Tag: EC Marketing Tech

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Where will our data go when cookies disappear?

James Avery Contributor
James Avery is the founder and CEO of Kevel and has over a decade of experience in the ad tech industry. He is also an expert on software engineering and API technology.

In January 2020, Google announced plans to eliminate third-party cookies, heralding a massive shake-up for digital advertising and the internet itself. The end of these cookies promises the golden age of digital marketing, where the internet becomes privacy-first.

At first glance, this update seems to be a step in the right direction, and in many ways, it is. That’s not to say Google’s motives are pure, though. Banning third-party cookies positions Google a step ahead and strips power from competitors, further solidifying its control over digital advertising. The company is essentially handicapping competitors by limiting access to data under the guise of a user-first, privacy-focused update.

Banning cookies will have a lasting effect on many publishers, although not all will be affected equally. Publishers relying on programmatic advertising served through third-party ad servers, like Google Ad Manager, will be impacted dramatically. Ad exchangers, demand-side platforms and advertisers can access cookie data in real time and then use that information to determine how much to bid on inventory. Without third-party data to augment the value of their inventory, traditional publishers can expect their programmatic eCPMs (expected revenue per thousand impressions) to decline, leading to a substantial drop in ad revenue.

So how can publishers win back their ad revenue? Whatever happens next, digital advertising won’t be as simple as it is now, and publishers will soon be forced to rethink their ad strategies and implement new solutions that will enable ad monetization.

First-party data is going to become immensely valuable, and publishers must start identifying how they can harness and monetize it.

Unified IDs are unsustainable in the long term

Publishers will need to be aware of this drastic shift in digital advertising and find alternatives in order to maintain their ad revenue. One potential path is a unified ID solution, where publishers pool together first-party data in an anonymized way, creating an ID that can identify users across the supply chain. This “cookie-less” solution, for example, could use anonymized email addresses to replace third-party data.

Many companies are already building unified ID programs, such as TradeDesk’s Unified ID 2.0. Prebid, an open source header bidding platform, has already announced it will support it. Unified ID 2.0 is just one of many on the market, each slightly different in terms of functionality, implementation and privacy.

Google recently announced its own form of unified ID, which helps publishers who use Google Ad Manager. Through publisher-provided identifiers (PPIDs), publishers can share first-party data in an anonymized way with outside bidders. This seems to be Google’s middle ground to protecting privacy while not alienating advertisers and publishers. The publishers will, of course, have to hand over their first-party data, so Google is once again left with an abundance of data it could potentially use.

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Hope and hype: Avoiding ad fraud in the hot connected TV market

Ian Trider Contributor
Ian Trider is VP of RTB Platform Operations at Basis Technologies, a leading comprehensive, automated and intelligent SaaS platform for marketers.

Advertising tends to work in hype cycles. Native ads, mobile targeting, social media — over the past decade, all of these channels have been touted as the long-sought miracle for marketers and advertisers to break through the noise.

Now, with at least one connected TV (CTV) in 80% of U.S. households, advertisers are ready to realign their hopes once more.

With seemingly high-quality content and a large reach, CTV — often powered by Google Chrome, Roku, Apple TV or other devices — seems like a good ad bet on its face. And with the looming possible obsolescence of third-party cookies triggering panic over ad targeting on desktop and mobile, CTV offers attractive inventory. But there may be a big downside for those not willing to perform due diligence: It can be easy to fall victim to bad actors exploiting the hype CTV is currently experiencing.

For ad buyers — especially those at startups and more agile organizations — CTV can be a viable and powerful channel to add to your advertising mix. But first, it’s imperative to know that CTV advertising can carry unique risks. Don’t get carried away by the hype, or taken advantage of by frauds. Investing the time and resources to get CTV advertising right before committing further is a smart strategy.

Knowing the risks of CTV environments

CTV can reach new and niche audiences, but transparency can be challenging. CTV ads don’t provide the technical visibility of ads on desktop and mobile — often, there’s no client-side tracking of when an ad is served.

