An advertiser’s
guide to higher
return on ad spend.
How AI scales planning, performance,and personalized creative.

Every 15 seconds. That’s how often an algorithm
can reinvent itself to consider auction attributes—

like site, seller, ad size, and position—to predict whether
or not an ad placement will get you one step closer tomeeting your objectives. No lead time. No repetitive
checking necessary.

But for many marketing teams, constantly checking
ad campaigns to see if budgets have been spent and if
goals have been reached is a routine occurrence. Withso many channels, data silos, complicated budgets, andmultiple creative variations, managing and making themost of your advertising resources is a huge challenge.
In fact, marketers waste more than 25 percent of theirbudgets on the wrong channels and strategies,
according to Rakuten Marketing.

2Artificial intelligence and Adobe Advertising Cloud can change all that.
With features powered by Adobe Sensei—our AI and machine learningtechnology—Advertising Cloud helps you better plan, forecast, create,
and deliver high-performing connected experiences.
“We found that the world of high-speed online auctions operates quickly
and changes dramatically throughout the day at a pace much quicker
than people operate,” said Alexander Perec, senior product manager atAdobe. “If you can handle changes intelligently through a machine, you
can react quickly to changes in the marketplace, where someone pullinga daily report couldn’t do the same.”
AI takes care of day-to-day tasks, keeping channels, data, and budgets inline, so your team can focus on more important things, like increasing
return on ad spend (ROAS) and growing your customer base.

“Our research shows that 89 percent
of marketers saw higher conversions
using algorithms for tested ad packages
compared to manual optimizations.”
Sid Bhatia
Product Marketing Manager, Adobe Advertising Cloud DSP

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With AI, it’s now possible to make every dollar count and prove the worthof your advertising efforts. Instead of chasing numbers and losing countlesshours poring over data, AI tools can help you better target and segment
audiences so you can plan, optimize, and even create more efficiently
and effectively.

46%
46% of advertisers say AI will help
them become more effective.
Source: Econsultancy

4Plan wisely and efficiently.

At one time or another, most advertisers have resorted to gut feelingor best guesses when planning and forecasting their media buys.

After all, predicting consumer behavior has never been an exact science.
But with more devices and interactions, making accurate predictions iseven harder, leaving even more room for error when it comes to planning.
AI in Adobe Advertising Cloud helps allocate advertising budgets acrosssearch, display, and television by finding patterns in huge volumes of data.
It uses simulations to see how changes in budgets or goals affect yourperformance and provides budget recommendations that will help youspend every dollar wisely. Make solid forecasting and dependable
planning for all your channels a reality without diverting precious
campaign development resources.

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Comparing planning and forecasting methods.
ManualAI-Driven

Forecasting advertising performance is
hit or miss.

Simulations allow you to see how budgetchanges affect predicted outcomes
before you spend a single dollar.

Inaccurate budget allocations result in
wasted advertising spend and poor ROI.

AI considers all available data likesite engagement, conversion, anddimensional data—including audience,device, and location—along withsearch engine and campaign settings
to determine the right bid amount andbudget allocation to most efficiently
meet your objectives.

TV planning is based on same-time-lastyear viewership, which only provides
limited information on past behaviors.

AI lets you make linear national TV
plans with more confidence andaccuracy, since planning is based on
predicted viewership behavior.

Features for planning and forecasting.
AI informs many planning and forecasting features in Advertising Cloud,including Performance Forecasting and Spend Recommendations forsearch advertising, and TV Planning for traditional television advertising.
That means higher accuracy with less tedium.

