Display Advertising: Accounts Engaged Plummeting

Jarrod Cohen

Hi all,

We recently updated the creative for our display ads, following best practices and guidelines but since that update, we've seen a precipitous drop in accounts engaged:

Account Drop Off.PNG

What's rather curious to us is:

1. Account reach is steady
2. CTR and clicks are steady
3. Spend has been steady

I know accounts engaged is a composite metric of accounts newly engaged and accounts with increased engagement — which is measured over time, but I can't help but notice this plummet so severely, which has never happened to us before.

Before we revert back to our initial creative — any ideas for this type of behavior? Have you seen it in your own advertising and found a way to overcome it? Would love to know. Thank you!

Tristan B

Hi Jarrod - I'd recommend reaching out to Laurie and our creative services team to get their take!

Here's a recent post that could help out:

https://revcity.6sense.com/home/discussion/1234/ad-creative-review-to-boost-roi-may-2024

lgallardo

Hi @Jarrod Cohen, thanks for sharing this! Would you mind sending over the campaign link and/or account instance?

lgallardo

Hi @Jarrod Cohen, we were able track down the requested info! This behavior is expected and unrelated to ad creative changes. Since engagement is clicks + view-throughs, and view-throughs have a 30-day lookback period, it'll keep increasing until you're more than 30 days out from the date. If you go back and look at a 30-day period greater than 30 days prior, it looks smoother.

That said, I'd be more than happy to take a look at a few creatives and provide feedback. Please let me know if you have any questions!

Jarrod Cohen

Hi @Tristan B and @lgallardo,

Thank you both so very much for the recommendations. Yes, this is the campaign in question. @lgallardo you bring up an excellent point that we learned in this process: the VTR and engaged metric have a 30 day lookback, and obviously, when you change something, you need time to pass to see the result.

CTR is something we can see rather immediately, but it was that accounts engaged metric that we realized needed to wait a bit longer for. And now we're seeing great results!

Thank you both again for your helpful responses, we've learned something about how the engage metrics work.

Best,

Jarrod

lumaexclaimer

Jarrod, I wonder how did your Account Engagement behaved after those 30 days. Did you see a steady improvement?

Jarrod Cohen

@lumaexclaimer Yes we did. As it's a 30-day trailing metric, we needed to wait the 30+ days to see the affect of our campaign changes. Indeed our KPIs improved! It was just a little nerve wracking to see it plummet so quickly, but knowing you need 30 days for accounts to 'see' your ads and then take some sort of action was reassuring that we didn't implode something so quickly. Hope that helps!