After selling a digital ad media plan, challenges often arise with ad campaign management. The degree of this has much to do with the technology you use and ad ops. While trafficking programmatic ads is an automated, seamless process involving a DSP (demand-side platform), problems can arise that create more work for you and can impact performance.

If managing the ad campaign hits snags in your organization, these tips and solutions can remove these obstacles.

6 Primary Challenges with Ad Campaign Management

Here are the issues that arise the most and how to address them.

Extending a Campaign

After a campaign launches for its dedicated time frame, there’s a good chance advertisers will want to extend it when it’s performing well. Sharing this during the ad run can prompt discussion on extending it.

When they say yes, you shouldn’t have to start from scratch with tactics already in motion that target the ideal audience. It’s much easier when you have a platform that enables extensions. You should be able to expand the campaign dates in just a few clicks.

Flighting for Strategic Ad Spending

Flighting provides a feature to schedule ad spending strategically. It allows you to define a “flight” period and concentrate budget on the best-performing periods. It’s advantageous because it enables:

  • Serving more impressions within specific time frames
  • Bulk ad campaign set up, which reduces ad waste during seasonal lulls
  • The ability to ramp up spending to align with audience buying behavior

Without flighting, all this would be manual, and you don’t have the time to manage this! Customizing the budget spending saves you time and boosts overall ad performance.

Custom Billing Gaps

Do you need more choices for billing options? Typically, if a business runs a three-month campaign at $10,000, the spending splits evenly across the 90 days. Most of the time, this is fine, but there are situations where custom billing is advantageous.

For example, you may require a higher prepayment or need to bill the majority at the end. The advertiser could make specific requests, too, because of accounting or fiscal year standards.

No matter the reason, custom billing functionality helps remove these challenges, and you can use it with flighting.

Manual Creative Changes

It’s great when advertisers make long-term ad buys but may want to mix up the creative and messaging. You’d often have to do this manually, which adds more admin work to your plate.

The best way to eliminate this is with creative scheduling. As you create the order, you can define which creative runs when. You can then account for the advertiser’s seasonal and limited-time promotions from the start.

Real-Time Update Obstacles

If you want to make a quick change to a campaign, how difficult is it? Is it a maze of tasks that create extra work and confusion?

Editing at the campaign level to adjust targeting or budget should be available quickly. The ability to do this with a few clicks removes the need for third-party support. These optimizations often improve performance, so they shouldn’t be hard to accomplish.

Campaign Monitoring Gaps

Another ad campaign management concern is the availability of metrics regarding results. Can you easily monitor these? With digital advertising technology, these features are in a dashboard showing results in real-time.

Having this data lets you keep customers updated and spot trends for budget optimization toward what’s performing the best.

Monitoring of pacing can also be a gap. You want to ensure the pacing is on track so there are no issues with over- or under-delivery. Access to this allows you to make the most informed decisions for the health of the campaign.

Managing Ad Campaigns Should Be Transparent and Easy

There’s much to do post-sale, and if you don’t have the visibility and features to monitor and optimize performance, ad campaign management can be a heavy burden. If they are current pain points, you should investigate why they exist and build a path forward to resolve them.

Much of this comes down to your tech stack. For more details on assessing these, read our post on selecting a third-party digital partner.