to 1022 characters
5.4.5 Best Practices For Social Campaigns Structure Strategies
Build target-centric ad sets (Facebook accounts)
The optimisation capability of Adobe Media Optimizer bids all
of the ads within a Facebook ad set to the same bid price.
Because targets have a strong impact on ad performance, it
is recommend that you create a different ad set for each
target audience. The optimisation will optimise bids
according to the click-through rate. This is important because
Facebook does not allow you to set an ad frequency limit or
to control the budget at the target level.
Similarly, when you use Facebook optimisation for your ads, Facebook recommends that you
use the same targeting for all ads within an ad set.
For each ad set use a unique set of targets and do not duplicate any of the targets in another ad
set. You can configure multiple targets for each ad within an ad set, but you must use targets
that are used exclusively for that ad set.
Campaign 1
Image 1 - Target 1
Image 2 - Target 1
Campaign 2
Image 1 - Target 2 + Target 3
Image 2 - Target 2 + Target 3
Tip
Find further information on
best practices to campaign
structure and ad creation on
https://www.facebook.com/b
usiness/
Image 3 - Target 1 Image 3 - Target 2 + Target 3
You can also include one general ad set with broader targets, which can overlap with the targets
used in the other ad sets.
Create the appropriate ad types for the portfolio's objectives (Facebook accounts)
Create a diversity of targets and build them out at a granular level so Adobe Media Optimizer
can analyse the performance of each target and bid accordingly:
Target small age ranges.
Group interests into themes. When an interest target is effective find more like it from the
list of suggested interests in the audience settings, which recommends targets beyond
the obvious ones. Experiment with different interests to improve the CPA, but be aware
that targeting users with very specific interests may lower the overall campaign volume.
We recommend that you start with a maximum of 20 to 50 interests and be careful to not
hyper-target.
Auto-split all target groups when you create bulk ads. For example, if you are targeting
men and women aged 18 to 22 you can generate separate ads for each gender at each
specific age (such as one ad for 18 year old men, another for 19 year old men and so
on). We recommend auto-splitting ages in a 1 to 10 year range.
Do not overlap the targets for each ad set except that the general-purpose ad set can
overlap a little with the others.
Continuously test targets.
5.4.6 Best Practices To Create Effective Social Network Ads
The following are just some of Facebook's requirements. See Facebook's advertising policies at
https://www.facebook.com/help/adpolicy for the full requirements.
Exclamation points are prohibited in ad titles.
Ads cannot offer incentives to viewers for clicking on the ad.
If an ad includes a price, discount, or free offer, the ad must clearly state what actions
are required to qualify for the offer and the landing page must clearly and accurately
offer the exact deal the ad has displayed.
Ads cannot require viewers to submit personally identifiable information (such as name,
date of birth, telephone number, social security number, physical address, or email
address) on the landing page or in the ad, except to enable an e-commerce transaction
when the ad and landing page clearly indicate that a product is being sold.
Ads must not contain audio that plays automatically without a user's interaction. Any
automated animation must cease after 15 seconds and must not replay.
Landing pages cannot generate pop-up windows.
Images used in ad units that will appear in user news feeds can contain no more than 20
per cent text. Text in product shots (real photos of products in real-life situations) does
not count toward this limit.
Recommendations for effective ads.
Design compelling ads specifically for a social network audience. The content should be
different from that used to attract search users.
The image is the most important element for social ads followed by the title and then the
body text. Use images and text and keep the text short.
Ask questions. Question marks in the title or body text increase the click-through rate.
Include a time prompt, such as "now," or "for a limited time" to increase the click-through
rate.
Emphasise discounts, free offers and promotional offers, but avoid using per cent signs
(%) or the word "per cent".
Use the third person (he/she/they, his/her/their) instead of the first person (I/me) or
second person (you/our) when possible for the best response.
Sell benefits, not features and include a clear call to action.
Be conscious of using messaging that your audience will find hip and current without
being too trendy. Avoid using words like "hip", "cool", and "trendy".
