Ten Critical Steps for Migrating to Campaign Manager

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Google Campaign Manager (CM) is an industry-leading ad server and reporting tool to help agencies and marketers manage thousands of digital ad campaigns across various publishers and websites. Deploying it helps to keep your trafficking organized while working with multiple vendors and publishers, and lets you report on your data from one standard baseline so you can make informed business decisions. Once you decide to migrate to Campaign Manager, it’s important to have a strategy in place that simplifies and expedites your learning curve, making it easier to traffic your ad tags and achieve your goals faster. Follow these steps below to avoid the inevitable race against your go-live date, and ensure that your team will be ready to move full speed ahead once you sign the dotted line.
  1. Run and save your reports If you’re transitioning from another ad server, take note of any platforms that you’ll no longer have access to and save their reports. Think in terms of what may be relevant to future campaign planning. Do you plan on optimizing based on past click or conversion data? Do you view your reporting data year-over-year? Run and store as many reports as you can and need. When it comes to saving your data, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
  2. Have your media plan in place Did you negotiate rates with your partners? Do you know the targeting and audiences you want to apply and create? Ask yourself these questions in advance of jumping into your ad server’s UI to ensure that you’ve cleared any trafficking hurdles.
  3. Remove any unnecessary tags from your Advertiser’s sites Keep your webmasters happy and their webpages clean by removing any conversion tags that will no longer be passing back data.
  4. Know your vendors To stay organized and ahead of your implementation, make a list of your partners and the pixels they provide. It’s also helpful to include a note about the type of information the pixel should capture (i.e. performance or conversion data). Implementing third-party tags is easy with CM’s ad server. Simply copy and paste to have your tags piggyback off of your CM tags and fire at the same time.
  5. Choose Google Tag Manager as your tag management solution With the complex tagging landscape that exists due to privacy laws, and the technical application necessary to implement tags, a tag management solution will save you from back-and-forth communication with your webmaster. Consider solutions that have a direct integration to the CM platform, such as Google Tag Manager, to simplify the process.
  6. Choose a partner who provides training and set aside the time to train While the Google Marketing Platform (GMP) UI is pretty easy to navigate, there’s always a learning curve when it comes to using a new interface. Adswerve provides training resources for all skill levels and learning styles. This will give you the chance to learn the new terminology necessary to be able to communicate and use the platform efficiently and effectively. Even further, delegate your team tasks in advance of training so they know what areas they need to focus on. Is your team member strictly in charge of optimizations? Then have them focus on reporting training. Is your colleague just trafficking? Have them focus on the campaign level.
  7. Know how you’ll want to view your reporting data Reporting always begins with the questions you want to answer. Ask yourself, “What do I care about?” Use this as a foundation to build out your naming conventions based on information that you find necessary to pass into reporting. This will help you easily leverage the reporting features in Campaign Manager to segment data in the way you need to view it.
  8. Plan out your implementation strategy Set a deadline for implementing your conversion tags and trafficking your placement tags, and know the contact who’s doing the implementation. Use this information to work your way back from your go-live date so you can make sure you’re on track to hit the deadline.
  9. Leave time for testing Your tags are only as useful as their implementation. Before your campaign goes live, make sure to pull two reports: a Floodlight Impression report to ensure your conversions will be captured and a Standard Basic report to check that you’re generating impression data.
  10. Aggregate your data points with Data Studio It’s easy to create highly customized reports comparing historical data to current data in a free platform like Google Data Studio. Use BigQuery to marry your new and old data sets, and create visually appealing and easy-to-read tables, charts and graphs that you can share through Data Studio. Need help building a custom report? Here’s a free dashboard for the holiday season, and we can help you build out additional versions.
Bonus Tip: Know what resources are at your fingertips Lean on your GMP partner to help you work efficiently within CM. Adswerve product experts are always available to streamline your workflows and increase your ROAS. With Adswerve as your partner, you can rely on us to provide guidance on the best practices and products that’ll help you accomplish your marketing goals, prove business success and make you look good. Contact us with any questions.