Everything You Need to Know About Marketing Data Governance

The global digital advertising market is expanding at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.7%, broadening reach and driving innovation in the space. However, this growth also results in higher global ad spending, increased costs, and stricter regulatory oversight.

In response, Improvado Marketing Data Governance offers a powerful solution for campaign, brand and data compliance that is set to help advertisers thrive in the highly competitive digital ad space by continuously optimizing ROAS. 

This guide provides an overview of Marketing Data Governance, its features, and how it addresses the challenges of today’s advertising landscape.

The Rising Costs of Digital Advertising Are Reducing ROAS

In the United States, digital ad spend surpassed $25 billion in Q1 2024, marking a 16% year-over-year increase, which ultimately increased costs and competition for all brands.

This is driven by several factors:

• Companies are investing more in digital advertising to capture consumer attention in a crowded marketplace, resulting in over 10% YoY increase in CPCs.
• In addition to growing competition, ad platforms are raising costs, such as CPCs and CPMs, driving up overall advertising expenses.
• Effective digital marketing now demands a multi-channel strategy that includes search, programmatic, social media, video, and display advertising. Each of these channels has its own cost structure and competitive dynamics.

If a company does not adapt to the changes and adjust its approach to digital ads, it will now require additional investments to achieve the same performance as previous years, let alone improve upon it.

Ultimately, brands have two ways to reach desired business outcomes:

1. Directly increase ad spend to outperform the competition.
2. Govern and optimize every component of ad campaigns and solve any inefficiencies in the execution to make sure ads reach the intended audience and every dollar spent contributes to the goal.

Marketing Data Governance is designed to help in both scenarios: optimize operations, and once you’re there – safely increase ad budgets.

Introducing Marketing Data Governance

Improvado’s Marketing Data Governance solution, is designed to minimize media waste and optimize campaign setups through quality assurance across various aspects of campaign execution, from keyword strategy to brand safety.

Marketing Data Governance is a powerful solution that monitors and validates key areas of campaign setup and management to ensure data integrity, accuracy, and compliance. The platform monitors adherence to campaign, operational, and business data guidelines across platforms such as TikTok, Meta, Google Ads, The Trade Desk, DV360, X and others and alerts you when it spots anomalies and deviations from set rules.

To understand Marketing Data Governance and its features, let's explore how it enhances processes at three stages of campaign execution and benefits end users in their daily operations.

1. Pre-Launch: Campaign Setup Governance

Who it’s for: Advertising Operations, Marketing Operations

At the first stage of the campaign lifecycle, Marketing Data Governance assists Advertising Operations and Marketing Operations by running campaign setup validation.  

This includes verifying that the targeting parameters accurately match the intended audience, ensuring the budget aligns with the campaign goals, and checking that the creative elements are properly configured. 

Such automated approach to setup monitoring streamlines launching multi-regional and multi-brand campaigns:

• Scalability: Marketing Data Governance ensures all campaign parameters are set correctly from the start, reducing the need for costly mid-campaign adjustments. This is crucial when managing campaigns which vary in terms of audience and regulations.
• Risk reduction: The platform minimizes the risk of ad spend wastage by avoiding misaligned targeting and inefficient budget use, ensuring that investments are directed towards achieving the highest possible ROI.

Here’s an example of DV360 campaign setup parameters Marketing Data Governance can validate:

• Keywords added for the insertion order
• Position selected for the insertion order
• A specific number of deals selected for the insertion order
• A specific amount of public inventory chosen
• Geographical targets set for the insertion order
• Keyword exclusions are used (Display & Video) 
• Third-party brand safety partner solution is integrated 
• Sensitive content placements were removed

2. In-Flight: Campaign Performance Governance

Who it’s for: Media Buyers, Performance Marketers, Growth Marketers

Once campaigns are set and running, Marketing Data Governance monitors whether they meet your performance expectations and benchmarks.

The solution enables real-time monitoring and adjustments of campaigns against performance benchmarks and metrics. By providing these insights, Media Buyers and Performance Marketers can fine-tune campaigns on the fly to align with budget goals and improve cost efficiency, which is crucial for maximizing the impact of each dollar spent on advertising. 

This strategic adjustment capability enhances the likelihood of achieving higher ROAS by ensuring that campaigns are continuously optimized for the best possible financial outcomes.

Example of The Trade Desk metrics guidelines you can track with Marketing Data Governance: 

• Advertiser account has an Avg. CPC of $X or less
• Advertiser account is at or less $X cost per conversion
• Insertion order is at or less $X CPM
• Insertion order is at or above X% conversion rate
• Line Item is at or above X% clicks 

3. Post-Flight: Campaign Analytics Governance

Who it’s for: Marketing Analysts

At this stage of the campaign lifecycle, Marketing Data Governance improves the reliability and value of campaign data, helping Marketing Analysts develop hypotheses, discover insights, and clearly communicate findings that can positively affect campaign performance.

This includes validating UTM naming conventions to ensure consistent tracking across platforms, monitoring the status of data extractions to confirm that all necessary data is accurately captured and up-to-date, and detecting anomalies in data to identify any irregularities or unexpected patterns that could skew analytics results. 

This governance approach ensures data uniformity and accuracy across various campaign elements, allowing analysts to trust that the data they bring to decision-makers is reliable. It also streamlines the analysis process by reducing the time spent identifying and correcting data discrepancies.

How to Set Up Campaign Monitoring with Marketing Data Governance?

Marketing Data Governance monitors adherence to campaign, operational, and business data rules and alerts on anomalies and deviations. The solution also aggregates all data points and displays the overall state of campaign governance on a clear dashboard for further review and analysis.

Within the platform, a 'rule' refers to a predefined standard that a specific aspect of the campaign must meet.

You can start by selecting pre-built rules from the library that covers common use cases for platforms like Google Ads, The Trade Desk, Meta, Google DV360, TikTok, YouTube and others.

If you can’t find a rule you need or want to tailor it to unique operational requirements, you can create new rules with Improvado AI Agent. The agent is an AI-powered analytics assistant within your Improvado account that can perform tasks based on your natural-language input. 

Simply provide a one-sentence description in plain English, and the AI will create a rule for you.

The AI-assisted method of creating rules reduces the complexity and time involved in the process, making it accessible and efficient.  

Get a demo with the Improvado team to explore all capabilities of Marketing Data Governance and our marketing analytics and intelligence platform.