How We Structure Campaigns at Scale

How We Structure Campaigns at Scale Speaker 2: Hello, hello and welcome back to the Better Advertising with BTR Media podcast. Today I'm incredibly excited to have Adam on the podcast. Adam is a LinkedIn legend at this point. You've definitely built your own network and reputation. And you manage pretty much everything from onboarding and training to leading a lot of our key accounts. So I want to bring you on because you have a very unique portfolio that you tend to work with. If I am on a call and someone says, I have a complicated ski line, I'm like, look, look no further. I have the person to chat with. Adam, do you want to tell us a little bit about your background and history and kind of what you do at Better Media before we dive in? Speaker 1: Yeah. Great to be here. I know we haven't recorded in a little bit. Long time coming though. So glad to be recording another episode with you, Dest. I come from a sort of a hybrid experience. Started in publishing, worked in full service, came over here and have been with Better AMS slash Better Media here for going on four years now. Essentially, what I pride myself in is specifics in terms of organization, and that empowers me to manage large, complex accounts at scale with precision. I know that's a lot of buzzwords. We'll get to how we do that, but that is my experience. Speaker 2: A hundred percent. It's perfect. And a lot of our core values at BTR are around trust, transparency, relationships, and results. And your opportunity to provide that customization for brands I think has been very advantageous for us. It's something we definitely lean into. We're a boutique agency for a reason. We want to provide that level of service. It's not a set it and forget it playbook across every account. And I think your book of business has really spoken to that. Top of mind, do you know what your largest What does a skew count book of business look like or can you throw out an average? Speaker 1: I would say let's go top two off the top of my head. The one that I have in mind I believe is the one that you have in mind. More of a side by side ATV OEM parts and that was I want to say Between 60,000 and 70,000 parent, or excuse me, child variations included. Speaker 2: 60,000 to 70,000. I wanted to reiterate that in case anyone kind of skipped past that portion of the podcast. Speaker 1: Yes, 60,000 to 70,000 fun times. And there are a couple other ones, largely sports apparel. I want to say that's probably closer to 40,000 to 50,000. Yeah. Speaker 2: You also mentioned a few in the tech category, and it's very similar to your sports and OEM category. Apparel is a fun one because you have your size, your color, your shape variation, so targeting can be difficult, but one model can fit another model. When you get into OEM parts and accessories, as well as tech accessories, think iPhone, Android, There are very specific guidelines across tagging, portfolio categorization, and alignment. Because if you do not get your sponsored ads correct, people are going to have a high return rate. They're going to buy something thinking it fits their product, an A-arm for an ATV, a charger or a mount for the wrong type of phone, and they're going to return, which can be detrimental for a brand. Those scenarios, I'd say, are what actually built our business. From a tech perspective, all of our internal nomenclature, all of our internal bulk launching, our keyword harvesting, and our reporting is built to accommodate those accounts. Because what we found, as mentioned, it's not a set it and forget it, and it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. So boiling that down, you have a very large presence on LinkedIn. You post a lot of content around these key initiatives of the business. So one, I want everyone to pause this episode right now and go follow Adam. Because even if you don't learn a ton from this episode, you're going to learn a ton from his LinkedIn. You are always posting solutions, opportunities, and workarounds in these certain areas. So that's really important to shout out. But through that network, I think that we've kind of defined there are a few areas that brands almost always struggle with. Operational scale, campaign naming and structure and organization, and reporting. So high-level Adam, when you're working with these brands, what's one of the first things that you do to clean up an account? Speaker 1: Yeah, great question. So, you know, let's use an OEM parts and accessories brand as a specific example because, of course, it matters here. You know, the first thing that I'll do is go in and take a look at the account structure, right? Are we working within campaigns with multiple ad groups? Are we working with large advertised product counts across Individual campaigns is targeting mixed. You know, I think with these specific complex brands, that single agent structure is imperative to making sure that we can optimize not only performance, but targeting budget allocation, et cetera, properly. Really, really challenging to do, especially across high complex view lines. If we don't have that system You know, sort of ironed out at the baseline. Speaker 2: And let's talk about that. Let's drill down a little bit further because I audit hundreds of accounts. You manage strategic accounts. When someone hears 70,000 SKUs, the first thing they're going to say absolutely not to a single keyword campaign or single ASIN campaigns, not single keyword. I apologize. Single ASIN campaigns are difficult to scale because you have to do independent keyword research for every single ASIN within every single campaign. What we see agencies typically do is create a campaign and upload hundreds of ASINs and just let the algorithm do its thing. The problem