DCO marketing : the complete guide to improve your campaigns

But are you familiar with DCO (Dynamic Creative Optimization), a marketing tool that helps you make your web advertising campaigns more relevant and effective?

Find out everything you need to know about this technology, from its benefits to its use cases.

What is DCO in marketing?

The acronym "DCO" stands for "Dynamic Creative Optimization". It's a tool that personalizes digital advertising in real time, according to the user.

Its major advantage is to make your marketing campaigns more relevant, by customizing them according to what the target audience can best identify with.

Thanks to DCO, you:

• Generate more leads to boost your sales 
• Personalize your messages to make them more relevant, and therefore more effective
• Contextualize the delivery of your ads to make them more impactful
• Rationalize your advertising spend, and optimize both your marketing actions and your return on investment
• Optimize your time, which you can then dedicate to higher value-added actions in your marketing strategy

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What are the use cases for DCO?

All types of advertisers can use DCO at some point in their digital communications strategy. 

Here are six interesting use cases for DCO in marketing. You can use this tool to:

• Promote recurring offers. DCO lets you schedule the distribution of a specific promotion, according to a predefined timing, and launch your recurring campaign automatically.
• Attract prospects in-store. Ideal as part of a drive-to-store strategy, DCO enables you to generate in-store visits, by highlighting a specific physical sales point in your ads based on the geolocation of your prospects.
• Capitalize on your prospects' interest in a product. This technology is perfect for showcasing a product that may have caught the attention of a particular prospect in the past.
• Promote a last-minute offer. Showcase a limited or last-minute offer via DCO, with an ad that leverages FOMO.
• Promote your product catalog. DCO automatically selects from your product feed the one that is most likely to attract a target according to its specific profile.
• A/B test your advertising creations. Not sure how effective one banner is compared to another? Test them both via DCO, and let the tool reveal which will deliver the best ROI.

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What data can you use to personalize your campaigns with DCO?

DCO uses different types of data to contextualize and personalize banners.

In particular, it can fetch data related to:

• The weather. For example, a company selling dairy products might want to highlight ice cream rather than yogurt in a banner when the weather is sunny.
• User geolocation. For example, a company might display a banner specifically dedicated to a promotion in a store near the user.
• Product stock. For example, a company can play on the urgency of its target audience by letting them know that there are only a few units of a product left in stock.
• Time of day. For example, a VTC company could change its advertising creation to indicate that its fleet of vehicles is available all night long, to ensure the safety of its passengers.

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In practical terms, how does DCO work?

As an advertiser, DCO is one of the most interesting marketing levers to ensure the success of your advertising campaigns. But how does it work in practice?

The DCO tool begins by detecting elements that characterize the target, based on its web browsing habits. It can identify their geolocation, as well as the products and pages they have viewed on your website.

‍The DCO technology then generates a customized banner in real time, based on the pre-designed template you've set. It can adapt the banner's visuals and text to make it ultra-relevant to the target audience.

The tool then broadcasts this banner to the user concerned, on the channels you have determined.
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“DCO is the key tool for fulfilling the promise of digital advertising: delivering the right message, at the right time, to the right target. It's a key factor at a time when consumers are increasingly sensitive to the personalization of brand communications. To deploy it in your next campaign, simply create a well-structured product or store feed, set up the necessary tracking elements... and simply watch as technology contextualizes your ads in an ultra-relevant way!” Sylvain Salerno, Developer at Gamned!

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What are the steps to implement DCO in your campaigns?

Want to add DCO to your digital marketing toolbox? Here are the four simple steps to do so.

1. Define your goals

As with all marketing strategies, the first step is to define exactly what you want to achieve with Dynamic Creative Optimization. 

Ask yourself whether you want to retarget audiences who have already visited your website, or whether you'd rather do drive-to-store.

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2. Create a product feed or store feed

The second step is to create the data feed for your marketing DCO. A product feed will be needed for retargeting campaigns, while drive-to-store campaigns will require a store feed.

The idea is simple: provide a CSV or XML file containing all the information about your products or retail locations, which can be used to personalize the banners that users will see.

• For products, this can be the product SKU, description, image URL, price, category... 
• For stores, it can be the store name, address, geolocation coordinates...

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3. Set up the necessary tags

This third step is only necessary for retargeting campaigns. It simply involves placing tracking tags on the web pages selected for your campaign.

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4. Create impactful visuals

The last step is to create different visuals, with different images and text, according to the personalization criteria linked to your product or store feed.

Afterwards, all you have to do is let the tool do the rest, and watch the ROI of your campaigns increase significantly!

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Want an example?

Here is an example to illustrate the benefits of a DCO well implanted in an advertising strategy.

This is what Loterie Romande, the company that organizes lottery and betting games in Switzerland's six French-speaking cantons, does in collaboration with Gamned! The company and the agency set up a DCO to contextualize banners according to sports news.

Specifically, the banners include:

• A sports poster featuring the corresponding live match on the sports betting page of the company's website
• A background adapted to the corresponding sport
• Dynamic sports betting odds, updated in real time

This DCO enables Loterie Romande to work on recruiting new gamblers, as well as reactivating and building loyalty among existing players.