6 Tips for Optimizing Your 6sense Display Advertising Campaigns

Johnny Rabe

One of the questions that our 6sense CSMs often get asked by our customers is “can you take a look at this campaign and tell me if I set it up right?”

There are a variety of ways to answer this question, but they all boil down to two things: The segment that campaign is built on and the campaign settings themselves. Here are 6 tips to help you get the most out of your 6sense Display Campaigns.

Engagement Rate:

Before diving into some optimization tips, it’s important to determine if your campaign needs optimizing at all. You know what they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

There are a variety of KPIs that can help determine if your campaign is performing optimally, but the one to start with is Engagement Rate. Engagement Rate is the combination of Account CTR & Account VTR, which equals the total percentage of accounts reached that have visited your website, either by clicking through or viewing through. The benchmark for Engagement Rate is 35-40% for a standard display campaign reaching at least 100 accounts. For more information on Engagement benchmarks, check out this RevCity post: Campaign Engagement Benchmarks by Ad Type

I would recommend evaluating these metrics after your campaign has been live for at least 2 weeks. That way, your desired audience has had some time to view-through and engage with the campaign. If you’ve evaluated Engagement Rate and optimization is for you, read on!

Who are we reaching? Checking the Segment:

Every 6sense campaign is built on a segment. No segment, no campaign. As the building block of any good campaign, the segment is the first place to review to make sure it’s set up to achieve the desired engagement rate.

When you crack open a segment, you may see an obvious issue like the audience being reduced to low/no accounts for one reason or another. Other times, you’ll have to ask yourself one of potentially dozens of guiding questions to determine the best path forward. Here are three to start with:

• Account Behavior: Does the segment contain accounts based on certain behaviors/activities? If so, does the copy for the campaign align to the actions an account would need to take to qualify for being in this segment?

Ex: Segment targets early stage (Awareness/Consideration) accounts but the ad CTA has a late-stage offer like “sign up for a demo”

• Account Attributes: Most segments target certain parts of your ICP based on specific firmographic/technographic attributes. Does your copy align to the attributes of accounts that are being targeted?

Ex: Segment targets large enterprises (10,000+ employees) but ad CTA is “learn more about our solutions for small businesses”

NOTE: If your campaign is targeting accounts in EMEA, head on over to this post on Tips & Tricks for Digital Advertising in EMEA

• Audience Size: The “no end date” feature of 6sense Display campaigns means that you can build stage-based display campaigns that will catch accounts at precise moments in their buying journey. These types of campaigns (and any other campaigns that are 90+ days in length) should be reviewed quarterly. Stage-based segments audiences fluctuate in size, so ensure you’re setting your expectations for performance relative to the audience size:

EX: Your segment targets accounts researching “2023 AI Trends”, so the audience drops significantly after 2023 ends

And how are we reaching them? Checking the campaign:

After reviewing the segment, take a look at the campaign itself. We’ve discussed some of the implications that ad copy mismatch can have on engagement rate relative to segment filters. Ad creative is super important, and I HIGHLY recommend asking our spectacular Creative Services team for feedback on your ads for optimal inventory performance: Ad Creative Review to Boost ROI

Outside of creative, review the other campaign settings by navigating to “Edit Campaign” and reading through the “Review” section. There are a dozen settings here that can impact performance, so here are the three I recommend reviewing first:

• Persona Targeting: 6sense display campaigns provide you the unique ability to target personas at the accounts in the target segment. This is hugely important when targeting larger enterprises, as you want to ensure your ads are getting in front of the right audience, and impressions are not being wasted. Persona targeting should always be used when:
  • Campaigns are targeting non-GDPR countries only (Ex: United States)
    • Read more about Digital Advertising in EMEA here
  • Segment contains accounts with 5,000+ employees
  • Ad copy is hyper-targeted to a certain persona

NOTE: Persona Targeting adds $4 to the maximum bid. This is NOT a $4 CPM upcharge. Costs to target individuals based on persona are higher than general targeting, so the $4 CPM increase gives you a higher likelihood to win these bids.

• CPM: 6sense campaigns are flexible and allow users to chose their own CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) during campaign setup. CPM is a balancing act: The higher the CPM, the better your ad placement quality, but also the more expensive your campaign will be. There are benefits to running a campaign with a low CPM, but if your Engagement Rate is lower than you’d like, consider bumping the CPM up by a few dollars. CPMs can vary, so chose the CPM that best fits your budget and desired campaign outcome.

• Frequency Cap: It’s important to set a limit on the maximum number of impressions that can be served to a targeted person at an account per day. This can be adjusted to fit your target audience size, target personas and desired exposure levels.
  
  6sense campaigns default to a Frequency cap of 6 impressions per user per day. To reach more users with fewer impressions, you can lower this number. However, that may impact your Engagement Rate, so I wouldn’t recommend going lower than 3 impressions per day.

All of these campaign settings can be adjusted while a campaign is in-flight, but don’t feel like you have to mess with a campaign that is live. Sometimes the best thing to do is run a campaign, see how it performs, then try some of the optimization tips above on your next campaign. Better yet, run an A/B test on two campaigns to test Segment/Campaign configurations that yield the best results.

BONUS TIP: Don’t Forget About Retargeting!

The most successful Display campaigns should always have a Retargeting campaign paired with them to ensure maximum exposure to engaged accounts. Implementing a retargeting campaign adds another touch point to your buyer’s journey and gives accounts another opportunity to engage with your content.

Have more tips for improving campaign performance? Comment below!

Yuda.Ben

this is great, thank you.