The Blog Post below is from Pete Kluge, Group Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Media Optimizer

-----

Creating Relevant Ad Experiences Without Thousands of Ad Units

Consumers are frustrated with the number of irrelevant advertisements they have to deal with daily:

• According to Infolinks, only 2.8 percent of study participants thought ads on websites were relevant.
• Adobe and PageFair found that in the United States, there were 45 million monthly active users (MAUs) of ad blockers during Q2 2015—equal to about 20 percent of Internet users, according to Strategy Analytics.
• According to PageFair, 33 percent of Internet users find display ads completely intolerable because they are not pertinent or interesting.

To rebuild consumers’ trust and drive better engagement, businesses today need to build more personalized ads.

Many advertisers still use static ads for their display advertising. This means that the actual content within the ad doesn’t change and therefore a different ad must be created for each audience segment. For any brand that is interested in delivering personalized ads to highly segmented audiences, the number of static ads necessary becomes a nightmare for the creative and traffic teams. The result? Impersonal ads that don’t engage the customer.

On the other hand, dynamic ads use a single ad layout (or dynamic template) that can be populated on-the-fly with predetermined personalized content.

Introducing Dynamic Creative Optimization
Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) allows advertisers to drive better engagement and performance from their ads by delivering the most relevant experience to the user in real time. DCO uses an ad layout with several dynamic elements that change depending on who the user is or which audience is actually seeing it. The content changes can include things like the product description, image, price, and call-to-action (CTA). Promotional copy can also be switched dynamically.

Retargeting campaigns is currently the most common use for DCO. It requires an advertiser to maintain a data feed with the dynamic outputs used to populate the ad at the time of the ad call. The ad is assembled in real time to deliver the most relevant content for any user. But DCO is not only for retargeting. It enables advertisers from a variety of verticals to deliver personalized experiences for consumers across the marketing funnel.

Elements of a DCO System
DCO works by combining several elements to output a real-time and relevant ad. Here’s a primer on some terms and definitions related to dynamic creative:

Dynamic Triggers: Pixels on a brand website capture retargeting values (i.e., product SKU) and are used to trigger outputs from the content source—such as data feed or API—to populate a dynamic ad. Other elements that can trigger dynamic ad content include geolocation and audience segment data.

Content: In the case of DCO, content refers to the advertiser feed, API, XML, business rules, offer grid, or product catalog that the dynamic trigger references for outputs to populate fields in the ad template. Content is provided by the advertiser, ingested by the DCO system, and output in the dynamic ad.

Dynamic Outputs: These outputs are ad elements that can be referenced by a dynamic trigger in the content source. Examples include images, URLs, and copy that are referenced in a data feed.

Variable Attribute: Variable attributes are dynamic elements within ads that are not referenced from the content source by a dynamic trigger. Delivery of the ad element is based on business rules (like A/B testing) and is not feed based. Examples include CTA, background color, and offer. Some items, such as copy or CTA, can be either a dynamic output or variable attribute, depending on setup.

Ad Layout or Dynamic Template: In DCO, these elements are the shell design that houses the dynamic content.

Experience: An experience is created by the combination of one ad layout and one or more content sources.

(No Cookie) Default Ad: The default state of a dynamic ad occurs when cookie targeting is missing or does not match the content source. Advertisers predefine defaults for each dynamic output. For example, if the DSP makes an ad call and there is no matching DCO cookie or if the dynamic trigger does not match the content source, the default experience will be generated.

DCO Delivers
Delivering highly personalized ads improves your campaign effectiveness. DCO can help manage the expense of ad creation and production by using an ad template and data feed to create infinite ad combinations without infinite time and money.

-----

Read the original blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/creating-relevant-ad-experiences-without-thousands-ad-units/

The Blog Post below is from Pete Kluge, Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Media Optimizer

-----

5 Reasons Now Is the Time to Implement Dynamic Creative

Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) was introduced to marketers a decade ago, but after the initial excitement, the implementation and delivery of use cases didn’t match the expectations. However, today, DCO is riding a new wave of adoption by advertisers and agencies.