This lack of transparency is just one of the risks uneducated CTV ad buying can bring. To get a more complete picture of the problem, we need to examine both the business and technical factors that make CTV unique:

  • High costs attract fraud. CTV inventory carries a higher price in cost per thousand impressions (CPM) than many other types of advertising. Fraudsters gravitate toward high CPM because it can maximize their return. If paired with a vulnerable ad ecosystem, there’s potential for big profits with little effort — a perfect recipe for opportunists and bad actors.
  • Scarcity drives low standards. CTV video inventory is inherently scarce. Making more requires building more CTV channels and either producing or licensing content. Under these conditions, a domino effect occurs. Ad platforms and networks become overeager to source enough inventory to keep business humming, leading to lax supply standards.
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The death of identity: Knowing your customer in the age of data privacy

Ted Schlein Contributor
Ted Schlein is a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins and a leading expert on cybersecurity and enterprise software.
More posts by this contributor

“Know your customer” is one of the foundational concepts of business. In the digital age, companies have learned much about their customers by forming individual profiles from third-party cookies, social content, purchased demographics, and more. But in the face of growing demands for privacy, businesses have the opportunity to overhaul their relationship with customer data to focus solely on first-party data and patterns of behavior.

Companies have employed digital analytics, advertising and marketing solutions to track customers and connect their behaviors across touchpoints. This enabled the creation of data profiles, which have been leveraged to deliver personalized experiences that resonate through relevance and context.

Now, however, this practice of profiling and identifying customers is increasingly coming under scrutiny. Regulators are adopting new data and consumer privacy legislation, most recently seen with the Colorado Privacy Act. Moreover, Apple’s privacy implementations in iOS 14.8 and iOS 15 have been adopted by an estimated 96% of users, who have opted to stop apps from tracking their activity for ad targeting. And Google has announced it will no longer support third-party cookies and will stop tracking on an individual basis altogether through its Chrome browser.

While these developments threaten to upend how digital marketing is performed today, they signal a necessary, and effective, shift in the ways brands will understand their customers in the future. Prioritizing individual profiles is far from the fastest or most effective way to understand and address customers’ intentions, needs and struggles. Brands don’t need to know who; they need to know what and why.

Thanks to rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), companies can process and interpret first-party data in real time and develop actionable behavioral intelligence.

Pattern analysis as a way forward

The security industry, which I’ve been involved in for 35 years, provides a template for the path forward. Historically, security professionals have sought to pinpoint individuals’ signatures in order to identify, thwart or at least prosecute bad actors. However, the last few years have marked the rise of some incredibly promising companies and approaches that leverage patterns of signals to proactively surface and stop threats before they happen.

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4 ways to leverage ROAS to triple lead generation

Xiaoyun TU Contributor
Xiaoyun TU is the global director of demand generation at Brightpearl, a leading retail operating system. She is passionate about setting up innovative strategies to grow sales pipelines using data-driven decisions.

Businesses that don’t invest in their future may not have a future to look forward to.

Whether you’re investing in your human resources or in critical tech, some outlay in the short term is always needed for long-term success. That’s true when it comes to marketing as well — you can’t market your product or service without investing in advertising. But if that investment isn’t turning into leads and conversions, you’re in trouble.

A “good” ROAS score is different for each company and campaign. If your figure isn’t where you’d like it to be, you can leverage ROAS data to create targeted campaigns and personalized experiences.

It’s vital to identify and apply the most suitable metrics based on business goals, and there’s no one best practice or one-size-fits-all method.

However, smart use of the return on advertising spend (ROAS) data can triple lead generation, as I discovered when I joined Brightpearl to restructure the marketing campaigns. Let’s take a look at some of the ways Brightpearl used ROAS to improve campaigns and increase lead generation. The key is to work out what represents a healthy ROAS for your business so that you can optimize accordingly.

Use the right return metric

It is paramount to choose the right return metric to calculate your ROAS. This will depend partly on your sales cycle.

