#audiences notice things. due to the inherent nature of paying attention to your product
Text
by the way. im making a lego set but i had to pause to say. Clarice failed in its basic fucking thesis statement. you can tell the creators wanted to uplift minority voices; opposing sexism racism and transphobia are some of the basic themes of the show and we saw them explicitly say shit like we want to address problems like transphobia in the original movie. but we saw them take a minor cishet white male character whose one characteristic was that he was a sexist and they elevated him to a charismatic hero. like. do you fucking hear yourselves. I don’t have a problem with cishet white male characters in general but when you see a perfectly good secondary antagonist already established in the text and decide actually “he’s one of the good ones don’t worry about it” it really fucking shatters any illusion that you give a shit.
#and yeah#you could argue that#it’d be hard to tell the story narratively if Paul is her boss and she isn’t getting any leeway#but like. At that point you need to reconsider if framing this story as the sequel to silence of the lambs is plausible#if you’re trying to plug things into this socket and you’re meeting resistance against the very point you’re trying to make?#you need to start over. sorry.#it really looks like you saw some resistance and went hopefully it’s unimportant and hoped no one would notice but like#audiences notice things. due to the inherent nature of paying attention to your product#it’s fucking lazy and insulting#AM I WRONG??!? ARE TOU SERIOUSLY GONNA SIT HERE AND TELL ME THAT IM WRONG?!?!#but i have legos to build so ill fuck off#claricespotting
1 note
·
View note
Text
5 Tips For Sourcing Ideas For eCommerce Content
Ecommerce isn’t quite as simple as ticking all the boxes from a functionality standpoint. Sure, it’s important to have great products, competitive prices, and customer service good enough to turn first-time buyers into loyal customers — but it’s really tough to be found in the first place, and it’s entirely possible to have a great store that goes largely unnoticed.
There’s no shortage of competition, after all, with so many stores offering very similar things. Very often, the key to making sales is simply being found first, because most people don’t want to spend huge amounts of time trying to hunt down fractional savings. They know what they want to buy and they just want to get their orders placed quickly and conveniently.
So how do you get found first? The answer is content marketing. By creating great content that’s relevant to your prospective customers, you can improve your rankings for relevant search terms (making it more likely that you’ll earn clicks) and build up your brand reputation. That’s easier said than done, though: content marketing is difficult.
The toughest part isn’t the production, though, or the distribution. It’s ideation. Coming up with great ideas for content (and enough of them for a conventional content calendar) is a major challenge, even for experienced content marketers. Having some issues with it? Let’s take a look at some options for sourcing eCommerce content ideas that you might not have tried:
1. Looking for Gaps in Rival Pieces
Researching what your competitors are already doing is far from a leftfield idea: it’s something that every eCommerce content marketer should do before they launch their ideation (and should repeat on a semi-regular basis to see how those other retailers adapt their strategies over time). Everyone knows about looking for gaps in the market. You check the keywords and topics being targeted by others, figure out which titles are being overlooked, and target those titles specifically.
That’s not what I’m talking about, though. I’m talking about gap analysis inside existing content. Suppose that you were interested in creating content about smartphones, for instance, and you noticed that your chief competitor had 20 blog posts on smartphone-related topics. If you opted for writing posts that seemed to be missing from that lineup, you might end up competing with content they’d lined up but not yet produced or released.
If you looked for missing elements in their published eCommerce content, though, you could build your strategy around beating that eCommerce content: covering the same ground, then adding a little extra to make your content more useful. That rival might notice eventually, but having that direct comparison going in your favor for a time would be good for your image (and for outreach).
This is a hugely efficient way of getting noticed for the quality of your content because it skips a lot of the regular creative process. So much goes into the development of an industry-leading piece of content: exhaustive keyword research, structured data optimization, and the lengthy process of writing, rewriting, and editing copy to get the tone and details right. By using the best pieces of content out there as templates, you can reap the benefits with none of the work.
Is this unethical somehow? Well, you’re not ultimately going to copy any individual elements. You’ll write everything from scratch, feature different graphics and structural elements, and align everything with your unique brand. You’ll also make some meaningful improvements as you do so, demonstrating that your piece is far more than simply an imitation of its predecessor.
2. Trawling Through Wiki Articles
If you’re looking for complete accuracy, you shouldn’t be using wikis: Wikipedia is disregarded as a reliable source of information for good reason, that being that the inherent strength of the platform — anyone being able to create eCommerce content — lends itself to ridiculous edit wars that drag on in perpetuity (additionally, there’s the tendency to remove content on a whim that has led to the creation of more open-minded forks such as Everipedia). But I’m not talking about using wikis to come up with citations for academic papers: I’m talking about using it for ideation.
This method is actually very simple. You find a topic that’s suited to your content marketing, and you start following internal links. You look for product types you’re not familiar with, or interesting nuggets of historical information — anything that stands out. A short session of chasing links will take you through numerous pages, and can yield a scattergun assortment of snippets that you can use to further fuel your creative process.
In addition to providing you with fresh concepts for topics and titles, this can inspire you to flesh out your existing content with things you never previously knew. Got a product page for an electric bike? Well, the more you learn about electric bikes, the more you can say to expand the content on that page — and you can even make it the foundation for a bigger piece all about the history of electric bikes, something that you can use to drive product page visits.
There isn’t much of a framework to this, but that’s something that you need to accept when you’re handling your own ideation. If you want a more orderly and predictable process, you can hire a digital marketing agency to do it for you, but keep in mind that developing your own digital marketing expertise is absolutely worth doing. Not only will it help you with your retail store, but it will also stand you in good stead for future employment opportunities.
3. Analyzing Customer Feedback
Paying close attention to what customers are saying is mission-critical for modern retailers because barring some rare exceptions (such as Apple), brands don’t have unique things to offer. Their customers always know that they can get what they need elsewhere in the event that they become unhappy, so they need to be kept happy, and that requires understanding.
That understanding stems from analyzing feedback. What do customers like about your store? What do they dislike? How do they use the products they buy from you? What else would they like to see you sell? All of this isn’t just vital for improving your business: it’s also vital for informing your content marketing because it gives you many things to write about.
Let’s say you get a lot of feedback from customers who say that your product range is the best in your niche. That’s great to hear, but it also gives you a prompt to write an article about how to choose a great product range. That article will give those customers more insight into how you think and work, reinforcing their support of you, but it will also allow you to demonstrate for a much broader audience than you bring something special to the table.
You should seek feedback from all possible angles, starting with your Google reviews (Google being the jumping-off point for so much e-commerce activity) but moving on to all social media references, blog comments, and even any YouTube videos that mention you. It isn’t just customer feedback that matters, obviously. What about the people who are aware of your brand but have never elected to buy from you? What exactly are you lacking in their eyes?
In the end, you have to keep in mind that you can’t make everyone happy, not least because you’ll encounter contradictory requests. One person might want you to focus on a specific type of product, while another might want you to branch out and diversify your range. All you can do is make the best overall call given the evidence.
4. Polling Your Audience for Titles
Getting content guidance from your audience shouldn’t be limited to squeezing extra value from the existing process of feedback collection. Instead, you should take advantage of social media activity and polling options to directly ask your customers — and followers — what content they’d like to see from you (Zapier has a good guide to this). Are there specific guides they’d find useful? Topics they want to be covered?
You can get as in-depth about this as you want. If you think there’s value in setting out some specific titles and having people vote on them, you can go about things in that way: just ensure that you check the analytics after you’ve produced and released your content, though, because people don’t always know what they want (it’s a significant failing in human nature).
If a massive majority of your followers back a particular piece of eCommerce content, but it barely gets any visits when you release it and promote it heavily, consider that a good indication of the usefulness of your polls (well, the lack thereof). Try being less specific and taking all expressed preferences with a pinch of salt. Go by what people read in the end, not what they claim to want.
That said, keep in mind that you need to deliver when it comes to content quality: and the more people are eager to see a particular piece, the more they’ll likely expect from it. If your audience wants a post about choosing a great ice-cream maker and you deliver something that meets that requirement but falls woefully short of expectations, the level of disappointment might mislead you into thinking the concept was a bad idea (instead of the execution).
Due to this, don’t just write an ill-received piece off as a mistake. Investigate what happened. Speak to your audience again to ask them why they didn’t like the content very much: don’t take an accusatory tone as though they’ve somehow disappointed you, but instead be completely calm and accepting of the possibility that you’ve failed to deliver something worthwhile.
5. Considering Events and Seasons
It’s standard practice in eCommerce content marketing to write both evergreen content and seasonal content, with the latter picking up some easy visits during the relevant times of the year. The latter is particularly useful because of everything it brings to ideation: simply by looking at the near future in your calendar, you can come up with a lot of great ideas.
As I write this, it’s the start of June, so the 4th of July is a little over a month away. Why not come up with some ideas for that? The beauty of event-based search volume is that it will accommodate anything and everything demonstrably relevant: it could be as valuable as a full history of American independence or as thin as a list of snack foods you could eat on the day.
“X great gifts for Y” is a reliable performer, and you can redo it every year by making it “X great gifts for Y in 2020”. It’s not the most interesting or sophisticated content, of course, but it gets visits and it drives sales — and that’s ultimately what matters for online retailers. Additionally, you can tie it into your larger and more high-quality pieces of content on broader topics.
Consider the hub-and-spoke strategy that’s become very popular in the content marketing world in recent years. If you create pieces like “4 Perfect Celebration Gifts to Get Your Patriotic Friend on the 4th of July” or “10 Great Christmas Gifts for Rock-and-Roll Fans”, you can link out to them from an overarching piece on how to buy gifts for friends and family members. Each niche piece of content you add makes the hub content more valuable for visitors and significantly more competitive from an SEO standpoint.
When you’re staring at your screen trying to come up with ideas to flesh out your content calendar, take a break from the monotony and resolve to try something else. See where you can beat rival content. Go on fun tangents through wikis. Address the most common queries that pop up through your feedback. Ask your audience directly what it wants. Look at your schedule and come up with some viable clickbait titles.