Gartner shows DCO rising on the “Slope of Enlightenment” for its July 2016 Digital Marketing and AdvertisingHype Cycle. According to Gartner, this is the phase where “more instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood.” We believe several factors contribute to this newfound enthusiasm.

Five Reasons Why DCO Is Back and Stronger than Ever

1. Programmatic Advertising Powers DCO and Retargeting
Before demand-side platforms (DSPs) and real-time bidding (RTB), media for DCO was bought directly from the publisher or an ad network. Getting sufficient scale and unique reach could be a challenge—an advertiser had to buy media on multiple publishers or ad networks. Reaching many small and granular audiences required a manual and cumbersome set-up process. This lacked efficiency and there was no way to de-dupe user targeting among the different inventory partners.

Being able to retarget ads to consumers who show interest in products and services through their online behaviors is an important application of DCO and RTB technologies. Combining DCO with real-time audience-based buying through a DSP addresses key challenges around scale and unique reach. The DSP is integrated with many ad inventory sources for maximum scale and has controls like frequency capping across all the inventory, allowing the advertiser to better manage scale and reach. Advertisers now have access to vast amounts of data and advanced technology platforms to apply that data to display advertising campaigns.

2. DCO Moves Beyond Retargeting
Early on, DCO was used primarily by the retail and travel industries for retargeting high-value consumers with advertising. Given the large number of possible ad permutations for retail and travel (thousands of SKUs or origination/destination combinations), these are the logical verticals to be the first to adopt DCO. But advertisers now grasp how DCO can be used beyond retargeting for campaigns across the marketing funnel and across verticals.

While DCO campaigns at the lower end of the funnel—like retargeting and loyalty programs—have always made sense, DCO is also now being applied to top-of-the-funnel prospecting and awareness campaigns. Even if very little is known about a user (for example, from a geotargeted prospecting campaign), DCO can algorithmically optimize the ad content to drive the best performance for the advertiser. DCO evaluates all possible ad permutations and optimizes creative elements and delivery to the best-performing option for the advertiser’s objectives. Any vertical that has granular audience data can benefit from DCO.

3. It’s All about Experiences
Consumers are engaging with brands across multiple devices and digital channels and they’re expecting a personalized, consistent, and compelling experience whenever and wherever they’re accessing brand content. This is truer today than ever before. The fact that ad blocking is on the rise sends a clear signal that consumers are demanding better ad experiences.

DCO is the solution advertisers need to deliver a better experience for their consumers. Advertisers have access to deeper audience insights than ever before and DCO allows advertisers to deliver relevant and engaging ad experiences, and in turn drive better engagement and performance.

4. Data Feeds Are Everywhere
A key component of DCO is the data feed. This is the content that is used to populate a dynamic ad in real time. In a change from just a few years ago, many advertisers are now using data feeds regularly to power their online advertising.

In addition, DCO technology has become more flexible in ingesting data and it no longer requires a third-party vendor. For example, a Google Merchant Center feed can easily be translated for DCO and an Excel file can be mapped for DCO.

Digital advertisers are generally more comfortable using data feeds and customer files to power their advertising campaigns, and they have a greater awareness of how data feeds support DCO.

5. Creative Flexibility
While early DCO vendors required an advertiser to select from a set of predefined and inflexible templates, today’s DCO solutions offer an agency and advertiser complete control and flexibility over the creative layout design. Dynamic ad templates can be custom built for the advertiser so they have control over how their brand is conveyed and experienced by the consumer. The ad layout can include features like a promotion countdown clock, drop-down box, search form, and product carousel, and can be delivered on mobile and across devices.

