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Centro’s Candidates and Causes team has been at the forefront of political advertising in digital media since 2006. In our Election Advertising 2020 series, they share insights for advertisers ahead of the U.S. 2020 General Election.
From the predicted uptick in early and absentee voting, to ever-changing publisher policies and restrictions, to shifting media consumption habits, there’s a lot for advertisers to keep track of this election season.
Understanding timing and key battleground geographies will help provide guidance to both political and non-political advertisers on how to plan for the inevitable rise in ad spend ahead. Read on for part one of Election Advertising 2020, and keep an eye out for parts two and three later this month!
With the move to allow for early voting access across many states, political advertisers will no longer wait for the final 2-4 weeks to execute high-frequency Get Out The Vote (GOTV) messaging.
At least 3 in 4 US voters will have access to mail-in voting this fall, meaning political ad spending is no longer only working towards an Election Day, but rather an Election Month. As a result of this:
While national advertisers may feel minor effects from the ramp of political ad spend, local campaigns running in battleground states or key congressional districts should expect some degree of impact in these final 60 days.
With many publishers restricting political messaging (i.e. Google, Spotify, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and TikTok), advertisers will lean heavily into programmatic, Facebook, and premium site-direct. To help minimize the pressure and remain proactive:
Check out part two of our Election Advertising 2020 series.
Digital audio advertising has ballooned over the past few years as technology has advanced the access and availability to streaming media, which in turn, has increased users' overall time online. According to the 2019 Infinite Dial report, Americans over the age of 12 years old are listening nearly 17 hours of online audio a week!
This is a huge opportunity to enter the new landscape of audio advertisements. eMarketer also reports that as listenership on traditional radio continues to fall year over year, digital radio is expected to surpass traditional by 2021.
The rise in digital audio streaming creates the need for easy and efficient digital audio advertising. This is where audio advertising, served programmatically, takes the lead. Programmatic audio is a type of digital advertising format designed for placement in audio contents such as podcasts, digital radio, and music-streaming services.
Centro’s Basis has direct PMP partnerships with some of the world’s leading brands and partners in the digital advertising landscape. Programmatic audio served through Basis is served based on an algorithm that analyzes where the targeted audience is within the specific programmatic audio marketplace.
Learn more about the audio advertising opportunity with Centro, here.
Native Advertising
Whether you’re new to digital advertising or a seasoned veteran, you’ve most likely heard clients and brands ask about native advertising. The amount of media dollars that brands are investing in native advertising has continued to increase year over year as the channel has evolved and more inventory has become available.
How Native Ads Work
Native advertising is commercial content that matches the look and feel of the site its on. Basis Technologies works with TripleLift and ShareThrough, two of the top native advertising platforms built for the visual web, to run native ads on our DSP. These platforms leverage pioneering ad and computer vision technology to integrate a brand’s most engaging images, across any device, at scale.
As consumers have become more and more accustomed to digital display banners, they’ve also become ‘banner blind,’ meaning they’ve become trained to ignore the typical areas of a publisher’s site where display banners are usually seen.
Native advertising can come in the form of in-feed content, branded content, or sponsored articles which all give the advertiser placement alongside relevant and engaging content to help mitigate banner blindness. This gives brands the opportunity to build awareness and consideration when the consumer is leaning in to learn more.
Basis Technologies’ experts are here to help! Learn more about Native Advertising with Basis here.
Anyone trying to navigate the Advanced TV space has felt the confusion—is there a difference between over-the-top (OTT) and Connected TV (CTV)? What is the benefit to Addressable TV over CTV? What on earth is an MVPD? Why are there so many acronyms?! Fear not! Centro is here to help navigate this rapidly expanding and increasingly confusing landscape.
The first piece of this puzzle is Advanced TV—this umbrella term encompasses each of the targeted TV types: Connected TV, OTT, Addressable TV, and Programmatic TV. Advanced TV is also typically the term people use to talk about the targeted TV landscape overall. With that down, we can tackle the definitions and differences for each type of Advanced TV. See? You’re already getting it!
