#Path to Conversion

The Genius Monkey platform is all about efficiency, but what happens when the “optimization” does more harm than good? Just as cutting out the DSP step leads to long-term loss, removing programmatic channels like display, audio, OTT, or video might cost less in the short-term, but weakens the overall advertising strategy and inevitably cuts into the bottom line. Programmatic ads work best when they work together, allowing the strengths of each medium to overcome the drawbacks of the others.

April is here and that means it’s Genius Monkey’s very own brand optimization month!! The first topic to kick off this month is A/B testing, or split testing. In programmatic advertising, every little uptick in performance matters and can affect your bottom line. Advertisers need to carefully craft the right message, the right landing page, and the right form fill or sales funnel to have the greatest impact. There’s a lot advertisers need to get right, and there’s no better method for doing so than split-testing.

Finding new customers will always be important, but the data suggests that retaining the customers you have is even more vital to your long-term success: On average, around 65% of your conversions will come from returning customers An industry-noted study suggests that boosting your customer retention rate by 5% can increase your bottom line up to 95% Acquiring a new customer costs 5 - 25 times as much to retain an existing one 1) Understand Customer Needs Before Even They Do At a basic level, you can keep customers happy by fulfilling their needs.

In early 2023, a startup called Telly boldly declared its intention to revolutionize the television industry. Many took notice because the founder and CEO is Ilya Pozin, the former CEO of the wildly successful Pluto TV streaming platform. Even more stand-out was the novel approach to selling televisions: giving them away at no charge. The basic premise is to sell ad space on the TV that subsidizes the cost of the panel itself.

Programmatic advertising has been on the rise ever since Genius Monkey helped coin the term in 2010. It’s no easy one-size-fits-all solution, though; a good programmatic campaign involves a lot of work with careful research, a thought-out strategy, and – the topic of today – a strong paid search plan. Travis Champ, COO of Genius Monkey, commented: “Paid search is so important that Genius Monkey will often tell clients to start – at the very least – a branded PPC campaign prior to using our platform.

If you live in the U.S. and have been on the internet this month, there’s a good chance you’ve been on YouTube. The video platform hosts more than 2.7 billion active users, and no platform can get that popular without seeing its fair share of controversies. Lately, YouTube has been making some not-so-great headlines that demonstrate the importance of knowing the entire customer journey in your programmatic campaigns. Let’s take a closer look at impression tracking and what we can learn about it from YouTube.

Getting clicks on your ad can be exciting, but a savvy marketer knows that a click isn’t too impressive on its own – it’s conversions that really count. That said, it is a necessary stepping stone: the moment a customer enters or moves along the sales funnel. A click is a good thing because it represents a consumer willing to take action… or at least it can. Some are better than others, and if you want to get conversions, you need to make sure you’re getting the right kind of clicks.

A crucial skill in marketing is knowing what types of ads work best for each stage of the sales funnel, as well as finding and filling the gaps. Long-thought to be top-of-funnel-only, we here at Genius Monkey have found that audio ads have become extremely flexible in the modern age, and can help you propel your customers through every part of their purchase journey. Let’s take a look: Turn Up the Radio Who would’ve thought that radio would continue to be such a powerful tool in our modern-day, internet-driven world?

The COVID pandemic was largely responsible for the explosive growth of CTV in the last few years. The lockdowns left many people looking for new entertainment, and connected TV was a simple solution. The U.S. Census Bureau reported a 35% increase in shopping for electronics during this time, suggesting an increased investment into in-home entertainment. The lockdowns are mostly lifted all over the world, and those TVs are still there and are still used.

DoubleVerify recently created an ad verification solution that can verify an ad’s viewability for connected TV. They launched this ad verification in February 2023, allowing advertisers to determine if an ad within a CTV app was actually seen by a user. This marks the first time a viewability measurement solution for CTV has hit the market. On top of our numerous other verification metrics, Genius Monkey employs DoubleVerify for all our video and CTV/OTT campaigns to ensure inventory quality and provide fraud avoidance.