What does the future hold for DCO?
As DCO approaches the “Plateau of Productivity” on the Gartner hype cycle, it will attain mainstream adoption. We will continue to see advertisers better understand how DCO works and what it can do for them. Access to data and ad-buying technology combined with DCO enables advertisers to deliver relevant and personalized ads to drive better performance and improved ROI.

Last year, Adobe acquired Tumri from Collective, adding DCO to its advertising technology stack alongside Adobe Media Optimizer, a cross-channel programmatic ad-buying platform, and Adobe Audience Manager, a data management platform (DMP).

This is the first in a series of five blogs on DCO. Stay tuned for blogs on what DCO can do for advertisers.

-----

Read the original Blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/5-reasons-now-time-implement-dynamic-creative/

The Blog Post below is from Maria Stalz, Senior Manager of Social Media Analytics at Adobe

-----

Top 3 Reasons to Take a Second Look at Your “Vanity” Metrics

Measuring social media’s impact on your business is critical. Yet, identifying the right metrics and tracking and analyzing social media’s impact can be challenging.

In the early days of social media, when measurement was new and available data was sparse, most businesses relied exclusively on so-called “vanity metrics” to quantify success. Classical engagement — the number of “followers” or “likes” that social media channels collected — was the primary metric considered. Fast-forward a few years, and strategists had quickly realized they needed more informative metrics connected to meaningful key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflected their business objectives. They needed to determine social media’s impact on the bottom line to demonstrate social ROI.

Today, vanity metrics have a bad rap because they do not have a direct tie to revenue. Traditional vanity metrics include Facebook “likes,” Twitter “followers,” and “page views” or “unique visitors” for blog posts. While obsessing over the number of Facebook likes you collect won’t necessarily win over a buying customer, vanity metrics do have their place when used alongside other metrics.

Following are some thoughts regarding the role of vanity metrics and how aligning traditional engagement metrics with more strategic business metrics can provide the insight you need to make informed decisions about your social media strategy.

Aligning Social Media Vanity Metrics with Business Metrics — and Achieving Results
Successful social media measurement focuses on the KPIs that are linked to business objectives, with vanity metrics playing a role in rounding out the big picture. Is Facebook growing at the same rate as Twitter? How is the community responding to different strategies and different types of content? Insights from vanity metrics can help identify whether organic strategy is working or it’s time to implement a larger paid strategy across channels. Bottom line? Understand how to use them to complement KPIs, and you’ll know what’s moving the needle for you.

How to Make Vanity Metrics Work for You
Let’s look at a few metrics and the insights they can provide.

1. Focusing on Followers
You spend a lot of time and money building up your following across the multitude of channels and networks. If you monitor your follower growth over time, it will be invaluable in helping you understand what is working when it comes to community growth.

Is your organic growth picking up or slowing down? Many factors influence growth rates, but by tracking follower growth, you can pick up on revealing patterns in your data. Does certain content cause sudden drops in your number of followers? Are you reaching the right people? Digging deeper into the demographics of your followers (on platforms through which that data is available) will allow you to determine whether your followers really represent your target demographic.

Does your brand have too many accounts? Comparing growth rates on multiple accounts may allow you to assess less-active or compelling accounts and make decisions about whether account consolidations or additional paid strategies would be beneficial. It’s also important to look at other metrics to evaluate whether stagnant accounts are still performing well in other aspects such as engagement or click-through rates, traffic, and conversions.

2. Evaluating “Likes”
Analyzing customer engagement can be one of the most important ways to gain insights into your content strategy as well as your followers. Of course, all those shares, video views, and comments should yield a positive ROI for your business; however, if you know what type of content works best for your audience on each channel, it will help determine your investment strategy.

Do people “like” your content but not share it? Not all interactions are created equal, and some are definitely more valuable than others. Categorizing your content by media type, subject matter, or objective will allow you to look at which category drives the most bang for your buck.

Do your videos receive a lot of views but low completion rates? Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn now auto-play videos by default. This makes it rather challenging to analyze video performance. One way to look at it is through completion rates rather than total video views. Which videos compel your followers to stop scrolling and watch long enough to reach that all-important call to action and link?