Some other terms often thrown around in the advanced TV space are MVPDs, vMVPDs, SVOD, and AVOD. Think of these as different sources of inventory for the types of Advanced TV. Review more detail on each of these services, below:
The Advanced TV landscape is complex, but hopefully this guide helped clarify some of its intricacies. Buyers can access and discover CTV/OTT inventory through the private marketplaces and open exchange in Basis. Centro teams can also advise and execute buys across data-driven linear and addressable TV—learn more about Centro’s Connected TV offering here.
If you run online marketing campaigns for your organization, you’ve probably heard a thing or two about the benefits of investing in automation to streamline reporting and drive more effective decision-making. According to statistics outlined in a study by Marketo and Ascend2, 52% of marketers surveyed declared that applying artificial intelligence to analytics and reporting was considered the most valuable use of automation.
There is a crop of business leaders today, though, who still regard automated reporting as an option, not a real necessity. In this blog post, we dive into some of the tangible costs that using repetitive manual reporting processes could have on your business operations.
Arguably the largest hidden cost of repetitive manual reporting is your loss of a major competitive advantage. Manual reporting is so slow that it’s necessary to delay decision-making that can improve your sales and marketing performance. Collecting data from different sources, compiling them into complex spreadsheets, and manually evaluating them can lead to significant errors in interpretation. This means decision-makers have less confidence in results, which can also lead to missed opportunities.
Businesses that analyze performance manually usually do so monthly or quarterly. However, in today’s competitive landscape, it’s critical that you make changes in real-time. There’s no way to calculate the full cost of delaying decisions until you replace it with automation. Once you do, it’s easy to see that your business was missing out on potential sales and revenue by doing things the slow way.
In the worst cases, marketing managers are pushed to make major decisions before data analysis is even ready. They have to move forward with their best guess as to the right course to take, which could lead to even more losses. Missing the competitive advantage isn’t just about lacking productivity. As described above, automation technologies can also help you gain more accurate and valuable insights in comparison to what you could discover on your own.
Just know that if your business doesn’t invest in automated reporting, your competitors will. They will take advantage of improved productivity and more accurate insights to secure more sales and revenue that you’ll continue to miss out on.
Regardless of how careful you are, there will undoubtedly be human errors when reporting is carried out manually. It’s easy to hit the wrong key, copy the wrong data field, or misinterpret information in data reporting. You can also run into issues when different people work with your reporting data simultaneously. Without clear, company-wide definitions for each data field, you’re likely to run into discrepancies when everyone creates their own methodologies.
Ultimately, the real cost of human error is two-fold. One: undetected errors lead to inaccurate data and reports. And two: detected errors require ongoing time and resources to fix. While it may not be necessary to automate all data management, leveraging automation for your reports can minimize preventable mistakes. Automated tools essentially empower you to compile and analyze your data while reducing inaccuracies safely. Top-of-the-line tools have functionalities in place to prevent errors within the automation process itself, one example of which is anomaly detection features that automatically pause bids and flag data if performance starts to deviate significantly from projections.
Many businesses today hold out on adopting automation, but all that leads to is increased labor costs. Why would a CMO pay for several employees to manually execute a task when one person could do it with the assistance of automation? It doesn’t make sense.
Having a group of people work on the same assignment simply takes longer, and as a result of human error, they are also likely to spend additional time going back and fixing mistakes. When automation is employed, marketing organizations can accomplish the task with a higher degree of accuracy in a shorter period of time, which frees up employees to work on other, more critical projects.
Manual reporting allows you to build custom reports that focus on the insights that matter most to your business. With automation, however, you can do all that and more. Many automated data management and consolidation technologies use artificial intelligence to help users derive enhanced actionable insights from their data sets. Centro’s intelligent automation platform, Basis, leverages machine learning to discover correlations between different data points that can expose performance insights that would have otherwise gone undetected with manual reporting.