Use colourful images.
Make sure images are not frightening or the audience may be deterred from clicking the
ad.
Avoid using faces in ads unless they are of celebrities or other people well-known to the
audience and who are endorsing your product.
Keep ads fresh by replacing ad copy and images frequently and make sure the ads are
noticeably varied.
Run three to 10 ads per campaign.
Bid according to the value delivered. Make sure you understand the impact of cross-
channel marketing.
Continuously test ad copy, images and landing pages (whether they are external Web
sites or Facebook pages, events or applications).
6 Technology And Product
Adobe technology should act as an enabler empowering your organisation to manage cross-
channel media advertising campaigns, obtain data and act on it. This section will take you
through how Adobe Media Optimizer was built to fit your business requirements, how it
integrates with other platforms to leverage its power, what are the best practices to ensure the
platform is deployed efficiently and has sufficient levels of support and professional services and
how you can leverage its automation capabilities to manage cross-channel campaigns and
democratise data to empower disparate business users to answer routine business questions.
6.1 Solution Fit
6.1.1 Solution Architecture
Adobe Media Optimizer provides the advertiser the capability to assess, forecast and optimise
online advertising spend across channels. Advertisers can manage all their search engine,
display and social ad campaigns from a single unified interface. Data from pixel tracking,
publisher provided reports and advertiser provided revenue feeds are processed by predictive
modelling algorithms to come up with spend and other configuration decisions for ad campaigns
across both batch and real-time bidding based publishers.
An advertiser typically uses the Adobe Media Optimizer product as follows:
The advertiser creates ad campaigns on various publishing platforms using the
campaign management capabilities of Adobe Media Optimizer or directly creates the
campaigns with the publisher and grants Adobe Media Optimizer access privileges to
those campaigns. In the case of real-time bidding based publishing platforms, all
campaign configuration is hosted by Adobe Media Optimizer and so only the former is
applicable. In the case of batch-based publishers, Adobe Media Optimizer will also
install tracking hooks on these campaigns so that ad clicks will redirect through the pixel
tracking server before going to the customer's landing page. Adobe Media Optimizer will
also start downloading click reports from the publisher on a daily basis to help with
reporting and optimisation.
The advertiser installs Adobe Media Optimizer's pixel tracking on their Web site. This
enables tracking of visitor behaviour when they reach the site after clicking on an ad or
other means. The pixel tracking captures page visits and conversions (revenue events
quantified in terms of advertiser specific revenue metrics, for example "subscriptions",
"ticket_purchase", etc.) by each visitor. The advertiser may also supplement, or
substitute, this with periodic revenue feeds from their end. All this revenue information is
correlated in the backend with ad impressions and clicks of the same visitor to attribute
value to each impression and click. The pixel tracking also segments visitors into
categories based on their behaviour on the site. This is critical to making bidding
decisions for this visitor with real-time bidding based publishing platforms.
The advertiser sets up portfolios which associate a set of ad campaigns with a budget
and a maximisation objective, usually expressed in terms of a weighted sum of the
advertiser's revenue metrics. Predictive modelling is applied to the correlated click and
revenue information to come up with the bids and other campaign configuration for the
next day. This is repeated daily and the campaign configuration adapts to changing
conditions.
The advertiser uses the Web-based UI to fetch reports and forecasts on ad campaign
performance.
6.2 Integrations
6.2.1 Marketing Cloud Integration
Today many advertisers are working with various tools and systems that do not usually work
seamlessly together. With Adobe Marketing Cloud you are bringing together marketing and
advertising technology to allow your organisation to deliver integrated digital experiences in real
time.
The following are the solutions integrated with Adobe Media Optimizer:
Data integration with Adobe Analytics: With this integration, marketers can attain
greater visibility into customer behaviour by unifying online and offline data and gain
precision in measuring conversion by exploring audience behaviours via Adobe
Analytics.