This is all about getting eyes on your content, so everything after that is up to you: if your content is bad, all the effort will end up wasted, so your main goal should be to produce great content that really delivers value. Do that, and promote sensibly, and you’ll get the results you’re looking for.
The post 5 Tips For Sourcing Ideas For eCommerce Content appeared first on CareerMetis.com.
5 Tips For Sourcing Ideas For eCommerce Content published first on https://skillsireweb.tumblr.com/
0 notes
Text
4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
For the past nearly 3 years, I’ve been in charge of Audience Development for one of the largest media companies in the US.
I learned a LOT during that time. Even more important, I learned a lot about what NOT to do.
Not all of these things were personal ‘mistakes’ per se. Some were top down decisions that were influenced by lack of foresight, knowledge or budget. Others were due to an industry that is undergoing rapid change.
As John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
To that end, here are the top 4 mistakes I learned during my tenure. I hope sharing these and their learnings will spark some good discussion – either internally or in the comments below.
1. Not Investing in Building User Data
This one definitely took me by surprise.
When I arrived, I had big plans to leverage CRM data to build remarketing pools, lookalike audiences, email campaigns, etc.
But there was no CRM database.
One thing not often considered about media companies is the fact the consumer data is controlled by the cable provider. The cable company collects the payment and therefore have all the associated consumer data:
Name
Address
Phone
Email
Credit Card Info
Purchase history
Login Username/Password
Etc.
In it’s simplest form, the media company simply provides the content the cable provider sells to the consumer. For the longest period of time, the value of collecting this data had been overlooked.
Plan of Action:
To access ‘free’ content within an app from the likes of NBC, CBS, Fox and others, you must go through an authentication process. This is done using the same credentials you would login to pay your cable bill.
In one of these apps, you’ve likely come across a login page that looks like this:
This poses two challenges:
Many consumers don’t know or remember this login. As a result, a lot of potential video consumption is lost.
As mentioned above, this is an interstitial page that drives to the cable provider as they own the username and password information.
In collaboration with the product team, a strategy was developed to implement a ‘free trial’ in exchange for the user’s email address. This would allow the user to forego the authentication requirement.
This was the minimal piece of information required for us to begin building a CRM and the beginning of a customer match marketing program across Google, Facebook and Twitter.
It also provided us with the initial piece of consumer data that we could subsequently build on with supplemental offers in exchange for profile completion.
The overarching lesson here is – invest in CRM. Even if you have to start with just a database of email addresses. Start somewhere.
2. Not Understanding the Nuances of Mobile Tracking
As you might imagine, much of our marketing strategy and budget focused on the mobile space. Interestingly enough, this is also a space where ad-blockers are not working.
That said, with mobile advertising comes tracking nuances that I was initially unaware of.
When I joined the team, we were full-steam into launching the first ever marketing campaign. In our haste to launch, we did not take the time to fully understand the impact of not solidifying our mobile tracking solution.
Our primary mobile advertising consisted of:
Desktop & Mobile Banner and Social Ads:
The standard process for attribution is based on the use of cookies.
When a user visits a website via their desktop or mobile device, your banner displays and a cookie is dropped on the visitor’s computers – regardless of whether or not they click through to your website.
Depending on the ad-server being used, this cookie can remain active for up to 2 years.
Eventually, if the user performs the desired action, that same cookie fires sending the proper attribution for your campaign. All is well in the world.
Apple’s Safari browser blocks 3rd party cookies by default which makes this ‘standard’ tracking more complicated. Among other things, this means your app cannot read the cookie data stored by Mobile Safari.
This presents a challenge to advertisers as Safari’s market share is around 33% globally.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our brand websites):
I’m sure you’ve noticed when you open a link in an app, it doesn’t open a new browser window. Rather, it opens an “in-app browser”.
This makes perfect sense for UX as it allows you to quickly return to the app.
The issue lies in the cookie drop on your phone. This naturally occurs with the click, however, it only drops a cookie for the in-app browser session. Unless the conversion happens immediately within that session, the attribution is lost.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our apps):
Quite simply, cookies are not used ‘in-app’. This left us with zero attribution or cross-device tracking.
The lack of attention to these details was quickly evident. At the end of the campaign, we were left pointing to engagement metrics like impressions, CTR and social shares as a measure of success.
Not at all what a consumer acquisition campaign should be reporting.
Plan of Action:
The quickest change to a leaky attribution bucket that we could make was to tackle the Safari issue. We simply updated our social and display targeting to remove Safari browsers.
While Google struggles with mobile and socially-driven demographic/interest targeting, Facebook provides the ability to target (or exclude) users by Web browser.
While not foolproof, for the likes of Twitter and Google, we targeted only older operating systems in an effort to capture users who were still using legacy browsers.
Considering our audience was US based, we estimated that we would only be missing out on approximately 15-18% of the overall market.
The other two challenges were a bit more complicated and required a mobile attribution solution that established the match between the user’s advertising ID and the publisher.
While there are many companies available for this, after evaluation, we landed on Kochava as our solution provider.
Pro tip: if you’re on a budget, Branch.io is a completely free solution that provides many of the same features.
3. Focusing on Sexy vs. Efficient
The programmatic display and mobile space is filled with shiny new tools, ad placements, and even ad units.
Combine that with the traditional types of advertising done by media companies (think big billboards, bus sides, etc) and these quickly become distractions from tactics that are proven to work.
I think it’s fair to say we spread our tactics far too wide in the early years in hopes of capitalizing on that sexy new ad-unit or the hot new ad targeting. This was, unfortunately, at the expense of tried and true tactics like traditional paid search.
A smarter approach would have been to test into these tactics rather than build a comprehensive media plan that included them.
Plan of Action:
I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. And Apple in general. One of my favorite quotes from him is:
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
With more data and proper attribution in place, we were more empowered to direct the media plans across the brands.
We focused on tried and true channels that significantly outperformed the “shiny objects” that had resulted in wasted spend and higher costs for creative development.
This paid off in a big way:
Total impressions declined significantly, however, clicks increased just as dramatically
Average click costs also declined
Cost per app install decreased nearly 200%
Cost per video start decreased 230%
Sometimes the ‘simple’ things just work better.
Ultimately, after seeing the data, I took away a few lessons that can be applied to almost any campaign:
Programmatic display isn’t the end all, be all. It’s an industry buzzword. I could even say ‘buzztactic’. It’s rife with click fraud and vendors with non-transparent ‘private networks’. It’s susceptible to ad blockers and comes with many privacy issues.
Don’t get me wrong. It can work.
But, test into programmatic options ONLY after you’ve exhausted the below tactics.
Focus on channels where a consumer is actively searching for you. They’re already self-qualified based on their actions. The most applicable here is paid search across Bing or Google.
Remarket your way to lower cost per acquisitions. You’ve already paid the premium CPC or CPM to get that user to your website. Typically, remarketing campaigns come with much lower costs. Why not re-engage a warm lead for less?
Image Source
#Hashtags are inherently social, but leave them out of social ad copy. Through our trimming of tactics, we also trimmed areas where consumers might be tempted to leave the topic at hand.
In this case, we removed any hashtag mentions in our ad copy so consumers would focus instead on the ‘install’. Our conversion rates improved as a result.
When pushing mobile installs, leverage a device in your creative. When you think about it, of course. It makes sense. But we proved it out via testing. Showing consumers an image of their device in the creative they’re being served improved conversion rates.
4. Not Leveraging an Always on Strategy
Consumers, myself included, are always on. Always plugged in. It’s a bad, addicting habit.
But, that also means running a campaign for a TV show only when that show is in-season leaves opportunity on the table.
There are a few challenges with being able to do this:
First, media companies are selling off the rights to their shows to the likes of Netflix and Hulu. In some cases, the ability to create a show is solely dependent on the revenue coming from these transactions.
This means an always on strategy will never be an option once the rights are sold.
Second, when we first launched our campaigns, we were spending large portions of our budget on fancy creative and higher cost CPMs trying to capture the next big thing.
This left us without budget pacing that would allow for an always on strategy.
Plan of Action:
We tackled the second issue as part of our streamlining of tactics. This enabled our budgets to stretch farther and for longer periods of time both pre-premier and post-finale.
The matter of rights was more complicated and is probably worth a completely separate post. That said, as a test, we decided to focus on a core set of shows where the rights had been retained for several years.
The hope was, if we could show a series with multiple seasons resulted in larger average views per user, we could start to build a case for investing in the rights for the more popular shows.
It worked.
We found not only were the average views per user up, but these campaigns were far outperforming pilot shows and series with limited rights.
This resulted in overall efficiencies for the campaign.
Wrapping Up
There’s no question the digital space can provide lots of opportunity for growth and learning. I have certainly learned a ton.
Hopefully sharing some of these insights will help you better streamline your digital marketing efforts, focus on what works, get your tracking in order and ultimately drive increased performance.
About the Author: Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly on SEO tactics, analytics and social media best practices. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on Instagram.
from Search Results for “analytics” – The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2wYmkQq
#Digital #Analytics #Website
0 notes
Text
4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
For the past nearly 3 years, I’ve been in charge of Audience Development for one of the largest media companies in the US.
I learned a LOT during that time. Even more important, I learned a lot about what NOT to do.
Not all of these things were personal ‘mistakes’ per se. Some were top down decisions that were influenced by lack of foresight, knowledge or budget. Others were due to an industry that is undergoing rapid change.
As John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
To that end, here are the top 4 mistakes I learned during my tenure. I hope sharing these and their learnings will spark some good discussion – either internally or in the comments below.
1. Not Investing in Building User Data
This one definitely took me by surprise.
When I arrived, I had big plans to leverage CRM data to build remarketing pools, lookalike audiences, email campaigns, etc.
But there was no CRM database.
