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When it comes to running an eCommerce business, there is a veritable wealth of relevant data you can use to improve performance and drive increased sales. Across the plethora of marketing and advertising channels, there are myriad metrics you can follow that expose which campaigns and initiatives are creating value and which are falling short.
If you want to ensure you’re getting all the most relevant insights to optimize your eCommerce marketing initiatives, here are 13 components you need as part of your marketing dashboard:
An eCommerce dashboard is a summary of all the marketing and business data that is most important to you. Instead of making you dig into pages and pages of reports, a dashboard allows you to get a snapshot overview of performance and track weekly, monthly, or quarterly trends.
When you use a Marketing Intelligence Platform (MIP) to centralize and analyze all your business data, it can help you build a dashboard of key performance reports that you can use to make optimization decisions. A dashboard can help you understand how your sales and marketing initiatives are performing overall.
The best thing about dashboards is that they’re customizable. Using widgets, you can add in all your own reports and track the metrics that are most important to your business. You can start with a template then add and remove widgets as needed. If you’re just getting started, here are some important dashboard components to include to make eCommerce management easy:
Every eCommerce dashboard needs an overview of key sales metrics that marketers can see at a glance, such as:
As an informed eCommerce marketer using dashboard analytics, you’ll have a good idea of what your AOV is any day of the week. So when you notice any major changes in performance, you know there’s an issue that needs to be addressed. Having these key sales metrics at your fingertips can help you always ensure your marketing and sales initiatives are on track for success.
Cart abandonment rates average around 76% for eCommerce sellers, leaving huge opportunities for improvement. You should always pay close attention to changes in your eCommerce store’s cart abandonment rate because they could be indicative of an underlying problem. There are a variety of potential factors that can cause people to leave without finishing their purchase, such as high shipping costs, slow shipping speed, long checkout process, and bad site user experience. Including your ongoing cart abandonment rate as a dashboard component can help you monitor and find ways to improve it.
Average Conversion Rate is an important metric to monitor as it can tell you a lot about how your overall marketing performance helps drive sales for your eCommerce business. With this dashboard component, you can compare your current conversion rate to the previous period or year. You can also break down your conversion rate across different traffic channels to compare and determine which are the most valuable for your business. If you find a particular channel has a much lower conversion rate than others, you could start initiatives to improve your marketing and user experience for this particular audience.
Key traffic metrics like total users and traffic sources should also be at the top of your eCommerce dashboard report. While total users won’t tell you much about the performance of your marketing campaigns, it does show you how many opportunities you have to drive a conversion. Traffic sources also give you a great overview of the potential value of different marketing channels, such as direct, organic search, referral, and paid ads.
As an eCommerce marketer, it’s important to know which products are your top sellers. Having an overview of your top 10 best-performing products as a dashboard component can help you monitor this at a glance. With this dashboard component, you can easily see how many sales you’ve made in the current period for particular products, how performance has changed over time, your total revenue from each product, and how it’s increased or decreased over time.
General demand changes, seasonality, and other factors can impact which products drive the most revenue over time. Paying attention to this report helps you discover changes you can make to your paid marketing initiatives to push products that will return the most profitable margin.
When you use an eCommerce dashboard that integrates with Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can get reports of your top organic keywords and their performance right from your dashboard. At a glance, you’ll be able to see what your top keywords are and your average position, as well as clicks, impressions, and CTR for each.
This is a valuable overview of your organic SEO performance but also can show opportunities to broaden your reach with PPC ads. For example, if keywords related to your top-performing products aren’t ranking well in organic search, you can target them through PPC to get more visibility for your best products.
Cost per acquisition (CPA) is another important component to have on your eCommerce marketing dashboard, especially if you’re investing in paid traffic through Facebook Ads or Google Ads.
Here’s how CPA is calculated:
(Total cost of paid traffic) / (Total sales from paid traffic) = Cost Per Acquisition
This metric is of course readily available to you through Google Ads and Facebook Analytics. However using your dashboard, you can see a combined metric that reflects how your paid ads are performing overall across platforms. Having this metric available at a glance on your dashboard alongside other components can also help you identify and address potential factors that could impact your CPA.
Not all site visitors are going to convert into paying customers the first time they visit, which is why Cost Per Lead is an important metric to track. Cost Per Lead helps you understand how effective your marketing campaigns are at generating leads for your business, based on how much budget you spent on the campaign. This metric is particularly valuable for eCommerce businesses that sell more expensive items, where lead nurturing is a key aspect of driving conversions.
End Action Rate is a measure of the last thing your audience members do as part of a marketing campaign. This dashboard component can include a graph illustrating what percentage of audience members take different actions, such as leaving your site, bounce, social engagement, purchase, or contact requests.
End Action Rate helps you understand how effective your campaigns are at driving key goals like engagement, lead generation, or sales.