Audience organisation and new audience identification with Adobe Audience
Manager: Adobe Audience Manager can help advertisers grow their revenue and
customer base via a unified, actionable view of their audiences that can be integrated
into efficient online and offline marketing efforts. Advertisers can combine attributes from
various data sources, including first-, second- and third-party online and offline data, and
then combine these attributes into high-value audience segments for targeting across ad
delivery solutions. Rich, algorithmic, lookalike modelling capabilities allow advertisers to
find users with the same characteristics as their most valuable audiences to help grow
their audience segments for marketing programs.
Delivering experiences with Adobe Target, Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe
Campaign: Advertisers can leverage the technology of Adobe Target to deliver
consistent, relevant and personalised experiences across multiple channels connecting
earned and owned media with paid media for optimal marketing results.
Asset sharing core service: Advertisers can access creative assets (including from
Adobe Creative Cloud) they have uploaded to the Adobe Marketing Cloud directly from
the user interface of solutions like Adobe Campaign and Adobe Media Optimizer.
6.2.2 Common Third-Party Integrations
Third-party integration with Adobe Media Optimizer drive
conversions by allowing advertisers to reach greater and
DISPLAY
SOCIAL
SEARCH
Tip
Adobe is constantly
releasing new integrated
applications. Check what is
new at Adobe Media
Optimizer Exchange
higher value audiences in real time across the Web with transparency into media costs
associated with each and every single advertising campaign. This integration also empowers
marketing technologies to expand the reach of your campaigns and possibly retarget high intent
site visitors across channels using the most valuable inventory sources.
Listed below are the most common third-party solutions integrated with Adobe Media Optimizer:
Data: These leverage the consumer intelligence, data integration and profiling and
connect them to the powerful channel delivery capabilities of Adobe Media Optimizer to
provide relevant, personalised, immediate one-to-one marketing conversations based on
insights. The following are common connectors used:
o Navegg
o Invoca
o Quantcast
o Exalate eXchange
o Addthis
o Dataline
o Datalogix
o V12
o Janrain integration
o TotaSource
o Datonics
o Transunion
o Nielsen PRIZM
o SecureConnect
o Bizo
o Epsilon
o Mastercard Audiences
o Experian
o Neustar
o Acxiom
o Demandbase
Content: The following integration options connect brands with digitally enabled
consumers across channels - from Web and mobile to tablets and digital signage. These
may work as content management systems, social tools or omni-channel delivery
systems that have built-in analytics and reporting features.
o MarketMix
o Sapient EngagedNOW
o Conductor Searchlight
Social: Adobe Media Optimizer enables cross-channel performance advertising
management for social display ads under one marketing platform. The following are the
connectors that are currently supported.
o Facebook for Adobe Media Optimizer
o Twitter for Adobe Media Optimizer
Advertising search: The following connectors allow your organisation to create,
manage and optimise search campaigns across the main search engines:
o Yahoo
o Google Adwords
o Baidu
o Yandex
o Microsoft Bing
Advertising display: One of the core capabilities of Adobe Media Optimizer is to allow
advertisers to display and reach broad online audiences in real time. Adobe Media
Optimizer allows you to consolidate data and management tools to create unified display
advertising campaigns and optimise them under the same user interface. The following
are the common integration targets:
o Impact 360
o Fluent
o Facebook Exchange
o AppNexu
o The Rubicon Project Connector
o Yahoo Ad Exchange
o DoubleClick Ad Exchange
o Microsoft Ad Exchange
o Pubmatic
o OpenX
6.3 Democratisation
One of the core differentiators of Adobe Media Optimizer is its comprehensive performance
report, analysis and automation capabilities. Adobe Media Optimizer allows you to track and
manage the performance of your ads, keywords, ad groups, campaigns, portfolios, ad networks
and ad network accounts at as granular a level as you like. Most reports provide complete
visibility into how the ads in each marketing channel contribute to the overall conversion rate.
With Adobe Media Optimizer reporting capabilities you can:
Save report settings as a template.