One thing not often considered about media companies is the fact the consumer data is controlled by the cable provider. The cable company collects the payment and therefore have all the associated consumer data:
Name
Address
Phone
Email
Credit Card Info
Purchase history
Login Username/Password
Etc.
In it’s simplest form, the media company simply provides the content the cable provider sells to the consumer. For the longest period of time, the value of collecting this data had been overlooked.
Plan of Action:
To access ‘free’ content within an app from the likes of NBC, CBS, Fox and others, you must go through an authentication process. This is done using the same credentials you would login to pay your cable bill.
In one of these apps, you’ve likely come across a login page that looks like this:
This poses two challenges:
Many consumers don’t know or remember this login. As a result, a lot of potential video consumption is lost.
As mentioned above, this is an interstitial page that drives to the cable provider as they own the username and password information.
In collaboration with the product team, a strategy was developed to implement a ‘free trial’ in exchange for the user’s email address. This would allow the user to forego the authentication requirement.
This was the minimal piece of information required for us to begin building a CRM and the beginning of a customer match marketing program across Google, Facebook and Twitter.
It also provided us with the initial piece of consumer data that we could subsequently build on with supplemental offers in exchange for profile completion.
The overarching lesson here is – invest in CRM. Even if you have to start with just a database of email addresses. Start somewhere.
2. Not Understanding the Nuances of Mobile Tracking
As you might imagine, much of our marketing strategy and budget focused on the mobile space. Interestingly enough, this is also a space where ad-blockers are not working.
That said, with mobile advertising comes tracking nuances that I was initially unaware of.
When I joined the team, we were full-steam into launching the first ever marketing campaign. In our haste to launch, we did not take the time to fully understand the impact of not solidifying our mobile tracking solution.
Our primary mobile advertising consisted of:
Desktop & Mobile Banner and Social Ads:
The standard process for attribution is based on the use of cookies.
When a user visits a website via their desktop or mobile device, your banner displays and a cookie is dropped on the visitor’s computers – regardless of whether or not they click through to your website.
Depending on the ad-server being used, this cookie can remain active for up to 2 years.
Eventually, if the user performs the desired action, that same cookie fires sending the proper attribution for your campaign. All is well in the world.
Apple’s Safari browser blocks 3rd party cookies by default which makes this ‘standard’ tracking more complicated. Among other things, this means your app cannot read the cookie data stored by Mobile Safari.
This presents a challenge to advertisers as Safari’s market share is around 33% globally.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our brand websites):
I’m sure you’ve noticed when you open a link in an app, it doesn’t open a new browser window. Rather, it opens an “in-app browser”.
This makes perfect sense for UX as it allows you to quickly return to the app.
The issue lies in the cookie drop on your phone. This naturally occurs with the click, however, it only drops a cookie for the in-app browser session. Unless the conversion happens immediately within that session, the attribution is lost.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our apps):
Quite simply, cookies are not used ‘in-app’. This left us with zero attribution or cross-device tracking.
The lack of attention to these details was quickly evident. At the end of the campaign, we were left pointing to engagement metrics like impressions, CTR and social shares as a measure of success.
Not at all what a consumer acquisition campaign should be reporting.
Plan of Action:
The quickest change to a leaky attribution bucket that we could make was to tackle the Safari issue. We simply updated our social and display targeting to remove Safari browsers.
While Google struggles with mobile and socially-driven demographic/interest targeting, Facebook provides the ability to target (or exclude) users by Web browser.
While not foolproof, for the likes of Twitter and Google, we targeted only older operating systems in an effort to capture users who were still using legacy browsers.
Considering our audience was US based, we estimated that we would only be missing out on approximately 15-18% of the overall market.
The other two challenges were a bit more complicated and required a mobile attribution solution that established the match between the user’s advertising ID and the publisher.
While there are many companies available for this, after evaluation, we landed on Kochava as our solution provider.
Pro tip: if you’re on a budget, Branch.io is a completely free solution that provides many of the same features.
3. Focusing on Sexy vs. Efficient
The programmatic display and mobile space is filled with shiny new tools, ad placements, and even ad units.
Combine that with the traditional types of advertising done by media companies (think big billboards, bus sides, etc) and these quickly become distractions from tactics that are proven to work.
I think it’s fair to say we spread our tactics far too wide in the early years in hopes of capitalizing on that sexy new ad-unit or the hot new ad targeting. This was, unfortunately, at the expense of tried and true tactics like traditional paid search.
A smarter approach would have been to test into these tactics rather than build a comprehensive media plan that included them.
Plan of Action:
I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. And Apple in general. One of my favorite quotes from him is:
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
With more data and proper attribution in place, we were more empowered to direct the media plans across the brands.
We focused on tried and true channels that significantly outperformed the “shiny objects” that had resulted in wasted spend and higher costs for creative development.
This paid off in a big way:
Total impressions declined significantly, however, clicks increased just as dramatically
Average click costs also declined
Cost per app install decreased nearly 200%
Cost per video start decreased 230%
Sometimes the ‘simple’ things just work better.
Ultimately, after seeing the data, I took away a few lessons that can be applied to almost any campaign:
Programmatic display isn’t the end all, be all. It’s an industry buzzword. I could even say ‘buzztactic’. It’s rife with click fraud and vendors with non-transparent ‘private networks’. It’s susceptible to ad blockers and comes with many privacy issues.
Don’t get me wrong. It can work.
But, test into programmatic options ONLY after you’ve exhausted the below tactics.
Focus on channels where a consumer is actively searching for you. They’re already self-qualified based on their actions. The most applicable here is paid search across Bing or Google.
Remarket your way to lower cost per acquisitions. You’ve already paid the premium CPC or CPM to get that user to your website. Typically, remarketing campaigns come with much lower costs. Why not re-engage a warm lead for less?
Image Source
#Hashtags are inherently social, but leave them out of social ad copy. Through our trimming of tactics, we also trimmed areas where consumers might be tempted to leave the topic at hand.
In this case, we removed any hashtag mentions in our ad copy so consumers would focus instead on the ‘install’. Our conversion rates improved as a result.
When pushing mobile installs, leverage a device in your creative. When you think about it, of course. It makes sense. But we proved it out via testing. Showing consumers an image of their device in the creative they’re being served improved conversion rates.
4. Not Leveraging an Always on Strategy
Consumers, myself included, are always on. Always plugged in. It’s a bad, addicting habit.
But, that also means running a campaign for a TV show only when that show is in-season leaves opportunity on the table.
There are a few challenges with being able to do this:
First, media companies are selling off the rights to their shows to the likes of Netflix and Hulu. In some cases, the ability to create a show is solely dependent on the revenue coming from these transactions.
This means an always on strategy will never be an option once the rights are sold.
Second, when we first launched our campaigns, we were spending large portions of our budget on fancy creative and higher cost CPMs trying to capture the next big thing.
This left us without budget pacing that would allow for an always on strategy.
Plan of Action:
We tackled the second issue as part of our streamlining of tactics. This enabled our budgets to stretch farther and for longer periods of time both pre-premier and post-finale.
The matter of rights was more complicated and is probably worth a completely separate post. That said, as a test, we decided to focus on a core set of shows where the rights had been retained for several years.
The hope was, if we could show a series with multiple seasons resulted in larger average views per user, we could start to build a case for investing in the rights for the more popular shows.
It worked.
We found not only were the average views per user up, but these campaigns were far outperforming pilot shows and series with limited rights.
This resulted in overall efficiencies for the campaign.
Wrapping Up
There’s no question the digital space can provide lots of opportunity for growth and learning. I have certainly learned a ton.
Hopefully sharing some of these insights will help you better streamline your digital marketing efforts, focus on what works, get your tracking in order and ultimately drive increased performance.
About the Author: Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly on SEO tactics, analytics and social media best practices. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on Instagram.
http://ift.tt/2v9TvhT
from MarketingRSS http://ift.tt/2vLPUdc
via Youtube
0 notes
Text
4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
For the past nearly 3 years, I’ve been in charge of Audience Development for one of the largest media companies in the US.
I learned a LOT during that time. Even more important, I learned a lot about what NOT to do.
Not all of these things were personal ‘mistakes’ per se. Some were top down decisions that were influenced by lack of foresight, knowledge or budget. Others were due to an industry that is undergoing rapid change.
As John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
To that end, here are the top 4 mistakes I learned during my tenure. I hope sharing these and their learnings will spark some good discussion – either internally or in the comments below.
1. Not Investing in Building User Data
This one definitely took me by surprise.
When I arrived, I had big plans to leverage CRM data to build remarketing pools, lookalike audiences, email campaigns, etc.
But there was no CRM database.
One thing not often considered about media companies is the fact the consumer data is controlled by the cable provider. The cable company collects the payment and therefore have all the associated consumer data:
Name
Address
Phone
Email
Credit Card Info
Purchase history
Login Username/Password
Etc.
In it’s simplest form, the media company simply provides the content the cable provider sells to the consumer. For the longest period of time, the value of collecting this data had been overlooked.
Plan of Action:
To access ‘free’ content within an app from the likes of NBC, CBS, Fox and others, you must go through an authentication process. This is done using the same credentials you would login to pay your cable bill.
In one of these apps, you’ve likely come across a login page that looks like this:
This poses two challenges:
Many consumers don’t know or remember this login. As a result, a lot of potential video consumption is lost.
As mentioned above, this is an interstitial page that drives to the cable provider as they own the username and password information.
In collaboration with the product team, a strategy was developed to implement a ‘free trial’ in exchange for the user’s email address. This would allow the user to forego the authentication requirement.
This was the minimal piece of information required for us to begin building a CRM and the beginning of a customer match marketing program across Google, Facebook and Twitter.
It also provided us with the initial piece of consumer data that we could subsequently build on with supplemental offers in exchange for profile completion.
The overarching lesson here is – invest in CRM. Even if you have to start with just a database of email addresses. Start somewhere.