Return on Investment (ROI) is a key metric eCommerce marketers need to make better growth decisions. ROI lets you understand how your time and money invested in marketing campaigns contribute to driving revenue and business growth.
ROI refers to your financial investment in a particular marketing campaign and new revenue generated by that campaign to calculate the metric. Say you spent $10,000 on an advertising campaign in a month, and during that time your sales grew by $15,000. Here’s what you’d end up with:
ROI = [($10,000 - $5,000) / $5,000)] x 100 = 50% ROI
ROI can tell you if a campaign is worthwhile to continue investing in, and can help marketers discover if their optimization tactics improve their bottom line.
Sales by marketing channel is an important metric for understanding which platforms and strategies are most effective at generating sales. Including this as a component in your eCommerce dashboard helps you easily see how paid ads, organic traffic, email marketing, and other channels drive revenue.
This can reveal opportunities to better allocate your marketing investment and drive more eCommerce sales through digital marketing.
Most eCommerce marketers put too much focus on finding new customers and overlook nurturing existing ones. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a measurement of how much revenue you can expect to earn from a single customer. Paying attention to CLV can help you focus on optimizing the entire customer journey, not just the path to first purchase. Monitoring changes to CLV can also inform you of how your retention efforts are performing so you can take steps to reduce churn.
New vs returning customers is another valuable metric that illustrates how your retention efforts are doing. Since it’s cheaper and easier to convert an existing customer than to complete a sale with a brand new customer, returning customers offer a huge opportunity to increase your ROI. Using your email campaigns, you can engage and upsell your existing customers, and monitor the effectiveness of these efforts with the new vs returning customers metric.
Even as a seasoned marketer, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the amount of relevant performance data to work with. An eCommerce dashboard is the solution marketers need to summarize important reports and track performance at a glance. Dashboard component widgets allow you to customize your reports to focus on the metrics that matter most to your unique business. Start out with the components mentioned in this post to build your dashboard, then add in new variables over time to optimize it.
The typical person can be exposed to more than 4,000 advertisements each day. Not surprising, given that people around the world spend an average of 170 minutes online per day! There are so many opportunities for advertisements to cross their screens.
If an advertisement catches your eye and it’s a product or service that you are interested in, there’s a good chance that it's part of that brand’s digital campaign strategy. This is where a media buyer comes in—it's their responsibility to strategically plan and place advertisements online to drive specific results for brands.
In digital media, there are two main parts to a media buyer’s job—media planning and media buying.
Media planning includes:
Media buying includes:
Brands and agencies rely on media buyers to ensure that their online advertising dollars are spent efficiently and effectively. Media buyers are also instrumental in tying online advertising dollars back to business objectives. This often includes increasing brand awareness, driving online sales, increasing site engagement, and more.
There are many tools available to help media buyers streamline day-to-day processes. At Centro, we are fortunate to have Basis—our own comprehensive & automated digital media platform that allows our team to run direct, programmatic, search, and social media buys through a single interface. This platform is the foundation of our company and has enabled us to service over 1,000 media teams throughout the years.
Some of Basis’ features include:
So as people continue to spend more time online and see thousands of ads each day, know that media buyers are behind the scenes, carefully crafting digital campaigns to place a lot of those advertisements. Hopefully these media buyers are using platforms like Basis to make their jobs easier and ensure advertisements are put in front of the right people, at the right time, and the right place!
When COVID-19 hit early last year, the world of healthcare marketing seemed to come to a halt. Media budgets and the people who controlled them paused, leaving marketers to reflect on how to move forward and the changes that would likely come due to the global pandemic.
While messaging and targeting may have changed, the one thing about healthcare marketing that hasn’t changed is that caring for and improving the lives of patients remains at the center of the industry.
Whether it’s advertising healthcare facilities, hospital service lines, new drugs, updated medical devices or simply continuing education for healthcare providers (HCPs), healthcare marketing still revolves around patients. What has changed is the way HCPs reach and engage with their patients and other people in their fields, and how healthcare marketers help them accomplish that.
Healthcare marketing is still focused on simplifying care for patients and keeping the relationship between HCPs and patients strong. However, things are now shifting to a digital-first approach.
A good example of these changes relates to telemedicine. It’s true that telemedicine isn’t exactly a new advancement in medical technology—in fact, it’s been around for decades—but its usage numbers saw a significant spike in 2020.
With the pandemic leaving people in quarantine and unable to visit their HCP, telemedicine offered a way to keep patients and HCPs connected and ensure that patients still received the care and attention they needed. The challenge that healthcare marketers faced was that telemedicine wasn’t the most popular or well-known service, to either HCPs or their patients.