Brightpearl has a lengthy sales cycle. On average it’s two to three months, and sometimes up to six months, meaning we don’t have tons of data on a monthly basis if we want to use new customer’s revenue data as the return metric. A company with a shorter sales cycle could use revenue, but that doesn’t help us to optimize our campaigns.

We chose to use the sales accepted opportunity (SAO) value instead. It usually takes us about a month to measure, so we can get more ROAS data at the same time. It’s the last sales stage before a win, and it’s more in line with our company goal (to grow our recurring annual revenue), but takes less time to gather the data.

By the SAO stage, we know which leads are good quality­ — they have the budget, are a good fit, and our software can meet their requirements. We can use them to measure our campaign performance.

When you choose a return metric, you need to make sure it matches your company goal without taking ages to get the data. It also has to be measurable at the campaign level, because the aim of using ROAS or other metrics is to optimize your campaigns.

Accept that less is more

I’ve noticed that many companies harbor a fear of missing out on opportunities, which leads them to advertise on all available channels instead of concentrating resources on the most profitable areas.

Prospects usually do their research on multiple channels, so you might try to cover all the possible touch points. In theory, this could generate more leads, but only if you had an unlimited marketing budget and human resources.

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Creative ad tech is on the cusp of a revolution, and VCs should take note

Casey Saran Contributor
An ad tech veteran who has logged time at Google and The Rubicon Project (now Magnite), Casey Saran is co-founder and CEO of Spaceback.

2021 has been a good year to be an ad tech investor. Valuations are surging, Wall Street is happy and exits are frequent and satisfying. It’s the perfect time to double down and invest in an area that has been largely ignored but is poised for major upside in the next few years: Digital creative ad technology.

Think about it. When was the last time we saw a major ad tech funding round that was directed at the actual ads themselves — the messages people actually see everyday? I’d argue that now is the perfect time.

The adtech startups that can figure out how to adapt ads that can interact with the remote control, a synced smartphone or voice commands — maybe even make them shoppable — can theoretically produce a game-changer.

Here are five reasons why VCs should consider ratcheting up their investment into ad tech startups building the next generation of creative tools:

Creative tech is far from being saturated

Consider how much has been spent over the 15 years on digital advertising mechanics such as targeting, serving, measuring and verification. Not to mention the trillions that have gone toward helping brands keep track of customer data and interactions — the marketing clouds, DMPs and CDPs.

Yet you can count the number of creative-centric ad tech companies on one hand. This means there is a lot of room for innovation and early leaders. VideoAmp, which helps brands make ads for various social platforms, pulled in $75 million earlier this year. Given how fast platforms like TikTok and Snap are growing, it won’t be the last.

Digital ad targeting is being squeezed

Ads need to do more work today. Between regulation, cookies going away and Apple locking down data collection, we’ve seen a renewed interest in contextual advertising, including funding for the likes of GumGum, as well as identity resolution firms like InfoSum.

But the digital ad ecosystem can’t get by only using broader data-crunching techniques to replace “retargeting.” The medium is practically crying out for a creative revival that can only be sparked by scalable tech. The recent funding for creative testing startup Marpipe is a start, but more focus is needed on actual tech-driven ideation and automation.

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What’s driving the global surge in retail media spending?

Cynthia Luo Contributor
Cynthia Luo is the head of Marketing at Epsilo, an all-in-one e-commerce SaaS solution for marketplace sellers in Southeast Asia. Cynthia also runs CAOSE, a boutique e-commerce and digital consulting firm working with clients such as ExxonMobil, Criteo and Shippit.

Most businesses by now are well versed with the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic: Faltering offline sales, flexible work-from-anywhere options, fluctuating foot traffic with lockdown mandates and e-commerce becoming a channel many brands wished they had built infrastructure for earlier.

As a record number of consumers in Southeast Asia move from shopping malls to online platforms like Shopee, Lazada, Tiki and Tokopedia, the advertising dollars are naturally flowing in. Emerging markets are witnessing the advent of retail media right now.

Amazon paved the way in North America in 2018 by launching Amazon Advertising to become the first bid-and-buy marketplace. BCG now estimates retailers have a $100 billion business opportunity to capture, if they can keep up.

