Do More, Click Less: How mobile marketers can get ahead with automation

Automation has been widely used within the marketing industry for over a decade. Today, everyday marketing tasks from scheduling follow up emails to posting on social media are done automatically. Yet there are still some areas where automation technology could be hugely beneficial but isn’t used nearly enough. Andy Chandler, VP, Customer Success at Adjust, explores the possibilities available to mobile marketers and discusses why digital campaign management is the next task that needs to be brought into 2020. 

The case for automation 
Mobile marketing has never been so complex, with marketers running more campaigns than ever before. A recent survey commissioned by Adjust found that marketers handle an average of 19 campaigns across approximately 14 advertising networks. That means adjusting over 250 bids and spend limits every day - highlighting the scale and complexity of the average campaign. 

Ultimately, setting up and managing campaigns is a lot of work. Part of the struggle lies in working with so many different networks: launching a campaign means uploading ads one by one across multiple network dashboards. When it comes to making optimisations, marketers need to merge and harmonise data from various sources before they can even act on it, and it takes yet more manual work to stop underperforming campaigns and redirect budgets towards better-performing ones. 

These tasks are essential to running successful advertising, but they’re often tedious and time-consuming. It’s not surprising then that many marketers find themselves stuck in the weeds, making calculations and correlations that could easily be done by machines, with little time to focus on creative or strategic decisions. 

By freeing them from menial tasks, automation allows marketers to focus on value-added work - whether that’s A/B testing, building better LTV models, segmentation analysis, or simply building relationships inside an organisation. Not only can machines do the heavy lifting more quickly, they can also do it better, leaving no room for human error.  

Automating workflows: how to start today
One of the easiest and most effective ways automation technology can help is by uploading creatives automatically, instead of uploading them one by one on multiple network dashboards. From there, marketers can quickly iterate on creatives by seeing which perform

best, creating similar concepts to the winning ones, and then uploading again automatically. This allows brands to test creatives at a much faster rate, and get well-performing campaigns out faster than before. 

Setting rules can also automate the entire optimisation process. Done manually, this can take a lot of time: marketers need to navigate between multiple dashboards and look at each line item one by one to determine where and how to optimise campaigns. This process can be automated by building rules to automatically adjust bids and budgets based on performance. For example, if day 7 retention rates from a certain network are less than 10%, marketers could set a rule to pause the campaign - or, if day 7 ROAS is more than 40%, increase bids by 10%. This moves spend from underperforming campaigns and creatives to those that are driving results. 

When implementing bidding automation, marketers still need to decide what information to feed the system for the best results. Looking ahead, we’re excited to see how machine learning models could evolve to the point where marketers don’t even need to set these rules. They could simply set target returns for campaigns - for example, expecting a return of four for a £50k budget across all networks. The model could then bid accordingly across different channels to achieve the target return set. This gives marketers an amazing opportunity to reach their targets faster, with maximum profitability and minimal effort.

Levelling the playing field 
Mobile marketing has never been more complex, and it’s never been more competitive either. But usually it’s the brands with the biggest teams or biggest budgets who win. 

Automation has the power to change that, allowing for things that would never have been possible before. By massively increasing the amount of campaigns that one person can manage, we could start to see teams running a thousand different creatives at the same time. Smaller teams will also be able to compete with larger marketing departments, and for teams with tighter resources, automation lets them spend their budgets more effectively. This means the battle will gradually shift from putting out as much advertising as possible to working as smartly as possible. 

The time saved by automating processes will also help deliver tangible business results. While a strategic optimisation might take 15 minutes to formulate, it could take over two hours to put into action. Automating certain tasks frees up hours of manpower a week, leaving marketers with more time to drive better performance. This is what will help companies scale, and scale fast. 

While automation will dramatically simplify how marketers run campaigns, it’s the potential it has to level the playing field that will really transform and help drive the industry forward.