Digital Interactive Services

Everything you need to know about ad operations

Businesses are in the midst of a digital evolution, and marketing leaders are prioritising their budgets towards crafting effective strategies to remain competitive. The global advertising and marketing sector has transitioned its operations into the digital space, which is growing rapidly to touch $786.2 billion by 2026. At the organisational level, businesses are allocating larger parts of their marketing budgets to digital marketing activities, which is evident from a survey that pegs the allocation at 72.2%. These figures point towards the increasing importance of digital advertising operations, more commonly referred to as ad ops. In this blog, we will discuss what is digital ad operations, how ad ops function, and why they are important for your business.

What are ad ops?

Processes that aid in setting up, managing, running, and optimising online ad campaigns fall under a broad term called digital advertising operations or ad ops. Simply put, ad ops connects ad space sellers with buyers to ensure that relevant ad campaigns lead to revenue generation. Specifically, it comprises workflow processes and software that connect publishers and advertisers to ensure the effectiveness of online ad campaigns and report on its success. Most digital ads are sold programmatically with little to no human participation. However, ad ops professionals are still required to configure and oversee these automated procedures.

Key responsibilities of ad operations

Online advertising is complex, with different software interacting in a data-driven manner to enable selling and delivering online ads to a specific target demographic. Today, digital ad campaigners cover a variety of spectrum, which includes mobile native ads, video ads, email display adverts, and banner displays. Ad ops facilitate and ensure that the right ad reaches the right audience at the right time. To ensure this, marketing teams have to deal with ad exchanges, ad networks, ad servers, supply-side platforms (SSPs), demand-side platforms (DSPs), and data management platforms (DMPs). Ad ops performs several important roles for the business such as:

• Scheduling:

  The ad ops team has to work towards maximising ROI for the buyer and the seller. This involves scheduling ads depending on the nature of the ad campaign and the target audience. For example, home improvement ad campaigns may begin towards the end of the week, while specific campaigns revolve around holiday seasons, weekends, or special events.

• Optimising:

  Every ad campaign needs to be optimised to ensure its success. The ad operations team functions to optimise ads through proper ad placement, SEO optimisation, keyword choice, tags, and trends to add value to every ad. It impacts the cost-per-click component, which dictates the ad campaign’s value to the business.  

• Trafficking:

  Trafficking refers to managing the ad traffic to ad exchanges and ad servers by monitoring the delivery of the ad campaign or ad space, depending on whether the ad ops team caters to the supply side or the demand side. It may also include tracking third-party ad tags from vendors and solving technical issues that prevent ads from delivering ROI.

• Yield management:

  Yield managers seek opportunities to generate revenue through online advertising. Yield management involves analysing and streamlining ad ops processes to minimise costs and maximise returns. This incorporates restructuring the ad campaign content, redesigning websites to optimise ad space, and handling pricing decisions, among other things. The objective is to ensure that online advertising campaigns accomplish their goals.

Why are ad ops important for your business?

Smooth working of digital advertising operations ensures that your business is visible to your target audience. As a critical part of the digital marketing ecosystem, ad ops implement the ideas for brand building. In a world of increasing screen time, digital marketing and ad operations matter because they offer the following benefits:

• Multiple online marketing strategies in digital marketing can match varying business goals and target markets. Ad ops maximise the impact of online marketing by offering a range of strategies that boost ROI.
• Cost-effective marketing is a significant advantage of digital marketing, and ad ops can boost cost efficiency through precise targeting. The flexibility to run a campaign for a few minutes to a few years provides unmatched agility to businesses to budget their marketing spending.
• The competitive ecosystem provided by digital marketing ensures that businesses of all sizes can compete evenly without spending large amounts on ad campaigns. What matters is your product or service offering and reaching the right audience at the right time.
• Advanced targeting and personalisation options are easier to manage in a digital marketing environment. Ad ops teams help to amplify the benefits of online advertising by retargeting ads, personalising pages, and advanced targeting.
• Accurate campaign tracking and performance feedback are possible thanks to advanced analytics. Analytics also provide valuable feedback to measure performance and uncover areas of improvement.

For organisations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organisational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organisations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organisations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.

How can Infosys BPM help?

Infosys BPM brings deep domain knowledge with ready-to-deploy digital marketing solutions for businesses. Under the Digital Interactive Services umbrella, Infosys BPM provides a range of digital marketing offerings that helps brands drive value from their business.