Automation also enables you to process and analyze significantly more data than you could with manual reporting alone. Look at advertising, for example. The competitive bidding landscape changes every day. Businesses can adjust their bids to take advantage of these changes, but only if they can analyze all the relevant data daily. Not even a team of the best data scientists are up to that task. With the help of AI-driven automation, however, you can do that. You’ll be empowered to surface timely insights and make appropriate changes to your campaigns that will drive improved performance.
The exercise of pulling together reports manually undoubtedly absorbs countless hours and resources. You have to gather data from various sources, verify it, conduct your analyses, build your charts and reports, etc. Depending on the size of your business and how much data you have to process, this could take employees several hours minimum. The universal reporting and analytics platform within Basis is one such solution that does all this work automatically, empowering marketers to consolidate their disparate data sources in one central location and completely eliminating the time it takes to stitch together disconnected performance reports.
By taking advantage of automation on this scale, employees become liberated from repetitive tasks and can instead focus on more complex initiatives where they can use their expertise to truly move the needle.
Thanks to the EU’s GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and other regulations coming into play, it’s become incredibly important for businesses to keep their consumer audience data safe. There are now strict rules about what kind of consumer data you can collect, how you store it, who can access it, and what it is used for, etc. Failing to comply with these regulations can lead to legal prosecution and massive fines.
This creates a big problem for businesses that regularly handle their data manually. Lack of knowledge and simple mistakes can lead businesses to break the law or compromise the security of their data. If this happens with your business, you’re legally obligated to notify your customers about the breach. That won’t look good for PR. Today, the majority of automation tools designed for data management strictly follow data privacy compliance laws. Managing your data within their system helps keep it safe and minimizes your liability.
In companies who still report manually, there’s usually one specific person who manages the data spreadsheet on behalf of the team. They define all the labels, create all the formulas, and run the analyses. What happens when this person is on paid time off or moves on? Who feels confident enough to go into the spreadsheet and pick up where this person left off?
When you automate data reporting, you’re not relying too heavily on your data expert to keep the ship afloat. Many different team members can easily work with the system to get the insights they need without having to put their hands on the raw data. This makes things easier for your team as a whole and eliminates the potential for major data issues caused by human error.
Manual data reporting equals numerous repetitive tasks. We’ve established that. You have to collect all the data, verify it, analyze it, create reports, and distribute results, etc. Often you have several people working on a single project at once. That makes it very difficult to keep track of who’s working on what, and what’s complete. This can also lead to duplication of effort — if nobody knows who’s working on which reports, it’s common for individual teams to create identical reports of their own.
When you work with one tool to automate data reporting like Basis, this issue goes away entirely. The reports are made automatically, and everyone knows exactly where to find them.
The above list illustrates just a few of the many hidden costs of using manual reporting in lieu of automation. Most of these costs are interrelated and compound each other to have a significant negative impact on your business. What’s more, leaders have no way to realize these losses unless they try out automation first.
Automating even some aspects of your marketing strategy comes with numerous benefits, namely improved productivity, better insights, more confidence in results, enhanced workflows, more leads, more sales, and increased revenue. With better, faster insights, you can make quick changes to your marketing campaigns to achieve these goals.
When you invest in advanced technologies like those offered by Centro, it’s also possible to automate changes to your advertising campaigns based on these insights. The more you can take advantage of AI-driven technologies to streamline your marketing process, the greater benefits you’ll start to see.
How is the marketing landscape going to look after COVID-19? Should businesses go back to following the same strategies that worked for them in the past, or have we entered into a whole new territory?
Realistically, both of those assessments are correct. Following marketing best practices is still important, yet much has changed about what businesses should prioritize and focus on. Arguably the most important tactic that will help businesses navigate the post-pandemic ecosystem is monitoring marketing ROI. Here’s why:
Many businesses have downscaled their marketing efforts significantly since the pandemic began. It just didn’t seem like the right time to be pushing the public into buying products and services.
