Beth Sibbring from Tangible Impact presented on "(digital) creative that counts" at the September 2017 Columbus Web Analytics Wednesday. The slides focus on digital display creative and outlines -- with examples -- what works and what doesn't (and why so many companies' processes lead to the latter).

1. CREATIVE
THAT COUNTS
WAW | SEPTEMBER 12, 2017

2. Beth Sibbring Bio
 Digital Marketing Pioneer
 Duke University
 Procter & Gamble
 Sterling Commerce
 CompuServe
 AOL
 Tangible Impact (since 2004)
 Dublin and Lakeside

3. Tangible Impact Profile
 Smart and effective design, copywriting and coding of
digital display ads, landing pages, forms, emails, microsites,
SEM, social media assets – plus print ads, direct mail and
more.
 Signature strength is in conversion optimization – strategic
testing, analysis and optimization of creative assets – to
maximize the performance of digital and print marketing
campaigns.
 100s of successful creative tests and CRO programs.
 Technical expertise for marketing automation support,
from managing testing platforms, to development in any
CMS, to building databases and integrating tracking across
platforms.
 We fuel digital marketing campaigns with high-performance creative.

4. Creative Counts
“Based on our years of research in this space, we’ve
determined that the quality of the creative is four
times more important than the characteristics of the
media plan in generating sales.
In fact, creative is the single most important factor and
accounts for over half the changes in a brand’s sales
over time.
Getting the creative right is absolutely essential, and
yet its importance so often gets minimized in the
process of developing an ad campaign.”
Jeff Cox
Executive Vice President
comScore ARS

5. Management Matters
 The impact of campaign creative is never neutral.
 Creative, in every case, affects campaign
performance – and it’s either positive or negative.
 Creative can be the difference between campaign
failure and success.
 Data-driven creative management will contribute to
campaign performance.
 Informed creative design, measurement, smart
testing, analysis, and optimization is proven to work.
 And yet digital creative is rarely managed this way.

6. Was This a Fair Test?
 In a strategic effort to expands its market beyond
millennials, Blue Apron embarked on a test campaign to
reach the “empty nester” market.
 The campaign was based on a promising target
audience, thorough media evaluation, careful placement
selection, pricing negotiation, and a clear ROI goal.
 Creative cobbled together from other campaigns.
 Banner messages, at least in part, off target.
 Landing page fairly impenetrable.
 Critical sign-up form 2 clicks away.
 The result: low CTR, poor conversion rate, high CPA
 This was largely due to creative.

7. This is More Like It.
 Strategically rethink the creative assets, to ensure
they make a strong contribution to this test
campaign’s performance.
 Banner messages with 3 different reasons for an
empty nester to give Blue Apron a try, appealing to
3 different motivations to buy.
 Banner designs optimized for 50+ eyes, in terms of
layout, brevity, type size, imagery and color
contrast.
 Banner animation showcases 3 meals, to both
attract the eye and broaden appeal to more
individual preferences.
 Banners link directly to the natural next step, the
short sign-up form, bypassing the landing page
entirely.

8.  The new banner, in a 300x600 size in
ROS inventory, produced a 35%
increase in CTR.
 The new banner, in a 300x600 size for
the Food Target, achieved a 138% to
171% increase in CTR.
 We can boost 300x600 banner
performance higher in both ROS and
for the Food Target – with a few
additional small changes.
 The 300x250 and 728x90 banners,
similar in design, can also be readily
refined, for improved CTR and net
acquisitions across the campaign.Original Revised
Better Creative Improves Campaign ROI
Recommended

9. Typical Campaign Creative Development
 Marketing makes request of Creative.
 Creative supports cross-company needs, with little direct
marketing expertise.
 Creative goals are to follow brand standards, adhere to
production specs and meet deadlines – without
accountability for campaign results.
 Creative deliverables are often a single design concept with
a single message, resized into all required units, likely
without HTML5 animation.
 Creative evaluation and approval is based on requirements
(brand, ad specs, compliance) and personal opinion.
 Best practices are not applied.
 Testing is not considered.

10. Typical Campaign Creative Management
 Campaign creative is launched, often pointing to the
company website homepage.
 Campaign performance monitoring is at media property
and placement level, not at the creative level.
 Creative does not appear in reporting.
 Individual creative performance is averaged together,
across placements and sizes.
 No analysis of creative is done, nor any mid-campaign
optimizations planned or executed.
 Campaign shortfalls in reaching CTR, CPA and ROI goals
are most often attributed to audience, media and cost.