2. Not Understanding the Nuances of Mobile Tracking
As you might imagine, much of our marketing strategy and budget focused on the mobile space. Interestingly enough, this is also a space where ad-blockers are not working.
That said, with mobile advertising comes tracking nuances that I was initially unaware of.
When I joined the team, we were full-steam into launching the first ever marketing campaign. In our haste to launch, we did not take the time to fully understand the impact of not solidifying our mobile tracking solution.
Our primary mobile advertising consisted of:
Desktop & Mobile Banner and Social Ads:
The standard process for attribution is based on the use of cookies.
When a user visits a website via their desktop or mobile device, your banner displays and a cookie is dropped on the visitor’s computers – regardless of whether or not they click through to your website.
Depending on the ad-server being used, this cookie can remain active for up to 2 years.
Eventually, if the user performs the desired action, that same cookie fires sending the proper attribution for your campaign. All is well in the world.
Apple’s Safari browser blocks 3rd party cookies by default which makes this ‘standard’ tracking more complicated. Among other things, this means your app cannot read the cookie data stored by Mobile Safari.
This presents a challenge to advertisers as Safari’s market share is around 33% globally.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our brand websites):
I’m sure you’ve noticed when you open a link in an app, it doesn’t open a new browser window. Rather, it opens an “in-app browser”.
This makes perfect sense for UX as it allows you to quickly return to the app.
The issue lies in the cookie drop on your phone. This naturally occurs with the click, however, it only drops a cookie for the in-app browser session. Unless the conversion happens immediately within that session, the attribution is lost.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our apps):
Quite simply, cookies are not used ‘in-app’. This left us with zero attribution or cross-device tracking.
The lack of attention to these details was quickly evident. At the end of the campaign, we were left pointing to engagement metrics like impressions, CTR and social shares as a measure of success.
Not at all what a consumer acquisition campaign should be reporting.
Plan of Action:
The quickest change to a leaky attribution bucket that we could make was to tackle the Safari issue. We simply updated our social and display targeting to remove Safari browsers.
While Google struggles with mobile and socially-driven demographic/interest targeting, Facebook provides the ability to target (or exclude) users by Web browser.
While not foolproof, for the likes of Twitter and Google, we targeted only older operating systems in an effort to capture users who were still using legacy browsers.
Considering our audience was US based, we estimated that we would only be missing out on approximately 15-18% of the overall market.
The other two challenges were a bit more complicated and required a mobile attribution solution that established the match between the user’s advertising ID and the publisher.
While there are many companies available for this, after evaluation, we landed on Kochava as our solution provider.
Pro tip: if you’re on a budget, Branch.io is a completely free solution that provides many of the same features.
3. Focusing on Sexy vs. Efficient
The programmatic display and mobile space is filled with shiny new tools, ad placements, and even ad units.
Combine that with the traditional types of advertising done by media companies (think big billboards, bus sides, etc) and these quickly become distractions from tactics that are proven to work.
I think it’s fair to say we spread our tactics far too wide in the early years in hopes of capitalizing on that sexy new ad-unit or the hot new ad targeting. This was, unfortunately, at the expense of tried and true tactics like traditional paid search.
A smarter approach would have been to test into these tactics rather than build a comprehensive media plan that included them.
Plan of Action:
I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. And Apple in general. One of my favorite quotes from him is:
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
With more data and proper attribution in place, we were more empowered to direct the media plans across the brands.
We focused on tried and true channels that significantly outperformed the “shiny objects” that had resulted in wasted spend and higher costs for creative development.
This paid off in a big way:
Total impressions declined significantly, however, clicks increased just as dramatically
Average click costs also declined
Cost per app install decreased nearly 200%
Cost per video start decreased 230%
Sometimes the ‘simple’ things just work better.
Ultimately, after seeing the data, I took away a few lessons that can be applied to almost any campaign:
Programmatic display isn’t the end all, be all. It’s an industry buzzword. I could even say ‘buzztactic’. It’s rife with click fraud and vendors with non-transparent ‘private networks’. It’s susceptible to ad blockers and comes with many privacy issues.
Don’t get me wrong. It can work.
But, test into programmatic options ONLY after you’ve exhausted the below tactics.
Focus on channels where a consumer is actively searching for you. They’re already self-qualified based on their actions. The most applicable here is paid search across Bing or Google.
Remarket your way to lower cost per acquisitions. You’ve already paid the premium CPC or CPM to get that user to your website. Typically, remarketing campaigns come with much lower costs. Why not re-engage a warm lead for less?
Image Source
#Hashtags are inherently social, but leave them out of social ad copy. Through our trimming of tactics, we also trimmed areas where consumers might be tempted to leave the topic at hand.
In this case, we removed any hashtag mentions in our ad copy so consumers would focus instead on the ‘install’. Our conversion rates improved as a result.
When pushing mobile installs, leverage a device in your creative. When you think about it, of course. It makes sense. But we proved it out via testing. Showing consumers an image of their device in the creative they’re being served improved conversion rates.
4. Not Leveraging an Always on Strategy
Consumers, myself included, are always on. Always plugged in. It’s a bad, addicting habit.
But, that also means running a campaign for a TV show only when that show is in-season leaves opportunity on the table.
There are a few challenges with being able to do this:
First, media companies are selling off the rights to their shows to the likes of Netflix and Hulu. In some cases, the ability to create a show is solely dependent on the revenue coming from these transactions.
This means an always on strategy will never be an option once the rights are sold.
Second, when we first launched our campaigns, we were spending large portions of our budget on fancy creative and higher cost CPMs trying to capture the next big thing.
This left us without budget pacing that would allow for an always on strategy.
Plan of Action:
We tackled the second issue as part of our streamlining of tactics. This enabled our budgets to stretch farther and for longer periods of time both pre-premier and post-finale.
The matter of rights was more complicated and is probably worth a completely separate post. That said, as a test, we decided to focus on a core set of shows where the rights had been retained for several years.
The hope was, if we could show a series with multiple seasons resulted in larger average views per user, we could start to build a case for investing in the rights for the more popular shows.
It worked.
We found not only were the average views per user up, but these campaigns were far outperforming pilot shows and series with limited rights.
This resulted in overall efficiencies for the campaign.
Wrapping Up
There’s no question the digital space can provide lots of opportunity for growth and learning. I have certainly learned a ton.
Hopefully sharing some of these insights will help you better streamline your digital marketing efforts, focus on what works, get your tracking in order and ultimately drive increased performance.
About the Author: Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly on SEO tactics, analytics and social media best practices. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on Instagram.
0 notes
Text
4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
For the past nearly 3 years, I’ve been in charge of Audience Development for one of the largest media companies in the US.
I learned a LOT during that time. Even more important, I learned a lot about what NOT to do.
Not all of these things were personal ‘mistakes’ per se. Some were top down decisions that were influenced by lack of foresight, knowledge or budget. Others were due to an industry that is undergoing rapid change.
As John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
To that end, here are the top 4 mistakes I learned during my tenure. I hope sharing these and their learnings will spark some good discussion – either internally or in the comments below.
1. Not Investing in Building User Data
This one definitely took me by surprise.
When I arrived, I had big plans to leverage CRM data to build remarketing pools, lookalike audiences, email campaigns, etc.
But there was no CRM database.
One thing not often considered about media companies is the fact the consumer data is controlled by the cable provider. The cable company collects the payment and therefore have all the associated consumer data:
Name
Address
Phone
Email
Credit Card Info
Purchase history
Login Username/Password
Etc.
In it’s simplest form, the media company simply provides the content the cable provider sells to the consumer. For the longest period of time, the value of collecting this data had been overlooked.
Plan of Action:
To access ‘free’ content within an app from the likes of NBC, CBS, Fox and others, you must go through an authentication process. This is done using the same credentials you would login to pay your cable bill.
In one of these apps, you’ve likely come across a login page that looks like this:
This poses two challenges:
Many consumers don’t know or remember this login. As a result, a lot of potential video consumption is lost.
As mentioned above, this is an interstitial page that drives to the cable provider as they own the username and password information.
In collaboration with the product team, a strategy was developed to implement a ‘free trial’ in exchange for the user’s email address. This would allow the user to forego the authentication requirement.
This was the minimal piece of information required for us to begin building a CRM and the beginning of a customer match marketing program across Google, Facebook and Twitter.
It also provided us with the initial piece of consumer data that we could subsequently build on with supplemental offers in exchange for profile completion.
The overarching lesson here is – invest in CRM. Even if you have to start with just a database of email addresses. Start somewhere.
2. Not Understanding the Nuances of Mobile Tracking
As you might imagine, much of our marketing strategy and budget focused on the mobile space. Interestingly enough, this is also a space where ad-blockers are not working.
That said, with mobile advertising comes tracking nuances that I was initially unaware of.
When I joined the team, we were full-steam into launching the first ever marketing campaign. In our haste to launch, we did not take the time to fully understand the impact of not solidifying our mobile tracking solution.
Our primary mobile advertising consisted of:
Desktop & Mobile Banner and Social Ads:
The standard process for attribution is based on the use of cookies.
When a user visits a website via their desktop or mobile device, your banner displays and a cookie is dropped on the visitor’s computers – regardless of whether or not they click through to your website.
Depending on the ad-server being used, this cookie can remain active for up to 2 years.
Eventually, if the user performs the desired action, that same cookie fires sending the proper attribution for your campaign. All is well in the world.
Apple’s Safari browser blocks 3rd party cookies by default which makes this ‘standard’ tracking more complicated. Among other things, this means your app cannot read the cookie data stored by Mobile Safari.
This presents a challenge to advertisers as Safari’s market share is around 33% globally.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our brand websites):
I’m sure you’ve noticed when you open a link in an app, it doesn’t open a new browser window. Rather, it opens an “in-app browser”.
This makes perfect sense for UX as it allows you to quickly return to the app.
