Guide to Managing and Optimizing Advertisement Campaigns.

Transcription

1 Advertisement Campaigns

2 Contents Introduction 3 Advertisement Concept Life Cycle 4 Typical Lifecycle 7 Campaign Management Creating a New Campaign 9 Search Campaigns 15 Campaigns Approval 18 Add Funds 19 Enable Campaigns 24 Editing a Campaign 26 Disable Campaign 28 Delete Campaign 28 Campaign Optimisation Concepts 29 Impression 29 Clicks 29 CPM 30 CPC 30 CTR 31 Performance Summary 32 Performance Charts 34 Chart Operations 35 Change Date Range 35 Change Graph Type/Export 36 Analyze Clicks Chart 40 Analyze CPC Chart 41 Agency Partners 42 Support 42 2

3 Introduction MTNL Ads is a portal that allows organizations to create/run and monitor Advertisement campaigns for their products/services. The advertisements are displayed as a Signature in s sent/received by MTNL Broadband users. As advertisements are appended to s as a signature, the advertisements need to be in a specific format. An advertisement can consist of one line (of at most 80 characters) and an URL. A sample advertisement is given below: STOP SPAM, STOP Virus, SAVE Bandwidth MTNL Ads portal allows organization to create and monitor advertisement campaigns. Statistics and Graphs relating to the advertisement performance are made available to Advertisers to gauge advertisement campaign performance. This guide helps you to Manage and Optimize your Advertisement campaigns. If you are a new user and trying to get your First advertisement campaign running on MTNL Ads platform, we would recommend the MTNL Ads Getting Started Guide 3

4 Advertisement Concept: Lifecycle In this section, we give look at the states an Advertisement campaign can be in from Creation to the end. This will give an idea of how MTNL Ads works with advertisements. The following picture gives a Work flow of how an Advertisement campaign changes over its life. 4

5 The Green blocks give the various states the Advertisement can be in. The state of the Advertisement can be see in the Home page of MTNL Ads Control panel (as follows): 5

6 The state of campaign is given in Status column (highlighted by Red Oval). The following table describes each state State Description Operations permitted New This is the state a new Advertisement is in. Advertisements in this state have to cross the following stages before being considered for display: 1. Editorial Approval for Advertisement content. 2. Activation by user (after adding funds for budget) Submit for Editorial Approval. Waiting for Approval A newly submitted Advertisement, or an old Advertisement whose content has been edited, lands up in this state. Editorial team reviews content of Advertisement and either approves it (moving to Approved state) or rejects it (moving to Rejected state). User can Edit the campaign while in this state. If you Edit the campaign, it goes back into Waiting for Approval state. Rejected When an Advertisement is rejected by Editorial team for policy reasons, it ends up in Rejected State. This means that user has to Edit the campaign and re-submit for approval. User can Edit the campaign and re-submit for approval. Approved When an Advertisement is approved by Editorial team, it lands up in this state. At this point of time, user can either Enable it (for running the campaign) or change it. If changed, the Advertisement again goes to Waiting for Approval state to be reviewed by Editorial team. When enabled, Advertisement starts appearing in s. User can Enable it and the advertisement starts getting displayed. 6

7 State Description Operations permitted Active These are advertisements that have been Approved and Enabled by the user. These are currently being displayed to recipients. The advertisement will continue to run till they exhaust their Budget (or) disabled manually by user. User can Disable the Advertisement. Exhausted Full Budget These are advertisements that have Exhausted their full budget and waiting for further action by Users. These advertisements can either be enabled by users again (after adding requisite funds) or Deleted (if considered no longer useful). User can Re-enable the advertisement (or) Deleted. Disabled by User Users can interrupt an Active advertisement at any point of time by Disabling it. Once disabled, the Advertisement lands up in this state. If user wants to change an Active advertisement, it has to be disabled first before changes can be made. User can Enable, Edit or Delete the advertisement. Deleted All advertisement campaigns that are deleted by user. These campaigns are no longer available for access. 7