Automate report generation even further by applying a report template to a customised
Microsoft Excel template to automatically add new data to the spreadsheet each day.
Create spreadsheet feeds for all basic reports and model accuracy reports.
Setup FTP delivery of basic and advanced reports that use a template.
All completed reports are available in the ‘Latest Reports’ section of the ‘Reports’ home page
and you can either view them in table format in the browser window or download them as files.
The following table shows the reports available in Adobe Media Optimizer:
Purpose Report
Performance monitoring Portfolio report
Search engine report
Search engine account report
Campaign report
Ad group report
Forecast accuracy report
Performance troubleshooting
and trend analysis
Keyword report
Ad Variation report
Transaction report
Identifying business growth
opportunities
Search term report
Geo distribution report
Domain referral report
Analytics Click assist report
Channel assist report
Organic search term report
Organic search engine report
6.3.1 Automation
Adobe Media Optimizer is designed at its core to provide businesses with all the benefits a
marketing automation tool can provide, meaning that your organisation can reallocate resources
to more strategic areas.
Financial: Creating digital advertising campaigns requires a high degree of technical
automation to be able to perform at its best. Once the processes are set up, data,
assets, media and content will flow dynamically generating operational efficiencies. Your
organisation will be allowed to build upon what exists and find new creative
opportunities. On the other hand, Adobe Media Optimizer has integrated a wealth of
highly accurate predictive forecast algorithms which will enable your organisation to
optimise your marketing ROI. Adobe Media Optimizer also allows advertisers to gain
visibility of budget spending and monitoring of results in real time, hence, empowering
your organisation to act quickly and respond to your customers’ needs.
Processes: Adobe Media Optimizer’s interface allows you to easily plan and build
advertising campaigns in an efficient manner. Its notification workflow creation capability
enables your organisation to optimise processes and action quickly on performance
data.
Stakeholders: Adobe Media Optimizer was built to guarantee a secure flow of
information among team members restricting how sensitive data is shown or handled.
Reporting: Adobe Campaign allows you to monitor and report on key performance
indicators. You can also build customised reports and schedule periodic deliveries so
stakeholders can take action.
6.4 Leveraging Your Investment (The Big Picture)
Marketing Automation
Financial
Cost efficiency ROI efficiency
ROI visibility
Processes
Campaign workflows
Plannig
Stakeholders
User administration
Consumer profiling
Reporting
Real timeSolution
integration
The Adobe Marketing Cloud, includes powerful Web analytics and Web site optimisation
products that deliver actionable, real-time data and insights to drive successful online initiatives.
It offers an integrated and open platform for online business optimisation. The cloud suite
consists of integrated applications to collect and unleash the power of customer insight to
optimise customer acquisition, conversion and retention efforts as well as the creation and
distribution of content.
Once you are up running with Adobe Media Optimizer and want to lift your digital capabilities to
the next level, you might want to go back to what your business needs are. We see a common
trend of Adobe Media Optimizer users purchasing Adobe Social as a next step in order to
improve their Web and mobile site experiences. Clients who feel they have a gap in acquisition
or want to improve their customer reach, opt to follow their AEM or analytics purchase with
Adobe Social, Campaign or Media Optimiser depending on their specific needs.
If your objective is to increase personalisation and engagement we suggest you purchase
Adobe Target together with Adobe Audience Manager. This will help you test and personalise
content across channels in addition to extending audiences across solutions. In the specific
Adobe Marketing
Cloud Solutions
Adobe Creative
Cloud
Manage Digital Experiences
Adobe Experience Manager
Personalise Content
Adobe Target
Build and Deliver Video
Adobe Primetime
Build Audience Profiles
Adobe Audience Manager
Manage Social
Adobe Social
Manage Campaigns
Adobe Campaign
Management Digital Ad
Adobe Media Optimiser
Collect and Analyse Data
Adobe Analytics
ACQUISITION ENGAGEMENT
Digital Asset
Management
case that you manage high volumes of video content and want to improve your video delivery
across channels and devices, Adobe Primetime will do the work.
