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Ad serving strategies for a high inflation environment

There are many factors that come into play when running a business, all of which can have an impact on sales. The business environments have become even trickier during the pandemic because of supply chain issues, the rising cost of payroll and a sharp increase in inflation on pretty much everything. These combined challenges are making it tougher for businesses. For our online advertising industry, we will take a look at a number of ad serving strategies that publishers and advertisers can consider during periods of high inflation.

Use dynamic ads

If you do any kind of shopping, you are well aware how prices can change almost constantly. During periods of high inflation, prices change even more rapidly because many input costs are rising. For advertisers, keeping up with the price changes can be difficult when advertising. However, there are ways around this problem. One obvious way is to simply leave pricing out of the ads. However, that is not always possible if pricing is one of your main competitive advantages or you want viewers to click on the ad and make a purchase right away. Also, if you do not publish your price, you will need to spend more time answering consumer’s questions about pricing. If you want to display pricing on your ads but it changes frequently then you can go with a dynamic ad serving strategy. These ads are no longer static and the actual content will depend on external data. Dynamic ads take pricing data from another source and display it inside the ad. For example, you can design an ad to display the product, its features but leave the pricing area blank. The actual pricing is plugged into the ad when it is actually served to viewers. This way, the current price is always properly reflected and you do not have to update the ad every time the price changes.

Cut costs

If you cannot raise prices easily to boost your top-line revenue then the next area to look at is your expenses. Even if you don't really want to, cutting costs is one option you must consider in this case. Take a closer look at different expenses in running your online business and see which items can be adjusted, reduced or even eliminated without affecting your current operations and future growth potential. Carefully evaluate the importance and necessity of each expense. For ad serving purposes, you still need to run ad campaigns to get the word out but avoid getting locked into a long term contract as it can be costly and reduce the flexibility that you need to run your business. The good news is that there are on-demand adservers that you can use with no to very small commitment. You can scale up or scale down at any time by upgrading to a larger plan or downgrading to a smaller plan, depending on your need. For example, when you have more ad campaigns then you can scale up for a few months and then scale down when these campaigns finish. Having flexibility is important to control costs and stay profitable.

Part 2 - Automation, promise and incentive

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