Programmatic Campaign Best Practices | Grace Dominique

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, brands, marketers, and media buyers. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Grace Dominique, Senior Director of Sales for the central division right here at Simpli.fi. Grace has been a proud member of the Simpli.fi Family for nearly seven years. She's had numerous roles in the organization starting in client success, then quickly moving into sales as a strategic partner manager, and she is now one of the company's most accomplished senior sales directors. She works with agencies and national brands, identifying and capitalizing on revenue opportunities. She is known for cultivating deep connections with her clients, leveraging extensive product knowledge, and employing a consultative approach. Grace, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Grace Dominique: Thanks for having me, David. I'm happy to be here. David McBee: I'm so happy you're here as well. Let's dive right in. I want to point out that you have had an extensive experience here at Simpli.fi, spanning nearly seven years and encompassing so many different roles. I feel like it makes you uniquely qualified to speak about programmatic campaign best practices. What advice can you share with advertisers about how they can improve the performance of their programmatic campaigns? Grace Dominique: Yeah, absolutely. Great question. For me, I like to lead with a goal first mentality and complete a thorough needs analysis with my advertisers before we get to a campaign build. Really, this is all happening in the RFP process when we come up with this strategy. I think it is extremely important to have a clear understanding how that end advertiser defines success. Simpli.fi has a robust product offering different tactics, different inventory placements, and with that comes that some perform better than others in different goals. I like to use my experience in the different roles that I've had to come up with the most strategic recommendation, knowing what that end goal would be that's going to deliver those results. My number one piece of advice to advertisers is really first to clearly define what that campaign goal is. We work with agencies, we work with brand direct clients, we work with local media groups, so we want to know who the end advertiser is and what do they really care about. What would they define the campaign as a success with being? Does that advertiser really care about website traffic and CTR? Or are they defining success as someone that receives an ad and then visits their physical brick and mortar location? Or are they looking at completed form fills on a site? Really, a lot of this can come into where our recommendations go into play, but I think first and foremost, knowing how the end advertiser defines success. Another part that comes with this needs analysis that goes right hand in hand with how success is defined is to understand and know if the client or the end advertiser is looking at another third party platform for their campaign performance. Whether this is a Google Analytics or maybe a third party ad server like a GCM, a DCM, or something along those lines, I always make the request if they are looking at a third party reporting platform to request read only access into the data that they're seeing to see how the performance is looking. Because we have our simplified data, but we might not be seeing exactly what they are in Google Analytics without that read-only access. We can make optimizations based on the robust data that we have from Simpli.fi, but we can optimize differently based on those third party reports as well. The more data the better. Or if you are running a similar campaign through multiple different vendors, I think it's helpful for me and really our whole Simpli.fi team to know how our performance is compared to the other vendors in the space. Then lastly, while I know this isn't always an opportunity available, I think taking advantage of incremental budgets, whether that comes from the end of the month, or the end of the quarter of the campaign, or from another vendor that maybe did not perform in line or as strong as the Simpli.fi campaigns did, I think moving budget to where the performances is going to be a big piece of my advice there. Take advantage of what's working. Something that I love Simpli.fi can always offer with any of our reports or at any one-off request, we can send over incremental budget recommendations based on if the campaign is hitting and exceeding that goal by at least 10%. If the performance is there and you can add more budget into the campaign, it's not only going to help maximize reach, but improve the overall performance for the campaign as a whole without making any changes to that campaign set up other than just putting more dollars behind it. Those are my key pieces of advice for you. David McBee: Those are pretty solid. If those are the best practices, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you've seen advertisers make? Grace Dominique: Simpli.fi's biggest differentiator from any other programmatic DSP is something that we call unstructured data. We're going directly to the source to collect our data rather than relying on the prepackaged third party audience segments. With unstructured data, everything is date and timestamped, refreshed in real time. The audiences are dynamic, updating every minute, so while I think third party audience segments are fantastic, it's not really something that makes Simpli.fi unique as most programmatic DSPs have access to all of those same third party segments. I wouldn't necessarily consider this a mistake that my clients make, but rather it's something that requires more education and I take that as an opportunity for me to teach more about unstructured data and Simpli.fi's offering since it is pretty unique in the space. For example, most buyers will come to me and say," Hey, we want to run this segment from this provider targeting these three zip codes," for an example. This is just what they know because they're familiar with buying third party audience segments. This gives me the opportunity to teach them about unstructured data where we bid, optimize, and we're reporting on that individual element level of the campaign. That individual element could be a specific keyword that a user searched, a location that a user visited, engagement in an individual zip code, a website that they're browsing content on, or even past purchase history. With the unstructured data approach, we can tell exactly what's working in a campaign and what is not. I always will