Week 11: Conclusion

Hello everyone, and welcome to my final senior project blog. I hope everyone who has followed me on this journey has learned as much as I have. When I first started my senior project, I thought that audience targeting was the most important aspect of digital advertising campaign success. This might have been the case a few years ago, but audience targeting is becoming less and less important. Platforms like Meta are actually encouraging broad targeting. Broad targeting is when an advertiser institutes little to no customer segmentation constraints. The reason Meta and other advertising platforms are shifting to this is because of their improvements in machine learning. Broad targeting enables Meta to find the perfect audience for an advertisement without the advertiser needing to implement customer segmentation techniques such as interest-based targeting. Sometimes an advertiser doesn’t know the best audience to target their advertisement to, and by enabling broad targeting, they can maximize campaign results. Although utilizing customer segmentation strategies such as retargeting and demographic targeting can improve the performance of a campaign, it is not what makes or breaks the success of a campaign. 

My onsite experience at Digicom taught me the full picture of the drivers of campaign success. Every day at Digicom, I would start my day by analyzing campaign data for a range of their clients. Through this, I learned how businesses can improve their advertising campaign success by optimizing for key metrics such as CPM, CTR, CPC, CPA, and ROAS. For example, if an advertiser wants to improve their ROAS (return on ad spend), either their CPA (cost per acquisition) needs to be lowered or their AOV (average order value) needs to increase. There are many strategies to lower CPA, such as improving a landing page or testing different audience targeting strategies, but the most important technique is creative testing. Creative testing is so critical to campaign success for a multitude of reasons. What’s the point of paying for ads if the advertisement is of low quality? A poor-quality advertisement can tank campaign success. But even if an advertisement performs great one week, that doesn’t guarantee that it will perform the same the next week. Social media is fast-paced and ever-changing, so advertisers need to keep up with trends and changes in consumer preferences. Through creative testing, advertisers can experiment with different types of advertisements to see which one drives the best results. 

I am very thankful to Digicom for providing me with the resources and guidance to thrive throughout my senior project. Through reflecting on my experience, I have had my largest takeaway. The largest winners in digital advertising are the platforms themselves. There is a reason why Google and Meta are both two of the largest companies in the world. Billions of people use Google Search, Facebook, and Instagram. Millions of businesses compete with each other to run digital advertisements. Hundreds of thousands of digital marketing agencies compete for clients. But there are only so many large social media platforms and search engines. Google and Meta are the market leaders in digital advertising. In 2023, Meta’s revenue was over $130 billion. In 2023, Google’s revenue will be over $300 billion. Through pursuing my senior project, I have learned the power of digital advertising. If utilized effectively, it could grow a business exponentially. But in all business, there are winners and losers. Meta and Google are definitely the biggest winners.

Thanks again to everyone for joining me on my senior project journey. This was my last blog, but I will be presenting my senior project at Basis on June 14th. I hope to see you all there, and if not, I will be uploading a recording of my presentation below. I hope you all enjoy my presentation!

Senior Project Presentation, June 14th, 2024: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QWbB_QMyRUDNA7xKRJPoiU5EhV8vaiyN/view?usp=sharing