with that is, as we all know, budget distributions on the campaign level. So if you have multiple ad groups or multiple SKUs, you have no control over the specific targets and specific ASINs that you are tagging. What Adam's recommending you do is the first thing you should do when you're cleaning up an account is look at that structure and organization and start shifting to a single ASIN structure. The reason for that is really budget allocation and providing so much precision on the keyword harvesting and the keyword targeting side. Do you want to talk a little bit about, okay, we cleaned up the account. We have some of the single SKU structure. How do you manage the keyword research at scale for that many SKUs? Speaker 1: Great question. You know, and this is going to depend specifically on the brand itself, right? There are examples where, you know, let's say, You know, an ATV company can give me a fitment guide and say, hey, these parts fit with these specific models. Here's the sizing. Here is the, you know, wheel size, something along those lines. If I can have, you know, a document like that at the ASIN level across an entire catalog, I can then, you know, kind of do a couple different things. The first place that I start are seed keywords or baseline keywords, right? What do we refer to the product as? And a lot of times I'll concatenate that along the Fitment guide and we'll string together, you know, four or five, six keywords per ASIN. And if you think about how that functions across broad phrase and exact, right, what you're doing is you're isolating your exact match keywords based on Fitment, but you're also collecting variation across broad phrase. Now, couple that with the software that we have at our disposal here at Better Media, which is essentially, you know, able to go and take converting search terms, recycle them into manual campaigns. That is an ever-evolving cycle of continuous targeting, ramp-up, and visibility at the ASIN level, right? It's all about how you manage at scale organizationally from there. That's imperative. Speaker 2: That's a fantastic call out. A lot of people actually struggle to harvest their keywords and put them in the appropriate campaigns at scale. A few things that we do to help assist with that process is our single ASIN structure makes it really easy to filter a search term report and say this ASIN drove this sale for this search term and then we recommend putting it into a new campaign. If you are constantly harvesting keywords and putting them into an existing campaign, one thing you're going to see is your budget doesn't necessarily scale at the level of your additional keywords. So you may have two to three keywords that are eating up the majority of your budget. Putting new keywords, even if successful, into that same campaign is going to dilute your budget or it's just not going to collect any impressions because your budget's already fuddling towards your top sales driving terms. We have internally built out a software to help with this alignment. It helps align the search terms that we're scraping that are successful and align them with the appropriate products to then launch new campaigns for. But our software is allowed to do that because of our structure and setup. So what Adam's saying is, because he set these things up so appropriately from the beginning, and we focus on things called seed keywords, but also we layer in ranking keywords, where do we have the most market share opportunity, we also take all historical data in account. No matter how messy the campaign or ad groups are, we are able to pretty much formulate through a lot of work, which is what Adam excels at, where those search terms should go. So when you have size or things like, again, Android versus iPhone, you're able to usually pull a few of those seed keywords and then manipulate the search term report data to create alignment. And what that allows him to do is then take a huge portfolio, look at your budget distribution. Because we're segmenting things in such a granular fashion, you can say, hey, I have $300,000. Here's how I need to segment it across the portfolio. Because the second question that Adam and I typically get with this is, that's too much to manage. I don't want three million campaigns. But because of the next level that Adam's going to talk about, which is our campaign nomenclature, we don't have to view the business on an ascent level. Can you talk about some of the levels that our reporting provides because of our naming and our tagging structure? Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, of course. And this is, in full transparency, one of my favorite subjects to dive into. I have a lot of questions that are pumped through my DMs on LinkedIn, you know, on this specific topic. Because it is, you know, it is one of the most important aspects of account management if you're going to manage properly at scale. For this example, I will use That NFL officially licensed apparel is probably my favorite example to bring up. But in this instance, it fits perfectly for a couple of different reasons, right? If we think about you know, one brand that sells NFL apparel. We're talking t-shirts, long-sleeve, fleece, which includes crewnecks and hoodies, and that's all across men's, women's, and children's, across six different sizes, four different colors, right? And that's across 32 teams. Well, 31 minus the Cowboys, because they have their own rights. Speaker 2: Naturally. Speaker 1: Naturally. We can see Just from that explanation, how complex this management can be and how complex the organization can be in the account. Where do I even start in terms of advertising at the child variation, etc.? If we think about nomenclature here, this is where the importance comes in. I work