Ad Creative or Media Placement: Which Is More Important When Optimizing Campaigns?
Optimization—the task of evaluating campaign results and applying one’s learnings—is an important and continuous process in online advertising. Advertisers who optimize effectively rapidly narrow in on the campaign tactics that produce the best results, so that each advertising dollar goes further. A number of companies and solutions exist to help advertisers optimize their campaigns. In direct response advertising, conventional wisdom is that three main factors—ad creative, media placement and offer—influence campaign performance. But most of the available online optimization solutions focus solely on elements of the ad creative. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, Microsoft Advertising Institute tested the relative role of ad creative against one of the other above factors, media placement, in online direct response advertising.