The issue lies in the cookie drop on your phone. This naturally occurs with the click, however, it only drops a cookie for the in-app browser session. Unless the conversion happens immediately within that session, the attribution is lost.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our apps):
Quite simply, cookies are not used ‘in-app’. This left us with zero attribution or cross-device tracking.
The lack of attention to these details was quickly evident. At the end of the campaign, we were left pointing to engagement metrics like impressions, CTR and social shares as a measure of success.
Not at all what a consumer acquisition campaign should be reporting.
Plan of Action:
The quickest change to a leaky attribution bucket that we could make was to tackle the Safari issue. We simply updated our social and display targeting to remove Safari browsers.
While Google struggles with mobile and socially-driven demographic/interest targeting, Facebook provides the ability to target (or exclude) users by Web browser.
While not foolproof, for the likes of Twitter and Google, we targeted only older operating systems in an effort to capture users who were still using legacy browsers.
Considering our audience was US based, we estimated that we would only be missing out on approximately 15-18% of the overall market.
The other two challenges were a bit more complicated and required a mobile attribution solution that established the match between the user’s advertising ID and the publisher.
While there are many companies available for this, after evaluation, we landed on Kochava as our solution provider.
Pro tip: if you’re on a budget, Branch.io is a completely free solution that provides many of the same features.
3. Focusing on Sexy vs. Efficient
The programmatic display and mobile space is filled with shiny new tools, ad placements, and even ad units.
Combine that with the traditional types of advertising done by media companies (think big billboards, bus sides, etc) and these quickly become distractions from tactics that are proven to work.
I think it’s fair to say we spread our tactics far too wide in the early years in hopes of capitalizing on that sexy new ad-unit or the hot new ad targeting. This was, unfortunately, at the expense of tried and true tactics like traditional paid search.
A smarter approach would have been to test into these tactics rather than build a comprehensive media plan that included them.
Plan of Action:
I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. And Apple in general. One of my favorite quotes from him is:
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
With more data and proper attribution in place, we were more empowered to direct the media plans across the brands.
We focused on tried and true channels that significantly outperformed the “shiny objects” that had resulted in wasted spend and higher costs for creative development.
This paid off in a big way:
Total impressions declined significantly, however, clicks increased just as dramatically
Average click costs also declined
Cost per app install decreased nearly 200%
Cost per video start decreased 230%
Sometimes the ‘simple’ things just work better.
Ultimately, after seeing the data, I took away a few lessons that can be applied to almost any campaign:
Programmatic display isn’t the end all, be all. It’s an industry buzzword. I could even say ‘buzztactic’. It’s rife with click fraud and vendors with non-transparent ‘private networks’. It’s susceptible to ad blockers and comes with many privacy issues.
Don’t get me wrong. It can work.
But, test into programmatic options ONLY after you’ve exhausted the below tactics.
Focus on channels where a consumer is actively searching for you. They’re already self-qualified based on their actions. The most applicable here is paid search across Bing or Google.
Remarket your way to lower cost per acquisitions. You’ve already paid the premium CPC or CPM to get that user to your website. Typically, remarketing campaigns come with much lower costs. Why not re-engage a warm lead for less?
Image Source
#Hashtags are inherently social, but leave them out of social ad copy. Through our trimming of tactics, we also trimmed areas where consumers might be tempted to leave the topic at hand.
In this case, we removed any hashtag mentions in our ad copy so consumers would focus instead on the ‘install’. Our conversion rates improved as a result.
When pushing mobile installs, leverage a device in your creative. When you think about it, of course. It makes sense. But we proved it out via testing. Showing consumers an image of their device in the creative they’re being served improved conversion rates.
4. Not Leveraging an Always on Strategy
Consumers, myself included, are always on. Always plugged in. It’s a bad, addicting habit.
But, that also means running a campaign for a TV show only when that show is in-season leaves opportunity on the table.
There are a few challenges with being able to do this:
First, media companies are selling off the rights to their shows to the likes of Netflix and Hulu. In some cases, the ability to create a show is solely dependent on the revenue coming from these transactions.
This means an always on strategy will never be an option once the rights are sold.
Second, when we first launched our campaigns, we were spending large portions of our budget on fancy creative and higher cost CPMs trying to capture the next big thing.
This left us without budget pacing that would allow for an always on strategy.
Plan of Action:
We tackled the second issue as part of our streamlining of tactics. This enabled our budgets to stretch farther and for longer periods of time both pre-premier and post-finale.
The matter of rights was more complicated and is probably worth a completely separate post. That said, as a test, we decided to focus on a core set of shows where the rights had been retained for several years.
The hope was, if we could show a series with multiple seasons resulted in larger average views per user, we could start to build a case for investing in the rights for the more popular shows.
It worked.
We found not only were the average views per user up, but these campaigns were far outperforming pilot shows and series with limited rights.
This resulted in overall efficiencies for the campaign.
Wrapping Up
There’s no question the digital space can provide lots of opportunity for growth and learning. I have certainly learned a ton.
Hopefully sharing some of these insights will help you better streamline your digital marketing efforts, focus on what works, get your tracking in order and ultimately drive increased performance.
About the Author: Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly on SEO tactics, analytics and social media best practices. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on Instagram.
from WordPress https://reviewandbonuss.wordpress.com/2017/08/18/4-mistakes-i-learned-about-marketing-and-data-while-working-at-a-fortune-50-company/
0 notes
Text
4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
For the past nearly 3 years, I’ve been in charge of Audience Development for one of the largest media companies in the US.
I learned a LOT during that time. Even more important, I learned a lot about what NOT to do.
Not all of these things were personal ‘mistakes’ per se. Some were top down decisions that were influenced by lack of foresight, knowledge or budget. Others were due to an industry that is undergoing rapid change.
As John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
To that end, here are the top 4 mistakes I learned during my tenure. I hope sharing these and their learnings will spark some good discussion – either internally or in the comments below.
1. Not Investing in Building User Data
This one definitely took me by surprise.
When I arrived, I had big plans to leverage CRM data to build remarketing pools, lookalike audiences, email campaigns, etc.
But there was no CRM database.
One thing not often considered about media companies is the fact the consumer data is controlled by the cable provider. The cable company collects the payment and therefore have all the associated consumer data:
Name
Address
Phone
Email
Credit Card Info
Purchase history
Login Username/Password
Etc.
In it’s simplest form, the media company simply provides the content the cable provider sells to the consumer. For the longest period of time, the value of collecting this data had been overlooked.
Plan of Action:
To access ‘free’ content within an app from the likes of NBC, CBS, Fox and others, you must go through an authentication process. This is done using the same credentials you would login to pay your cable bill.
In one of these apps, you’ve likely come across a login page that looks like this:
This poses two challenges:
Many consumers don’t know or remember this login. As a result, a lot of potential video consumption is lost.
As mentioned above, this is an interstitial page that drives to the cable provider as they own the username and password information.
In collaboration with the product team, a strategy was developed to implement a ‘free trial’ in exchange for the user’s email address. This would allow the user to forego the authentication requirement.
This was the minimal piece of information required for us to begin building a CRM and the beginning of a customer match marketing program across Google, Facebook and Twitter.
It also provided us with the initial piece of consumer data that we could subsequently build on with supplemental offers in exchange for profile completion.
The overarching lesson here is – invest in CRM. Even if you have to start with just a database of email addresses. Start somewhere.
2. Not Understanding the Nuances of Mobile Tracking
As you might imagine, much of our marketing strategy and budget focused on the mobile space. Interestingly enough, this is also a space where ad-blockers are not working.
That said, with mobile advertising comes tracking nuances that I was initially unaware of.
When I joined the team, we were full-steam into launching the first ever marketing campaign. In our haste to launch, we did not take the time to fully understand the impact of not solidifying our mobile tracking solution.
Our primary mobile advertising consisted of:
Desktop & Mobile Banner and Social Ads:
The standard process for attribution is based on the use of cookies.
When a user visits a website via their desktop or mobile device, your banner displays and a cookie is dropped on the visitor’s computers – regardless of whether or not they click through to your website.
Depending on the ad-server being used, this cookie can remain active for up to 2 years.
Eventually, if the user performs the desired action, that same cookie fires sending the proper attribution for your campaign. All is well in the world.
Apple’s Safari browser blocks 3rd party cookies by default which makes this ‘standard’ tracking more complicated. Among other things, this means your app cannot read the cookie data stored by Mobile Safari.
This presents a challenge to advertisers as Safari’s market share is around 33% globally.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our brand websites):
I’m sure you’ve noticed when you open a link in an app, it doesn’t open a new browser window. Rather, it opens an “in-app browser”.
This makes perfect sense for UX as it allows you to quickly return to the app.
The issue lies in the cookie drop on your phone. This naturally occurs with the click, however, it only drops a cookie for the in-app browser session. Unless the conversion happens immediately within that session, the attribution is lost.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our apps):
Quite simply, cookies are not used ‘in-app’. This left us with zero attribution or cross-device tracking.
The lack of attention to these details was quickly evident. At the end of the campaign, we were left pointing to engagement metrics like impressions, CTR and social shares as a measure of success.
Not at all what a consumer acquisition campaign should be reporting.
Plan of Action:
The quickest change to a leaky attribution bucket that we could make was to tackle the Safari issue. We simply updated our social and display targeting to remove Safari browsers.
While Google struggles with mobile and socially-driven demographic/interest targeting, Facebook provides the ability to target (or exclude) users by Web browser.
While not foolproof, for the likes of Twitter and Google, we targeted only older operating systems in an effort to capture users who were still using legacy browsers.
Considering our audience was US based, we estimated that we would only be missing out on approximately 15-18% of the overall market.
The other two challenges were a bit more complicated and required a mobile attribution solution that established the match between the user’s advertising ID and the publisher.
While there are many companies available for this, after evaluation, we landed on Kochava as our solution provider.
Pro tip: if you’re on a budget, Branch.io is a completely free solution that provides many of the same features.
