Blog Post 
April 16, 2020 COVID-19 has changed how advertising professionals conduct business. Adswerve is committed to providing our clients and their partners’ resources, tools and efficiencies to help them through these tough times. We can’t discuss ways to save time without mentioning one of our go-to tools, Google Campaign Manager 360. The robust and centralized campaign-reporting platform offers several features that allow you to streamline workflows, optimize time and increase operational efficiency when ad-operations teams are faced with additional workloads.
Take a look at this video to see how.
Read on for more about these six time-saving Campaign Manager 360 features shared in the video.
Planning Tool
Campaign Manager 360 has a built-in planning tool that allows businesses to consolidate and organize their media plans and RFP processes. Easy to access and use, Planning allows you to execute all aspects of your media buys including: organizing the media planning process for your teams; issuing RFPs and negotiating inventory from publishers; generating and issuing insertion orders, change orders and cancellation orders; and synchronizing your media plan with Campaign Manager 360.
A RFP sent in Planning automatically establishes a secure line in which you and the publisher can discuss inventory and pricing, and the ability to export/import data in bulk reduces precious time ad operations teams spend on these processes. Contracting and billing are simple and transparent, as billing actualizations within Planning greatly reduce the amount of manual entry required to measure ad delivery against contracted amounts.
Pro tip: Shift your inventory to align with what is most relevant to your consumers. Consider multiple environments and device types, with consistent creative refreshes to engage users as they consume more cross-screen media.
Streamlined Trafficking Workflow
Our daily routines are changing, but cross-environment ad-interactions are still occurring at a high frequency and it’s important that advertisers deploy their most engaging creatives and formats to users cross-screen. Campaign Manager’s responsive workflow for HTML5 creatives allows users to reduce trafficking complexity for display campaigns by associating many creatives to a single display placement that supports multiple sizes. This means that placements can have many creative dimension sizes, and upon tag export, you will receive one placement tag per dimension size so you can still send tags to your publisher for specific ad slots. This workflow reduces the number of creatives, ads and placements you need to traffic in Campaign Manager 360.
Pro tip: A consolidated trafficking workflow frees up time for deeper, more intentional analysis of your campaigns, allowing media professionals to adapt to their clients’ needs alongside rapid change.
Creative Optimization
Utilize automated creative-rotation features in Campaign Manager 360 to weight your creatives based on a metric you choose. Clicks, click-through conversions, view-through conversions and video completions are available, and allow the system to harness recent performance data for optimizations in an effort to reduce manual creative-rotation alterations. For example, you could optimize a group of creatives to weight one based on the volume of click-through conversions it was responsible for driving. Similarly, for video completions, Campaign Manager 360 would weigh the creative based on the video that is most frequently watched to completion.
Pro tip: Don’t forget to carefully review the tone and imagery of your creative executions, no matter the size of spend or channel. Get more tips on reassessing campaigns from Google’s article, “5 Media Principles Guiding Our Media Teams in the Wake of Covid-19”.
Bulk Spreadsheet Tool
Directly accessible from a campaign, this powerful tool allows you to manage a campaign’s trafficking details within a spreadsheet. You can make time-saving changes such as trafficking placements and ads in bulk, duplicating an existing campaign, or assigning or updating creative landing page URLs for your ads. The bulk spreadsheet is also useful for a high-level overview of a campaign’s dates, ad statuses and assigned URLs. For any time-strapped ad operations teams, this tool can help manage large changes all at once. We have experts who can help modify details and ensure successful spreadsheet imports.
Pro tip: Assigning creative in bulk or when only a few items need to be updated can lead to errors. Save this tool for the scenarios listed above and count on us for guidance, should you need it.
Verification Tools
Use Campaign Manager’s Verification tool to ensure you are protecting the integrity of your campaigns, as well as delivering your ads in quality, brand-safe environments. Google’s Active View measurement, a feature within Verification, allows you to confirm whether your ads are being viewed. Built-in Content and Brand Safety controls allow you to understand what websites and content categories ads are being served on. You can also control specific targeting requirements within Verification, such as ensuring your ads are served in the correct geographies.
Visibility into key areas such as Environment allows you to understand what the exact user experience is. For example, which app is serving ads on what type of video player. Alerts and notifications in Verification allow you to flag and escalate any applied elements that are not met appropriately.
Our clients commonly use Verification to audit the exposure of their ads across geo, domain and environment. These insights allow users to be notified when an ad has crossed a certain threshold and therefore, allows users to police and manage buying platforms to ensure proper delivery.
Pro tip: Utilize content classifiers and brand safety controls to ensure your ads are not serving against content that doesn’t align with your advertiser’s messaging or goals. Agility, empathy and contextual alignment are critical principles when industries face setbacks.
Instant Reporting
Instant Reporting allows you to see data immediately, instead of waiting for a report to run and then downloading the file for offline viewing. It’s great for quick performance checks, one-off reports and routine analysis of common dimensions and metrics. You can visualize data in useful ways and uncover insights such as core video, detailed video, performance by creative, performance by platform type and performance by site. Use Instant Reporting to reduce the time you spend manually downloading reports and to highlight areas of success across your campaigns.
Pro tip: Utilize data visualizations to understand the changes you see in user engagement and inform your media buys.