6Performance Forecasting (Advertising Cloud Search)—Using AI,
Advertising Cloud Search averages 90 to 95 percent accuracy in its
machine learning models for paid search forecasting. With Performance
Forecasting , powered by Adobe Sensei, you can use a simulation toshow how changing your budget or business goals will affect your KPIs.
For example, if you want to see how changing your daily budget affects
predicted click volume, revenue, and costs, simply select a new target
budget, and the simulation is immediately available.
You can also see exactly how your paid search campaigns performed
against forecast—and you can uncover anomalies that might need yourattention. For example, you can drill down into discrepancies between
forecast and actual performance at the keyword level to get a better lookat why search traffic varied, whether due to a news report, weather, orsome other event. This transparency gives you the confidence that thealgorithms are working the way they should, which helps you stay incontrol of underperforming or overperforming models, down to thebid-unit level.
Brands like CORT, a furniture rental company, use Advertising Cloud tobetter manage their search advertising. They rely on AI-powered forecast
simulations and spend recommendations to help them more effectively
plan their campaigns. The company also uses model transparency andaccuracy reports to ensure that forecast models are delivering as expected.
Through automation and customer intelligence, CORT was able to scale
their targeted ads across channels.

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“Adobe Advertising Cloud offers
powerful capabilities that help us get
the information we need to shift ourdollars and adjust our strategies to reachaudiences with high-performing ads.”
Mindy Oliver
Director of Online Business, Media, and Analytics, CORT

Spend Recommendation (Advertising Cloud Search)—Creating a budget
for search advertising covers a lot of ground. It’s not just cost per click. You
need to consider whether or not a user has already visited your site, how
they entered the shopping cart, which pages they visited, which devices
they’re using, what your campaign settings are, and so on.
With the Spend Recommendation feature in Advertising Cloud Search,
powered by Adobe Sensei, you can effortlessly allocate budgets acrossyour portfolios and more efficiently meet your goals. AI uncovers patterns
in your campaign performance data and automatically adjusts yourcampaigns so you can get the most for your media spend. And if you
anticipate budget changes along the way, like a little extra here or alittle less there, you can quickly see how those changes will affect yourrecommended allocation with just a click or two.

8Automating ad spend for higher ROAS.
Telenor Norway, a telecommunications company in Fornebu, Norway,
wanted to set their brand apart in the competitive entertainment market
and increase customer engagement through more targeted digitaladvertising. Using Advertising Cloud Search, they’re improving ad spend
across audiences and encouraging more people to sign up for broadband
checks—a leading indicator that customers will likely convert to subscribers.
Performance Forecasting and Performance Optimization—both poweredby Adobe Sensei—determine the expected rate of clicks and broadband
checks for different keywords, and automatically adjust spend across
keywords to ensure that budgets are allocated in the best way possible.
Results:
144% ROAS

56% increasein broadband
checks“One of the reasons that I championed
Adobe Advertising Cloud was theintelligence in Adobe Sensei. Working
with smart capabilities enabled by
Adobe Sensei, we can optimize
marketing efforts in any channel toimprove sales and retention.”
Ahmet Demirel
Head of Marketing, Telenor

9TV Planning (Advertising Cloud TV)—Adobe Advertising Cloud uses
AI to help you plan across all screens and formats, including television.
Traditionally, TV advertisers use last year’s viewership data to infer where
their target audiences will be watching this year.
With the help of machine learning, TV Planning, powered by Adobe Sensei,
allows you to conduct more precise planning against those audiences.
You’ll gain more confidence and accuracy by creating linear national TV
plans using sophisticated predictions based on the viewing history in theNielsen panel.
Here’s an example. Suppose a large automaker wants to move away fromtheir “spray and pray” approach to TV advertising. To make sure they plan
successfully around the key programs and channels that reach their target
demographic, they use TV Planning to forecast more accurately against
future viewership results. Not only does this help them optimize ad spend,
but also improves the customer experience by serving customers more
relevant ads.

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Optimize with confidence.

Every irrelevant ad you present to a customer is a lost advertising dollar.
That’s why it’s so important to understand your customers. But withloads of data pouring in from different audiences and channels, it’s impossible
for your team alone to make decisions around which ads resonate best with
future customers. AI and machine learning can help you use that data to
make better decisions and achieve more valuable outcomes.

“If a bank that wants more loan signups,
or a travel company that wants to boost
bookings, manually optimizes theiradvertising, they’ll reach a plateau.
The art of successful algorithms is thatthey reinvent themselves on a daily
basis, ensuring no valuable data point
slips away.”
Sid Bhatia
Product Marketing Manager, Adobe Advertising Cloud DSP

11Comparing advertising optimization methods.
ManualAI-Driven

Decisions around bid amounts andbudget allocation are made by manuallypulling hundreds of levers and making
educated guesses.