3. Focusing on Sexy vs. Efficient
The programmatic display and mobile space is filled with shiny new tools, ad placements, and even ad units.
Combine that with the traditional types of advertising done by media companies (think big billboards, bus sides, etc) and these quickly become distractions from tactics that are proven to work.
I think it’s fair to say we spread our tactics far too wide in the early years in hopes of capitalizing on that sexy new ad-unit or the hot new ad targeting. This was, unfortunately, at the expense of tried and true tactics like traditional paid search.
A smarter approach would have been to test into these tactics rather than build a comprehensive media plan that included them.
Plan of Action:
I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. And Apple in general. One of my favorite quotes from him is:
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
With more data and proper attribution in place, we were more empowered to direct the media plans across the brands.
We focused on tried and true channels that significantly outperformed the “shiny objects” that had resulted in wasted spend and higher costs for creative development.
This paid off in a big way:
Total impressions declined significantly, however, clicks increased just as dramatically
Average click costs also declined
Cost per app install decreased nearly 200%
Cost per video start decreased 230%
Sometimes the ‘simple’ things just work better.
Ultimately, after seeing the data, I took away a few lessons that can be applied to almost any campaign:
Programmatic display isn’t the end all, be all. It’s an industry buzzword. I could even say ‘buzztactic’. It’s rife with click fraud and vendors with non-transparent ‘private networks’. It’s susceptible to ad blockers and comes with many privacy issues.
Don’t get me wrong. It can work.
But, test into programmatic options ONLY after you’ve exhausted the below tactics.
Focus on channels where a consumer is actively searching for you. They’re already self-qualified based on their actions. The most applicable here is paid search across Bing or Google.
Remarket your way to lower cost per acquisitions. You’ve already paid the premium CPC or CPM to get that user to your website. Typically, remarketing campaigns come with much lower costs. Why not re-engage a warm lead for less?
Image Source
#Hashtags are inherently social, but leave them out of social ad copy. Through our trimming of tactics, we also trimmed areas where consumers might be tempted to leave the topic at hand.
In this case, we removed any hashtag mentions in our ad copy so consumers would focus instead on the ‘install’. Our conversion rates improved as a result.
When pushing mobile installs, leverage a device in your creative. When you think about it, of course. It makes sense. But we proved it out via testing. Showing consumers an image of their device in the creative they’re being served improved conversion rates.
4. Not Leveraging an Always on Strategy
Consumers, myself included, are always on. Always plugged in. It’s a bad, addicting habit.
But, that also means running a campaign for a TV show only when that show is in-season leaves opportunity on the table.
There are a few challenges with being able to do this:
First, media companies are selling off the rights to their shows to the likes of Netflix and Hulu. In some cases, the ability to create a show is solely dependent on the revenue coming from these transactions.
This means an always on strategy will never be an option once the rights are sold.
Second, when we first launched our campaigns, we were spending large portions of our budget on fancy creative and higher cost CPMs trying to capture the next big thing.
This left us without budget pacing that would allow for an always on strategy.
Plan of Action:
We tackled the second issue as part of our streamlining of tactics. This enabled our budgets to stretch farther and for longer periods of time both pre-premier and post-finale.
The matter of rights was more complicated and is probably worth a completely separate post. That said, as a test, we decided to focus on a core set of shows where the rights had been retained for several years.
The hope was, if we could show a series with multiple seasons resulted in larger average views per user, we could start to build a case for investing in the rights for the more popular shows.
It worked.
We found not only were the average views per user up, but these campaigns were far outperforming pilot shows and series with limited rights.
This resulted in overall efficiencies for the campaign.
Wrapping Up
There’s no question the digital space can provide lots of opportunity for growth and learning. I have certainly learned a ton.
Hopefully sharing some of these insights will help you better streamline your digital marketing efforts, focus on what works, get your tracking in order and ultimately drive increased performance.
About the Author: Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly on SEO tactics, analytics and social media best practices. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on Instagram.
Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2017/08/4-mistakes-i-learned-about-marketing.html
0 notes
Text
4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
For the past nearly 3 years, I’ve been in charge of Audience Development for one of the largest media companies in the US.
I learned a LOT during that time. Even more important, I learned a lot about what NOT to do.
Not all of these things were personal ‘mistakes’ per se. Some were top down decisions that were influenced by lack of foresight, knowledge or budget. Others were due to an industry that is undergoing rapid change.
As John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
To that end, here are the top 4 mistakes I learned during my tenure. I hope sharing these and their learnings will spark some good discussion – either internally or in the comments below.
1. Not Investing in Building User Data
This one definitely took me by surprise.
When I arrived, I had big plans to leverage CRM data to build remarketing pools, lookalike audiences, , etc.
But there was no CRM database.
One thing not often considered about media companies is the fact the consumer data is controlled by the cable provider. The cable company collects the payment and therefore have all the associated consumer data:
Name
Address
Phone
Email
Credit Card Info
Purchase history
Login Username/Password
Etc.
In it’s simplest form, the media company simply provides the content the cable provider sells to the consumer. For the longest period of time, the value of collecting this data had been overlooked.
Plan of Action:
To access ‘free’ content within an app from the likes of NBC, CBS, Fox and others, you must go through an authentication process. This is done using the same credentials you would login to pay your cable bill.
In one of these apps, you’ve likely come across a login page that looks like this:
This poses two challenges:
Many consumers don’t know or remember this login. As a result, a lot of potential video consumption is lost.
As mentioned above, this is an interstitial page that drives to the cable provider as they own the username and password information.
In collaboration with the product team, a strategy was developed to implement a ‘free trial’ in exchange for the user’s email address. This would allow the user to forego the authentication requirement.
This was the minimal piece of information required for us to begin building a CRM and the beginning of a customer match marketing program across Google, Facebook and Twitter.
It also provided us with the initial piece of consumer data that we could subsequently build on with supplemental offers in exchange for profile completion.
The overarching lesson here is – invest in CRM. Even if you have to start with just a database of email addresses. Start somewhere.
2. Not Understanding the Nuances of Mobile Tracking
As you might imagine, much of our marketing strategy and budget focused on the mobile space. Interestingly enough, this is also a space where ad-blockers are not working.
That said, with mobile advertising comes tracking nuances that I was initially unaware of.
When I joined the team, we were full-steam into launching the first ever marketing campaign. In our haste to launch, we did not take the time to fully understand the impact of not solidifying our mobile tracking solution.
Our primary mobile advertising consisted of:
Desktop & Mobile Banner and Social Ads:
The standard process for attribution is based on the use of cookies.
When a user visits a website via their desktop or mobile device, your banner displays and a cookie is dropped on the visitor’s computers – regardless of whether or not they click through to your website.
Depending on the ad-server being used, this cookie can remain active for up to 2 years.
Eventually, if the user performs the desired action, that same cookie fires sending the proper attribution for your campaign. All is well in the world.
Apple’s Safari browser blocks 3rd party cookies by default which makes this ‘standard’ tracking more complicated. Among other things, this means your app cannot read the cookie data stored by Mobile Safari.
This presents a challenge to advertisers as Safari’s market share is around 33% globally.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our brand websites):
I’m sure you’ve noticed when you open a link in an app, it doesn’t open a new browser window. Rather, it opens an “in-app browser”.
This makes perfect sense for UX as it allows you to quickly return to the app.
The issue lies in the cookie drop on your phone. This naturally occurs with the click, however, it only drops a cookie for the in-app browser session. Unless the conversion happens immediately within that session, the attribution is lost.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our apps):
Quite simply, cookies are not used ‘in-app’. This left us with zero attribution or cross-device tracking.
The lack of attention to these details was quickly evident. At the end of the campaign, we were left pointing to engagement metrics like impressions, CTR and social shares as a measure of success.
Not at all what a consumer acquisition campaign should be reporting.
Plan of Action:
The quickest change to a leaky attribution bucket that we could make was to tackle the Safari issue. We simply updated our social and display targeting to remove Safari browsers.
While Google struggles with mobile and socially-driven demographic/interest targeting, Facebook provides the ability to target (or exclude) users by Web browser.
While not foolproof, for the likes of Twitter and Google, we targeted only older operating systems in an effort to capture users who were still using legacy browsers.
Considering our audience was US based, we estimated that we would only be missing out on approximately 15-18% of the overall market.
The other two challenges were a bit more complicated and required a mobile attribution solution that established the match between the user’s advertising ID and the publisher.
While there are many companies available for this, after evaluation, we landed on Kochava as our solution provider.
Pro tip: if you’re on a budget, Branch.io is a completely free solution that provides many of the same features.
3. Focusing on Sexy vs. Efficient
The programmatic display and mobile space is filled with shiny new tools, ad placements, and even ad units.
Combine that with the traditional types of advertising done by media companies (think big billboards, bus sides, etc) and these quickly become distractions from tactics that are proven to work.
I think it’s fair to say we spread our tactics far too wide in the early years in hopes of capitalizing on that sexy new ad-unit or the hot new ad targeting. This was, unfortunately, at the expense of tried and true tactics like traditional paid search.
A smarter approach would have been to test into these tactics rather than build a comprehensive media plan that included them.
Plan of Action:
I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. And Apple in general. One of my favorite quotes from him is:
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
With more data and proper attribution in place, we were more empowered to direct the media plans across the brands.
We focused on tried and true channels that significantly outperformed the “shiny objects” that had resulted in wasted spend and higher costs for creative development.
This paid off in a big way:
Total impressions declined significantly, however, clicks increased just as dramatically
Average click costs also declined
Cost per app install decreased nearly 200%
Cost per video start decreased 230%
Sometimes the ‘simple’ things just work better.
Ultimately, after seeing the data, I took away a few lessons that can be applied to almost any campaign:
Programmatic display isn’t the end all, be all. It’s an industry buzzword. I could even say ‘buzztactic’. It’s rife with click fraud and vendors with non-transparent ‘private networks’. It’s susceptible to ad blockers and comes with many privacy issues.