The money is where the consumer is

To understand why retailers will capture more ad spend, it’s important to evaluate what modern day marketing has become.

Is it bus stop advertisements? Bidding on Google keywords or a Clubhouse session? Or is it a viral TikTok video? As the world becomes more connected and the lines between offline and online blur even more, modern day marketing is a mix of all the channels tied to key performance metrics.

The main goal of marketing, no matter the medium, is to highlight a business or product to the right consumers to score a potential sale. And like most things, there is a bad, a good and a much better way of doing things.

E-commerce as an advertising channel is unique, because it encapsulates the entire consumer journey from start to finish, especially as marketplaces continue to steal the share of search from search engines.

Traditional marketing channels were primarily linear TV, radio and print, because the mediums were highly popular at the time. However, with the birth of the internet newer platforms emerged such as email, websites and streaming. Then came the rise of social media and apps that shook up the advertising landscape. But regardless of these shifts, there has always been one constant: The business went where the consumer was.

So when sources of traffic and revenue once again change, let’s say due to a pandemic, the marketing mix follows. In the next 12 months alone, many marketers are planning to decrease spending in cinema, print and out of home (OOH), while the majority will increase budgets in social and search, according to Nielsen.

The search for superior advertising channels

So which channels will benefit as money flows out of outdated buckets? A good indicator is ad revenue trends in mature markets like the U.S. While Google and Facebook remain the dominant advertising players, Amazon has eaten into the duopoly’s ad revenue pie in the U.S., growing its share from 7.8% to 10.3% in 2020 alone, according to eMarketer.

How? Because the most valuable advertising channel is the one that has the most measurable touch points with the consumer.

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5 advanced-ish SEO tactics to win in 2021

Mark Spera Contributor
Mark Spera is the head of growth marketing at Minted. He's the co-founder of growth marketing blog Growth Marketing Pro and content generation tool GrowthBar.

In nearly every Google algorithm update in recent memory, Google has rewarded old, megatraffic sites, sending their search rankings soaring at the expense of smaller, newer sites. Big sites have increased their search traffic by 28% year over year, according to GrowthBar’s organic search data on the 100 most visited sites.

Why? Large sites such as Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Amazon, Home Depot and Target have something the rest of us don’t — they’ve got years of built-up Google trust signals.

Start with best practices like making incredible content and securing backlinks to your best web pages, but also be willing to think a bit outside the box.

I’d contend that Google favors large sites more than ever before — and it’s a trend that doesn’t seem to be slowing down. After all, Google exists to deliver the best search experience to users. Bad search results would be a death sentence for their business, since Googlers would flock to alternatives like DuckDuckGo and Bing.

Especially today, where distrust of the media is at an all-time high, Google can’t risk its reputation by surfacing bad search results, so I think their algorithm errs on the side of caution. It’s simply safer for their business to surface household names at the top of the search engine results page, particularly in ultrasensitive your money, your life categories.

John Mueller, Google’s SEO mouthpiece, practically settled the debate that older sites are preferred by the algorithm when he said, ” … freshness is always an interesting one because it’s something that we don’t always use. Because sometimes it makes sense to show people content that has been established (SEJ).”

So, how can you hope to compete if you’re deploying an SEO strategy on one of the billions of smaller sites?

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Of course, you should start with best practices like making incredible content and securing backlinks to your best web pages, but you should also be willing to think a bit outside the box. The cards aren’t in your favor, so you need to be even more strategic than the big guys. This means executing on some cutting-edge hacks to increase your SEO throughput and capitalize on some of the arbitrage still left in organic search. I call these five tactics “advanced-ish,” because none of them are complicated, but all of them are supremely important for search marketers in 2021.

Scaling your time with content generators

Businesses spent over $300 billion on content marketing last year. That’s in part because creating new content is the most straightforward way to draw in organic search traffic. Whether you’ve got a mature site or you’re just starting a WordPress SEO site, content is likely a large part of your SEO strategy.