Automated bidding rules help you siftthrough billions of data points and adjust
based on market fluctuations.

Multiple platforms are used to create
tracking pixels and unnecessary hours
spent testing and checking technologies
to manually adjust bids.

Highly valuable site analytics data allows
you to automatically determine the bidstrategy that will best help you meetyour goals.

Advertising dollars are spent on video ads
without being able to prove impact.

Viewability rate or viewable CPM help
you more confidently determine thebest ad bidding strategy.

Features that power advertising optimization.
AI helps you demonstrate advertising impact more accurately andefficiently with features like Performance Optimization for search anddisplay advertising, as well as Viewability Optimization for display ads.
Here’s how.
Performance Optimization (Advertising Cloud Search)—The performanceof your search advertising depends on finding the best keywords at thelowest price. If you bid too high, you’re wasting money. Too low, and yourcompetitor can swipe that click away from you. In addition, if your teammembers are glued to the computer screen manually adjusting bids
throughout the day, their higher-level skills go unused.
12Performance Optimization, powered by Adobe Sensei, evaluates available
data and automatically determines the right bid amount and budget
allocation to most efficiently meet your objectives—freeing your teamfor more strategic work. It considers all available data like site engagement,conversion, and dimensional data—including audience, device, andlocation—along with search engine and campaign settings.
It lets you weight objectives to more accurately reflect the importanceof an activity such as adding a product to a cart or placing an order.
And finally, you can implement multiple search engine bidding strategies
to optimize your campaigns across search engines like Google, Bing ,Yahoo, and regional providers.
Performance Optimization (Advertising Cloud DSP)—Managing dollars
across multiple ad packages and campaigns can quickly become
overwhelming. Similar to Advertising Cloud Search, Advertising Cloud
DSP uses AI to create thousands of predictive models that help you
automatically allocate your ad budget in real time based on past ad
performance, and the importance you give different site actions throughweighted objectives.
For example, signing up for an email newsletter might have a higher weight
than simply visiting a product page. Adobe Sensei can also consider siteanalytics data from Adobe Analytics—including revenue, time spent onsite, page views, and product views—to capture deeper engagement thatexternal DSPs can’t. Based on these models, the feature chooses the best
bid strategy to help you meet your KPIs. And the algorithms constantly
reinvent themselves to account for new data around latest ad performance.

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Viewability Optimization (Advertising Cloud DSP)—If your brand spends
a lot of resources creating video ads to engage customers, you need to
be able to show how much impact those ads have on users. After all,if customers scroll down after viewing only a third of your ad, you’rewasting ad spend.
Viewability Optimization in Advertising Cloud DSP helps you meet
impression goals and maximize brand awareness using AI. Set yourviewability rate or viewable CPM and let Adobe Sensei recommend thebest ad bidding strategies to meet your goals, measured by the thirdparty partner of your choice. As with Performance Optimization, AdobeSensei automatically adjusts bid prices over time to ensure you’re using
your ad budget most effectively.

Exceeding limits with advanced bidding.
Crocs, a popular casual footwear company, wanted to increase online
purchases, but they needed a strategy to compete with major online
retailers. They also knew they had to keep up with changing consumer
trends. Using Performance Optimization, powered by Adobe Sensei, theyturned to advanced bidding tactics to drive online revenue, with a goal ofgreater than 150 percent return on ad spend.
With the help of Adobe Advertising Cloud, they achieved a 200 percent
improvement over their initial performance goal, as well as 30 percent
and 56 percent month-over-month exponential algorithm improvement.

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Master your creativity.