Now we’re many months down the road and the economy is still running. The vast majority of marketing organizations that took a break at the onset of COVID-19 have returned to work. Many never rolled back their initiatives. According to Advertiser Perceptions, only one in 10 new product or service launches have been canceled for 2020; 41% are proceeding as planned, and 48% were simply pushed to the second half of the year.
While there are, of course, plenty of businesses that are still in survival mode, many are not. Influencer Marketing Hub’s recent Coronavirus Marketing & Ad Spend Impact Report indicates that one in four companies are set to increase their marketing activities this year. So if your competitors aren’t taking a break, why should you?
A large number of CMOs are investing heavily right now. If you want to keep up with your competition—or even outpace and outperform them—you need to ramp up your performance monitoring and optimize your marketing strategy post-pandemic.
Previous campaign performance has always been a valuable indicator of what to expect from your current efforts. However, that’s all completely changed. Adapting to new economic and societal norms is bringing businesses into whole new territory.
Marketers now are changing which channels they invest in and how much budget they allocate towards each. IAB’s COVID Impact on Ad Spend Report documents that many brands expect to increase their spend across digital channels in the second half of 2020, including CTV/OTT, digital video, social media, podcasts, digital audio, and paid search.
With that in mind, it’s safe to say that your previous marketing results won’t tell you much about how your campaigns will perform right now. Metrics tracking lead generation, conversions, sales, and retention can be drastically different from what they were back in January. The only way to know if your current marketing efforts are effective is by paying close attention to real-time performance trends.
The global pandemic has led to drastic changes in consumer sentiment. If you want your marketing message to resonate with your target audiences, you need to continuously adapt it to their current preferences. You’ve probably seen a lot of marketers already doing this with new advertisements. Businesses are going out of their way to show how they care and help their communities—those in the restaurant and travel industries, for instance, have been highlighting their sanitation practices to ease consumer fears.
As the pandemic continues to unfold, preferences among consumer groups change week-to-week (and almost day-to-day!) The best way to ensure your marketing message is still relevant in the long run is by constantly and maniacally monitoring performance.
According to a recent Media Frenzy Global survey, 47% of US consumers are interested in reading or hearing news that is not related to the pandemic, and 45% also say they want to be inspired by brands so they can be hopeful about the future. Your brand can cater to these changing sentiments, but only if you’re closely observing audience reactions and adapting accordingly.
Just about every business sector has been negatively affected by COVID-19, either directly or indirectly. According to research from McKinsey & Company, it could take more than five years for the most severely affected sectors to return to 2019-level contributions to GDP:
Regardless of whether your industry is set to recover, it could take a long time to reach pre-pandemic levels. Business leaders need to operate frugally while still moving forward with their sales and marketing initiatives.
The best way to do this is by ensuring every marketing dollar counts. The more you check your metrics, the more informed optimizations you can make to your campaigns, ensuring your budget is always spent as effectively as possible.
Just about every day, we are seeing new restrictions, shutdowns, and major events happening around the world in real-time. Many of these events can significantly impact your business and marketing efforts.
For example, many cities in the US and around the world are quickly imposing local lockdowns that include closing select businesses and limiting the opening hours of others. But you don’t want to leave your Google Ads running until 10pm each day when your business is suddenly forced to shut down at 5pm.
It also makes a lot of sense to segment your audiences based on their location and local sentiment. People in certain areas are more inclined to shop in-store or online, and the only way you can figure this out—and take advantage of it—is by paying close attention to how they engage with your marketing message.
Throughout the last few months, certain channels have become significantly more (or less) popular with marketers compared to pre-pandemic times, and this means there are numerous opportunities you can take advantage of. Advertising is a prime example: a recent global advertising investment forecast from WARC shows that 2020 ad spend is expected to decline by 8.1%, rather than growing 7.1% year-over-year as expected.