But to scale content like a startup, you’ll need to devote a lot of time to it and/or manage a fleet of writers. Your time is probably better spent building your product or helping customers than on planning hundreds of blog articles. This is precisely where a content generator tool comes into play.

A whole new era of SEO tools is emerging, and some of these are augmented by OpenAI’s GPT-3 technology, the most advanced artificial intelligence language model. These tools have changed the game for SEOs and content creators by automating parts of the content creation cycle. Several tools utilize SEO signals and combine them with OpenAI to help you create blog outlines that include SEO-optimized titles, word counts, keywords, headlines, intro paragraphs and much more.

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Can advertising scale in VR?

Michael Boland Contributor
Mike Boland is chief analyst of ARtillery Intelligence, an AR/VR research firm.
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One of VR’s prospective revenue streams is ad placement. The thought is that its levels of immersion can engender high engagement with various flavors of display ads. Think billboards in a virtual streetscape or sporting venue. Art imitates life, and all that.

This topic reemerged recently in the wake of Facebook’s experimental ads in Blaston VR. As TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney observed, it didn’t go too well. The move triggered a resounding backlash, followed by the game publisher, Resolution Games, backing out of the trial.

This chain of events underscored Facebook’s headwinds in VR ad monetization, which stem from its broader ad issues. In fairness, this was an experimental move to test the VR advertising waters … which Facebook accomplished, though it didn’t get the result it wanted.

VR advertising is a bit of a double-edged sword. It could take several years for VR usage to reach requisite levels for meaningful ad monetization.

Regardless, we’ve taken this opportunity to revisit our ongoing analysis and market sizing of VR advertising in general. The short version: There are pros and cons on both qualitative and quantitative levels.

The pros of VR advertising

VR advertising’s opportunity goes back to factors noted above: potentially high ad engagement given inherent levels of immersion. On that measure, VR exceeds all other media, which can mean higher-quality impressions, brand recall and other common display-ad metrics.

Historical evidence also suggests that VR could follow a path toward ad monetization. VR shows similar patterns to media that were increasingly ad supported as they matured. These include video, social media, mobile apps and games (just ask Unity).

To put some numbers behind that, 75% of apps in the Apple App Store’s first year were paid apps — similar to VR today. That figure declined to 15% in 2014 and hovers around 10% today. Over time, developers learned they could reach scale through free downloads.

Prevalent revenue models today include in-app purchases — especially in mobile gaming — and advertising. The question is whether VR will follow a similar path as developers learn that they can reach scale faster through free apps that employ “back-end monetization” like ad support.

This trend also follows audience dynamics: Early adopters are more likely to pay for content and experiences. But as a given technology or media matures, its transition to mainstream audiences requires different business models with less upfront commitment and friction.

“Today, there are only about 18% of applications in VR stores such as Steam and Oculus that are free,” Admix CEO Samuel Huber said. “This is fine for now because we are still very early in the market and most of these users are early adopters. They are willing to pay for content, just like they were willing to pay for prototype unproven hardware and generally, they have higher purchasing power than the average person.”

Drawbacks of VR advertising

Considering the above advantages, VR advertising is a bit of a double-edged sword (or beat saber). Those advantages are counterbalanced by a few practical disadvantages in the medium’s early stage. Much of this comes down to the requirement for scale.

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3 data strategies for selling to developers

Sam Richard Contributor
Sam Richard is senior director of growth at OpenView.
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Yes, developers are a tough crowd. They hate being sold to, and it’s pretty easy for traditional marketing campaigns to fall flat with them because they’d much rather get a recommendation from a colleague. Failed campaign after failed campaign has led many software company executives to throw up their hands and declare all sales and marketing to be pointless.

And that’s just wrong. Selling to developers isn’t impossible — it’s just difficult. I cover why it’s difficult and offer examples of exceptional developer-focused marketing in my new playbook. Part of selling to developers involves balancing two things: building out a strong organic marketing function and targeting your audience with the right message at the right time throughout their buyer journey.

Selling to developers isn’t impossible — it’s just difficult.

