3 Reasons to Consolidate Your Campaigns on the MediaAlpha Platform—And 4 Best Practices For Doing So

Consolidating your campaigns can make your life easier and your customer acquisition efforts more effective

Consolidating campaigns on the MediaAlpha platform can make you more effective.

When insurance advertisers manage their customer acquisition campaigns on the MediaAlpha exchange, they sometimes get excessively granular with their audience segmentation. It’s easy to fall into the trap of creating an unnecessary number of campaigns based on demographic and geographic targeting requirements.

Indeed, the instinct to segment campaigns and bid different prices for different audiences is a good one. However, creating too many campaigns can create headaches that make your digital customer acquisition harder to manage and optimize. More often than not, changes in bidding for different audiences can be better achieved through alternative methods. These include using bid modifiers, adjusting the channel-oriented distribution page, and creating new ad groups.

Here are three reasons to consolidate your campaigns, and four tips for doing this effectively.

Three reasons to consolidate your campaigns

1. Consolidating campaigns eliminates extra work

When you have a large number of campaigns running at the same time, any targeting and bid modification changes that you want to make will need to be manually applied to each campaign. This could mean making changes to the same settings over and over again, sometimes dozens at a time. In addition to creating more work for you, this creates a greater likelihood that you will make an error.

2. Excess campaigns make it harder for your MediaAlpha support team to help you optimize your performance

At MediaAlpha, we pride ourselves on our team of hands-on insurance experts and data scientists, who give our clients the guidance and support they need to maximize their customer acquisition results.. When you have a small number of campaigns, it’s easier for our team to see and understand the objective of each one. But as this number multiplies, sometimes the goals of any one campaign can become a bit convoluted. As a result, a cleaner, more consolidated campaign setup makes it much easier for us to help you troubleshoot, evaluate performance, and adjust your settings to achieve each campaign’s objective.

3. It can be hard to get statistically significant results if you have too many campaigns

If your media buying is spread out across too many campaigns, no one campaign will be able to generate enough results to give you statistically significant data. As we like to explain it, the more you slice up your campaigns, the less data you have to go off. It’s like a pizza—if you cut it into dozens of slices, you can’t really taste what you’re eating anymore.

When you consolidate your media buying, your campaigns will be able to achieve the scale necessary to return trustworthy results that you can rely on to evaluate and optimize performance.

4 tips for intelligent campaign consolidation

Of course, there will still be times where it makes sense to split your media-buying into separate campaigns. Here are four rules for when and how to consolidate (or not consolidate) your campaigns.

1. You can usually use the Distribution page of the platform to adjust bids for different publishers and channels, rather than creating a new campaign

Advertisers often create separate campaigns for different publishers and channels, which can very quickly become cumbersome. Most often, you’ll be just fine adjusting your bids for different publishers and channels on the Distribution page of our platform. If you have a channel that performs especially well—or where you spend a large portion of your budget—it might make sense to create a separate campaign. But unless you’re spending enough money to get back statistically significant data signals, it probably doesn’t make sense to do so.

2. Split out campaigns when you have state-specific budgets

Creating separate campaigns for different states is usually a mistake, as differentiating your bidding by state can be done more easily by creating ad groups for each state in your campaign.

However, if you have state-specific budgets, you’ll want to ensure that those states have specific campaigns set up for them. For instance, let’s say that it’s a firm requirement that you can’t spend more than $100,000 for the month in Texas. Budgets live at the campaign level, so you will only be able to set a hard cap on the Lone Star State if you split Texas into its own campaign.

3. Separate insured and non-insured drivers

Different kinds of consumers deliver different kinds of value to your business, and it’s important to make sure that your customer acquisition strategy takes this into account. Usually, you can handle this by using modifiers to set different bids for different audience segments.

However, one place where it makes sense to create separate campaigns is when you’re bidding on both insured and non-insured drivers. Because these two kinds of campaigns often have very different goals, it’s a good idea to split them so you can monitor and optimize your performance separately.

4. Pull results granularly from within the same campaign

One reason carriers sometimes split their audiences into separate campaigns is so that they can see how different consumer segments are performing for them. This is unnecessary. By using the reporting features on our platform, you can pull reports for granular segments of a given campaign, enabling you to evaluate performance for different channels and consumer types. If you want, you can even drill down to see your performance at the click level.

Need more help deciding when and how to consolidate your campaigns? We’re happy to help.

Consolidating your campaigns intelligently can help you save time and achieve greater marketing performance. And by following these rules, you should have a pretty good idea of where to get started.

But if you have any more questions about how best to organize your campaigns on the platform, we’re here to help. Just email insurancehelp@mediaalpha.com, or contact your MediaAlpha account manager.

And if you’re not yet a MediaAlpha client, you can schedule a meeting to learn more about what we bring to the table on our website.