Authored by Saurabh Khattar, Country Manager of India at Integral Ad Science

For a new business starting out or an established organisation trying to sell their newest product, social media continues to be popular amongst advertisers to attract new customers. With the rapid digitalisation in India coupled with the low cost of mobile data usage, we continue to see growth in the number of social media users. According to eMarketer data, 521.6 million people or 37.3% of the population are social networking users, and this number is estimated to reach 604.9 million or 42% of the population by 2027.

Given the growing user base, social media advertising continues to be popular amongst advertisers. A GroupM report estimates that digital advertising in India will cross INR 82,000 crore for 2023, leading ad spends in 2023 at 56%.

Changing consumer behaviour has impacted how attention metrics play a part in the advertising world. Attention is key to engage a consumer, engagement is key to delivering performance, and better performance can be linked to improved revenue. As the number of users on traditional social media platforms saturates, short-form video content’s rise to popularity has captured the attention of the consumer, resulting in a growing base of consumers.

While users spend less time per visit to a social platform compared to a traditional news site, brands have only a finite amount of time to engage with that user, in a more and more crowded environment. But the number of times a user visits a social platform over a given day is in fact much greater, and unsurprisingly a greater share of advertiser budget is now flowing into the major social platforms.

If you are an advertiser, it would make perfect sense to advertise your brand on social media for a successful digital campaign, however, the reality is far from the truth. Since social media advertising attracts a lot of money and fraudsters follow where the money goes, there is a high risk of ad fraud on social media platforms. Let’s take a look at how ad fraud on social media can affect your business or digital campaign:

Decreased ROI: In current times, as we face financial headwinds, advertisers need to constantly justify their ad spending. And, social media fraud will decrease the return on investment (ROI) for social media marketing. If the ads were placed in front of bots, fake followers, or had fake engagement, the advertising budget was wasted, resulting in direct financial losses for your brand.
Skewed analytics: Insights are critical to deliver a successful digital campaign; however, social media fraud can skew social media analytics and data, leading to incorrect decision-making. This can severely impact the brand from generating leads effectively as well as harm their reputation.
Brand safety & suitability concerns: If a brand’s advertising appears next to unsafe/ unsuitable content, it can damage their reputation by creating false perceptions of popularity or positive sentiment on social media, leading to negative customer perceptions and declining trust.
To ensure digital campaigns are viewable, brand safe and suitable, fraud free, and in-geo, advertisers and brands need to understand the measurement tactics available to them and employ best practices. Let’s look at some steps on how to set up a social media campaign for success.

Define your business objective and use it to set up your campaign strategy
Advertising on social media can vary widely depending on factors such as: cost per click (CPC) or cost per impression (CPM), ad quality, targeting, and engagement rates. It’s important to have a well-planned advertising strategy that considers the goals and budget of the advertising campaign. Ensure that the objective of the campaign matches the strengths of the platforms to be confident that the budgets are allocated well, and the campaign can be set up for success. Look beyond traditional KPIs, and at parameters such as time-in-view, viewability, and brand safety  to make sure your campaign aligns with your objectives and brand values.

Greater time-in-view leads to greater conversions, and a study found that ads with time-in-view longer than 15 seconds experienced the highest attention.

For example, you are electronics brand whose objective is to see a certain number of television (TV) sets by the end of the year. To attain that, you need consumers to be aware of the TV, identify those who are interested in it, lead the interested buyers to your website or POS, and finally, tell them a story that will make them want to buy this TV. Your objective is to sell TVs, the rest are strategies to accomplish that goal.
Know your social media outreach
As a brand/ marketing head, empower your team to experiment, monitor and optimise the ongoing campaign to make sure that your budgets are directed towards different strategies such as reach, performance, awareness, retargeting — these should tie back to the main objective set at the beginning of the campaign. Learnings from this should be incorporated back into the campaigns to make them more effective.

Since ads will be served on social media, deriving deeper and valuable insights from the social media channels you’re running the campaign on help to improve performance. Setting social media hygiene, starting with naming conventions so that the campaign names are correctly tagged will be key in this phase. Examples of good naming conventions are — Initiative | Environment | Campaign Objective | Audience | Geo | Targeting | Creative Type | Creative Name (use consistent separators like "|" or "~" etc…) -- Ex: Summer Sale | IS | BrandAwareness | M25 - 54 | UK | AutoEnthousiasts | Carousel | Red SUV. 

Being as granular as possible will help to identify what is performing. Making some room for A/B testing the ad groups, different ads, formats, creatives, CTA. for testing and learning and then to optimise towards high performing ads on social platforms will be crucial steps to success.

Customising campaigns on-the-go for effective ROI
Regular analysis of third-party measurement data will ensure you get the most out of your partnership with the major social platforms. Focus on changing parameters such as a decrease in viewability, particularly if you are targeting the same audience over an extended period of time. Due to creative wear-out, you may start to see a creative’s viewability levels drop. This also can be a helpful insight to bring to your creative agency and look to refresh creatives.

Although social platforms have a range of automated tools that can help optimise creative mid-flight, they won’t necessarily make recommendations about how to spot patterns and human eyeballs, or provide data analysis for this, which is where verification data becomes essential. Since it’s a long-term play, make sure your next campaign is driven by data and insights gathered from previous ones. It’s a process and you need to keep working at it to make sure you drive further experimentation to build your campaign for success.