Since businesses are investing less in advertising, competition for ad rank and cost-per-click is decreasing. If you optimize your advertising strategy right now, you can potentially rank well for keywords that were once too expensive to target. That said, diving into this new territory is only going to be effective if you prioritize regularly measuring performance.
In short, there’s no need to be in survival mode. Research from Rakuten recently showed that 87% of global consumers still plan to shop for Christmas and other seasonal holidays. What’s more, 57% expect to buy on key days like Black Friday. Imagine competing for ad space on Cyber Monday with half of your competition out of the advertising game. Businesses that are brave enough to take an aggressive marketing approach right now can set themselves up for significant success.
These are not normal times, which means businesses cannot rely upon a normal marketing strategy. If there was ever a time to start checking your marketing performance metrics several times per week, it’s now. Society, sentiment, marketing platforms, and business strategies are changing faster than ever before. If you don’t prioritize monitoring marketing ROI, don’t be surprised if your performance changes significantly each time you check-in.
The good news is you won’t have to be vigilant forever. Slowly, the world will go back to normal, and it will eventually become easier to predict the marketing landscape. Just keep monitoring performance closely. Once things level out with your metrics, you can start relying more on past performance again.
Paying close attention to marketing ROI may well be a chore, but it does come with many added benefits. Businesses that manage to market effectively through 2020 will have built a strategy that’s much more in-tune with consumer preferences in the long run.
According to a study by New Vantage, 97.2% of organizations are investing in big data practices today. Just how valuable the intelligence you collect is, though, depends entirely on how capable you are of harnessing it. The first thing you need to do is consolidate your data effectively so you can easily process, analyze, and extract insights from the swathes of information.
Data consolidation can be challenging, time-consuming work. However, it’s easy to streamline your efforts by adhering to some key best practices. We delve into them below.
First, a quick summary of why data consolidation is critical in the modern marketing ecosystem. Combining your CRM, email, advertising, web performance, and other relevant intelligence in one place empowers you to do all of the following:
This is by no means a comprehensive list. Data insights can help you improve sales, marketing, customer success, and many other areas within your organization. Consolidating your data will ultimately enable you to maximize the value of investing in big data and artificial intelligence in the long term.
Effective data consolidation involves creating a system where your business data is regularly processed and uploaded to a single platform. You can manually consolidate data from various sources, but it will quickly become outdated and irrelevant as new, real-time business data comes in. Combining application programming interfaces (APIs) from your various data sources is the solution to this problem.
The most valuable marketing technologies today have features in place that allow them to easily communicate and share data between other software programs. You need to have flexibility and control over how your different tools share data, what format the data is in, etc. If you’re unable to combine APIs between your various tools, it’s worthwhile investing in new technologies that can.
Successful data consolidation means you must have complete control over your own audience data. This becomes challenging when you rely heavily on “walled garden” data environments. Platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have a wealth of third-party data you can use to surface insights about your marketing campaigns. However, you don’t actually own this data, so you can’t control it or consolidate it.
While you can’t simply cease using Facebook and Google Ads, there are tactics you can adopt to minimize your reliance on such walled garden data environments. For instance, avoid using features that also allow these platforms to control your first-party data (such as Facebook’s tracking pixel or Google’s tracking tags). Instead, use your own technologies to capture your intelligence. This will make it easier to control, unify, and analyze your audience data the way you want to.
Utilizing technologies that can share and merge data is very valuable, but it’s easy to run into issues if the data you’re transferring is incomplete. Different tools use data points in different ways to categorize, tag, and sort consumer data. If you don’t have complete information about each of your leads or customers, this could lead to organizational issues later on.
As an example, some CRM platforms identify leads by their name, while others identify and categorize leads by their email address. If the data you transfer over is missing email addresses, then the tool will be unable to distinguish and categorize those leads properly. For this reason, ensure that all your fields are filled out before engaging in any kind of data consolidation activities.