Is there a correlation between the drop in followers and the content you published that day? Sudden follower drop can be as insightful as follower growth. Understanding the correlation between your followers who are bailing out and the particular types of content you are showing or your posting frequency can help to ensure you keep those fans you worked so hard to attract.

3. Analyzing Page Views
On the surface, page views — counting the number of “hits” your webpage or blog gets — is another vanity metric. No, by itself, it will not reveal how your content on the page is moving the needle for your business. For insight like that, you will need to explore not only what happens further down the conversion path, but also the contribution of the page view to the desirable user behavior on the site. However, using page views alongside smart segmentation and a few additional metrics will help you assess the quality of the page’s content.

Does some of your blog content attract ongoing traffic while traffic to other pages tapers off quickly? This could either indicate that some pages are better optimized for search engines (look at your persistent traffic sources!), or that some content is compelling enough for people to continue sharing (check out your social shares on various platforms). It could also indicate that some content types are more relevant to your audience, so grouping your pages by content type or topic, and then assessing average lifespan for each, may give you insight into what you should focus on in the future.

How many of your page views were “bounces?” If a visitor landed on the page but did not interact with any content or visit a different page, he or she may have found the page content irrelevant or not known how to navigate to content that may be of interest. Segmenting your bouncers according to devices used may shed some light on whether your pages perform well on mobile devices or have loading issues on some browsers.

What is the best referring channel? Do people who are visiting from different sources behave differently? Perhaps one source yields more bounces than average, and a different source drives more conversions down the line. Segmenting traffic can help you fine-tune content that is targeted toward different customer segments and identify where your target customers roam free.

A Multi-Tiered Approach to Measurement
We know there’s value in social media marketing, but being equipped with the right tools to demonstrate how and why has never been easy. With only 15 percent of today’s marketers able to demonstrate the quantitative impact social media has on their businesses, it’s clear that measuring what matters is tough. Business metrics tied to objectives may be seen as more strategic, and they are certainly instrumental in showing how social media is creating value overall. But, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet — vanity metrics are useful for uncovering the reasons behind trends. And, when used in conjunction with business-oriented metrics, they can offer powerful insights into the details necessary for fine-tuning larger strategies at a tactical level.

-----

Read the original Blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/really-measuring-matters-social-media/

The Blog Post below is from Cici DeWaal, Social Advertising Manager at Adobe

-----

15 Years of Defining Programmatic

Programmatic ad buying growth continues to explode. The online advertising ecosystem can be complex to navigate but for those that have embraced it programmatic simplifies the online ad buying, management and optimization process.

Looking back on how the industry has evolved, offline direct marketing tactics and principles have been applied to online ad technology and have now come full circle connecting the offline and online worlds. Because of these changes advertisers can now track and target audiences, and measure performance results across channels on and offline.

How did we get here? Looking back 15 years.

For today’s internet based businesses, online advertising channels like search and display are top channels used to acquire new customers. However, that wasn’t the case for us back in 2000. During the dot-com boom and crash, I was managing direct marketing programs for new customer acquisition at the “first online grocer,” HomeGrocer.com (Amazon was an investor, and it was later acquired by Webvan). We tested various direct marketing channels at HomeGrocer.com. Interestingly, we found that direct mail was the most efficient channel for us to profitably acquire new customers at scale (~$20M annual spend).

A lot has changed since the peak of the internet bubble in 2000 for advertisers. Here is a snap shot of today’s common direct marketing channels as they were used 15 years ago.