8 Advertisement Concept: Typical Lifecycle While the full life cycle operations have been given above, most campaigns go through a simpler cycle as follows: User action User starts with New Campaign in MTNL Ads Control panel. User has submitted a New campaign with all details filled up. Editorial team has approved the Advertisement User has added funds to account and enabled the Advertisement. Advertisement has run through its full course and exhausted allocated budget. Advertisement is deleted by User State New Waiting for Approval Approved Enabled Exhausted Full Budget Deleted In the following sections, we will look at each of user action in detail. 8

9 Campaign Management: Creating a New Campaign A new campaign can be created as follows: 1. Get a Free MTNL Ads account, by registering for a free account at 2. Login to MTNL Ads Control panel. That will bring up the following screen: 3. Click on Add New Campaign link (highlighted by Red Oval). 9

10 4. That will display the following page: 10

11 5. Enter all the details asked for in the Form. You may refer to following table for help. The table gives a description of each field, What to enter in the field, and an example (if applicable). Field name Description Example Campaign Name A descriptive name for Advertisement campaign. This is only for identifying your campaign and does not appear in your advertisement. First MTNL Ads Advertisement. Advertisement Text The Advertisement text that will be displayed to user. MTNL Ads Advertisement consist of two elements - a descriptive text and an URL. The advertisement text should be specified in this field. Change the way you advertise to Mumbai. Maximum Budget (INR) A budget should be specified for every campaign. Once the budget is exhausted, MTNL Ads automatically stops the campaign. The amount specified is the maximum that will be spent on this campaign. Please note that you need to specify the amount in INR. The minimum budget that can be specified is INR

12 Field name Description Example Max. Budget / Day (INR) This field specifies the maximum budget for the Advertisement per day. You can use this to schedule your campaign over a certain number of days. For example, if you specify overall budget as INR 10,000 and Daily budget as INR 1000, your Advertisement campaign will run for at least 10 days. Once the daily budget for an Advertisement is exhausted, it is not considered for display for rest of the day. The minimum budget that can be specified is INR Max. Bid / (INR) This is the maximum cost you are willing to incur per advertisement shown. In this field, you should specify the same. Every time your advertisement is appended to an and delivered, this amount will be charged to your account. The minimum value that can be specified is INR 1. If you are not sure what amount to place here, do the following: 1. Click on Bid History link. That will show the lowest winning bid for the last 7 days. 2. Place your bid INR 0.01 above the average. This bid amount can be changed even after the Advertisement is made active. 1 12

13 Field name Description Example URL - Site This is the web site, advertisement recipient is taken to, when she clicks on the link in advertisement. In Digital parlance, this should be the Landing page for your advertisement. Brief Description (not more than 500 characters) In this field, you can enter a Description of this Advertisement campaign. This is only for you reference and does not appear in the Advertisement. MTNL Ads Winter Promotion Advertisement 13

14 6. Click on Add Campaign to add the campaign. 7. The campaign now appears in Waiting for Approval state. By default, in the Login home page, all campaigns created in the last one year are displayed. 8. The newly created campaign appears as given below: 14

15 Campaign Management: Search Campaigns By default, MTNL Ads Control panel only shows advertisements that have been created during the last one year. Advertisements that are 1. Older, 2. Disabled, 3. Waiting for Approval, or 4. Approved are not shown in the Control panel home. If you are managing multiple campaigns and want to look at specific campaigns, it is also possible to search for campaign by names. To look at specific campaigns, follow these instructions: 1. Login to MTNL Ads Control panel. That will bring up the following screen 2. Select the criteria to search. Details of the criteria is given in the table below: Criteria Description Name Starting With This criteria helps user locate specific campaigns whose name starts with specific characters. For example, if you want to search for campaigns whose name starts with MTN, enter MTN in this Edit field (highlighted by Red Oval) Status This criteria helps in searching for campaigns depending on the state they are currently in. By default only Active Campaigns are shown. To see other campaigns, you may select from one of the following states: 15

16 Criteria Description State Description All Campaigns Displays all campaigns irrespective of what state they are in. All Approved Campaigns Displays all campaigns that are in Approved state and are waiting to be enabled. All Waiting got Approval Displays all campaigns that are in Campaigns Waiting for Approval state to be approved by the Editorial team. All Rejected Campaigns All Disabled Campaigns All Budget Exhausted Campaigns Displays all campaigns that are in Rejected state to be submitted for approval after making changes. Displays all campaigns that have been disabled by User. Displays all campaigns that have exhausted their budgets and waiting to be re-enabled. The state may be selected from an option in the List box (highlighted by Green oval above) Created between By default MTNL Ads displays only campaigns that have been created in the past one year. To see older campaigns or to narrow down the search to a more recent time period, this search criteria can be used. The date range can be specified by specifying the Beginning date and End date in the Edit fields (highlighted by Blue Oval above) The dates can entered or by clicking on the Calendar icon next to the Edit fields and selecting a Date. 16

17 3. Please note that the Criteria works in AND mode. This means that if you specify! A for Name Starting With! All Approved Campaigns in Status, and! One year before now and current date in Created Between field, MTNL Ads will show campaigns whose name start with A and are in Approved state and have been created during the past one year. 4. Once you enter the desired criteria, click on Submit button (highlighted by Black Oval above). That will only display campaigns satisfying your criteria. 17

18 Campaign Management: Campaign Approval Advertisement campaigns are manually inspected by the Editorial team and once Approved, you will see the Advertisement as follows: If the campaign is not approved, you will get an giving reasons for the same. Then you can edit the campaign and re-submit it for Approval. It could take up to 24 hours to approve a campaign. 18

19 Campaign Management: Add Funds Once your advertisement has been approved, you will need to Add Funds to your Account so that the campaign can be activated. This process is called Recharging the account. MTNL Ads has a minimum recharge of INR You will need to recharge your Account balance by at least the Overall budget for the advertisement you want to activate. For example, if you want to activate an advertisement with Budget INR 7500, your account needs to have at least INR 7500 and therefore, you must recharge by at least INR Account can be recharged using Credit Cards You may follow the appropriate instructions to add funds. 19

20 Campaign Management: Add Funds Advertisers can add to funds by following these instructions: 1. Login to MTNL Ads Control panel. That will bring up the following screen. 20

21 2. Click on Account Information link (Highlighted by Red Oval above). That will bring up the following page. 21

22 3. Click on Recharge button. That will bring up the following screen 4. Enter the amount to be recharged (in INR) in the Recharge Amount field (Highlighted by Red Oval). 5. Click on Update button (highlighted by Blue Oval). That will display the overall Charges in INR (including taxes and fees) as below. 22

23 6. The full recharge amount will be given in Total Charges field (highlighted by Green Oval), 7. You can pay by Credit Card by clicking on the Pay Online link (highlighted by Red Oval). 8. Kindly note that Account Recharge is not refundable and can only be used for running advertisements. An alert indicating the same will be displayed as follows: 9. Click on OK to accept the terms. 10. This will take you to the Credit Card payment Gateway. You should follow the instructions in the Payment Gateway site to complete the transaction. 11. You can check your Account balance after the transaction by going to Account Information page. 23

24 Campaign Management: Enable Campaign Once funds have been added to Account balance, the campaign can be enabled by following these instructions: 1. Login to MTNL Ads Control panel. That will display the following screen: 2. If your campaign is not visible, select All Campaigns from Status combo box (highlighted by Blue Oval) and click on Search button (Highlighted by Green Oval). 3. Your advertisement campaign will be shown in inactive state. 4. Click on Enable link (Highlighted by Red Oval) next to your Advertisement campaign to enable it. 5. MTNL Ads will now enable your Advertisement campaign. Your advertisement will be considered for display with immediate effect. From this point onwards, your Advertisement will be shown in Active state as follows: 24

25 6. The advertisement is Active (See the tick mark highlighted by Red Oval). 7. To see how the Advertisement is performing, click on the Campaign Name (Highlighted by Blue Oval). The page will display various performance parameters including CPC, CPM, Impressions, Overall cost etc. 25

26 Campaign Management: Editing a Campaign Any parameter specified in an advertisement campaign can be edited at any point of time. Detailed instructions for the same are given below: 1. If the Advertisement campaign is Active, it needs to be Disabled before it can be edited. An Active advertisement will have the Disable link enabled (as given below): 2. Click on the Disable link (highlighted by Red Oval) to disable the campaign. 3. To edit the campaign, click on the Edit link next to campaign (highlighted by Red Oval below) 26

27 4. That will bring up the Edit page. The Edit page will contain all attributes of the Advertisement and any of them may be changed. 5. After making the desired changes, click on Save Changes button (highlighted by Red Oval). 6. If either Advertisement Text or URL Site is changed, the Advertisement goes into Waiting for Approval state and has to be approved by Editorial team. 7. If the above two fields are not changed, Advertisement stays in the same state as before. In this case, it can be made Active by enabling. 27

28 Campaign Management: Disable Campaign Campaigns that are under performing can be disabled to improve overall efficiency of Advertising. Active campaigns can be disabled as follows: 1. Login to MTNL Ads Control panel. 2. If your campaign is not visible, search for the same and make the campaign visible. Your campaign should be visible like the one below 3. Click on the Disable link (highlighted by Red Oval above). 4. The Campaign is disabled and placed in Disabled by User state. It is not considered for display and remaining unused budget in the campaign is transferred back to Account cash balance. Campaign Management: Delete Campaign Campaigns that do not need to be run further can be deleted by users. Please note that such campaigns and their details are deleted and will not be available for further access. The instructions for deleting campaigns are given below: 1. Login to MTNL Ads Control panel. 2. Active campaigns cannot be deleted directly. They have to disabled before deleting. 3. If your campaign is active, Disable the campaign. 4. Your campaign will appear as follows in the Control panel. 5. Click on the Delete link (highlighted by Red Oval above) 6. This will delete the campaign and make it unavailable for access. 28

29 Campaign Optimisation: Concepts MTNL Ads Control panel provides tools to monitor a Campaign's performance. These tools provide values to parameters typically used in On line advertising mechanism. Please note that certain advantages of MTNL Ads (like Shelf life) cannot be measured over a short term. In this document, we will give details of terminology used while analyzing an Advertisement performance. Campaign Optimisation: Concepts: Impression At any point of time, MTNL Ads looks at all Eligible campaigns (with daily budget and overall budget available) and chooses the one with the highest bid per for display. When a campaign is selected and Advertisement appended to the , it is referred to as an Impression. The number of impressions for your advertisement gives an idea of how many times it has been displayed to recipients. Campaign Optimisation: Concepts: Clicks MTNL Ads advertisement consists of a line of text and an URL. If the being sent is in HTML format, then the link will be click able. If an recipient is attracted by your advertisement and clicks on the link, MTNL Ads will keep track of it. This will be reported as Number of Clicks for your Advertisement campaign. 29

30 Campaign Optimisation: Concepts: CPM When an advertisement gets appended to an , the cost incurred is the amount bid for the advertisement per . For example, if you had bid INR 1 per , cost of one display will be INR 1. CPM, which is the short form for Cost Per Mille, refers to the cost for your advertisement to be shown in Thousand s. This will be the bid price multiplied by Suppose, your Bid per is INR 1, CPM will be INR The Bid per can be changed over the life of an advertisement. In that case, the following is used in calculating the CPM. (Total Cost Incurred for Advertisement) / (Total Number of Impressions) * 1000 Campaign Optimisation: Concepts: CPC CPC stands for Cost Per Click. This figure gives an idea of the effectiveness of your campaign. If your advertisement displays a certain number of times (say M) and cost per is say C, the total cost of this campaign is M x C. If N number of recipients clicked on the link and visited the Landing page, then the cost per click (or CPC) will be (M x C) / N CPC says how much you are spending to get a single visitor to your landing page. In general, a lower CPC figure indicates that your Advertisement is effective. While the CPC depends on various factors, an average advertiser can expect a CPC of INR 75/USD 1.88, Please note that links may not always be click able (specifically in the case of text s). If an recipient visits your Landing page directly (without clicking), it would not be accounted for in the above calculations. 30

31 Campaign Optimisation: Concepts: CTR CTR (Click Thru Rate) is an indication of the attractiveness of your campaign in making people visit your site immediately by Clicking. CTR is usually expressed as a percentage. If your Advertisement has a total of M impressions and received N clicks from user, CTR is calculated as follows: (N / M) * 100 % Please note that the above calculation only includes Click able links and where Recipient clicked on link and reached your Landing page. CTR depends on a lot of factors including the attractiveness of your Advertisement. 31

32 Campaign Optimisation: Performance Summary Once a campaign is activated and starts running, you can get Performance metrics of the Advertisements in MTNL Ads Control panel. The instructions for the same are as follows: 1. Login to MTNL Ads Control panel and search for your campaign (if required). 2. Click on the name of Advertisement campaign (highlighted by Red Oval above). That will display the Advertisement Summary page (as follows) 3. By default, the page will display details of the Advertisement including its Description, Overall Budget, Daily budget and Bid per . To get the performance details, click on the Display Performance Statistics link (highlighted by Red Oval). That will display the Performance Summary table (as follows) 32

33 4. The above displays all relevant performance parameters of the Advertisement campaign since the time it was enabled. Detailed information on each field is given below: Field Name Number of times displayed in current run Number of times displayed so far Number of times clicked so far CTR (Click Thru rate) Description An advertisement can be enabled and disabled at any point of time. This gives the Number of Impressions of the advertisement since the last time it was enabled. Number of impressions of the advertisement since it was first enabled. MTNL Ads advertisement consists of an Advertisement text line and an URL (of your Landing page). In case the is of HTML format, then the URL will be click able. This gives the number of times an recipient has clicked on the link to your Landing page. Kindly note that this only includes recipients who directly clicked on the link. If someone visited your Landing page directly after seeing the Advertisement, it cannot be tracked and would not be included in above statistics. Click Thru rate gives an indication of the Number of clicks received for every 100 impressions. In the above table, CTR is given as 0.885%. That means that for every 113 impressions, one person has clicked on your Advertisement. CPC (Cost Per Click - INR) CPM (Cost per thousand impressions - INR) CPC is a parameter related to CTR. This figure gives the cost (in INR) for track able clicks from the Advertisement campaign. The above table says that this campaign, on an average, costs INR 113 per click. CPM gives the rate for 1000 impressions of your Advertisement. This directly relates to your Bid per rate and is calculated as follows: (Total Cost for campaign) / (Total Number of Impressions) * The above table gives the parameters required to evaluate and optimize your campaigns. 33

34 Campaign Optimisation: Performance Charts While the above table gives the overall performance parameters, the evolution of these parameters over time is important to understand how efficient the Advertisement is. According to surveys, a prospect needs about 7 contacts with a firm before buying decision is made. This means that a campaign may start showing results after some time. time. Similarly, if a campaign is seasonal, its effectiveness may start wearing off after some To analyze this information, MTNL Ads provides charts that graph the parameters over a period of time. By default, the performance of 1. Number of Impressions 2. Number of Clicks, and 3. CPC over the last 7 days is given as a Line chart. Before going to analysis of these charts, we will describe the different operations that can be performed with respect to charts in the next few sections. 34

35 Campaign Optimisation: Chart Operations: Change Date Range MTNL Ads allows users to adjust the ranges of dates for which the data has to be graphed. This can be done as follows: 1. Login to MTNL Ads Control panel. 2. Click on Advertisement campaign name. 3. Click on Display Performance Statistics. That will bring up the following screen. 4. By default, data for the last 7 days is charted. This can be changed by specifying a different From Date and a To Date. 5. To specify a different Starting date, click on calendar icon next to From Date edit box (highlighted by Red Oval) and select the desired date. 6. To specify a different End date, click on calendar icon next to To Date edit box (highlighted by Blue Oval) and select the desired date. 7. Click on Submit button (highlighted by Green Oval). 8. This will now graph the parameters Impressions, Clicks and CPC for the advertisements between these dates and display the same. 35

36 Campaign Optimisation: Chart Operations: Change Graph Type/Export MTNL Ads allows users to see the same performance charts in different type of charts. User can also import the data in XLS (Spreadsheet) format so that it can be exported back into your CRM system. Detailed instructions for the same follow: 1. Login to MTNL Ads Control panel 2. Click on the Advertisement campaign name 3. Click on Display Performance Statistics 4. By default Line Charts are displayed (sample given below) 5. Displayed above the chart is Control to change type of chart. 36

37 6. To get the Chart as a Bar Chart, click on the Bar Radio button (highlighted by Red Oval). That will display the char as follows: 7. To get the chart as a Area Chart, click on Area radio button (highlighted by Blue Oval in the Control). That will display the data in Area graph format (as follows): 37