Don’t get me wrong. It can work.
But, test into programmatic options ONLY after you’ve exhausted the below tactics.
Focus on channels where a consumer is actively searching for you. They’re already self-qualified based on their actions. The most applicable here is paid search across Bing or Google.
Remarket your way to lower cost per acquisitions. You’ve already paid the premium CPC or CPM to get that user to your website. Typically, remarketing campaigns come with much lower costs. Why not re-engage a warm lead for less?
Image Source
#Hashtags are inherently social, but leave them out of social ad copy. Through our trimming of tactics, we also trimmed areas where consumers might be tempted to leave the topic at hand.
In this case, we removed any hashtag mentions in our ad copy so consumers would focus instead on the ‘install’. Our conversion rates improved as a result.
When pushing mobile installs, leverage a device in your creative. When you think about it, of course. It makes sense. But we proved it out via testing. Showing consumers an image of their device in the creative they’re being served improved conversion rates.
4. Not Leveraging an Always on Strategy
Consumers, myself included, are always on. Always plugged in. It’s a bad, addicting habit.
But, that also means running a campaign for a TV show only when that show is in-season leaves opportunity on the table.
There are a few challenges with being able to do this:
First, media companies are selling off the rights to their shows to the likes of Netflix and Hulu. In some cases, the ability to create a show is solely dependent on the revenue coming from these transactions.
This means an always on strategy will never be an option once the rights are sold.
Second, when we first launched our campaigns, we were spending large portions of our budget on fancy creative and higher cost CPMs trying to capture the next big thing.
This left us without budget pacing that would allow for an always on strategy.
Plan of Action:
We tackled the second issue as part of our streamlining of tactics. This enabled our budgets to stretch farther and for longer periods of time both pre-premier and post-finale.
The matter of rights was more complicated and is probably worth a completely separate post. That said, as a test, we decided to focus on a core set of shows where the rights had been retained for several years.
The hope was, if we could show a series with multiple seasons resulted in larger average views per user, we could start to build a case for investing in the rights for the more popular shows.
It worked.
We found not only were the average views per user up, but these campaigns were far outperforming pilot shows and series with limited rights.
This resulted in overall efficiencies for the campaign.
Wrapping Up
There’s no question the digital space can provide lots of opportunity for growth and learning. I have certainly learned a ton.
Hopefully sharing some of these insights will help you better streamline your digital marketing efforts, focus on what works, get your tracking in order and ultimately drive increased performance.
About the Author: Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly on SEO tactics, analytics and social media best practices. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on Instagram.
from DIYS http://ift.tt/2wYmkQq
0 notes
Text
4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
For the past nearly 3 years, I’ve been in charge of Audience Development for one of the largest media companies in the US.
I learned a LOT during that time. Even more important, I learned a lot about what NOT to do.
Not all of these things were personal ‘mistakes’ per se. Some were top down decisions that were influenced by lack of foresight, knowledge or budget. Others were due to an industry that is undergoing rapid change.
As John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
To that end, here are the top 4 mistakes I learned during my tenure. I hope sharing these and their learnings will spark some good discussion – either internally or in the comments below.
1. Not Investing in Building User Data
This one definitely took me by surprise.
When I arrived, I had big plans to leverage CRM data to build remarketing pools, lookalike audiences, email campaigns, etc.
But there was no CRM database.
One thing not often considered about media companies is the fact the consumer data is controlled by the cable provider. The cable company collects the payment and therefore have all the associated consumer data:
Name
Address
Phone
Email
Credit Card Info
Purchase history
Login Username/Password
Etc.
In it’s simplest form, the media company simply provides the content the cable provider sells to the consumer. For the longest period of time, the value of collecting this data had been overlooked.
Plan of Action:
To access ‘free’ content within an app from the likes of NBC, CBS, Fox and others, you must go through an authentication process. This is done using the same credentials you would login to pay your cable bill.
In one of these apps, you’ve likely come across a login page that looks like this:
This poses two challenges:
Many consumers don’t know or remember this login. As a result, a lot of potential video consumption is lost.
As mentioned above, this is an interstitial page that drives to the cable provider as they own the username and password information.
In collaboration with the product team, a strategy was developed to implement a ‘free trial’ in exchange for the user’s email address. This would allow the user to forego the authentication requirement.
This was the minimal piece of information required for us to begin building a CRM and the beginning of a customer match marketing program across Google, Facebook and Twitter.
It also provided us with the initial piece of consumer data that we could subsequently build on with supplemental offers in exchange for profile completion.
The overarching lesson here is – invest in CRM. Even if you have to start with just a database of email addresses. Start somewhere.
2. Not Understanding the Nuances of Mobile Tracking
As you might imagine, much of our marketing strategy and budget focused on the mobile space. Interestingly enough, this is also a space where ad-blockers are not working.
That said, with mobile advertising comes tracking nuances that I was initially unaware of.
When I joined the team, we were full-steam into launching the first ever marketing campaign. In our haste to launch, we did not take the time to fully understand the impact of not solidifying our mobile tracking solution.
Our primary mobile advertising consisted of:
Desktop & Mobile Banner and Social Ads:
The standard process for attribution is based on the use of cookies.
When a user visits a website via their desktop or mobile device, your banner displays and a cookie is dropped on the visitor’s computers – regardless of whether or not they click through to your website.
Depending on the ad-server being used, this cookie can remain active for up to 2 years.
Eventually, if the user performs the desired action, that same cookie fires sending the proper attribution for your campaign. All is well in the world.
Apple’s Safari browser blocks 3rd party cookies by default which makes this ‘standard’ tracking more complicated. Among other things, this means your app cannot read the cookie data stored by Mobile Safari.
This presents a challenge to advertisers as Safari’s market share is around 33% globally.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our brand websites):
I’m sure you’ve noticed when you open a link in an app, it doesn’t open a new browser window. Rather, it opens an “in-app browser”.
This makes perfect sense for UX as it allows you to quickly return to the app.
The issue lies in the cookie drop on your phone. This naturally occurs with the click, however, it only drops a cookie for the in-app browser session. Unless the conversion happens immediately within that session, the attribution is lost.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our apps):
Quite simply, cookies are not used ‘in-app’. This left us with zero attribution or cross-device tracking.
The lack of attention to these details was quickly evident. At the end of the campaign, we were left pointing to engagement metrics like impressions, CTR and social shares as a measure of success.
Not at all what a consumer acquisition campaign should be reporting.
Plan of Action:
The quickest change to a leaky attribution bucket that we could make was to tackle the Safari issue. We simply updated our social and display targeting to remove Safari browsers.
While Google struggles with mobile and socially-driven demographic/interest targeting, Facebook provides the ability to target (or exclude) users by Web browser.
While not foolproof, for the likes of Twitter and Google, we targeted only older operating systems in an effort to capture users who were still using legacy browsers.
Considering our audience was US based, we estimated that we would only be missing out on approximately 15-18% of the overall market.
The other two challenges were a bit more complicated and required a mobile attribution solution that established the match between the user’s advertising ID and the publisher.
While there are many companies available for this, after evaluation, we landed on Kochava as our solution provider.
Pro tip: if you’re on a budget, Branch.io is a completely free solution that provides many of the same features.
3. Focusing on Sexy vs. Efficient
The programmatic display and mobile space is filled with shiny new tools, ad placements, and even ad units.
Combine that with the traditional types of advertising done by media companies (think big billboards, bus sides, etc) and these quickly become distractions from tactics that are proven to work.
I think it’s fair to say we spread our tactics far too wide in the early years in hopes of capitalizing on that sexy new ad-unit or the hot new ad targeting. This was, unfortunately, at the expense of tried and true tactics like traditional paid search.
A smarter approach would have been to test into these tactics rather than build a comprehensive media plan that included them.
Plan of Action:
I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. And Apple in general. One of my favorite quotes from him is:
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
With more data and proper attribution in place, we were more empowered to direct the media plans across the brands.
We focused on tried and true channels that significantly outperformed the “shiny objects” that had resulted in wasted spend and higher costs for creative development.
This paid off in a big way:
Total impressions declined significantly, however, clicks increased just as dramatically
Average click costs also declined
Cost per app install decreased nearly 200%
Cost per video start decreased 230%
Sometimes the ‘simple’ things just work better.
Ultimately, after seeing the data, I took away a few lessons that can be applied to almost any campaign:
Programmatic display isn’t the end all, be all. It’s an industry buzzword. I could even say ‘buzztactic’. It’s rife with click fraud and vendors with non-transparent ‘private networks’. It’s susceptible to ad blockers and comes with many privacy issues.
Don’t get me wrong. It can work.
But, test into programmatic options ONLY after you’ve exhausted the below tactics.
Focus on channels where a consumer is actively searching for you. They’re already self-qualified based on their actions. The most applicable here is paid search across Bing or Google.
Remarket your way to lower cost per acquisitions. You’ve already paid the premium CPC or CPM to get that user to your website. Typically, remarketing campaigns come with much lower costs. Why not re-engage a warm lead for less?
Image Source
#Hashtags are inherently social, but leave them out of social ad copy. Through our trimming of tactics, we also trimmed areas where consumers might be tempted to leave the topic at hand.
In this case, we removed any hashtag mentions in our ad copy so consumers would focus instead on the ‘install’. Our conversion rates improved as a result.
When pushing mobile installs, leverage a device in your creative. When you think about it, of course. It makes sense. But we proved it out via testing. Showing consumers an image of their device in the creative they’re being served improved conversion rates.
4. Not Leveraging an Always on Strategy
Consumers, myself included, are always on. Always plugged in. It’s a bad, addicting habit.
But, that also means running a campaign for a TV show only when that show is in-season leaves opportunity on the table.
There are a few challenges with being able to do this:
First, media companies are selling off the rights to their shows to the likes of Netflix and Hulu. In some cases, the ability to create a show is solely dependent on the revenue coming from these transactions.
