Native ads, or any other online advertising formats, need more than just a few minutes per day to maintain. To some marketers, managing and optimizing campaigns can even eat up their entire day! However, as the old adage says, time is money.
But managing your ads is crucial too, isn't it? If you don't optimize your campaigns properly, you will also lose money. What then should you do? The answer is simple: work smarter.
Working Smart with Native Ads
Fortunately, there are a few tricks to make time and money work for you, not the other way around. Here are some tips to help you maximize your time.
1. Hire a virtual assistant.
This is one of the most common solutions to make the most out of your time. Good virtual assistants are easy to find. You can source one in Upwork.com or even Fiverr.com.
Now if you want to save money, you would have to search for a freelancer that you can teach about native advertising. A freelancer that already knows his way about native advertising would be hard to come by. He might even charge expensively for his services. From experience, hard-working yet affordable virtual assistants can be found in Asia.
It’s not that hard to teach a person about managing native ads, and a few days of training your VA would help you be confident that the task will be done properly. For a few dollars a day, you will be able to complete your native ad tasks (such as creating, optimizing, and split-testing ads) so you can focus on planning and strategizing instead of doing all the grunt work.
2. Use tools that will make your life easier.
The tools you have should do all the work for you, instead of you doing all the work while using these tools. If you are buying traffic from various native ad providers (Outbrain, Taboola, and RevContent), then it would be wise to use a platform where you can access all three providers, yeah?
But accessing them alone is not enough. You have to be able to upload new campaigns, monitor existing ones, and even optimize them all in one place. Such is what Brax.io can do for you.
One more thing that can make life easier for you is by using Brax’s Power Editor. With the power editor, you can upload several new campaigns for different traffic providers with just a few clicks.
Using the Power Editor is easy enough. Once you have connected your accounts from Outbrain, Taboola or RevContent to Brax, you will be able to access them with ease. You can download all campaigns and creative groups at once with a few clicks.
When editing campaigns, you can click on the traffic source, and then click on the “Download All Campaigns” button or “Download All Creatives” button, whichever suits your need at the moment.
You can then edit any part of your campaign using the downloaded excel sheet. You can:
- Enable or disable the campaign
- Create new campaigns
- Adjust the CPC
- Edit the tracking tokens
- Change the devices you are targeting
- Change the operating system
...and more.
Make sure to add the word “update” on the first column of the campaign you want to update, else the row will be ignored. Once you are finished editing all the campaigns or creatives you want to adjust, save the file and upload it back to Brax.
Read this guide to using Brax Power Editor for more information on what you need to do. It’s pretty simple, once you get to understand how it works.
Brax.io can actually make managing your tasks easier and simpler. Just sign-up and use the platform for 15 days for free to have a feel of how the platform works.
3. Use a Native Ads spy tool.
One of the toughest tasks of a marketer is coming up with new ideas to promote age-old products. If you’re having a hard time finding new angles, you can always research what your competitors are doing.
You can do this manually by looking at publisher websites and checking out the native ads in common placements. However, this can take a lot of time. And since you want to work smarter, why not use a tool that will give you native ad ideas within seconds?
Examples of native ads spy tools you can use are Adplexity, Anstrex, Power Ad Spy, and SpyOver.
Bonus Tip: Don’t Multitask.
This tip might be contrary to what other people teach, but there’s more to multitasking than meets the eye. Multitasking means doing something at the same time, which means it can actually reduce your productivity.
Having the skill to do other tasks is good, but doing them all at the same time can lead to not being able to complete anything at the end of the day. What you need to do to make the most out of your time is to complete one task at a time. Once you are finished with one task, you can move on to the next.
Multitasking in marketing can involve jumping from one strategy to the next, which is not ideal. First, focus your energy, resources, and ideas in one strategy. Once you have enough data for this strategy, you can then move on to the next. This way, you’ll actually get conclusive and workable results.
Have you tried any of these workarounds before? If you have, let us know how these worked for you by leaving a comment below.