While healthcare marketers couldn’t entirely control HCP usage and adoption of telehealth services, they could help get patients on board for doctors who already signed on to the “new” platforms. Shifting patient-centered campaign messaging away from showcasing service lines, clinic locations, and offerings, and towards making it clear that a patient’s HCP was still available, just in a different way, was integral to keeping relationships between patient and HCP strong.
Despite a gradual and hesitant adoption of a new technology, as it turned out, telemedicine’s shining moment in the midst of a pandemic impacted the healthcare industry more than anticipated. FAIR Health reports that the United States saw a 5,680% increase in telehealth claims, from privately insured patients, from May 2019 to May 2020. According to a survey from Doctor.com, 83% of patients expect to use virtual appointments even after COVID-19 dies down.
While there will always be a number of issues or conditions that do require an in-person visit, for the remaining conditions, the number of patients likely to choose a virtual appointment over going in-office are strong and keep rising.
Another big change in Healthcare marketing is the balance between non-personal promotion (NPP) and personal promotion budgeting and strategy. Previously, NPP budgets had taken a back seat to personal promotion, like drug sales-rep meetings or event booths and sponsorships.
While effective, personal promotion was a bit outdated and challenging even before COVID-19 entered the scene. Since COVID-19 forced a sort of evolution in the outdated practices of engaging with HCPs, NPP has increased rapidly. MM&M surveyed medical marketers recently, and 45% said they were increasing NPP, with 73% of those individuals citing COVID-19 as a significant factor for that increase.
This is by no means bad news—it’s actually a big step towards a more digitally evolved healthcare industry which benefits everyone involved. But it also presented a unique challenge for healthcare marketers… how do you make non-personal promotion feel personal? This question pushed marketers to work smarter and reevaluate how HCPs are targeted online and how they’re consuming media, which is something that will last long after COVID-19 ends.
In short, COVID-19 gave the healthcare industry, and thus healthcare marketing, a big push into the digital space, where it will remain long after COVID-19 dies off. Telemedicine, more non-personal promotion, and the ever-evolving digital solutions for healthcare, are here to stay. And, so is the responsibility of healthcare marketers to keep communicating the industry trends to both patients and healthcare providers, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Connect with us to learn more about healthcare marketing with Centro!
One of the most critical aspects of building a robust digital marketing strategy is engaging your audience in a consistent, meaningful way online. Social media platforms offer a huge opportunity to do this, yet it’s easy for your brand voice to get lost in the noise these channels generate if you don’t continually test and track your efforts.
Failing to optimize your social media strategy puts you on the path toward poor performance, wasted time, and misallocation of your marketing budget. If you’re serious about social media marketing, you need powerful reporting technology with built-in social media dashboard templates that empower users to continually improve performance.
A social media dashboard is a tool that marketers can use to track the KPIs from all social accounts to ensure strategies are being executed as intended. While you could create your own reports using spreadsheets, it’s much more effective to use a social media dashboard to automate the process. Dashboards pull data directly from your social platforms and summarize performance in easily digestible visualizations that update automatically based on the latest data.
If you’re interested in using social media dashboards to monitor marketing performance and optimize your campaigns, here are five tips for success.
Before investing in a dashboard tool, it’s important to first have a clear understanding of your social media marketing goals. Essentially, you need to be able to answer these questions:
Defining the exact make-up of your strategies before you implement them is paramount. This means investing in a dashboard reporting tool that includes all the integrations and key reporting metrics you need to monitor progress.
Most social media platforms have their own native reporting tools, which leads many marketers to (mistakenly) believe that they are sufficient enough to track performance. While your Facebook Insights Report and Twitter Page Report are valuable, you need to view your data holistically to understand social media performance overall.
When you use a reporting tool that creates social media dashboards, you can integrate performance data from every major platform, including:
If you have any additional social media performance data you want to add to your dashboard beyond these reports, you can import it using CSV files, or arrange for data to be regularly uploaded automatically.
Next, you want to ensure your dashboard reports include the critical data points you need to examine campaigns and work towards achieving your social media marketing goals. With that, there are likely certain KPIs that you’ll want to prioritize and view quickly at a glance. You could build your dashboard reports from scratch, yet the best strategy is to start with a premade template and then customize it to highlight your preferences. Templates include widgets dedicated to the most important performance indicators built right in, affording users the opportunity to rearrange them, switch them out, and build a custom dashboard to fit performance goals more accurately.
Some important KPIs to consider are:
Followers
It’s important to look at the total number of followers you have on each social platform and how they’ve grown over time. The great thing about dashboards is that you can see a combined total of followers on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can understand, therefore, how your social media efforts are impacting your follower growth overall.
Likes and Shares
Tracking how many likes and shares your posts get isn’t just for social media influencers. Marketers can learn a lot about how their content is resonating with their target audience by how they react to it. Tracking your likes and shares across social media channels also tells you a great deal about how each platform is performing. Your number of likes ultimately gives you an idea of how many potential leads you can target on a platform.