Continue growing your digital marketing strength and add a new Adobe Marketing Cloud
solution based on what your business demands. A good level of integration across solutions will
help you make, manage, measure and monetise your content across every channel and screen.
7 Checklist
The following lists highlight some specific high-level points. They are not meant to be
exhaustive, but aim to give some pointers and provide a basis for your own checklists. You and
your Adobe customer success manager can use the first checklist to qualify which of our
recommendations from this document have been put in place.
Item Completed
Executive sponsor named and communicated
Stakeholder buy-in across the business
Communication plan created and announced
Steering committee established
Working groups established
Digital advertising maturity assessed
Digital KPIs defined and agreed upon across business units
Business structure identified, agreed upon and communicated
Project-based organisational structure agreed upon and communicated
Business partners engaged and involved
Community and culture practices documented and communicated
Search, display and social advertising plan created
Marketing channels integration plan created
Initiation phase
Establish advertising campaign parameters
Create promotional calendar
Establish digital advertising budgets
Determine Adobe Analytics report suite details
URL mapping for all domains and properties
Coordinate production of creative assets
Produce campaigns as per forms and templates
Planning phase
Send meeting agendas and recaps (ongoing)
Create and deliver segment strategy
Create and deliver project plan
Create and deliver media plan
Define strategies
Campaign structure strategy
Assess data flow
Validate AAM tracking and segments (if applicable)
Validate pageview tag data (see tab 2 for details)
Validate creative
Validate conversion tag data (see tab 2 for details)
Execution phase
Provide launch date for first set of campaigns
Verify campaigns have impression data
Determine readiness to start portfolio optimisation
Start portfolio optimisation
Launch phase
Execute reporting methodologies
Investigate pacing and performance issues
Creative refresh
Traffic new creative
Create display campaigns
Create new ads
URL swap
Start portfolio optimisation
Account performance:
Create and provide weekly performance report
Real-time bidding monitoring and validation
Proactively evaluate possible additional optimisations
Schedule audits along with ad hoc reviews
Audience management team built and structured
Privacy
Review privacy policy and plan opt-out and notice and choice configuration
Build, test and deploy
Environment creation and setup
Data warehouse provisioning
Training
Creation of training roadmap
Forecasting questions
Post production support
8 Adobe Media Optimiser Product Maturity Activities
Are you using Adobe Media Optimizer at its full potential?
Have a look at the entire list of features and capabilities and assess the degree to which your
organisation is using the solution.
Solution Features
Social video
Sponsored promo
SEM
Social retargeting
Display retargeting
Social photo
Lookalike modelling
SEM retargeting
Social post Amp
Tech Features
Portfolio mgmt
Budget mgmt
Tracking
Geo target
Keyword learning
Metric optimisation
Portfolio simulation
Domain optimisation
Data resilience
Adobe Marketing Cloud Integrations
Adobe Analytics
Adobe Target
Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Campaign
Adobe Primetime
Audience Manager
Adobe Social
9 Adobe Consulting Operational Maturity Review
Operational Readiness Assessment and
Recommendations - $6000 (per brand or business unit)
Adobe Consulting provides a package to review your
operational business readiness and provide a recommended
roadmap of initiatives to accelerate your maturity. This service
is highly recommended if you are new to the solution and
need assistance in evaluating your capabilities.
Activities include:
Conference call or meeting to interview executive sponsor.
Consulting guidance on completing the solution maturity assessment.
Consulting walk through of maturity operational readiness checklist.
Qualification of current documents, templates and processes.
Draft of initial findings to highlight focus themes reviewed with executive sponsor.
Executive sponsor sign-off.
High-level roadmap of recommendations presented to stakeholder group.
10 Adobe Media Optimizer Glossary of Terms
Term Definition
A/B test An activity that compares two or more versions of your Web site content to see which best lifts your conversions, sales or registrations.