• Display – The first click-based banners were sold on HotWired.com in 1994. In 2000, display buying was done primarily through direct placements. Yahoo, AOL and MSN were the big portals around. Advertising.com, the ad network, came around in 2000 and was acquired by AOL in 2004.
• Search – Overture and Google were just getting started in 2000 with the auction-based, pay per click (PPC) model. Google launched AdWords in 2000, began offering PPC in 2002 and went public in 2004.
• Social – Facebook didn’t exist in 2000 and was founded in 2004 the same year they ran their first ads.
• Email – The perception on email marketing was low due to poor performance and offshore spammers clogging up inboxes with non-relevant content. The Can SPAM Act of 2003 helped to legitimize email marketing with clear opt-in and opt-out requirements.
• Direct Mail – Direct mail was a scalable and effective direct marketing channel. From magazine subscriber files to those compiled from warranty registration cards and phone books, advertisers had access to hundreds of marketing lists to test for performance (and all appended with demographic data). Database marketing was popular and allowed an advertiser to efficiently manage their prospect lists and direct mail communications.

With the growth of the internet and access to more audience data, the industry has progressed. Search, social and display channels have had tremendous growth and are now primary direct marketing channels for many businesses. Today we have a lot more options for online advertising.

Advertising 15 years later

Advertisers now have access to massive amounts of audience data, everything from online site activity and web analytics data to offline customer data, and 3^rd party data. Offline CRM data and email marketing data can now be linked to programmatic ad buying platforms. Audience targeting can be done more efficiently now than ever before.

Today advertisers have access to advanced advertising technology platforms to help them manage and optimize their online advertising campaigns. Everything from search bid optimization, display ad buying and audience management, to site optimization and marketing automation tools.

All channels have shifted to programmatic (or automated) ad buying with a focus on audience-based buying. In display, audiences can be reached at the impression level through real-time bidding. Facebook enables social advertisers to reach custom, website and search retargeting audiences. In search, advertiser can now target audiences for their campaigns via RLSAs (Retargeting Lists for Search Ads).

Display Advertising 15 Years Later

For display advertising channels specifically, the industry has changed completely.

Ad exchanges revolutionized the industry. The ad exchange allows a publisher to sell their ad inventory in an auction environment, and an advertiser to bid on ad inventory in real time. The auction determines the fair price for the user impression. This process is similar to the stock market with buyers and sellers, but with display ads instead of stock.

Demand side platforms (DSPs) permit advertisers to plug into the ad exchanges to bid in real time on their key audiences at the user impression level. The DSP optimizes for the advertisers performance objective. The advertiser can bid what they believe to be the right price for each impression based on the available data they have about that user.

Data management platforms (DMPs) enable advertisers to consolidate audience data from various sources, identify and segment high value audiences, and activate those audiences for cross channel marketing on external ad targeting platforms like DSPs and site optimization platforms.

Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) allow advertisers to reach granular audiences with flexible ad creative that is personalized in real time to drive user engagement, conversions and integrated experiences.

Everything is in real time (or close to it). The entire real-time bidding process takes less than 100 milliseconds. When a user visits a website, before the ad appears, an ad call goes to an ad exchange which sends bid requests to participating demand-side platforms (DSPs). The DSPs in play then evaluate available data on that impression (audience, category, time of day, geo device, etc.) and send back bids based on what they know about the user and the likelihood they’ll convert for the advertiser. The ad exchange holds the auction and the highest bid wins. The ad served on the website was the highest bidder of the real time advertising auction. All this takes place in less than 100 milliseconds.

Real-Time Bidding Process

Are we coming full circle between the offline and online advertising worlds?

Many traditional offline direct marketing tactics and principles are still in practice and have been applied to ad tech and the online world.

In 2000, marketing databases were popular with offline direct marketers. These databases allowed for consolidation of various audiences down to individual user profiles, and expanding of audiences using 3^rd party demographic, business attribute data and look-alike models. It gave the advertiser deeper insights into their audiences, enabling them to identify high value audience segments and deliver them to vendors for direct marketing channels. Does that sound like a Data Management Platform in the online world?

Direct mail letters were laser personalized with creative content (offer, message) based on the audience segment.Sound like Dynamic Creative in the online world?