Impressions and Reach
These metrics show you how many people could see your posts in their social feeds, regardless or not of whether they have interacted with them. Having high reach and impressions is important to gain visibility for your brand and increase potential engagement. If your impressions and reach are low, you may want to change your posting strategy or invest in boosting posts to garner increased visibility.
Engagement Rate
Having a large number of followers actually isn’t all that important if you’re not doing a good job of engaging with them. There are plenty of brands who build their following and post frequently but are never able to truly interact with their followers and nurture them as leads. That’s why it’s really important to monitor your engagement rate and make sure your marketing efforts work to improve it.
Engagement rate has a formula:
(Total social interactions [Likes, comments, shares, clicks, etc.] /Total number of followers) x 100
Essentially, if you get 1,000 social interactions a day with ten thousand followers, your engagement rate will be much lower than if you got the same number of interactions with only a few thousand followers.
If you’re investing in paid ads, other important metrics to include might be:
Your main dashboard can include reports on any KPIs you want through the use of customizable widgets.
Social media dashboards give you a quick, valuable overview of social media performance with insightful reports. The main benefit of dashboards, though, is the opportunity they offer to zoom in on different reports and break down your data to surface more actionable insights. With just a few clicks, you can change your reports to show performance for different time periods, or filter data by platform, content type, conversions, and more.
By digging into your dashboard reports, you can get a better understanding of how different factors are influencing performance. For example:
You can also examine other key metrics that can reveal opportunities for improvement and inform you where it’s best to invest your marketing efforts, namely:
Succeeding in social media marketing isn’t just about growing your followers, engaging them, and driving traffic back to your website. You want to find the people who are most interested in what your business has to offer, target them on the social media platforms they spend their time on, and optimize CTR and conversion behaviors to drive your marketing goals. Your social media dashboard provides all the data insights you need to achieve this.
If you want to get the most value out of your social media dashboards, then this is the most important tip you should follow. Social media dashboards aren’t just for checking how you’re doing - they’re designed to help you monitor performance and determine how your marketing campaigns are influencing key goals.
Once you understand how your social media engagement performs as a baseline, you can introduce different marketing initiatives to improve it. Dashboards help you monitor week-over-week engagement changes to see if your efforts are paying off.
Your dashboards can also be used to understand how your marketing campaigns help your brand perform compared to competitors in the social media space. You can monitor changes in factors such as:
Dashboards provide the most value when you utilize the actionable insights they expose to create refined, more optimized social media marketing campaigns. Intelligence gleaned from your dashboards can help ensure your efforts are always focused on the right platforms, the right audiences, and the right tactics to achieve your goals.
Social media marketing offers huge opportunities to engage your audience, build your brand image, generate leads, and drive conversions. However, you can end up wasting a lot of resources on social channels if you don’t monitor performance effectively.
Building dashboards is the best way to surface the insights you need to understand how your marketing efforts are driving key goals across your social outlets. Start by investing in a robust reporting platform, then follow the tips outlined in this article. You’ll end up with all the data you need to build a winning social media strategy.
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At Centro, our universal reporting and analytics dashboard empowers marketing teams to make better, data-driven decisions for campaigns. You can view metrics from programmatic, direct, search, social, and connected TV via one platform. Ready to learn more? Get in touch with us today!
Marketers have been prioritizing the digital experience over traditional advertising channels for many years now, with most businesses today opting to pursue omnichannel marketing: the strategy of creating a seamless user experience across multiple channels simultaneously.
Omnichannel marketing drives all sorts of key business goals such as improving engagement and retention and driving more sales from your marketing investment. However, optimizing for digital experiences across disparate platforms and handling the massive amounts of data needed to achieve this is a huge challenge that limits these benefits for scores of marketers. That’s why many businesses are increasingly investing in a Marketing Intelligence Platform (MIP) as a consolidation solution.
The struggle to keep up with the demands of omnichannel marketing can manifest itself in countless ways across your business and marketing initiatives. Here are a few key signs that indicate a MIP is the answer to your problems:
If you’re having trouble keeping your data centralized and standardized, you’re among friends in the marketing space. There are so many different marketing channels, CRM systems, offline sales data, product information, and more to work with that most marketers struggle to keep up with data integration — or fail to achieve it entirely.
Ongoing data integration efforts can also sap huge amounts of time, so much so that you end up spending more time on integration processes than actually using them to implement better, more streamlined customer experiences.
A Marketing Intelligence Platform can help fix this problem by automating major aspects of data management. A strong MIP integrates with all your existing systems to gather relevant customer data, with features in place to help clean up your data by removing duplicate entries and organizing everything into uniform categories.
Getting all your data integrated and standardized in a centralized location using a MIP not only saves you time, but also increases your confidence in its accuracy. Being able to trust your data makes it easier to derive valuable insights and act on them to improve your campaigns.
