Recently, a prospective client ask how we would go about building out a new campaign launch from scratch assuming we had a new client and a brand new instance of The Trade Desk.
This is a good question and a good thought process to go through before launching a client. Often times, when building out a new campaign, most of the ground work (e.g. pixels, conversion goals, audiences) has already be done at some point in the past. Building out a new campaign is usually quite simple and often times you can duplicate an old campaign and tweak it for the updated targeting settings.
But what about when you are starting from scratch? Again, there is no one way to go about it but here would be our recommendation:
Pixels
Start by getting the pixels placed using The Trade Desk’s universal site tag. While this is an extremely simple task, it can be a drawn-out process when dealing with a large brand. They are adding code to their website after all so it makes sense for them to be careful with it. It’s best to start this process as soon as possible with the brand so it does not hold up the launch. After the Trade Desk’s UST is placed, you can then start building out conversions and segments.
Conversion Goals
As hinted in the previously, once the pixel is placed, you can start building out conversions for whatever actions match your campaign objectives. Obviously for awareness campaigns you might not have a hard action that you want the user to take. For some campaigns like DOOH and CTV, you won’t even be sending traffic to the brand’s site directly.
Nevertheless, now is a good time to think through any conversion goals that related to your campaign objectives. Even if it’s something as simple as viewing a product or pricing page, having a conversion goal gives you more options on how to set up and target within your campaigns (even if you don’t end up using any of these goals).
Create “Converters” segments.
Assuming you did set up at least one conversion in the previous section, next take the time to create a segment of these users and label these segments so all your buyers will easily understand what the segment(s) is. A segment of converters can be used not only for suppressing your targeted audiences (another way of saying excluding those that have already converted), then can also be used for re-targeting for other products or services.
Create Audiences.
Most clients using the Trade Desk are going to take advantage of their broad access to thousands of different targeting segments within the Trade Desk data marketplace.
Now might be a good time to make a distinction between a segment and an audience. A segment is one singular collection of user ids that are affiliated with one another in some way. For example, a segment of past converters (an example already mentioned), a segment of user IDs that have shown an behavior that suggests they are in the market for a new car, or a B2B segment of users that have been identified as working in the technology industry. The key word here is ‘singular’ segment of users that are associated with one another.
An audience is a combination of segments. An audience could indeed contain only one segment and there would be little distinction between the two. But many times marketers will combine segments into one audience. Furthermore, buyers will exclude certain segments from the audience, like a segment of converters or a CRM segment that has been on-boarded.
Creating all of your audiences could be time consuming if you don’t already have the segment IDs and/or you have an elaborate combination of of inclusion and exclusion. Either way, it makes sense to carry out the process of building out the audiences you will use in one fell swoop, rather than building the audiences as you build the various ad groups of your campaign.
Two further notes: the naming of your audiences should follow a specific convention or a convention as prescribed by the client. Second, you can using duplicate your audiences and save time by swapping out the desired segments.
Create Ad Groups
Now that you have your audiences built out, you can now start building out your ad groups. We are making an assumption that you would build out your ad groups to match your audience targeting. This is not always the case and does not always make sense, but 9 out of 10 times, creating ad groups for each audience is a good organization tactic to follow.
As you create each ad group and name it, you can simply add your audiences that you created in the previous step.
Assign Creative Tags
After the ad groups have been created and the audiences layered on to the corresponding ad group, next go through and upload and assign the correct tags to each ad group. There is an integration that you can set up between TTD and most of the major ad servers to make this step a little easier. But even if you don’t have this integration in place, it doesn’t take long to upload the tags in bulk all at once in the creative section of TTD. Then you can go back and assign the tags to the correct ad group.
Obviously we skipped over the most time consuming step which is trafficking and wrapping your ad tags. We make the assumption that this has already been done by an operations team. Usually the group or person trafficking the creatives is not the same person building out the campaigns. This order of operations assumes it is from the media buyer’s perspective.
Budget Settings
Needless to say, budget settings is the most important section of the campaign build out. If your budgets and dates are not correct, you won’t have the client for long. That’s why this should be the last thing a buyer does in the the order of operations for building out a campaign and the first AND last step that a manager takes when QC’ing that buyer’s set-up.
The Trade Desk has an option to auto-allocate budget across your various ad groups. We recommend using this auto-allocator unless the specific budget amounts are already prescribed for each ad group.
Note: you might need to press a toggle within the budget settings to reveal the view of your budget by ad group.
Even though we recommend using TTD’s auto-budget allocator, we also recommend setting a minimum budget for each ad group. Otherwise the allocation will likely lean heavily to one or two ad groups based on either scale of the audience or performance.
Obviously shifting budget to ad groups that are performing well is a good thing. But if you went to the effort to setting up and testing all these different audiences (and creating the tags), then it makes sense to give these ad groups at least some minimum budget so you can see how they perform. If they don’t work, then you and turn them off or reduce the budget when you feel it’s the right time.
Conclusion
As already stated, there is not right way to build out your campaigns. But building out a new campaign launch following this order of operations is a good place to start and will keep you on track.