We’ve reached a point in advertising where the power truly belongs to the online user. With easy access to virtually anything online, consumers have total control to research and compare multiple products and services alike online before reaching a purchase decision. 63% of respondents are highly annoyed by the way brands continue to rely on the old-fashioned strategy of blasting generic ad messages repeatedly. Companies and brands no longer win clients over as easily by aggressively pushing ads that evoke “this product is great for you, buy it!” Advertisers now must strategically catch their target group’s attention by mindfully creating user-centric content and push relevant, helpful ads. 

Enter the need of personalized and relevant ads. 94% of customer insights and marketing professionals across multiple industries said personalization is “important,” “very important,” or “extremely important” for meeting their current marketing objectives. We’ve evolved to a point where customers demand more personalization, and thanks to programmatic technology and AI-driven targeting options, advertisers can make the most of their marketing budget by reaching the right audience.  

 Ad personalization is the status quo  

Considering the busy holiday season and within certain industries-such as e-commerce, fashion, and beauty- companies and brands within these fields with multiple B2C products face a challenging opportunity. With today’s technology, brands can infinitely target granularly to individual-specific audiences across the web to promote their products. However, to address more personalized ads based on audience segments interested in different products based in varied locations and situations, advertisers miss the chance to reach their pocket target group when making generic ads. Ideally, if an online shop features a numerous variety of clothing, it would be ideal to promote all their products from winter gear to summer clothing to serve different target groups situated in different environments. Why would the retailer trigger an ad about a winter coat to someone based in sunny California when they could simply trigger a swimsuit ad instead?  

As you can imagine, if a retailer has thousands of inventories available to promote, a new challenge arises for the creative team. There’s not enough resources and time to create thousands of ads promoting an individual product to realize all personalized content. This is where Dynamic Creative ads comes into play. Using Dynamic Creative Optimization, or DCO helps advertisers, especially B2Cs within e-commerce, scale their business up and potentially decreases the cost-per-lead (CPL). 

What is DCO?  

Dynamic Creative Optimization, or DCO, is a type of programmatic advertising that allows advertisers to creatively personalize their ads through real-time technology. In DCO, a variety of ad components- such as image, text of value propositions, CTA, etc.- are dynamically assembled to serve ads based on specific impression needs. Paired with various parameters, such as local weather, geolocation, and time of day, advertisers can reach multiple target groups with infinite, personalized possibilities. The machine learning technology drives ads to deliver to relevant audiences based on user data and its context set by advertisers. 

Thanks to technology and programmatic advertising, DCO shows users the best offer and most suitable ad based on user preferences and demand, thus increasing performance and cost efficiency for advertisers. 

DCO helps you decrease your CPL 

Customer needs have evolved; personalization is now crucial to a campaign’s success. According to Warc, 81% of people said they prefer to see ads that are relevant, and DCO certainly helps achieve this. Applying DCO to your campaigns, especially one promoting a large inventory of your products, not only gives your target group a great user experience and impression to your brand, but it also helps you maximize your budget and scale your business through low effort and high impact. Here’s an overview of the benefits of DCO: 

5 DCO benefits: 

• Time saver: DCO cuts down the required time it takes to produce multiple ad sets for your campaigns through AI technology and programmatic advertising 
• Higher user acceptance: individually set ad creatives based on the appropriate parameters will yield improvement in campaign performance via users’ personalized experience 
• Creative flexibility: DCO gives you the opportunity to deliver thousands of ad variations in real-time with endless possibilities to promote your products 
• 2-in-1 KPIs: DCO is made for performance and retargeting campaigns- start by warming up your lead through engaging ads, then retarget and reengage that same lead you’re your purchase funnel through familiar ad creatives  
• Lower CPL: with all the benefits above, DCO gives you the opportunity to hit a lower cost-per-lead with the chance to maximize your ROI

With 59% of customers saying that personalization influences their shopping decision, creating and delivering dynamic ads efficiently through DCO technology brings effective business outcomes. Let’s uncover how you can apply DCO to your next campaign and how to decrease your CPL in 3 steps. 