Adcopy
An adcopy is the writing that shows up in the sponsored results section whenever someone searches. An adcopy is basically a call to action and hence should be very well worded and highlight any special offerings the client may have. Ad copies are also called ads or creative.
Anonymous visitor Visitor that engages with the brand through paid, owned or earned media without providing PII.
Audience A group of similar-activity entrants who will see a targeted activity.
Tip
Also use the self-
assessment tool designed to
help you identify your
organisation’s strengths and
prioritise focus areas in
Adobe Media Optimizer and
integrated Adobe Marketing
Cloud Solutions
Bid unit
Bid Units are the most granular level at which you set bids for a particular network. In search bid units would be keywords (primarily) whereas a bid unit in display would be an ad.
Big data Describes any voluminous amount of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data that has the potential to be mined for information.
Call to action
A call to action is an advertising and marketing request to 'do something' — typically the next step that marketers invite clients in order to purchase a product or service.
Clicks Number of times someone clicked on an ad and landed on the landing page
CPA Cost per acquisition or application
CPC Cost-Per-Click: how much an advertiser pays when users click on an ad (They will never pay more than their specified maximum CPC)
CTR Click-Through Rate: how often users click on an ad (CTR is important because it measures relevance and user response)
Data ingestion Data ingestion is the process of obtaining, importing and processing data for later use or storage in a database.
Digital asset manager (DAM) The library containing items to be used as content in marketing campaigns.
Display URLs
Indication of the Web site your customer will land on as a result of a click on an AD. Search engines and social advertising platforms typically allow the customisation of these.
Dynamic insertions Keywords, adcopy or creative that is dynamically personalised as a result of behavioural data.
Engagement The measurement of a visitor’s interest in a site, measured by time on site, clicks, conversions and other metrics.
First party data
Data collected directly by the organisation.
Web behaviour
Survey responses
PII examples
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
Social security number
Impressions Number of times an ad has been displayed.
Key performance indicator (KPI)
Key performance indicators simplify Web analysis data reporting so that only relevant information is presented in an easily understood and actionable format.
Keywords The search terms an advertiser bids on to show ads against. If no one searches for these keywords, no one will see these ads.
Known customer
Visitor that has provided PII to the brand (and consent to use that PII in communications) and is receiving a direct communication or is authenticated or logged in.
Landing page campaign
A landing page campaign allows you to use targeting to display different landing page content for different visits. Otherwise, the landing page shows the same content for each visit. A landing page campaign compares different versions of the page to help you see which version of the landing page produces more successful results. In Target Standard, replaced by experience targeting.
Lifecycle Term used to describe a set of steps the typical consumer undertakes in order to make a buying decision.
Metadata
Metadata is descriptive information about your files (data about your data). Digital asset management systems rely heavily on metadata as it’s critical for searching, retrieving and managing your rich media assets.
Optimisation campaign Ensures the most effective experiences are shown more often by automatically distributing traffic to the best-performing segments.
Personalisation Is the use of data to deliver a relevant and engaging experience to a consumer across channels and devices and measure the impact of that experience.
PII
Personally identifiable information. Information that can be used on its own or with other information to identify, contact, or locate a single person, or to identify an individual in context.
Placements
When an advertiser expressly includes categories of sites or specific Web sites on which the ad can appear (content with expressly included Web sites and categories).
Portfolio bidding
This method begins with defining the objective and works its way down to the optimum bid for every keyword given the objective. Rather than looking at keywords in isolation this looks at the entire set of keywords. It bases bidding decisions on what will provide maximum overall benefit from all keywords. Adobe offers the portfolio theory approach with its premium solution.
Real-time reports
Real-time reports display Web page traffic and rank page views in real time so you can more quickly understand what is trending on your marketing landscape.
Rich media asset
Enhanced digital assets such as images, graphics, illustrations, audio and video that offer a more interactive experience for users, especially when compared to simple text documents.
ROI Return on investment.