This means an always on strategy will never be an option once the rights are sold.
Second, when we first launched our campaigns, we were spending large portions of our budget on fancy creative and higher cost CPMs trying to capture the next big thing.
This left us without budget pacing that would allow for an always on strategy.
Plan of Action:
We tackled the second issue as part of our streamlining of tactics. This enabled our budgets to stretch farther and for longer periods of time both pre-premier and post-finale.
The matter of rights was more complicated and is probably worth a completely separate post. That said, as a test, we decided to focus on a core set of shows where the rights had been retained for several years.
The hope was, if we could show a series with multiple seasons resulted in larger average views per user, we could start to build a case for investing in the rights for the more popular shows.
It worked.
We found not only were the average views per user up, but these campaigns were far outperforming pilot shows and series with limited rights.
This resulted in overall efficiencies for the campaign.
Wrapping Up
There’s no question the digital space can provide lots of opportunity for growth and learning. I have certainly learned a ton.
Hopefully sharing some of these insights will help you better streamline your digital marketing efforts, focus on what works, get your tracking in order and ultimately drive increased performance.
About the Author: Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly on SEO tactics, analytics and social media best practices. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on Instagram.
4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
0 notes
Text
4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
For the past nearly 3 years, I’ve been in charge of Audience Development for one of the largest media companies in the US.
I learned a LOT during that time. Even more important, I learned a lot about what NOT to do.
Not all of these things were personal ‘mistakes’ per se. Some were top down decisions that were influenced by lack of foresight, knowledge or budget. Others were due to an industry that is undergoing rapid change.
As John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
To that end, here are the top 4 mistakes I learned during my tenure. I hope sharing these and their learnings will spark some good discussion – either internally or in the comments below.
1. Not Investing in Building User Data
This one definitely took me by surprise.
When I arrived, I had big plans to leverage CRM data to build remarketing pools, lookalike audiences, , etc.
But there was no CRM database.
One thing not often considered about media companies is the fact the consumer data is controlled by the cable provider. The cable company collects the payment and therefore have all the associated consumer data:
Name
Address
Phone
Email
Credit Card Info
Purchase history
Login Username/Password
Etc.
In it’s simplest form, the media company simply provides the content the cable provider sells to the consumer. For the longest period of time, the value of collecting this data had been overlooked.
Plan of Action:
To access ‘free’ content within an app from the likes of NBC, CBS, Fox and others, you must go through an authentication process. This is done using the same credentials you would login to pay your cable bill.
In one of these apps, you’ve likely come across a login page that looks like this:
This poses two challenges:
Many consumers don’t know or remember this login. As a result, a lot of potential video consumption is lost.
As mentioned above, this is an interstitial page that drives to the cable provider as they own the username and password information.
In collaboration with the product team, a strategy was developed to implement a ‘free trial’ in exchange for the user’s email address. This would allow the user to forego the authentication requirement.
This was the minimal piece of information required for us to begin building a CRM and the beginning of a customer match marketing program across Google, Facebook and Twitter.
It also provided us with the initial piece of consumer data that we could subsequently build on with supplemental offers in exchange for profile completion.
The overarching lesson here is – invest in CRM. Even if you have to start with just a database of email addresses. Start somewhere.
2. Not Understanding the Nuances of Mobile Tracking
As you might imagine, much of our marketing strategy and budget focused on the mobile space. Interestingly enough, this is also a space where ad-blockers are not working.
That said, with mobile advertising comes tracking nuances that I was initially unaware of.
When I joined the team, we were full-steam into launching the first ever marketing campaign. In our haste to launch, we did not take the time to fully understand the impact of not solidifying our mobile tracking solution.
Our primary mobile advertising consisted of:
Desktop & Mobile Banner and Social Ads:
The standard process for attribution is based on the use of cookies.
When a user visits a website via their desktop or mobile device, your banner displays and a cookie is dropped on the visitor’s computers – regardless of whether or not they click through to your website.
Depending on the ad-server being used, this cookie can remain active for up to 2 years.
Eventually, if the user performs the desired action, that same cookie fires sending the proper attribution for your campaign. All is well in the world.
Apple’s Safari browser blocks 3rd party cookies by default which makes this ‘standard’ tracking more complicated. Among other things, this means your app cannot read the cookie data stored by Mobile Safari.
This presents a challenge to advertisers as Safari’s market share is around 33% globally.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our brand websites):
I’m sure you’ve noticed when you open a link in an app, it doesn’t open a new browser window. Rather, it opens an “in-app browser”.
This makes perfect sense for UX as it allows you to quickly return to the app.
The issue lies in the cookie drop on your phone. This naturally occurs with the click, however, it only drops a cookie for the in-app browser session. Unless the conversion happens immediately within that session, the attribution is lost.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our apps):
Quite simply, cookies are not used ‘in-app’. This left us with zero attribution or cross-device tracking.
The lack of attention to these details was quickly evident. At the end of the campaign, we were left pointing to engagement metrics like impressions, CTR and social shares as a measure of success.
Not at all what a consumer acquisition campaign should be reporting.
Plan of Action:
The quickest change to a leaky attribution bucket that we could make was to tackle the Safari issue. We simply updated our social and display targeting to remove Safari browsers.
While Google struggles with mobile and socially-driven demographic/interest targeting, Facebook provides the ability to target (or exclude) users by Web browser.
While not foolproof, for the likes of Twitter and Google, we targeted only older operating systems in an effort to capture users who were still using legacy browsers.
Considering our audience was US based, we estimated that we would only be missing out on approximately 15-18% of the overall market.
The other two challenges were a bit more complicated and required a mobile attribution solution that established the match between the user’s advertising ID and the publisher.
While there are many companies available for this, after evaluation, we landed on Kochava as our solution provider.
Pro tip: if you’re on a budget, Branch.io is a completely free solution that provides many of the same features.
3. Focusing on Sexy vs. Efficient
The programmatic display and mobile space is filled with shiny new tools, ad placements, and even ad units.
Combine that with the traditional types of advertising done by media companies (think big billboards, bus sides, etc) and these quickly become distractions from tactics that are proven to work.
I think it’s fair to say we spread our tactics far too wide in the early years in hopes of capitalizing on that sexy new ad-unit or the hot new ad targeting. This was, unfortunately, at the expense of tried and true tactics like traditional paid search.
A smarter approach would have been to test into these tactics rather than build a comprehensive media plan that included them.
Plan of Action:
I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. And Apple in general. One of my favorite quotes from him is:
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
With more data and proper attribution in place, we were more empowered to direct the media plans across the brands.
We focused on tried and true channels that significantly outperformed the “shiny objects” that had resulted in wasted spend and higher costs for creative development.
This paid off in a big way:
Total impressions declined significantly, however, clicks increased just as dramatically
Average click costs also declined
Cost per app install decreased nearly 200%
Cost per video start decreased 230%
Sometimes the ‘simple’ things just work better.
Ultimately, after seeing the data, I took away a few lessons that can be applied to almost any campaign:
Programmatic display isn’t the end all, be all. It’s an industry buzzword. I could even say ‘buzztactic’. It’s rife with click fraud and vendors with non-transparent ‘private networks’. It’s susceptible to ad blockers and comes with many privacy issues.
Don’t get me wrong. It can work.
But, test into programmatic options ONLY after you’ve exhausted the below tactics.
Focus on channels where a consumer is actively searching for you. They’re already self-qualified based on their actions. The most applicable here is paid search across Bing or Google.
Remarket your way to lower cost per acquisitions. You’ve already paid the premium CPC or CPM to get that user to your website. Typically, remarketing campaigns come with much lower costs. Why not re-engage a warm lead for less?
Image Source
#Hashtags are inherently social, but leave them out of social ad copy. Through our trimming of tactics, we also trimmed areas where consumers might be tempted to leave the topic at hand.
In this case, we removed any hashtag mentions in our ad copy so consumers would focus instead on the ‘install’. Our conversion rates improved as a result.
When pushing mobile installs, leverage a device in your creative. When you think about it, of course. It makes sense. But we proved it out via testing. Showing consumers an image of their device in the creative they’re being served improved conversion rates.
4. Not Leveraging an Always on Strategy
Consumers, myself included, are always on. Always plugged in. It’s a bad, addicting habit.
But, that also means running a campaign for a TV show only when that show is in-season leaves opportunity on the table.
There are a few challenges with being able to do this:
First, media companies are selling off the rights to their shows to the likes of Netflix and Hulu. In some cases, the ability to create a show is solely dependent on the revenue coming from these transactions.
This means an always on strategy will never be an option once the rights are sold.
Second, when we first launched our campaigns, we were spending large portions of our budget on fancy creative and higher cost CPMs trying to capture the next big thing.
This left us without budget pacing that would allow for an always on strategy.
Plan of Action:
We tackled the second issue as part of our streamlining of tactics. This enabled our budgets to stretch farther and for longer periods of time both pre-premier and post-finale.
The matter of rights was more complicated and is probably worth a completely separate post. That said, as a test, we decided to focus on a core set of shows where the rights had been retained for several years.
The hope was, if we could show a series with multiple seasons resulted in larger average views per user, we could start to build a case for investing in the rights for the more popular shows.
It worked.
We found not only were the average views per user up, but these campaigns were far outperforming pilot shows and series with limited rights.
This resulted in overall efficiencies for the campaign.
Wrapping Up
There’s no question the digital space can provide lots of opportunity for growth and learning. I have certainly learned a ton.
Hopefully sharing some of these insights will help you better streamline your digital marketing efforts, focus on what works, get your tracking in order and ultimately drive increased performance.
About the Author: Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly on SEO tactics, analytics and social media best practices. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on Instagram.
from DIYS http://ift.tt/2wYmkQq
0 notes
Last Seen Blogs
oakfieldofficial
Oak Field
give-me-up345-blog
Møöñ
universalgemology
Universal Gemology
ffcd
Fuchigami to Funato CD catalog
admin-109
Untitled