in aspects like a product identifier, what we refer to the parent as, with a variation. Pittsburgh Steelers hoodie, black, extra large, men, SKU, ad strategy, targeting type, et cetera. You can then essentially provide a key, right? Hey, to bring up performance at the SKU level, type in the SKU. There's all of your campaigns. So really, you can get creative and organize this any way you want. Speaker 2: Which is incredibly important, because a lot of people will be, again, overwhelmed. That's too many campaigns. I don't know how to manage that at scale, which is why we built out this structure within our tech. For a brand manager who just needs to see everything holistically, we can drill down and say, hey, the total NFL portfolio is managing towards this ROAS, this NUDA brand, this detail page views, this opportunity to scale XYZ. Let's say they want to go a little bit deeper because they're really hands-on keyboard and they understand. We can say, okay, within the NFL, here's how this team's performing. Within that team, this is how this product line's performing. Within that product line, here's how the search terms are performing on the ASIN level. We've provided that visibility to satisfy both needs. The person who's hands-on keyboard and needs ASIN level performance data from a search term perspective, but also the CEO or the brand manager who just needs, you know, the 80,000 foot view. It allows us to go as granular as needed or as broad as needed. And that's, you know, I mentioned the budget distribution perspective. A lot of people come to us, I have this amount of budget, how should I deploy it? We are big fans of the 80-20 method, but we're also really good at what we do. So what happens when you perfectly optimize the 20% of your portfolio that's driving 80% of the sales? Well, we're able to then start working down that portfolio list and say, okay, we have that 20% done, let's start working on the next list. Let's identify opportunities where we're converting better than category. We have the tech. That's probably the biggest thing. Tech in place to make that doable at scale. That's really, really important. Adam's not doing all of this by hand. I mean, there were times in the past where he's definitely done this all by hand until we built this out. But it allows you to, I think, shift really quickly from, you know, being the CEO that is looking at the business high level, quarter to quarter, year over year, but also drill down as granular as you need immediately. Speaker 1: 100%. That's perfectly said. And a great example I'll digress to my NFL officially licensed apparel brand. Think about the adjustments that need to be made on both sides, both the brand side and the agency side, seasonally and week to week. There's two things that impact apparel or sports apparel, team performance and weather outside. When we start the NFL season, A lot of places, it's 90 degrees. T-shirts and tank tops and whatnot are selling. Well, fast forward to week eight, that switch from short sleeve to long sleeve, et cetera, is going to be abrupt and it's going to be quick, right? And if you think about, let's say, the 2017 Pittsburgh Steelers who won 11-0 and then lost five in a row to end the season, that's going to be a big sales drop. You have to be able to adjust on a week-to-week basis. And if your account is not structured and organized accordingly, You're never going to be able to get there, especially on the budget side. Speaker 2: How do you feel about the Eagles? Speaker 1: You know, I think we'll need more time for a second episode. Speaker 2: How do you feel about DayXee Tomko and the Eagles? Anything you want to shout out to her while we're on this podcast? Speaker 1: You know, I respect her passion. Absolutely love having conversations with Day. She is awesome. We will see what this year brings. I'll just leave it at that. Speaker 2: Amazing. I do want to call out an aspect of that that you mentioned. I've been very clear. We don't run a set it and forget strategy. We're a boutique agency. We are hands on keyboard. We are making adjustments fast. We are able to do that because of our reporting, but also our campaign naming and our tagging. As Adam just mentioned, We could see a team have a major loss or a major win and search volumes immediately going to correlate with what happened the day of that game. If you do not have great campaign naming, you cannot do that very well. You can somewhat use your targeting tab and filter by ASIN, but it's pulling your campaign name, so that's not the easiest. You could pull your advertised product report and make adjustments on the search term level. Not the easiest because you need to adjust both bids and budgets. We are doing that very efficiently because of our naming. Our campaign naming high level is typically product identifier, strategy, Keyword research type, portfolio, and internal categorization that a brand maybe utilizes. And what that means is Adam can be sitting at home on the couch watching the game, see the outcome of the game, and within five minutes, if that, go in and make the appropriate changes in ad console because it is so clearly labeled and named. And I think that's really, really important to highlight. Speaker 1: Yep, 100%. And, you know, I think there's this There's this notion in the industry that you need a, you know, a shiny tech solution to be able to do this at scale. Now, of course, it does help, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Our developers done an amazing job empowering the team to be able to manage these accounts effectively and honestly, much, much simpler now than in previous years, right? But the foundation of what we're talking about here comes down to campaign structure, organization, and nomenclature. And if you can master that side of it, It's easy enough to bring up a full list of campaigns and adjust budgets by 10-20% incrementally. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I've actually heard a few people in the industry lately saying campaign naming doesn't matter if you have a good tech solution. Speaker 1: Oh. Speaker 2: And I actually hate that because yes, you can achieve the same thing with a good tagging system, but not all tagging systems are based off campaign naming. It's just how we chose to kind of make it easier in my opinion. And that's because we can easily pull up any name and know exactly what the goal and outcome of that campaign name is, which makes the tagging 3000 times easier. I would also say, It makes it, in my opinion, a much stronger transparent relationship with the brands in the beginning when they log into Ad Console and they see a campaign running at maybe 100% ACOS. But they know that campaign is named as a new product launch and a ranking campaign. They can clearly see an objective of a campaign in the campaign name. We can clearly see the name to go make adjustments on the fly. I mean, I've literally been on the call with clients who have been like, I want to see my ad at the top of the page. On the call, I logged in, made it happen, told them to refresh their screen. Because of our campaign naming, It was done and easy. So it's a pain to set up. We built our tech for it. But having good campaign naming and or campaign tagging allows you to have incredible reporting, which makes your account so much more actionable, in my opinion. Speaker 1: Yep. Agreed. I would say, you know, high level, the most complex SKU lines or SKU accounts that I manage would be Probably ATV, OEM parts and accessories. Phone cases is always fun and very challenging. Speaker 2: Model and then the new launch completely changes what's trending and returns. Speaker 1: It's multifaceted, right? There's a ton of layers. But, you know, to your point, Dest, if you can display Organization in an account, right? And then display adjustments that you can make because of that organization. That's an understanding of a business as ebbs and flows. And if you can master that, that's going to help build trust in the long term for your brands that maybe didn't get this quality of service at their last agency. You know, it's tough, but it's definitely doable. Speaker 2: And I will iterate on that. It's the quality of service, the speed at which we can make decisions, the speed at which the brand can log into ad console and just know what's going on. It adds a level of efficiency and trust to all of our relationships that I think has been exponential. Like seeing what we're able to provide from a transparency perspective has improved our trust. And there's a reason that we had a 95% retention rate in the last 12 months. Brands understand what's going on and they trust that what we're doing is in their best interest. And there's a reason that Adam, you specifically, I think have led the way Originally, I think set a retention record. I think you went almost a full year with 100% retention rate. I will say you had an incredible book of business. Speaker 1: Very lucky. Speaker 2: You've set the standard in the space for what's possible. And I think a lot of it is by pushing our tech to be better, pushing our reporting to be better, which you've absolutely done with your complicated clients, but also providing this level of customer service and level of just listening and making adjustments and accommodating our brand's needs, I think has set the bar for the company. Speaker 1: Yeah, I appreciate that. It's been a pleasure and an honor to be able to do that and then take those aspects of management and teach the team. That's something that really motivates me and lights my fire. Wouldn't change a thing, wouldn't have it any other way. Speaker 2: That being said, if you are a difficult brand manager and have the most difficult SKU line possible, Adam is not available. I'm available for questions. I cannot continue to give only Adam these accounts, but you do have a perfect skill set. I think that's the thing that's been the most exciting for me is you have helped guide our tech in a way where that strategy no longer just lives in your brain. It is really the core and the focus of what we do at BTR Media. Everyone from our interns up into our senior account managers is providing that same level of customization, that hands-on keyboard response times, and that's been incredible. With that, I will say thank you so much for hopping on today. Any other key pieces of feedback or value you want to give to the audience? Speaker 1: You know, as a closing statement, I will say, popular to contrary belief, I am not an Excel wizard. I am not a math wizard. I am very specific in my organization and structure and how I like to manage. And if you can master that, it makes things like Excel utilization all the more simple. Speaker 2: Absolutely. That's actually fantastic feedback. I know we have Dustin on one end posting all the API hacks and wizardry on his end. I always resonate with your content because I'm like, I don't know how to use Excel, but I can name a campaign really well. So we're covering everything from the most advanced developer to someone who's just getting started with ads and needs no campaign naming. Anything and everything between, I would say, is kind of the Better Media value prop from an education perspective. Speaker 1: Perfectly said. Speaker 2: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for hopping on. Again, follow the team. We're doing so much more with our podcast in terms of content, education, and just making sure to cover everyone's biggest needs in this space. Thank you so much, Adam. Speaker 1: Thanks, Dest.