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      Some ideas on the use of external Data Feeds

      It is possible to connect any JSON type data feed you want to The Next Ad to dynamically optimise your campaigns. We explain how you do this in this article.

      This feature can be very powerful, as long as you set it up properly. That's what this article is for, to give you some ideas of creative applications of this unique feature!

      Please note that these examples are mostly based on feeds that have been tailor-made to the user's needs. If you haven't got the resources to build your own feed, you will have to find the feed that suits your needs best.

      Case 1: the ice cream seller

      People generally eat ice cream when the temperature is high. You can find the temperature of a city, province, or entire country. Let's say we want to sell ice cream in London whenever it is over 20 degrees Celsius.

      1. Once we've found a feed that contains this information, we go to the The Next Ad data feed section and add a new data feed as explained here.
      2. Name your feed, paste the feed URL and select your attributes. In this case these could be: 1. Location with type string & 2. Temperature with type number. Of course this is dependent on the actual setup of your feed.
      3. Save your data feed connection.
      4. Open your draft campaign, go to Campaign settings > Advanced > Conditional publishing.
      5. Create an activation campaign rule: select the data feed you just added and use the following settings: (WHEN 'Location' IS 'equal to' THIS 'London') AND (WHEN 'Temperature' IS 'greater than' THIS '20'). Please note: if your data feed does not use Celsius to denote temperature, you will need to convert the value yourself.
      6. Create a 'pause campaign' rule: select the data feed you have just added and use the following settings: (WHEN 'Location' IS 'Equal to' THIS 'London') AND (WHEN 'Temperature' IS 'Less than or equal to' THIS '20'). Please note: if your data feed does not use Celsius to denote temperature, you will need to convert the value yourself.
      7. Please note that we selected AND between the attributes because we want the campaign to be activated only whenever the temperature in London is over 20 degrees and paused only whenever the temperature in London is under 20 degrees. In a feed with multiple cities, using OR would have resulted in the campaign being activated whenever the temperature in any city in the feed was over 20 degrees and paused whenever the temperature in any city in the feed was under 20 degrees.
      8. Add both rules to the campaign and you're done!

      Case 2: the airline marketeer

      You're a marketeer at a major airline company, selling flights all across the world. You want your target audience to book flights that are not fully booked a certain time in advance. You have your data team build a feed or find an existing one that contains the daily average booking percentage between any two cities your company services. It also includes a timer countdown in seconds to the scheduled hour of departure.
      You want to build a campaign to push people to fly from Paris to Stockholm if the flights for that day are less than 50% booked 2 weeks in advance.

      1. Once we've found a feed that contains this information, we go to the The Next Ad data feed section and add a new data feed as explained here.
      2. Name your feed, paste the feed URL and select your attributes. In this case these could be: 1. City of origin with type string, 2. City destination with type string, 3. Booking percentage with type number & 4. Timer with type number. Of course this is dependent on the actual setup of your feed.
      3. Save your data feed connection.
      4. Open your draft campaign, go to Campaign settings > Advanced > Conditional publishing.
      5. Create an activation campaign rule: select the data feed you just added and use the following settings: (WHEN 'City of origin' IS 'equal to' THIS 'Paris') AND (WHEN 'City destination' IS 'equal to' THIS 'Stockholm') AND (WHEN 'Booking percentage' IS 'Less than' THIS '50') AND (WHEN 'Timer' IS 'Less than or equal to' THIS '1209600') Fun fact: 2 weeks is exactly 1,209,600 seconds 😉
      6. Create a pause campaign rule: (WHEN 'City of origin' IS 'equal to' THIS 'Paris') AND (WHEN 'City destination' IS 'equal to' THIS 'Stockholm') AND (WHEN 'Booking percentage' IS 'Greater than or equal to' THIS '50') OR (WHEN 'Timer' IS 'Greater than' THIS '1209600') Please note that we selected OR between the attributes ' Booking percentage' and 'Timer' because we want the campaign to be paused whenever the flight is more than two weeks in the future or whenever the booking percentage gets over 50%, even if the flight is less than two weeks away.
      7. Add both rules to the campaign and you're done!

      As you've been able to see in the second case, anything is possible if your feed contains the right information in the right formatting. Below we have listed some other creative applications of dynamic feeds to get your imagination going!

      Example 1: the summer festival tickets vendor

      You sell tickets to outdoor festivals and want to generate extra traffic to your website when tickets sales are slacking behind your schedule. You could add an additional campaign that only starts serving a special discount ad when sales for your festival are below 10,000 per day during the last week. One way to construct this feed would be by having it contain the average from the last 7 days. Alternatively, you could send the data per day individually in the feed and create a more elaborate activation rule in which the sum of the sales in the last 7 days must be higher than 10,000 x 7=70,000 tickets sold. Pausing rules would be triggered in this case when the average per day is at least 10,001 or when the sum of the sales in the last days climbs to 70,001.

      Example 2: the precious metals broker

      You are in the jewellery business and only want to encourage people to visit your online pawn shop when the gold prices are below a certain threshold (for example, less than €30 per gram). In your activation rule, you use that price to activate the campaign dynamically. The pause rule will pause the campaign as soon as the gold price rises to €30.01. By defining specific price ranges (for example, €30-€35, €35,01-€40.00 and €40.01-€45.00) you could even have us dynamically run different campaigns with different messages that correspond to the actual gold price. Those are two automations with just one feed!

      Example 3: the supermarket marketeer

      Supermarkets sell a wide range of products which could profit from all rules that have been discussed above: temperature triggered rules when selling ice cream, price based rules to give an extra push to products currently in bonus and absolute number based rules to push extra people to less-visited supermarkets. Another application might be to keep track of the amount of shelf stokers turning 18 in the coming 6 months. As supermarkets are continuously looking for young teenagers to keep their wage costs as low as possible, additional campaigns could start running when more than a certain percentage of the workforce will turn 18 in the coming months. Once the workforce is young enough, the campaign can be paused again.

      We hope you've found enough inspiration to get the creative juices flowing. Don't hesitate to contact us if you want to get into using this highly useful feature and we'll help you set it up!