It’s also vitally important that data types are consistent across these platforms. Different platforms will categorize and illustrate the same data contrastingly. You don’t want to discover this after your data is already merged. One tool may use a date/time format while another uses date only. Or one may denote currencies using symbols ($, €) while another uses USD and EUR abbreviations. It’s much easier to adapt your data to a new system before transferring it over, rather than fixing it after the fact.
As a result of globalization and the growth of the technology industry around the world, there are now a plethora of tools on the market that allow you to store single-byte characters (used for European languages) and double-byte characters (used for languages like Chinese and Japanese). However, if you merge your data to a platform that doesn’t have this flexibility, you could end up storing data with incongruent characters, making some fields impossible to read.
Regardless of whether or not you run an international business that uses multiple languages, it’s just good practice to use a character set that can express data in any language. Unicode is one popular option that can encode and represent text irrespective of the character set used.
Data consolidation can be a huge task, particularly for enterprise-level businesses with various distinct audiences, marketing channels, and campaigns. Since it will take a while to achieve full data consolidation, it’s best to start with the data sets that you can derive the most valuable insights from.
Cross-channel data is one of the best places to start. Consistently marketing to leads across platforms is now more important than ever. It can grow your purchase rate, conversion rate, and ROI. According to Omnisend’s 2020 Marketing Automation Statistics Report, Omnichannel campaigns that include SMS are 47.7% more likely to lead to conversions:
That said, omnichannel marketing is only possible if you’re able to track interactions across marketing channels. That’s a key benefit of data consolidation. So, start by integrating disparate data that will offer the most valuable insights into your marketing strategy, such as online and offline performance data and cross-channel interactions.
Even if you’re able to combine APIs to automatically share data between platforms, there’s still a lot of possibility for errors in your data. The worst way to discover data errors is after you’ve already consolidated it in a single processing platform. Then you have to fix the problems on multiple platforms rather than one. The majority of data management systems have safeguards in place to prevent people from accidentally corrupting or deleting data. However, mistakes can still be made. It’s best to review your data at the source before consolidating it.
Using the right data management tools, you can also use automation to double-check for data errors. Many automated bidding technologies have anomaly detection capabilities that can identify potential data errors, flag them, and notify marketing managers. In the case of PPC bidding, artificial intelligence can identify when campaign performance varies significantly from projections, then pause campaigns and give marketers the chance to determine if data anomalies are the cause.
Technologies that can help you streamline data consolidation are growing in number. Turning to technology for help is necessary for just about any sized business because there’s simply too much relevant business data to sift through by hand.
What kind of tool you should invest in, though, depends on what your goals are. Why is data consolidation important to you? Most businesses invest in data consolidation to gain insights to empower sales and marketing organizations. In that case, it makes sense to consolidate data using a tool that can also help you analyze it and act on new insights.
There are plenty of benefits to data consolidation, but there is also a lot of room for error. You need to take a careful, planned approach to consolidate your data accurately, minimize the time you invest, and maximize the value for your marketing and sales strategy. Ultimately, the effectiveness of your data consolidation efforts owes a lot to your MarTech stack. You should work with technologies that can share data with each other and look to employ a central tool that can process all your relevant data for you. Invest in technology that’s designed for data consolidation and you can’t go wrong.
As the usage rate of mobile devices climbs annually, marketers may be wondering how they can best leverage mobile apps to boost their user acquisition via mobile advertising. While evaluating which channels will best capture an intended audience, I urge you to consider mobile gaming apps for your next mobile advertising campaign!
Advertisers looking to cater their mobile advertising to a large target audience will find that mobile gaming apps have a very wide reach. Globally, the number of downloads of gaming apps lead in the app download category, well ahead of downloads of social networking, tools, and photo and video apps.
The diversity of mobile games available to download, such as puzzles, shooter, and/or action games, contributes to a diverse audience of mobile gamers. Research from Jun Group found that the majority of U.S. mobile gamers identify as women, and 45% of U.S. mobile gamers are 18-34 years old. Advertisers should consider their target demographic when selecting a mobile game app type to target ads. The same study found that female gamers prefer puzzle/strategy games, while male gamers prefer sports/racing and adventure/story games.