Rules based bidding:
Bid optimisation process on which keywords are optimised at their individual level. IT examines each individual keyword in isolation setting bids based on the historic performance of each keyword. Adobe's standard offering (also known as bid rules) allows the user to set rules that will determine the bid for every keyword.
Search The ability to connect consumers’ thoughts to relevant content through sophisticated algorithms, when they are in an active mind state. Search is a pull medium.
Search engine optimisation Practices by which Web content is methodically optimised to ensure rank performance in search engine results.
Search engine marketing
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of Web sites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising.
Second-party data
Data shared by a trusted source.
Data shared between a credit card company and a co-brand partner such as an airline.
The airline provides loyalty program data to the credit card company.
The credit card company provides spend pattern data to the airline.
May be PII.
Segment
A specified set of criteria used for targeting a campaign. Only visitors who meet the criteria see the content of a campaign targeted to that segment. Some segments are reusable across multiple campaigns and others are specific to a campaign.
Success metrics The parameters used to measure the success of an activity.
Tagging Tagging is the activity of adding metadata to digital assets to annotate and categorise content.
Test
A campaign that compares two or more experiences against the success metrics you specify, so you can choose the experience that is most likely to provide the results you want.
Third-part data
Aggregated data from sources such as:
Data purchased from providers like Bizo, Exelate or Acxiom.
Demographic data.
Spend-pattern data.
Geographic data.
Time on site An engagement type that represents the time spent in the visit (in seconds) from the point the visitor sees a campaign until leaving.
Visitor
A visitor is any person who accesses your site. A visitor is evaluated against activity criteria to determine whether the visitor is included in an activity. See entrant.
Workflows
Set of features grouped into activities that let you schedule and automate specific processes like delivery sending, approval processes and file transfers. The various workflow activities also let you manipulate data, enrich it and collect information stored in an external database.
11 Adobe Media Optimizer Templates
11.1 Digital Advertising Framework
11.2 Campaign Brief Template
ORGANISATION DETAILS
Organisation
Brand/Division:
Campaign name:
Start date: End Date:
Total budget:
Target audience for
response to brief:
Level of detail
required:
Expected format
(word, .ppt,
presentation,
conversation):
Due date:
OBJECTIVES
What is the primary and secondary objective of this campaign?
Please include:
Display and search: Volume and CPA targets as well as performance display benchmarks achieved by
previous media agency.
Social: Social network growth, brand awareness, drive traffic to on or off platform, lead generation, etc…
Primary objective:
(incl. historical performance)
Secondary objective: (incl.
historical performance)
Core metrics
Targeting
Geographic, Demographic, Psychographic and Behavioural Traits
Location:
Gender: Male
Female
Both
Age:
Psychographic and
behavioural traits (please
provide consumer research, if
any)
Creative
What ad formats will be supplied?
i.e. 728x90, 300x250, 12x600, 160x600
Number of creative
concepts per ad unit?
Will there by separate (more compelling)
messaging for audience segment retargeting?
When will assets be
submitted?
Creative messaging (please be as descriptive
as possible)
Destination URL:
Campaign Details
Other channels and activities planned:
If TV, can the media schedule be shared?
Available marketing material, can this be shared:
Approved creative:
Landing page / microsite
URL:
Media Tracking & Analytics
What are the business parameters on cookie
settings for conversion tags?
Who manages the Web
site?
How quickly can changes be made to the Web
site?
Please specify any
additional third-party ad servers you are using.
Other
Are there any regional or seasonal factors that should be considered for this campaign?
Do you have any research and learnings available? E.g. offline strategy, overall digital media strategy, competitor
information or historical campaign learnings.
Please provide examples of any online or offline key sponsorships (Magazines/ TV Shows/ Web sites). This will aid
correlation for interest-based targeting.
Additional Tracking Requirements? Is there capacity to implement Adlens conversion, retargeting tags, Facebook
conversion pixels etc?
Existing database? If available, can we use for prospecting and re-messaging purposes? This can be in the form of
customer email addresses or phone numbers.
11.3 Deep Dive Insights Request Template:
