Collectively, the industry spends around $674 billion on global advertising every year. How sure are you that your ad budget is being used effectively? Are you confident your ads are relevant to your target audiences?
Today, ecommerce is all about personalization. Online shoppers expect a tailored experience that focuses entirely on their needs and preferences. Your customers do not have the time or patience to consume anything that isn’t in their interest. This is why you need to customize the way you advertise your business and products for each individual customer. Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) helps businesses create ads for different audiences more efficiently.
How does dynamic creative optimization benefit ecommerce businesses?
Nearly all online customers (99%) skip ads frequently because they find them disruptive and irrelevant. In fact, more than 63% of them use ad blockers.
Dynamic creative optimization is a modern advertising strategy that focuses on delivering relevant and impactful advertisements to the right audience, customized and personalized based on real-time data analysis. Given the wide range of consumer audiences across the world, creating separate ads that cater to each segment manually is unrealistic for any business. DCO helps you generate multiple versions of the same ad quickly by tweaking parts of the ad in such a way that it is suitable for diverse customers. By adopting this strategy, you can cater to a wider set of audiences without exasperating time and resources – all while ensuring consumers stay engaged.
Here is how DCO can benefit your ecommerce business:
- Creating personalized shopping experiences for customers
This year alone, 65% of ecommerce stores have witnessed an increase in their conversion rates after switching to a personalization strategy. With huge volumes of content across the web, it’s easy for your content to get lost in the crowd. You need to ensure your ads and listings stand out by providing them with a desirable experience instead of flooding them with unwanted information.
Today, 91% of online customers prefer to shop with businesses that remember their preferences and provide relevant shopping experiences. Dynamic creative optimization helps you customize your advertisements based on customer insights instantly, offering them a personalized experience across platforms and devices. This way your content is valuable to each potential customer, leading to increased conversion rates.
- Enhancing operational workflows
Dynamic creative optimization tools ease the complexity of handling huge product feeds for ad creation, without requiring manual edits, version control, or re-uploads. This saves you time and effort in creating several separate advertisements for each of your users. As a result, you can focus on growing your business rather than merely creating multiple versions of ads.
For instance, the Productsup platform offers an Image Designer tool, which is a quick and effective way to create and save highly customized image templates. The Image Designer enables you to move, resize, and rotate text, images, ratings, or icons, as well as set color, transparency, fonts, background images, and more. With more than 800 fonts and 200 icons available, its bulk editing options make it easy to personalize creatives according to any channel, market, and audience.
- Maximizing return on investment (ROI)
Why spend advertising budget on users who you know wouldn’t convert anyway? Why create ads with a banner that doesn’t resonate with your customers? Advertisements take up a huge chunk of your business’ budget and it plays a significant role in marketing your business to your customers. DCO can help you allocate ad spend more effectively by speeding up ad customization, saving resources, and boosting performance.
- Learn More: Top 7 global consumer trends for 2024
How to create an effective DCO strategy
Here’s how you can create an effective DCO ad campaign to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time:
- Define your scope
Before you build an ad campaign, set a clear scope. Decide what your actual goals are and what outcome you expect out of your DCO campaigns. Define your objectives and KPIs. This helps you measure success and evaluate performance during the campaign.
- Know your audience
Conduct thorough research on your target audiences— their demographics, geolocation, purchasing behavior, search history, preferences, etc. Decide whom you wish to target with a particular DCO ad and what message you want to convey to them. Find out how to make your messaging relevant and interesting for your users.
- Prepare a strong ad template
Build an effective ad template that considers the elements that you want to customize. Decide how dynamic elements, like product names, CTAs, discount labels, and background images, will be presented together within the creatives. Fix the size dimensions and ratios of the imagery that you want included. Create a flexible template to avoid costly back-and-forth readjustments.
- Analyze performance and test elements regularly
As your ad campaigns are running, regularly check their performance among your different audiences. Check if the ads have reached your intended audience and how well they engaged with them. If a certain ad isn’t performing well, try switching out different elements, like your custom image background, to see if engagement improves.
By frequently testing creative elements, you can identify what works best and optimize accordingly. This iterative process ensures that your campaigns remain effective and relevant. Keep an eye on your traffic and conversion rates as well to measure the campaign’s effectiveness.
Recent trends in dynamic creative optimization
In 2024, 82% of businesses have adopted a DCO strategy. Of these businesses, 33% of them are planning to increase their budget for DCO. Let’s look at the top DCO trends that can improve the scalability of your ecommerce business.
- Entering a cookieless future
Cookies have always been an integral part of the internet, used by browsers to create a smooth surfing experience. Advertisers use third-party cookies to identify their target audience and analyze their behavior, thereby creating relevant ads for their customers. Cookies also allow you to track and measure the performance of user experiences.
But now that the web is being groomed towards a user-controlled future, third-party cookies will soon cease to exist. However, dynamic creative optimization leverages first-party data and contextual targeting, so advertisers can still provide the right audience with the most relevant ads.
- Enhancing data collection
With the huge role that data plays in helping advertisers resonate with their target audience, advertisers need to exhaust all of the ways available to gather quality data. A few such reliable options are:
- Purchasing history
- Geolocation
- Demographics
- Device IDs
- Mobile tagging
- Customer relationship management (CRM) data
With these data sources, you can better understand your audiences to deliver a highly personalized customer experience.
- Optimizing ad campaigns with AI
AI is making huge strides in the advertising world. You can now leverage AI-powered tools to customize your DCO ad campaigns by simply uploading relevant images, ad copies, CTAs, etc.
Further, AI can be used to track the performance of your creatives and optimize them accordingly to gain more relevant impressions. The technology can also be used to analyze customer behavior and display products relevant to their search history or encourage them to return to their abandoned shopping carts.
Are you curious to learn more about dynamic creative optimization and how it can improve the efficiency of your ad campaigns? See Productsup’s DCO capabilities by booking a demo.