Today’s customer journey is so complex that businesses can easily end up dealing with hundreds of touchpoints their audience takes on the path to purchase. Every marketer knows how important it is to track and understand audience experiences in the digital space, though doing so in any comprehensive way can be particularly challenging. Consumers interact with your business through numerous different channels and devices, not to mention third-party brands that can influence their purchase decisions.
If you feel like you don’t have a complete picture of the customer journey, you need a Marketing Intelligence Platform. If you’re missing key data points or data is difficult to access and analyze, you’re much more likely to make marketing decisions based on what you think the customer journey is like, as opposed to what you know.
Using an incomplete customer journey to make decisions for brand building, advertising, and audience communication can cost you significantly. When your customer journey isn’t optimized and your advertising message and targeting is even slightly off the mark, you can end up wasting a meaningful portion of your budget.
That’s what makes MIPs so essential for success. Better data management allows your business to avoid regular bottlenecks of gathering and interpreting data from different points throughout the customer journey.
Perhaps centralizing your data isn’t the problem. A great many businesses have more relevant consumer data than they know what to do with. They simply lack the resources, know-how, or capacity to derive actionable insights from it all.
If that sounds like your business, then a Marketing Intelligence Platform is the ideal solution. You need a tool that offers advanced analytical insights, but also helps you discover them within your own data. A top-of-the-line MIP harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze your data and discover valuable insights for you.
Not only that, but a MIP can summarize these insights into custom dashboards using data summaries and visuals to illustrate the most important insights for you. These dashboards are interactive, so you can get a closer look at data reports and adjust them using filters. They also update with the latest data insights in real-time, empowering you to interpret performance from large amounts of consumer and performance data with pinpoint accuracy.
Most businesses today work in industries where fast, regular changes to their marketing strategy can improve performance immensely and drive improved ROI. Depending on what tools you use to create data reports, it’s possible you’re just not getting insights quickly enough to make the optimizations you need to succeed. The challenge is even greater if you also have to wait on reports from different departments or your data analyst to expose and extract insights.
Marketing Intelligence Platforms with native dashboard features are the perfect solution for this. Data integrations combined with dynamic visualizations will help you easily keep up with all the important aspects of your marketing initiatives while simultaneously lessening your reliance on disparate teams to report on or analyze your data sets.
MIP dashboards also make it quick and easy to share performance reports with different departments and individuals within your company. Compare that to creating reports manually, where you have to handle data consolidation, preparation, analysis and presentation before anyone can see any insights. MIPs automate each of these steps so you can focus on the most important task: taking action to optimize your marketing campaigns.
The digital marketing landscape has changed massively in recent years. Now there are so many relevant channels to target that even enterprise businesses with substantial marketing budgets need to be careful how they allocate it.
If marketing competition in your industry has intensified and you’re struggling to keep up, inefficiencies in budget allocation could be to blame. Even minor oversights and inaccuracies in execution on different marketing channels or campaigns can make it very difficult to stay apace with competitor tactics.
A Marketing Intelligence Platform comes with many benefits that ensure you’re spending your budget effectively. The key to all of it is unified data management. Analyzing data from your entire suite of marketing tools combined with relevant product and business data will empower you to better understand what campaigns and customer segments are driving the most ROI. Customized reports can also be utilized to determine how increases in budget allocation can influence crucial marketing goals like revenue and retention.
Real-time reports also allow you to quickly understand how changes in the competitive landscape are affecting your campaigns. Armed with this knowledge, you can make swift and relevant changes to your investment strategy to improve efficiency and stay ahead.
94% of marketers and 90% of agencies say that “personalization of the web experience is critical to current and future success.” You know that personalization is important, but like many fellow marketers, you probably struggle to implement it at scale. Having a consistent and pertinent customer experience across channels and devices is a heavy task to take on.
MIPs can address this challenge in numerous ways, primarily by helping you understand behavioral patterns across platforms. Comprehensive data reports can, for example, make it possible to see how individuals who first engaged with your brand through Google went on to convert through Facebook. Exposing the complete picture of all audience touchpoints and behaviors across your program will make it much easier to segment audiences and optimize personalization initiatives at scale.
If you run an enterprise-level marketing program, there are likely many key players who work on your campaigns and drive performance, within and without the marketing department. While team leaders may understand what areas need to be focused on to improve performance, it can be challenging to keep all relevant players up-to-date on what to prioritize.
If your business struggles with this problem, a Marketing Intelligence Platform can help. Instead of keeping key data insights in the hands of analysts and team leaders, dashboards help you share them with all relevant team players. The same dashboard reports can be shared across devices and viewed by anyone who could benefit from understanding how different initiatives impact program performance. Including data from sales, marketing, and other relevant departments can help individuals from different teams understand how their work plays a role in overall performance.