38 8. To get the data underlying the charts as a Spread sheet, click on the Export link (highlighted by Red oval below) and click on Export to XLS link (highlighted by Green Oval in the Control). That will give a file in CSV format and can be imported into any spreadsheet. The file will contain date wise data for Impressions, Clicks and Costs. Campaign Optimisation: Analyze Impressions Chart The first chart displayed gives the Number of Impression over a time period. A sample is given below: 38

39 The chart gives the Number of impressions of your advertisement in given time period. As you can see in the sample chart, the Number of Impressions will not be the same every day. In general, following observations will hold good: 1. As majority of MTNL Ads clients use for official purposes and they do not work weekends, the volume of s delivered during weekends usually drops. This means that you are likely to get lower number of impressions over weekends than during weekdays. You are likely to see less number of Impressions during Holidays. 2. The chart displays a Red line (highlighted by Green Oval) giving the maximum number of Impressions possible within your current daily budget and bid per . For example, if your Bid per is INR 1 and daily Budget is INR 1000, the maximum impressions you can get per day is (1000 / 1), which is The line indicates this amount. 3. As far as Impressions go, your goal must be to get number of Impressions as close to the maximum as possible. Otherwise, your Advertisement is wasting its potential and not even reaching the Daily budget. 4. If the number of Impressions is consistently below the the Red line (excluding seasonal changes), you can consider increasing the Bid per for your Advertisement. 5. Increasing the Bid per will lead to more Impressions, leading to better results. 6. For example, if the Number of Impressions is consistently very low (as highlighted by Red Oval above), you can increase the Bid per so that it gets close to the Red line. 7. You can gradually increase the Bid per (by INR 0.1 at a time) to see how it affects the Number of Impressions. 39

40 Campaign Optimisation: Analyze Clicks Chart The second chart that is displayed shows the Number of Clicks per day over the given Date range. A sample is given below: The number of clicks give a reasonable attractiveness of your Advertisement. 1. Like Impressions, Clicks are likely to exhibit a cyclic behavior. Since most of the users are Corporates, the number of clicks is likely to go down during weekends and holidays. 2. Otherwise, a good advertisement should see a gradual growth in the Number of clicks over a period of time. 3. If the Number of clicks starts falling (without any corresponding decrease in Number of Impressions), then it shows that your Advertisement effectiveness is falling. 4. At that point of time, you may want to evaluate and check if any changes to Advertisement text will make it more effective. 40

41 Campaign Optimisation: Analyze CPC Chart The third chart that gets displayed is the movement of CPC (Cost per Click in INR), over the date range. A sample is given below: Unlike Clicks and Impressions, CPC should not vary and in fact should stabilize at a particular value. 1. CPC will be very high initially. This is because users tend to click on an Advertisement they have seen before and recollect. Since your advertisement is new, the clicks will generally be low and CPC high. 2. You will see a rapid drop (highlighted by Red Oval) in CPC as your Advertisement reaches a critical point and users start clicking. Depending on the Advertisement, this could take up to a week. 3. Then over a period of time, the CPC will either come down gradually (or) stabilize (as highlighted by Blue Oval). 4. Barring abnormal situations, if CPC starts increasing consistently, then Recipients are losing interest in your Advertisement. 5. If recipient start losing interest in your Advertisement, you may want to tweak the Advertisement text to see if it improves performance. 6. In normal cases, your Advertisement reaches a CPC plateau and that is the natural CPC for your Advertisement campaign. If you are fine with that value, you can keep the Advertisement running. 41

42 Campaign Optimisation: Agency Partners MTNL Ads campaigns can be tweaked for maximum performance by analyzing the on line reports. If you would prefer that an experienced Agency partner do the same for you, you can visit MTNL Ads partner page at In addition to Creating Advertisement campaigns, MTNL Ads partners can continually monitor if required tweak your Advertisement for maximum performance. Campaign Optimisation: Support MTNL Ads offers following support: 1. Live Chat: You can chat with our trained Advertisement specialists as follows:! Click on Live Chat help link on top right corner of any MTNL Ads page.! Enter your Name and address.! You will be connected to an Advertisement specialist. 2. Offline Message: If all the Support personnel are busy and Live Chat is not available, you may leave a message by clicking on the Leave a Message link in MTNL Ads Support page at Response will be given within 1 business day. 42