Audiences quickly dismiss ads that aren’t relevant to them. In fact,we’ve found that more than 50 percent of consumers say ads areeasy to ignore. On the other hand, 33 percent are more likely to make apurchase if content is personalized. But creating personalized content at
scale is the biggest obstacle for brands—taking an average of 12 days tocreate and iterate on a single piece of content and bring it to market,
according to an Adobe Digital Insights report.
AI and Adobe Advertising Cloud can help you improve workflows between
creatives and marketers so you can increase productivity, lower costs,
improve the customer experience, and ensure you’re delivering the mostrelevant ads to your audiences.
Comparing experience delivery methods.
ManualAd rotation is based on manual reportanalysis and best guesses.

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AI-Driven
Data around audience segments,conversions, devices, and more traits
automatically determine when andhow often to present the right creative
to the right consumer.

One powerful feature for experience delivery.
Match the right creative with the right consumer every time with AI andAdvertising Cloud Creative. Rather than show the same ad to everyone
over and over again, give every consumer what they want in the moment
they want it. The Ad Rotation Optimization feature makes it easy.
Ad Rotation Optimization (Advertising Cloud Creative)—Clicks andconversions. Subscriptions and registrations. Whatever your aim,
putting relevant content in front of your audience will help you reachyour performance goals. That’s why ad rotation is so commonly usedin advertising today. However, if you’re manually running and analyzing
reports, it’s impossible to understand how your ads are performingat scale—not to mention which ads you should serve up to whom,and when.
Ad Rotation Optimization in Adobe Advertising Cloud Creative uses AI tocreate a set of recipes that combine creative attributes such as headlines,colors, images, and CTAs, and it stands ready to present the recipe to a
specific user once the ad is loaded.
Using data from Adobe Analytics around audience segments, history,conversion, devices, and more, probability weights are assigned to ads
that determine when and how often to show each ad. Your audience, byresponding to ads they see in rotation, “teaches” Ad Rotation Optimization
what to show them during future site visits.

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“To meet all of our client’s goals, we needed
to work with a solution capable of delivering
dynamic ad content. After extensive evaluationof dynamic creative optimization platforms,
Adobe Advertising Cloud Creative was our top
choice to not only create personalized ads thatdraw in fans and connect them with their favorite
teams, but also to create ads that are data driven
and informed by real-time in-market results.”
Michael Kaushansky
Executive Vice President and Chief Data Officer, Havas

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Make way for amazing
advertising connections.

The advertising world was once unscalable and manually labor
intensive, but with AI, you can transcend your sense of what’spossible. Increase your efficiency, raise your return on ad spend, improvethe customer experience, and secure your competitive advantage—all
free of the manual processes that hold other advertisers back.

With the help of Adobe Sensei across the entire Adobe Advertising Cloudsuite, better advertising planning, forecasting, optimization, and experiences
are within your reach.

To see firsthand how Adobe Sensei and Adobe Advertising Cloud can helpyou increase your return on ad spend, please request a demo or contact us
at 877-722-7088.

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“2019 Adobe Brand Content Survey,” Adobe, 2019.
“Adobe State of Creative and Marketing Collaboration Survey,” Adobe, 2018.
Alexander Perec, Product Manager, Adobe, personal interview, March 20, 2019.
“Attracting Viewers in a Competitive Market,” Adobe Customer Story, Telenor Norway,
December 2018.
“Connecting with Fans,” Adobe Customer Story, Havas, March 2018.
“Dream vs. Reality: The State of Consumer-First and Omnichannel Marketing,” Econsultancy,
September 2018.
Pete Kluge, “Artificial Intelligence—A Game-Changer for Paid Search?,” Adobe Blog, September
12, 2018.
Pete Kluge, Product Marketing Manager, Adobe Advertising Cloud Search, Adobe Advertising
Cloud Creative, personal interview, March 19, 2019.
“Pinpoint Advertising for Efficient Spend,” Adobe customer story for CORT, December 2018.
Siddhant Bhatia, Product Marketing Manager, Adobe Advertising Cloud DSP, personalinterview, February 15, 2019.
“State of Digital Advertising,” Adobe Digital Insights, 2018.
“What Marketers Want: Five Strategic Opportunities for 2018,” Rakuten Marketing, 2018.

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Adobe and the Adobe logo are either registeredtrademarks or trademarks of Adobe Inc. in theUnited States and/or other countries.

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