Today, more and more brands are moving away from traditional local advertising like paper flyers and brochures. That shift is pushed by factors like the increased likelihood of using primarily digital media, the increase in costs of paper, and new anti-spam laws that make it harder to deliver brochures in some European countries.
Switching to digital advertising for local campaigns is still a big move for many advertisers. That’s especially true as hyperlocal solutions like Adcombi are still relatively new to the market. That newness also means that brands are struggling to migrate to digital. One of the most common issues we see is budgeting across hyperlocal campaigns.
Aggregated Local Campaigns Don’t Create Local Advertising Pressure
For many brands, making the shift to online advertising means setting up a national level campaign across all of their points of sale. Sometimes, that means creating a campaign across thousands of individual locations.
For that reason, most choose national or aggregated local campaigns. At the same time, that can be a mistake. The DSP randomizes ad visibility across your target locations – and always prioritizes locations with higher population density.
For example, Adcombi completed a study with Scopience, assessing the performance of a national campaign with 8.8 million ad impressions. We found that the DSP is highly likely to focus ads in urban areas. In fact, during our campaign, budget was heavily over allocated towards urban areas, under-allocated towards rural areas, and only ideal in 10% of zip code areas. In most cases, we found media pressure in rural areas was almost non-existent. And that can be dramatic for multi-location brands where locations span the country: in urban AND in rural areas.
If you have multiple locations inside the same campaign, the locations in rural areas will receive less advertising pressure than desired. Instead, you’ll spend the majority of your ad budget on the high population density areas that the DSP prioritizes.
Setting Up Ads per Location
The solution is, of course, to set up an individual line item on the DSP per location. Traditionally, that would have required hundreds of hours with an extensive set up process. However, technologies like Adcombi’s Hyperlocal Advertising platform automate that process, allowing you to quickly set up campaigns, give local brand owners ownership and access of their campaigns, and use local or nationally distributed budgets per location. In short, to individually set budgets per zip code to fine-tune control of your advertising pressure.
In fact, most advertisers already have the data. It’s the same data you use to drive traditional flyering and brochures. You likely already have the research into which zip codes to target and what your advertising pressure should be. It’s important to shift that same research to digital as you move.
At Adcombi, we recommend the following process when optimizing the budgets for your multi-location national campaign.
- Perform a geo analysis to determine what kind of budget you’re using and what advertising pressure should be per area
- Set up one campaign/one line item per advertising area so that you can properly define and realize budget per area
- Set KPIs that map to how you’re advertising. You have to see if your advertising campaign is working offline, because you can’t use pixels to track sales in drive-to-store campaigns. That often means investing in quality campaigns with big formats, high visibility rates, and high-quality inventory sources. Just like OOH campaigns don’t work when billboards are in shady locations, hyperlocal digital won’t work if you’re advertising on lower-quality websites either.
- Continue to optimize those campaigns to ensure budget is being spent as desired. Making sure you meet targets / KPIs is normally more than enough for this part of the campaign.
If you’d like to learn more or to discuss how Adcombi can automate your multi-location advertising setup, contact us, we’re happy to help.
