Slevin Consulting

It’s hard to know what best practices to follow if you’ve have never had hands-on-keys experience of setting up and running campaigns on the platforms you’re activating.

Recruit individuals into your team with previous platform buying experience who understand the steps required to launch and optimise campaigns. They’ll be familiar with campaign pre-launch checklists; the due diligence required to adhere to it and can bring this knowledge into your best practice framework.

Seek experienced buyers who know the mechanisms and capabilities of platforms, ran campaigns achieving various outcomes for a range of brands, and can formulate their own opinions on what is a definitive best practice and what requires further validation.

If internal recruitment of this experience is a challenge, collaborate with your buying teams on what best practices they adopt across the brands they work with. Or work with consultancy businesses/individuals who can provide independent and honest opinion.

What may be a best practice today, can often quickly change following new product releases or an update to methodology from platforms. So, staying up to date with platform updates is essential in ensuring your best practice guidelines are still relevant and that you can implement them successfully.

For example, in 2025, DV360 upgraded YouTube Video Action campaigns to Demand Gen – this change updated the Google Video Partner terminology to Google Display Network and moved the opt-out option from Line Item to Ad Group. Whilst the best practice of opting out of 3^rd party / non-disclosed inventory remained, the implementation of the best practice could be missed without knowing the details of the platform change.

Providing you own your platform seat, regularly visit platform help/support pages to review the latest news from the platform. Or ensure you’re signed up to platform newsletters distributed over email. Often, platforms will provide a lead time to when updates will be released, so this can help you prepare for changes that may impact your best practices.

If you cannot directly access platform updates, request with the team owning the platform seat to keep you informed of platform updates and seek their opinion on what impacts it may have.

Setting best practice guidelines is one step but knowing how to measure successful implementation and adherence requires specialised knowledge of the platforms.

There are two ways of identifying if best practices are followed:

1. Utilise platform reporting where the data will provide definitive fact to whether you’re meeting best practices or exposed to bad practices. For example, if you have specific Facebook placements you want to exclude in all campaigns, you can easily identify if you are targeting these placements via Facebook Ads reporting.
2. Manually check platform settings to ensure best practice are implemented. This is necessary if platform reporting does not provide insight on the platform settings relevant to your best practice. For example, it’s best practice to exclude users who have already converted from your conversion campaigns, but target audience reporting is often not available in platform reporting – so manual checks are necessary.

Best practices may be forgotten if there’s no accountability for implementation, so when you’re creating your best practice guidelines it’s vital that you know how you can measure successful implementation.

As mentioned, some best practices can be binary which all brands should adopt, but others may require further validation to check if it provides the best performance for your campaigns.

For example, on Paid Search, Google Ads recommends that utilising Broad Match + Smart Bidding can drive more conversions and conversion value than Exact Match terms which traditionally performs the best. This recommendation led to agencies re-distributing budgets, trusting the recommendation.

Whilst there are benefits to Broad Match + Smart Bidding, brands need to validate that this recommendation works for them. This recommendation can work for high-volume accounts with enough conversion data – however it does not work for all brands, and I’ve observed many cases where Exact match still provides optimal CPC and CPA performance.

This is why it’s imperative to approach best practices with caution and to run your own tests to understand if what may be regarded as a best practice, even from a platform representative, results in better performance for you. This is particularly true to new updates that platforms release.

Continuously review your framework to ensure that your best practices are still relevant, identify ones that you can re-test to see if they drive the same outcome as before.

My final tip, is to consider the different stages in the marketing funnel to identify best practices that are relevant to apply at each stage.

This approach is particularly relevant for audience targeting where you need to ensure that you’re targeting controls are applied correctly to hit the correct users for the intended objective of your campaign and line items. For example, you want to apply limited audience targeting on Awareness, target 1^st party data and interest-based audience on Consideration and exclude converters on Conversion campaigns.

This is also applicable to ad formats, where your format choice should align with your objective, especially as platforms have ad formats that are suited to achieve the certain outcomes. For example, Instagram Reel Ads are far better suited to driving Awareness and Consideration but are less likely to drive a user to convert than Shopping or Collection Ads.

It’s equally important to identify best practices that apply to all objectives, this is particularly true for brand safety best practices. Analysing best practice implementation by the marketing funnel helps you validate why you have this best practice and are applying it correctly.