Under-delivering campaigns are part and parcel of the online advertising industry.  They can be frustrating, time-consuming to resolve and even panic-inducing…“we have to deliver, we need to ramp up immediately!” is a cry we’ve all heard.  Sometimes over-zealous sellers can over-promise on inventory availability and this can result in disappointing under delivery, both on numbers and on client expectations.

It is important to ask ourselves why this happens.  Pre-roll video is scarce and consequently, we’ve become highly selective about content, use data where we can and are laser-focused on who we want to talk to either from a demographic, geographic or socio-economic perspective.  I have also heard it referred to as “targeting gone crazy.”

As an industry we need to take heed and understand how our desire to over-target is affecting the important issue of under-pacing. We need to find a comfortable middle ground – especially in the highly scarce in-stream space (where there are 100 display impressions for every pre-roll impression).

In the meantime, here are five tips to combat under-delivery:

• Reduce frequency caps or remove them altogether.
• Open up the DMA targeting so you can target people who work and travel outside of their immediate zone.
• Remove day-parting unless it is absolutely essential – often when we consult to our clients about this they are happy to remove it.
• Be open to more content categories – rather than just finance and business – consider news and information, health, travel and arts and entertainment  It is increasingly known that behaviorally targeted campaigns can far out-perform content-targeted campaigns.  We can always exclude verticals we are 100% not happy with.
• Take another look at pricing and determine what wiggle room you have.  You’d be surprised how often a $1 CPM increase can broaden the reach potential exponentially.

Susie Moore, Sales Manager for Adap.tv

Tags: CPM, frequency capping, pre-roll, targeting