We don’t provide media buying at Astronaut, though we’re regularly asked about strategies for making paid advertising more effective.
Some clients buy media internally and others have dedicated media agencies we collaborate with.
In both scenarios we’re asked for strategies to improve Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). Paid media costs are growing, spend with Google and Meta is significant, and brands seeking growth (who isn’t?) have an always-on mission of improving ROAS and making their media spend work harder.
Generally, the levers for improving ROAS are:
Generating effective creative at scale – relatively straightforward
Audience and campaign setup – usually pretty solid already
Adding well-segmented customer lists for better targeting – this is usually the opportunity.
Consistently, the most effective media strategy for improving ROAS is automating segmented digital ad lists for better targeting. This can move the needle significantly and quickly.
There are many different lists, of course. These can include:
High lifetime value (LTV), VIP or regular high value customers for ‘lookalike’ targeting
The same list, segmented for customers who haven’t purchased in a while – for ‘win back’ or reactivation of high value customers
Converted customers with recent purchases, to exclude from ad campaigns – typically there’s no point advertising to a customer who has just purchased
Customers segments who’ve previously purchased a category of products or services, and are likely to be interested in a new offering
Customers who haven’t purchased, but whose purchasing opportunity has already passed – for exclusion.
..etc. That’s just a handful examples, there are many more relevant customer segments depending on the brand and market category.
We build fully automated segmented customer lists for scenarios like these. They’re dynamically kept up-to-date and are sent to Google and Meta automatically – either every hour or every day, depending on the technology we’re using to maintain the lists and pipe them to Google and Meta. We send customer lists automatically to other platforms as well, but Google and Meta are the big two.
Generally, the technology we’re using is either:
Customer Data Platform (CDP): We implement and optimise CDPs and use them for initiatives like marketing automation and website personalisation. We build out detailed customer profiles with a history of all purchases, website behaviour and marketing comms interaction. We use these same profiles to create dynamic customer segments with the relevant search filters and customer attributes and implement live customer data feeds from the CDP to Google and Meta.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system & data platform: If a brand doesn’t have a CDP in place, we can usually obtain enough customer data from existing CRM systems and build out segments similar to a CDP. While the available data is generally not as detailed as a rich CDP it’s still enough to make a meaningful impact on ROAS. We connect the CRM to a data platform to turn the segments into live customer data feeds, and from there the data is sent to Google and Meta.
The improvements to ROAS are generally rapid and significant.
For example, with just a couple of live customer feeds implemented, we’ve seen a 6x ROAS jump to over 10x. Every $1 invested in paid media previously returned $6 in revenue. Now every $1 invested returns over $10.
When paid media spend is significant, so too is the impact of automatically growing ROAS using this method. Some brands are spending $30,000 per month on paid media, others are spending $100,000. With ROAS moving from 6x to 10x, that’s an additional $120,000 or $400,000 revenue per month, respectively.
Put your Google & Meta ads on easy mode. It’s worth it.