We have come full circle and connected the offline and online advertising worlds by allowing advertisers to take their offline data (CRM, call center, POS), consolidate it with their online data (site visitors, web analytics) and use it for online targeting of ads.

Today marketers can meet their objectives more efficiently with Programmatic

Manual processes have given way to automated buying. CPM based selling models have moved to transparent pricing models. The massive amounts of online and offline data that is available to an advertiser can now be easily harnessed for ad targeting and optimization. Programmatic enables advertisers to buy more efficiently, reach more granular high value audiences, and as a result drive better performance.

Here is how Adobe views programmatic and some key characteristics of programmatic today.

Automated buying of ads across channels and devices

Many think of display advertising and real-time bidding (RTB) when they think of programmatic but it includes the automated buying of ads on any digital channel including Search and Social.

Data driven

Data powers programmatic ad buying. To gain the most from programmatic, it’s all about using and applying data. This includes online and offline data, and 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd party data. Data powers the following benefits of programmatic:

• Enables an advertiser to build and reach high value audiences
• Fuels performance optimizations
• Powers personalized dynamic experiences
• Drives automated ad buying decisions across channels and devices

Transparency

Advertisers have financial transparency into media costs by ad inventory source, and visibility into where their ads are running.

Advertising has come a long way

Today’s advertisers have access to integrated buy side tools – from audience management (DMP) to media buying (DSP) to dynamic creative optimization (DCO) – to help them most efficiently meet their online advertising objectives.

Programmatic ad spend continues to grow at a fast pace. According to IDC, global programmatic display spend will grow from $10B in 2014 to $70B in 2019. 60% of display transactions will be programmatic by 2019.

For advertisers that are embracing programmatic ad buying and leveraging their businesses audience data, the result is more efficient ad buying, better audience targeting across channels, and better performance results.

-----

Read the original blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/15-years-of-defining-programmatic/

The Blog Post below is from Cici DeWaal, Social Advertising Manager at Adobe

-----

Getting the most from your marketing dollar isn’t as straightforward as it has been in the past. Social media has changed dramatically over the past few years, and marketers have had to quickly learn the art of using social advertising as part of an effective digital strategy.

Why have social platforms evolved? Simple: They need to make money. And most of the big ones—Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, for example—are turning to their communities to secure advertising revenue. Paid social media is a fantastic avenue to reach your desired audience, but if you’re not smart about how you go about it, you could lose ground quickly. New to the pay-to-play space? Try these tips to get started.

Develop The Skill Set For Paid Social
Doing social advertising well on the major platforms requires a basic foundation in ad buying and bidding. Part of your learning strategy can include borrowing skills from other departments within your organization. The search or SEO team likely has experience bidding on different platforms, using handy techniques for setting up paid campaigns on social channels. Audience targeting is another useful skill for serving your social ads to the right audience.

Many of the social networks are beginning to publish their own resources—check out Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. A lot of the learning will start as you begin to test and create your own campaigns. Though each of the networks have slightly different terminology and set up, a lot of the functions are similar.

Learn From the Platforms Themselves.
In the absence of available formal strategies for implementing paid social, the platforms themselves are improving resources for those just starting out. Facebook and Twitter have comprehensive resource centers—and occasionally, helpful training webinars—with information on how to create and manage paid campaigns. Of course, if you spend enough money, many of the platforms will assign your company its own representative. LinkedIn also has a helpful section on marketing solutions for the beginner looking to implement paid features.

How Paid Social Works: What Can You Expect?
Getting started with social advertising is a relatively simple process. Navigate to the ads dashboard and login; this is where you set up your account and create and fund your campaign. You usually begin by defining your target audience and then creating content to be promoted. Within each platform, you have the ability to manage your campaign—whether checking on live content, promoting content more aggressively, or creating new content altogether.

To make things easier, Twitter has six or seven predesigned campaign types that can be helpful if you’re just starting out. Twitter designed these to help optimize your campaign whether you want to gain more video views or increase engagement. While it can be tempting to set and forget, staying actively involved in your campaign is good practice.

