4 steps to gain greater control of your ad spend

With ad fraud on the rise and growing brand safety concerns, it’s more important than ever for marketers to know where their ads are appearing

With ad fraud on the rise and growing brand safety concerns, it’s more important than ever for marketers to know where their ads are appearing. Partnering with reputable digital publishers is a basic step for buyers to protect their media budgets and reputations. But how can this be achieved within an ecosystem that is often confusing and opaque?

Here are four steps media buyers can take to gain greater control of their ad investments, understand which sites their ads run on, and ultimately achieve better marketing outcomes.

1). Make your vetting process more efficient

To spend media budgets wisely, media buyers must make sure that their messages are reaching the right people. To do so, it’s essential to vet media partners so ensure that they are legitimate sources that will provide human audiences.

Some buyers take a multilayered approach when vetting media partners by examining website content, ad fraud detection reports and measurement data. It’s also important to understand publishers’ traffic and related business practices. By investing in publishers that have been vetted by a third-party auditor, buyers can be assured that their ads appear on sites with minimal fraud risk. Plus, by seeking out audited publishers, marketers save time by leaving the vetting process to a trusted third party.

2). Choose the right KPIs

Programmatic advertising made the process of buying ads at scale quicker and easier, often with lower CPMs than other channels or direct buys. But buying cheap impressions and generating lots of clicks might not pay off when those impressions are being shown to bots.

Since bots can be designed to mimic human behavior and generate clicks, it’s important that marketers select the right KPIs such as conversions or sales, and create campaigns optimized to meet those targets. By determining what KPIs provide the most insight into a campaign’s success, marketers can assess what’s working and what’s not, which allows for greater campaign optimization and better results.

3). Use industry resources

Another way to take control of campaigns is to incorporate industry solutions into the buying process. Whether it’s seeking out publishers that have been audited or partnering with ad fraud detection vendors that have been accredited by the Media Rating Council, it’s possible to save time by relying on data and resources provided by organizations committed to creating solutions that foster greater transparency in the industry.

4). Demand transparency

It is important for marketers not only to incorporate industry solutions into their media buys but also to be vocal with their partners about the importance of providing greater transparency. Marketers must ask for transparency and prioritize partners that integrate industry standards and solutions into their platforms.

If marketers continue to invest in quality publishers, not only will they see improvements in their campaign ROI, but they’ll help promote increased transparency, which elevates the entire supply chain.