Advertisers looking to promote their own mobile gaming app would do well to consider mobile advertising on other similar mobile gaming apps, as users who enjoy one type of mobile gaming app are more likely to install another similar game type. Some networks can leverage behavioral data in their targeting that will allow advertisers to target ads based on mobile device ID, operating system, or device type, but reliable, cost-effective third-party data tools are still in development, as of October 2019.
While mobile gaming apps are generally brand-safe due to the lack of user-generated content, rising ad fraud rates still plague the platform. In a July 2019 study by Appsflyer, most gaming apps measured below-average mobile app install fraud rates, relative to other categories like finance, social, and shopping. As new ad formats, networks, and exchanges are introduced, though, fraud rates will continue to rise.
Displaying mobile advertising on mobile game apps presents new challenges and ad formats for advertisers to try. Because mobile ads can disrupt gameplay and affect gamer satisfaction with the app, there are also unique challenges posed for gaming app developers who include ads in their product. Most global game developers offer a mix of rewarded video, interstitial, and banner ads in their mobile gaming apps.
The majority of U.S. millennials and high-income gamers prefer opt-in rewarded mobile ads, which are ads that can be launched within a game, in exchange for a benefit to the gamer, like a bonus life for example. While this format comes with a higher eCPM, it also delivers results. Video completion and install rates of rewarded video ads are high and the advertiser only pays if the viewer completes the action.
Advertisers looking for an engaging mobile advertising opportunity should also consider a playable ad, which is essentially an interactive, miniature version of the advertised game, or a branded mini-game.
Mobile gaming apps have enjoyed rapid growth in mobile advertising, due to their high number of downloads, wide audience reach, and contextual targeting capabilities. For gaming app publishers and advertisers—advertising on mobile gaming apps is a win-win!
Learn more about Mobile Advertising with Centro.
Due to advances in smartphone capabilities, we now spend more time on our mobile devices than ever before. Advertisers are aware of this shift and have refocused a majority of their efforts to cater to mobile advertising. However, with the ever-changing guidelines of pixels and cookies on mobile devices, advertisers are struggling to measure the effectiveness of these efforts. Fear not! We provide some insight and best practices on how to track mobile advertising efforts effectively below:
First, let's talk about the cookie—a common tracking tool on desktops, but a term wrapped in caution tape and question marks on mobile. Apple introduced Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) within Safari in 2017 to curb tracking abilities and protect users’ privacy online. There have been several ITP updates since then; all of them have been focused on restricting the utilization of cookies to track user behavior.
In the Safari browser, third-party cookies are fully disabled and first-party cookies are deleted after seven days. From an advertisers’ perspective, this means that conversion activity can be recognized only if a user has: 1. clicked on an ad (thereby setting a first-party cookie), and 2. completed the conversion action within seven days of clicking.
The emergence of ITP has made the measurement of mobile advertising challenging for many advertisers. However, since ITP is focused solely within the Safari browser, there are additional mobile environments that an advertiser can utilize to gain better insights into their mobile advertising performance:
By employing mobile attribution partners, advertisers can track any actions or engagement within their app. These actions range from installs or opens, to placed orders.
If an advertiser wants to drive users to a brick and mortar location, Centro works with partners to measure in-store traffic via paid media efforts.
When a user navigates to an advertiser’s website after exposure to an ad, the phone number on the website dynamically updates to a new, custom number that a user can click to call. An advertiser can then easily attribute their call volume back to their paid media.
It's no secret that mobile advertising lacks a simple solution to measure the overall effectiveness of a campaign. By understanding the goal or target KPI you’re trying to accomplish, Centro can help strategize and implement a plan that will allow for maximum visibility into your mobile advertising performance across all devices.
Learn more about Mobile Advertising with Centro.