How to apply DCO in 3 Steps 

Imagine this scenario: you are an e-commerce shop with 300 products in retail and want to promote all your products, reaching each pocket of potential where someone would purchase. Among the thousand products, you have 3 CTAs that represent your value proposition and have 5 colors to use from your brand palette. With these components combined, you can easily create a bundle of 4,500 ads in this one campaign through DCO. You can build a large possibility of distinct ads from one another and optimize each delivered ad experience. These 4,500 creative ad variants can be optimized through best-performing colors, imagery, and text placed against your set parameters based on your target group’s demographic. 

Endless creative possibilities applied through DCO technology 

300 products (images) * 3 CTA * 5 colors = 4,500 distinct creative ads  

DCO combines various ad creatives with analytics, making it more relevant to viewers while hitting marketers’ KPIs. DCO enables a personalized marketing like no other advertising medium. Marketers see an average increase of 20% in sales when using personalized experiences. The advertisements are individually tailored to the user, corresponding to the user’s needs, providing highly relevant content in real-time. The result is a personal user experience with higher click-through and conversion rates.  

1. Plan and prep your campaign  

Like any campaign, planning starts with your target group– what is your marketing message(s), and who do you want to deliver it to? Continuing with the 300-e-commerce product example, let’s map out how to plan this DCO campaign together, inspired by Hunch Ads: 

DCO campaign planning graphic to build:  

Which KPIs are you aiming to hit, and where in the customer journey is your target group? Are you focusing on leads in the beginning of the funnel, are you retargeting and warming up leads already familiar with your brand, or both? Are you an e-commerce, automobile, and/or entertainment company? Depending on your industry and product, DCO variations can strategically alter to your business goals. For instance, with e-commerce, dynamic ads are shown to your target group based on a person’s website browsing, such as products viewed or added to a shopping cart, perfect for retargeting. You can also take advantage of DCO if you want to open up new customer segments, increasing brand awareness or by bringing your diverse range of products to the right target group, for instance. When planning your DCO campaign, remain user-centric and consider where your target group is at in their purchase funnel. 

2. Set your parameters 

Real-time in nature, the technology behind DCO delivers personalized ads based on a users’s situation and behavior when viewing the ad. While Persona 1 may be based in sunny Los Angeles, California, Persona 2 could be based in wintery Munich, Germany, where you should refer to your DCO plan when setting your campaign parameters. Depending on your goal, product and offering, you selecting DCO triggers is part of your overall strategy. For instance, if you’re a sports entertainment company pushing sports bets, you can set your campaign with frequently changing parameters, such as the game score, location, and football team’s regional location.  

Another strategy to try is targeting users with an interest in concerts and a countdown trigger promoting a limited time of available tickets. Finally, with geolocation, you can try retargeting visitors who are familiar with your brand and encourage them to visit your nearest store location based on where they are. With DCO, you can do a range of strategies, from advertising multiple products to urging a limited time offer special, and more. 

3. Launch and measure 

With any effort you put out there, don’t forget to measure. Once you’ve launched your DCO, measure if your set success metrics are being met. Depending on where your ads are at, there’s always room to optimize along the way. For the more advanced DCO users, utilize multivariate testing and ad-user scenarios that best fit along your buyer journey. See which combinations of text and parameters work best in achieving your campaign goals. 

Think of a DCO campaign as a “pop-up catalogue” of all your products 

44% of consumers say that they will likely become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience with a particular company. This calls for advertisers to depend on DCO technology’s set parameters to combine with the multiple ad creative variations. So, what does a dynamic ad look like? See our Native Ad example of a DCO campaign, which brought our German e-commerce client a 30% click uplift with the cities Hamburg and Berlin being the top-performing campaigns through a 14% user interaction with the ad. 

Decrease your CPL with plista’s DCO solution 

Combined with our classic Native Ad, our DCO technology has proven to help our advertisers reach up to a 57% ROI and 3x CTR increase in their respective campaigns. Team up with our industry experts for strategical consultation through our possible ad variations such as retailer addresses, e-commerce products, and countdown components, to name a few.  

With a simple implementation process, all you need to do is provide all your creative assets to us, select your triggers and context to set, and we will handle the rest! Don’t miss out on a lost opportunity of, scale campaigns with your creatives, data, and our technology for the best business outcomes. Book your next DCO campaign with us by reaching out to our account managers here.