Challenges With Cross-Channel Campaign Management

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A marketer at a desk resting a hand on her head while two monitors show a social feed grid and campaign charts beside a laptop, a phone and printed reports

It seems like a no-brainer to reach more customers by running ads in multiple channels. In actuality, coordinating search, social, display, programmatic, CTV, and other channels all at once can become quite complicated.

There are reporting, targeting, creative constraints and performance signals for each platform. When a customer takes in multiple campaigns before converting, what may appear to be a good result on one channel might not be the full picture.

Such are the difficulties of digital marketing campaigns that managing them across channels is not about being everywhere; it’s about knowing how they fit together.

Keeping Campaigns Connected

Achieving uniformity across channels is one of the most difficult aspects.

A customer may see a social ad, then search the brand, and then watch a CTV ad, before finally clicking a display ad. When each campaign is run independently, your messaging can become disjointed and your customer experience can appear disjointed.

There should be some level of coordination between campaign goals, audience definition, offer, and creative direction. This does not necessarily mean that all channels must have the same messaging. It involves treating every interaction as if it were a part of the same campaign, not a series of individual ads.

Making Sense of Different Data

Each advertising site publishes reports of its performance in slightly different ways.

One platform might be more about clicks and conversions, the other more about impressions, view-through, or engagement. These numbers are then gathered into one report, making it difficult to compare.

Attribution adds to the complexity of the problem. A conversion can happen over multiple channels, but not every interaction should be attributed to the conversion.

An effective cross-channel process begins with uniformity of measurement. Teams must determine what business goals are important, what constitutes a conversion and what metrics should be used to measure the success of each channel.

Two colleagues comparing a tablet, a laptop monthly budget dashboard, printed charts and a calculator, piecing together numbers reported in different ways

Managing Different Audiences

Audiences can be shared across platforms, and the same customer can be in more than one audience segment.

A visitor to a site one day may be a part of a retargeting audience, lookalike audience, and a more general interest-based segment all at the same time. If he or she is not coordinated, that person may see the same ad several times from different campaigns.

This may result in unnecessary frequency and less efficient media spending.

It’s important to consider the customer journey when thinking about audience management. These different types of customers may require different messaging and priorities for campaigns.

A strategist drawing overlapping circles on a glass wall around photo cards of people, mapping how audience segments share the same customers

Keeping Creative From Getting Stale

There’s another practical issue with cross-channel campaigns: creative volume.

Multiple formats may be needed for placements across search, social, display, video, CTV, and more in a single campaign. Ensuring those assets are relevant and adapted to each platform can be a big job.

Creative fatigue can also occur at various speeds. The ad that’s successful in one channel could be failing in another.

Teams should not consider creative as a single product, but as an ongoing process that needs to be tracked in terms of performance by audience and location. If you have good ideas, you can work with those ideas, if you have not-so-good ideas, you can replace it before it eats up the budget.

A designer at two monitors editing photos of an orange bottle in an image editor beside a video timeline, adapting one campaign into several formats

Knowing Where to Shift Budget

If multiple channels are involved in one customer journey, then it is difficult to allocate the budget.

It might seem obvious that funneling resources into the most cost-efficient channel makes sense, but it’s not always the most cost-efficient channel. If a campaign to raise awareness happens prior to this, it could impact conversions that are attributed to other campaigns later in the funnel.

That’s where cross-channel campaign management transcends dashboard monitoring.

The quality of conversion, customer value, attribution, reach, frequency, and the journey that each channel plays should all be taken into account when deciding on a budget. Those decisions should be made based on performance data, but it’s still important to take business context into account.