11. A Better Way
 Ensure your creative delivers measurable results.
 Define conversion events, metrics of success and goals.
 Develop informed hypotheses.
 Prioritize based on impact and effort.
 Apply best practices.
 Develop multiple design concepts, to increase chance of success.
 Create multiple messages to appeal to more people and motivations.
 Cast a wide net, then optimize (pull under-performers), mid-campaign.
 Develop both all-new designs and subtle variations, for more success.
 Declare multiple winners – and nurture performance of contenders.

12. Frontpoint – Creative Testing Preparation
 Review and research audience personas,
marketing channels, creative assets, past
campaign performance and competitive activity.
 Establish testing priorities based on potential
impact, upside and feasibility.
 Audit marketing automation environment,
including CMS, testing platform, LMS, data
integration and analytics tools.
 Integrate customer journey data by enabling
lead passing from test landing pages into LMS
(Janus)
 Ensure actionable analytics by layering in
Google Analytics
 Prepare to deploy tests in Optimizely.

13. Frontpoint- Banner Test 1 Baseline
 Challenge – Frontpoint had run display campaigns, but without ever
achieving a satisfactory CPA.
 The site design agency produced new creative (below) that was consistent
with the site and landing page but in which Frontpoint lacked confidence.
 Goals – Develop and test new creative to show an immediate CTR increase
and a decrease in CPA (click and view-based attribution).
 Metric of Success – Achieving target CPA.

14. Frontpoint- Banner Test 1 Strategy
 Design – Develop creative with a clearer visual
emphasis on the system (vs. components) and/or
end users (vs. call-center staff or text-only designs).
Make the logo/brand more prominent, as view-
based conversions are being counted.
 Messaging – Use headlines and supporting copy to
address a broad range of motivations for choosing a
security system: trust in the system, technological
superiority (wireless), personal safety, a $100
discount, the “completeness” of the solution, and
past home invasion experience.
 Technical – Speed to market and cost are
limitations, so deploy test creative as static GIFs,
rather than developing them as fully animated
HTML5 ads.

15. Frontpoint – Banner Test 1 Structure
Plan for sufficient impressions and clicks to produce 100 leads per test cell and 95% confidence in lift/depression.

16. Frontpoint - Banner Test 1 Results
 CTR Impact – The overall top performer
(“Get Complete”) drove a 75% increase in
CTR.
 CPA Impact – The top CPA performer
(“Trusted”) produced 54% improvement in
CPA vs. the top CPA-performing control.
 View-Based Conversions: Taken as groups –
new vs. control creative – the new banners
produced a 68% improvement in view-
based conversion rate.
 Result – CPA goal achieved.
 Result – Improved brand awareness and
affinity as evidenced by the view-based
conversion gains.

17. Frontpoint – Banner Test 2 Strategy
 Design – Build upon the success of the new
designs vs. creating all-new designs.
 Optimize these standouts – still diamonds in-
the-rough – before moving on to testing
additional all-new concepts.
 Messaging – Test more subtle variants of the
headlines, sub-heads, and CTA copy, as well as
different messaging angles.
 Retest copy from lower performers – with the
thought that some designs may have held back
strong copy.
 Technical – Introduce HTML5 animation, as it’s
consistently shown to improve all key metrics.

18. Frontpoint - Landing Page Test 1 Baseline
 Challenge – The landing page performance is critical
to any and every campaign channel achieving its
target CPA.
 Hypothesis – This landing page requires another
click to see and interact with the sign-up form -
inhibiting cross-channel campaign performance.
 Goals – Improve conversion rate and the Google
Quality Score.
 Metric of Success – Increased conversion rate per
visitor. Improved Quality Score.

19. Frontpoint – Landing Page Test 1 Strategy and Structure
 Test Strategy – The 3 test pages each feature a different lead gen form: multi-step with buttons, 4 form-fields, and
6 form-fields.
 Test Setup – The test pages are being run head-to-head against the control page as an A/B/C/D test through a 3rd
party testing platform. Traffic is coming from multiple sources – both display and search.

20. Frontpoint – Landing Page Test 1 Early Results
 Early Results – All 3 test pages are outperforming the control by double digits, with the 4 form-field page leading.

21. Takeaways
 Creative is of enormous importance to digital
marketing campaign success.
 Digital creative must be strategically developed.
 Craft a multi-message strategy.
 Develop diverse concepts.
 Apply design best practices.
 Test continually and quantify all contributions.
 Data-driven creative optimization is one of the
most cost-effective ways to improve campaign
performance.

22. Takeaways - Best Practices – beth@tangibleimpact.com

23. Beth Sibbring
614.296.4327
beth@tangibleimpact.com
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