Easier said than done, right?

Yep. I see it all the time. Part of what’s blocking marketers from widening the top of the funnel (driving more developers to sign up for their free tools) for their developer-focused businesses is ensuring they have the right data and measurement capabilities in place to understand how much impact their activities have on the business.

That’s mostly because these marketers, community managers and developer relations experts have the most luck with organic marketing. In this industry, organic marketing is one of the most challenging to measure.

Organic marketing means investing in channels like referrals, organic search, organic social (community) and direct traffic to your website (brand). New users from paid marketing, banner ads, events or sales reps (the most measurable channels) don’t count as organic. We measure the fruits of these efforts with a new metric called Natural Rate of Growth.

In a digital, multi-touch-point world, it’s getting more challenging to measure which users hear about your brand from which channels. That’s why tools like Orbit, Tribe and Mighty have gained traction so quickly.

That’s all good, and it’ll be a huge boon for community managers in time, but these tools still don’t solve some of the core data strategy issues I see developer-focused software companies fighting. These quick tips should help your team align around what needs to be done and what’s just a “nice to have” so that selling to developers feels less like a battle.

 

  1. Treat data like a product where a core end user is the go-to-market side of the team.
  2. Map your customer’s journey from discovery to expansion and track it religiously.
  3. Don’t overthink it.

Treat data like a product

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5 companies doing growth marketing right

Mark Spera Contributor
Mark Spera is the head of growth marketing at Minted. He's the co-founder of growth marketing blog Growth Marketing Pro and content generation tool GrowthBar.

What do all companies, regardless of industry, say they want? Growth. Lighting-fast, continuous growth. The good news is you can quickly learn which growth marketing strategies work by studying other companies’ success and adapting it to your own business.

Most technophiles remember Dropbox’s referral program — the one that helped it grow 3,900% in 15 months. Its philosophy was simple: reward customers with free storage space for referring other customers. In 2008, it was an absolute revelation. A golden ticket.

Tell a story with your business’ proprietary data. You’re the only one with this information, and that makes it valuable.

In 2021, you’d be hard-pressed to find a company without a formal referral program. It’s a standard growth marketing trick. If you study other companies’ tactics, you’re going to be able to shortcut growth — it’s as simple as that.

The race to grow faster is more pressing than ever before. When you consider the speed with which venture capital funds need to return dollars to their investors and that consumer acquisition costs have increased by 55% over the last three years, forward-thinking entrepreneurs and growth marketers simply must make time to study their competition, learn best practices and apply them to their own business growth.

Of course, you should still run your own experiments, but it’s just more capital-efficient to emulate than to trial-and-error from scratch. Here are five companies with growth strategies worth emulating — including the most important lessons you can begin applying to your business today.

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1. Doing SEO right: Flo

SEO is going to spend this summer shaking in its boots. Google began rolling out a two-week core algorithm update on June 2, and it’s unleashing a page experience update through August. These updates usually come with significant volatility that makes organic Google rankings jump all over the place.

However, one clear winner of the 2021 SEO footrace is Flo, a women’s ovulation calendar, period tracker and pregnancy app. According to GrowthBar, a SEO tool I co-founded, Flo’s organic traffic has soared 192% over the past two months and it ranks on page one for some staggeringly competitive women’s health keywords.

If SEO is a strategy you’re pursuing, there are two key growth lessons to take away from Flo’s recent success.

1. Authority matters now more than ever. Healthcare websites fall into a category of sensitive sites that Google classifies as Your Money, Your Life (YMYL). Because of oodles of fake news and suspect web content, Google has rightfully raised its bar for expertise and factuality. Go to any one of Flo’s more than 1,000 blog posts (yes, content is still king) and you’ll see that nearly all of them are reviewed by gynecologists, primary care physicians or some other type of women’s health expert. Its site also has pages devoted to its writers and medical reviewers, content guidelines and peer-review specifications. Flo takes its information seriously. From the 2020 election to QAnon to vaccination side effects, Google is on high alert. Whatever your niche, you need to establish credibility to win Google searches.