Anyone can get a closer look at customized reports to see how their performance compares to your business objectives. The ongoing feedback these dashboards provide can also help guide their focus towards initiatives that can further key business goals.
The year 2020 created a lot of uncertainty for businesses, but it did make one thing very clear: the focus on digital experiences is more important now than ever. Businesses that haven’t started investing in omnichannel need to get started, while those that have need to optimize their efforts for success.
With so many business factors influencing marketing performance, it can be difficult to understand where your inefficiencies are. However, if any of the telltale signs in this post resonated with you, then a Marketing Intelligence Platform is a smart investment you need to stay ahead of the competition in today’s digital marketing world.
Centro was recently chosen by AdExchanger as one of The 2020 Programmatic Power Players. AdExchanger provides an authoritative and informed voice trusted by marketers and advertisers. They created this list of the best agencies, tech providers and partners in programmatic advertising by choosing from hundreds of submissions received from across the globe. AdExchanger’s editors evaluated entries based on strength and breadth of offerings, documented case studies and client references.
Here is why Centro was recognized:
Services & Tech
What are some of the qualities that cemented Centro as a Programmatic Power Player? We have unique synchronicity of programmatic advertising services and expertise in omnichannel digital media operations built on the media workflow automation technology of Basis. While most programmatic providers offer a single point solution of either technology or services—Centro offers a bespoke, blended model of technology and services across all digital channels. This approach enables a holistic view of digital spending and performance across channels and tactics, resulting in workflow efficiencies, expedited optimization and enhanced performance.
Centro’s media services team is powered by our proprietary technology, Basis—an automated digital media platform that addresses direct buying, programmatic, connected TV (CTV), search, and social via a single interface. Our team uses Basis on behalf of our clients, to plan, activate, and manage campaigns. Basis facilitates automation that allows our media professionals to focus on the high-value strategic aspects of campaign activation such as bidding strategies, optimization, and cross-channel performance.
Flexibility
Another differentiator of Centro is the flexibility we offer clients and the wide variety of service options to choose from—managed service, path to self-service, or self-service. Agencies and brands alike can utilize Centro to extend the bench strength and capabilities of their teams; whether clients are staffing up for new business, adding to their offering, or needing more digital media strategy and buying support, Centro can help. Our team of digital media strategists, ad operations experts, performance analysts, and search and social specialists plan, execute, and optimize, across all channels and tactics, in partnership with clients. We implement the right solution for clients’ specific needs and provide ongoing flexibility along the way.
Centro’s newest service option enables a seamless transition to bring programmatic and digital media capabilities in-house. Through this offering, we begin the engagement as managed service, with our team handling the entire lifecycle of the campaigns. In using Basis, clients have full transparency of Centro’s planning approach, optimization strategy, performance and overall results. We take the lead, while the client observes and learns. If interested, and the time is right for their business, clients can take over and in-house their media—or they can continue leaning on the Centro team to support their needs. The top advantages of this solution are the campaign data and performance results that are stored within the client’s instance of Basis. Therefore, if the long-term preference is to in-house media, it is a turnkey process for clients to take control.
The Centro team is committed to delivering service, results, and high levels of client satisfaction. We create Raving Fans through extraordinary efforts by our team to exceed the expectations of our clients. Our service embodies a combination of great service and outstanding results powered by technology and top-rated talent.
Connect with us to learn more about Centro’s technology and service offering.
For many, advertising on social media platforms is comparable to trying to solve a puzzle that constantly rearranges its pieces. Whether it is the multitude of different campaign objectives, countless targeting options, or endless amounts of customizable creative available—running an effective social media advertising campaign on any platform can be daunting, to say the least.
While all the different levers available to advertisers ensure that no two campaigns will ever be the same, it's important to understand each platform’s algorithm and set-up campaigns that coexist with the on-going machine learning optimization that exists within each of them. This understanding will boost your confidence, and help you manage multiple social media initiatives simultaneously, and more effectively. Review our three key points to better understand and optimize your social media advertising, below:
Social media platforms have relied on user engagement since their inception. This is now more important than ever before, with advertising revenue accounting for a significant portion of each popular social site’s bottom line. To solve for this and meet business goals, social platforms have taken information from billions of users and created a digitized proprietary “brain” (i.e. algorithm) in order to sort what they show users, based on popularity and relevance.
Naturally, these algorithms have migrated over to benefit advertisers as well. Each social platform utilizes its algorithm to determine which ads to show to which users via machine learning, in order to ensure advertisers that their ads are being served in real-time to the most valuable user.
While each platform’s algorithm is slightly different, common variables used in machine learning outputs include automating and maximizing each advertiser's bid amount in real-time, understanding the effective rate they'll have to pay in an auction in order to win an impression, and factoring in the perceived value of each ad to the end-user. This is real-time, auction-based bidding in a nutshell!