recommend testing out our unstructured data tactics to run alongside of those third party segments that the client is used to running. When they see their first performance report and they see the performance of the unstructured data tactics specifically, the data and the granular performance really speaks for itself. One of my favorite and most utilized tactics on the Simpli.fi platform is our keyword level behavioral targeting. We can serve, display, native online video, CTV, and audio ads to users based on terms their searching or content embedded in an article that that user is reading. I've seen some advertisers push back on our keyword targeting to me because I almost always recommend it, but they'll say, "No, we don't need that. We're running paid search in-house". This is where I think the mistake comes from. If an advertiser is running paid search, this is absolutely the best opportunity to compliment it with our keyword level behavioral targeting. We can take your paid search keyword list and apply it to our keyword targeting and your reach significantly increases as we're not just limited to one exchange. We have the whole rest of the internet at our fingertips there. When you run Simpli.fi's keyword targeting alongside your paid search efforts, you'll see how the two compliment each other and more likely than not, you'll see performance with your branded terms increase overall in your paid search initiatives. With all this being said, I think all advertisers working with Simpli.fi should at least give our unstructured data tactics a test in addition to running those third party segments, and then the performance will speak for itself. David McBee: Do you have any examples of that performance speaking for itself and proving that the unstructured data is effective? Grace Dominique: Yes, I do. As you had mentioned, I've had a lot of different roles within sub-organizations at Simpli.fi, so I like to consider myself an expert on programmatic advertising, but especially an expert on Simpli.fi's offering. I will always be 100% transparent with my clients on what's going to work best for them given their goals, and it's really imperative for my clients and end advertisers to know that I want Simpli.fi to be a partner, not just another vendor that they're working with, to really truly be an extension of their team. Because I focus on growing those relationships with my clients, it then leads to establishing trust, where they know I'm going to recommend a strategy that will set the advertiser up for success from the beginning. Of course, it takes time to build that trust, and I'm not afraid to push back with my clients on a strategy if I know that those results are not going to be up to par for what they're looking for. Going back to that example of some advertisers pushing back and not wanting to run our keyword level behavioral targeting because they're running paid search in-house, I've had many, many conversations with my current clients and prospects around this, and it's just some of those don't want to give it a test. After some back and forth, we usually get approved for a little test, just allocating minimal budget to our keyword targeting tactic. Then after that advertiser sees the first performance report, they're like, "Okay, so this is actually our top performing tactic. We want more budget to go to this. Can you shift it from the third party segments into the keyword targeting? I'm glad we tested this." That's a really rewarding feeling for me, and I think it adds to the overall trust and growth of our partnership together. I did have another quick example for when a client has taken my advice, and this is with the incremental budget opportunities. On a regular cadence, I like to provide my advertisers with the incremental budgets that we could support for a campaign based on the overall performance without making any changes to the campaign setup, just what we could do if we added more budget to the campaign. I recently was working on an annual agriculture campaign for a international Ag equipment Company. We were running placements across display, online video, CTV and audio, and I just felt like there was so much more we could be doing because our performance was outstanding and we maybe needed a little more budget to maximize that reach. On a monthly cadence, I would send my client a note, let them know the incremental budget available. We wouldn't have to make any changes, and this is what performance would look like if we did add in those additional funds to the campaign, taking into account average reach and frequency at the individual line item or tactic level. Finally during the last quarter of this campaign's flight, we got the green light and we nearly tripled the budget for the final three months of the campaign. After we were able to prove performance with those incremental dollars applied in that last quarter, we then got approved for the annual campaign to run again this year at an even higher budget level. David McBee: Love that. Love it when your recommendation actually pays off and does what you say it's going to do. Grace Dominique: Absolutely. David McBee: All right, well, before I let you go, do you have a podcast or a book that you feel has been instrumental in your success? Grace Dominique: Yes. I have read hundreds of books related to our industry. I think it would be difficult to just pinpoint one that's been instrumental in my success. Some of my favorite authors include Jill Conrad, Dale Carnegie, and Jen Sincero. I was recently introduced to a new podcast that's really grabbed my attention. It's called Marketecture. Marketecture is a non-biased podcast all around technology, advertising and trends to stay ahead of the curve. They interview CEOs from some of the leading platforms, DSPs, SSPs, exchanges, publishers, and more, and they release new episodes each week, all varying in length. I definitely recommend giving it a listen and going to check it out anywhere you stream podcasts. David McBee: All right. I'll add that to my list. That's great. What is the best way for viewers to learn more about you, Grace? Grace Dominique: Yeah, come check me out on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect. I'm always creating different posts on industry related topics, and then I try to occasionally tie in the Kansas City Chiefs where I can. I'd love to connect. David McBee: Love that. Go Chiefs. Thank you so much for being my guest on Simpli.fi TV. Grace Dominique: Thanks, David. David McBee: Thank you guys for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simply.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.