Automation can help or hinder your campaigns, depending on what you use it for. Rely on it too much and you may miss crucial flags that tell you a campaign isn’t performing well. Too little and you will fall into paralysis as you chase stats. Marketing is all about knowing your audience and staying apprised of what it wants to hear, so it’s important that you clear time in your day to analyze your findings. That’s where automation can play its greatest role, offering you the chance to pack more work into the same amount of hours.
Day Parting
One of the first ways to use automation is to schedule your campaigns to run at a certain time. If your campaigns don’t do well on weekends or at night, you might consider stopping these campaigns to see if your conversions improve. Rather than do this manually, which you might forget to do, automate the process and your campaigns will show only during the dates and times you specify.
Reporting
Automating your reporting can help you gather data quickly, and clear time to review it. Say that you need to review keywords weekly. You could order an automated report from your traffic provider, scheduled every Monday, so that you would have the results of last week’s campaigns on your desk.
Alerts
Alerts help you keep track of current trends in your market. Alerts for your brand name, the product name, or certain blogs that are popular in your niche can cue you into new ideas. You may also see examples from others, so you can follow trends to see what works.
Bio: Ted Dhanik is the cofounder and CEO of engage:BDR, a Los Angeles based buy-side platform for display advertising. Ted Dhanik has sold banner advertising for MySpace.com and LowerMyBills.com. Find out how to generate leads for your business online with tips from Ted Dhanik.