The ad ops industry is supersaturated. To compete, organizations are continuously tasked with accomplishing more with diminishing resources. The combination of fast-growing competition and increasing client expectations necessitate supreme efficiency in order to survive and thrive. Do you have the top spot in your market locked for life? Or do you need to improve your ad-ops efficiency to continue dominating?
We’ve outlined critical considerations around workflow management to make sure your organization is poised for sustainable growth. If any of the following identifies gaps in your processes, that’s an indication you need to improve or implement a new workflow management system.
The Competitive Advantage in a Highly Aggressive Industry
Dynamic and flexible workflow management enables next-generation efficiency, which is a major gamechanger in today’s brutal advertising arena. Assess whether your daily operations integrate the following workflow capabilities.
Time savings: Spreadsheets still play a central role in operations and reporting. Their built-in functions and filters allow you to manipulate data according to your unique needs. Spreadsheets also provide a universal language, facilitating readily understood external communication. This is in line with Ad-Juster building the industry’s first data dictionary in concert with our unique data normalization technology to unify, transform, and standardize terms and values across incongruent platforms.
As helpful as they are, spreadsheets are time consuming. You can significantly reduce time by leveraging a dashboard tool that mitigates how much time you need to work directly in spreadsheets. The right dashboard tool will deliver all your key metrics with just a few clicks by granting access to data within a user-friendly, intuitive UI. Reducing what usually takes three hours to just a few minutes means spending more time getting answers instead of wading through questions and running reports.
Cost savings: A full-bodied workflow management solution will deliver comprehensive performance visibility, which ensures accurate reporting and analysis, helping you optimize across departments and campaigns while preventing costly mistakes born of manual, scattered data and processes. Such a solution will also save you money by reducing the amount of time your team needs to spend on reporting and analysis. It’s not just about taking less time on one campaign, it’s about creating enough time to take on and work more business than what your traditional capacity would allow for.
Give Your Users What They Need, the Way They Need It
Categorized and centralized users: Scattered logins and isolated accounts prevent the head of operations from keeping track of overall and individual performance. Instead, a central hub for all involved parties promotes optimal visibility and collaboration. Look for a solution that provides a simple dropdown menu, making it easy to designate access to certain data for specific types of users (for example, account managers, advertisers, agencies, and salespeople). This way, top-level executives can view performance metrics for all users. Categorizing users delivers the right data faster to improve workflow. Each type of user can manipulate data according to what they need.
Multiple users can be involved simultaneously for comprehensive input, awareness, and solutions. Everyone who needs to be involved can learn the exact status of every campaign at any given time—no more siloed data. It’s important to create a common bond across departments to connect your entire organization.
Fast and simple sharing: How much time does it take you to format a report until it looks professional and clean enough to send to your boss or client? Too much time. And have you ever selected and accidentally attached the wrong file? Oops. You can avoid these all-too-easy woes. Look for a workflow management tool that, when viewing any report directly in the UI, gives you the option to download, forward, send link, and schedule. This way, standardized reports can be sent/forwarded directly from the UI with no manual, additional formatting or filtering required—one click to send or just a few clicks to schedule. You’ll see exactly what the client will see—no surprises. In addition, users can quickly communicate their insights to key stakeholders for expedited decision making—never miss an opportunity.
Campaign Performance Metrics for All Levels of Ad Operations
Quick and accurate analysis: Your workflow system should allow you to view both high- and low-level metrics simultaneously to identify patterns, trends, and the root of problems with speed and ease. Issues should be organized by who, what, and when, bringing campaign problems to the user instead of the user having to search through endless, chaotic data. This way, significantly less time and effort is required to glean meaningful connections, whereby some connections might not otherwise be possible. Take advantage of proactive, strategic planning instead of the industry-typical reactive modus operandi.
Flexible reports: Look for a solution that comes preloaded with a variety of categorized report types (selected from a simple dropdown menu), pivoting, and settings. This allows you to aggregate data in multiple ways. It’s easy for users to combine/recombine virtually countless permutations to get the exact types of reports and data sets they need (for example, report A, with B settings, for C delivery; then reorder for a new campaign, client, internal department, set of metrics, etc.). Give your users access to all the necessary parameters in one place.