Now that we have a working understanding of social algorithms under our belt, the real work begins. It’s imperative that advertisers ensure their budgets, bids, and KPIs are clear and fully fleshed out, prior to launching any social campaign. Aside from that, given what we know about the algorithm and the signals it uses to make decisions, the best way for advertisers to get the most out of their social media advertising is to:
1) Create ads that are relevant and engaging.
2) Ensure campaigns are set-up to optimize the desired business outcome.
3) Take advantage of automated features within each social media buying platform to maximize the impact of its algorithm.
By working with machine learning (and doing these three things), you ensure that your campaign is set-up for success.
Finally, some quick and helpful hints to optimize your social media advertising:
Connect with us to learn more about social media advertising with Centro.
According to Treasure Data’s State of the Customer Journey report, 47% of marketers say that silos are their biggest problem when it comes to gaining insights from data.
A further 20% reveal they don’t even have the knowledge or capacity to extract insights from their data. Both of these issues can be solved by prioritizing effective data management to break silos down and expose valuable insights. Here’s everything you need to know about what data silos are, how they come to be, their impact on marketing, and how to get rid of them.
A data silo is a group of organizational data available to one person or internal team that exists in isolation. While data silos typically create problems for IT, administration, HR, sales, and other departments, nobody is more acutely affected than those in marketing. Data silos make it impossible to have a transparent view of performance and will inevitably create efficiency issues, make collaboration increasingly difficult, and prevent key insights from surfacing that could inform revenue generation opportunities.
Marketing teams are facing a new, very modern challenge as siloed data begins to seriously hinder their capacity to execute effective analyses. That’s because key developments in the field over the past few years have made silos more prominent and destructive than ever before. Here’s why:
More marketing channels and platforms
Today, marketing channels aren’t as simple as online and offline. Now there’s television, radio, mail, and newspapers, all paired with a growing number of digital channels including search, social media, email, messaging, apps, display, and more.
There are also more platforms that allow marketers to reach niche audiences, such as emerging social media giants like Snapchat and TikTok. YouTube has also evolved into a relevant search engine for marketers to target. Each of these platforms offers its own analytics capabilities, siloing marketing performance data more voluminously.
More relevant data
With more platforms comes more relevant audience data marketers can use to improve targeting and campaign optimization. Audience demographics, behavioral insights, and interests from social media and search can inform campaign targeting across disparate channels. Marketers can get a broader picture of audience demographics and habits from third-party data platforms. There’s also a new stream of location data derived from mobile and wearable devices. These new data sources are creating costly silos that didn’t exist even a decade ago.
More tools to manage all of the above
According to Scott Brinker’s MarTech Landscape Supergraphic, the number of marketing tools available has grown from 150 as of 2011 to 8,000 in 2020:
The growth in marketing channels has called for an increase in the number of tools needed to manage them and monitor performance. Rather than helping aggregate marketing data, more tools often just create more silos.
Many companies end up with siloed data by accident. However, few seem in a hurry to fix the issue. This is likely because they don’t fully understand the hugely negative impact data silos have.
1. Wasted time
Data silos don’t completely prevent employees from accessing different data sets, they just make it challenging to do so. Teams can waste countless hours analyzing data only to realize later they need additional information from another analytics source. Then they have to find where the data is located, request access to it, wait for it to arrive, then start analysis again. There’s also the unhappy and lengthy task of stitching different reports together. When siloed data sets need to be integrated, your team likely ends up spending the majority of their time on consolidation instead of tracking performance and optimizing strategy.
2. An incomplete view of performance data
With a multi-channel marketing strategy, you have numerous siloed analytics tools offering relevant performance insights, such as Facebook Analytics, Google Analytics, Bing Analytics, call tracking software, email marketing analytics, etc. This makes it near impossible to get a comprehensive view of how your campaigns work together to reach your marketing goals. Once you’re able to integrate all data and performance analytics, you become empowered to expose new opportunities to drive efficiency, growth, and revenue.
3. Lower data quality and confidence
It’s not uncommon for teams to use different tools and strategies to store and analyze data. The longer data is siloed this way, the more inconsistent and potentially inaccurate it will become. People working on independent marketing initiatives may miss important data streams or accidentally consolidate similar data categories that should remain separate. Some may also end up working with older versions of the same data. Poor data quality can lead to very different analyses, which decreases everyone’s confidence in the accuracy of reporting.
4. Wasted resources
The growing amount of marketing channels and relevant audience data has caused most marketers to expand their MarTech stack to manage data streams, analyze them, and implement their marketing strategies. This means spending more money, time, and resources on different technologies. Storing all your marketing data in a centralized location and analyzing it from there saves significant resources that were necessary when data was siloed.