When funding a specific campaign, or “bidding,” be sure to set a maximum campaign budget. A defined maximum amount will automatically stop the platform from spending when it reaches your bid amount. Setting an upper threshold will save the campaign from going over budget if you forget to turn it off or pause it. Lowering your bid can also help set the pace. Bid high to start and then drop the threshold as you see it beginning to gain traction.

Build Paid Social Skills In-House.
Do companies need dedicated teams of paid social media experts to be successful? The way the industry is going, yes! Ultimately, the goal of your campaign will depend on what you want your audience to do—read an article, download a whitepaper, watch an empowering video, or something else altogether. However, it’s helpful to have a group of people within your social team—even if it’s an extension of your organic team—to handle social media advertising. They know which content performs well, and building this skill set in-house, rather than with a third party, creates more value within your social team.

Put It all Together!
As social becomes even more pay-to-play for brands, more challenges emerge. Securing a budget large enough to make a meaningful investment in paid social is still an uphill battle for many social marketers. The techniques involved in paid social aren’t excessively complex, but gaining that knowledge is more difficult, as the industry still lacks a single go-to resource to gain the necessary skills. On the plus side, paid social is a convenient and proven way to reach your desired audience. Unlike many traditional marketing campaigns, social media advertising makes it possible to see exactly where the money went—and what value it drove! 

-----

Read the original blog post at - http://www.cmo.com/opinion/articles/2016/8/11/a-beginners-guide-to-social-media-advertising.html#gs.SSKD8ew

The Blog Post below is from Tim Wadell, Director, Product Marketing at Adobe

-----

Cross-Channel Advertising With Adobe Media Optimizer

A decade ago, marketing options were limited on digital platforms. The focus was largely on search and banner ads. Things have changed greatly with advances in data collection and management, audience segmentation, numerous social-media platforms, video and mobile ads, and the ability to attribute value to the various touchpoints a consumer engages along the path to an ultimate conversion event (not just retail).

And, when you realize that marketing departments always have limited budgets — especially when unable to tie their efforts to ROI — it highlights the importance of understanding which channels are working. It is also vital to realize which types of ad campaigns and collateral work on which platforms and for which audiences.

Of course, this is easier said than done. As agencies and customers attempt to understand, return on ad spend (ROAS) or return on investment (ROI) can be tough to confidently quantify. It can be even tougher to drill down for further insights. To prepare your organization to receive cross-channel insights on your advertising campaign, you need the following foundation:

Data-Capture Mechanisms: If you are not capturing data on your campaigns — including clicks, visitors, users, and the demographics that go along with these things — it is virtually impossible to determine whether your campaign is effective. At a bare minimum, an organization needs to capture the results of their campaigns before they can begin to get actionable insights regarding what is working.

Clean Data: Tied in with the first point, if the data you are analyzing is not clean, your insights will not be as valuable as they could be. Clean data can mean a number of things: ensuring that data is being pulled from all the correct sources, is mapping to the correct fields, or even that it is being collected in a standard format. For example, if you want to understand whether you have more customers in New York or California, you would likely run a query to find out. However, if the data in the “state” field in your database contains values like NY, New York, CA, California, or Cali, this query is likely to miss customers and be inaccurate as a result. Clean, standardized data is a must when it comes to gaining insights.

Cross-Channel Analysis: Once you have hit these first two items, it is critical in today’s digital landscape to be able to understand that the majority of your customers will have multiple touchpoints with your brand before they convert. All brands need a mechanism for understanding what is happening across various digital channels.

Now that you have taken the necessary steps to be on all the appropriate platforms available, make sure that you also take the steps to understand where your efforts are most effective. In this paper, we explain the key points that all marketers should consider in their deliverance of cross-channel advertising.

-----

Read the original blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/cross-channel-advertising-adobe-media-optimizer/