5. Limited cross-team collaboration
Data silos create difficulties for teams needing to collaborate. Each internal organization is forced to work with their own data to derive their own insights to make decisions. This makes it tough for individuals to share their vision and goals. Rather than working together, teams often miscommunicate and can end up working in competition to reach business goals.
Once you understand the negative impact data silos have on your business, you’re ready to investigate different approaches to fix the problem. Here are some strategies you can use to start integrating your data.
1. Change your company culture
Breaking down silos isn’t just about having systems in place to aggregate data. You also need understanding and buy-in from people who use data at all levels of your business. Even if you use a data management platform, it’s easy for team members to create silos again if the company culture doesn’t change.
When addressing the issue, start by communicating why data silos are so damaging to your marketing initiatives. Make your goal to move marketing data to a single source of truth clear to employees. Leaders can also take steps to encourage the kind of cross-platform performance analyses that are only possible with consolidated data.
2. Invest in a holistic third-party platform
As opposed to looking for solutions to help you integrate data on your own servers, you can invest in a third-party platform to manage it all. Intelligent platforms like Basis can help to unify all your business data in one place, including from Facebook, Google, Bing, your call center platform, offline data sources, and other channels.
What sets our software apart from other data management solutions is that it also has native analysis features. So not only can users access marketing data from a centralized location, they can use the same tool to uncover insights, create visuals and reports, and share these with internal teams. When everyone uses the same platform to store data and create reports, it’s easy to update analyses based on the latest insights, add in new relevant streams of data when necessary, and collaborate effectively.
3. Set data governance standards
Once you centralize your data, it’s a good time to set governance standards to ensure it’s used properly to avoid creating new silos. This is easy enough to do. Employees may use some data and analysis features but don’t necessarily need access to all your marketing data. You can use your software to set up account levels and permissions to grant levels of access to different employees. It’s also possible to put rules in place for how employees can use and analyze data. Otherwise, you’re likely to get instances of employees exporting data to spreadsheets for analysis, creating new silos again.
The customer journey is becoming more complex year after year, with new touchpoints online and offline that influence decision-making. This provides a wealth of marketing data to go along with relevant operational and sales data you can use to optimize all sorts of processes. Harnessing a wide variety of data types from different sources means that database management is now a top priority for businesses small and large. The negative impact of data silos will only grow if leaders continue to ignore this need.
The secret is out! Social media advertising is a highly effective digital media partner for top-performing brands across the globe. EMarketer shares that 43% of small businesses report social media advertising as the channel that helps them achieve their marketing goals over other digital and traditional means of advertising.
That said there isn’t a “one size fits all” strategy that leads to an effective social media campaign. Rather, here are three of the top considerations we use at Centro to create effective and efficient media strategies for our clients:
“There is no significant correlation between click-through rate and any Nielsen Brand Effect metrics” according to a study led by Facebook and Nielsen.
As media has evolved in the past decade, so have the ways we are able to measure performance. What was once only trackable through impressions and clicks can now be connected back to deeper signals like conversions or brand lift—allowing advertisers to understand more about the quality of audiences they are reaching with their ads.
The most successful campaigns are those that consider a business’ core objectives to guide the choice of their key performance indicator instead of prioritizing site traffic and impression delivery as those signals. Rather than optimize to a click—brand awareness, messenger engagement, lead generation, and conversion campaigns pulling in signals from your website, your app, and even offline data can paint a much more complete picture of success.
Many of these goals can be met across one of all social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit or TikTok. The right platform for the job depends on the audience you are trying to reach.
You should know that when investing in these strategies on certain platforms, you may see a high cost per click and cost per impression result. The reason is the media buy is focused on generating an efficient cost per “action” – and you could end up paying more per click or impression in order to get an ad in front of the highest quality audiences that are going to drive that deeper impact to business objectives.
Audience data is a major conversation in the digital space as consumers and platforms prioritize privacy and control of personal information. Over the years we’ve seen these trends transpire in the form of government-led policy (like GDPR or CCPA) or platform capability updates (Chrome’s cookie updates, or Facebook’s limit of targeting options for housing, employment, and credit advertisers).
While it’s necessary to communicate how you are collecting your audience’s data, and to give them the option to have a say in how it is used—advertisers should also look to use as many sources of data as possible to help identify the most relevant audiences and personalize ad messaging to them.
Here are some tips to get started:
Advertisers can no longer expect one good commercial blasted across TV, programmatic video, and paid social to create a decent return on investment. The market is cluttered, and audiences are being inundated with more ads than ever before. In this environment, ads need to stop the scroll and command the audience’s attention.
On social, most active users browse the platforms via a mobile device as opposed to on desktop/other devices (with the exception of LinkedIn). This means that the following mobile best practices will get you ahead:
Use these core principles to lay the framework upon which you’ll build your own effective paid social advertising strategy. Remember: there is no cookie-cutter approach!
To learn more about social media advertising with Centro, check out our managed service solutions.