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Centro Academy, an educational program where digital media buyers are trained in DSP buying foundations and advanced programmatic strategies, welcomed its second group of buyers to our Chicago HQ this month.

The May graduating class consisted of programmatic buyers at media companies and agencies from across North America. During the two-day immersive program, attendees were trained on a variety of DSP tools and techniques such as:

As we told you back in March, students are encouraged to participate in interactive group work, ask questions, and get to know their fellow students. At the end of each day, students take a test to apply what they learned and become Centro Certified.

It's a unique experience, but don't just take my word for it. Hear from a Centro Academy graduate! Patrick McGovern, President and Chief Strategy Officer at brandigital.net, talks about his experience:

“Although the content ranged from fundamentals to advanced principles, it was always engaging. Each of the Centro experts brought their subject matter to life with metaphors, examples, and just plain enthusiasm.

The whole program was well choreographed; and every segment was thought-provoking and informative. The trainees in attendance also brought a lot of digital savvy to the table. In fact, a big part of learning for me was the workshop sessions.

During the group work, teams of four would come up with solutions to campaign scenarios that were put together by the Centro staff. Many of the solutions were smart; and there was so much to be learned just from the experience and skills of our fellow participants."

Want to know more about what Patrick learned at Centro Certified? Head to brandigital’s website, where Patrick wrote about everything that happened over those two days in the Windy City.

Missed the training event? We have another one coming up in August. Reach out to your Centro representative for more details!

An international thrift store chain came to Centro for help building brand awareness, increasing foot and website traffic, and soliciting donations. The store decided to launch a test campaign to see which digital partner could help them achieve the most efficient cost-per-acquisition.

Centro's audience buying solution was the clear winner and delivered the following results:

To read more about our campaign strategy, read our case study.

In order to build brand awareness and generate engagement across more than 7,000 ZIP codes, a major telecommunications company developed a microsite complete with testimonials and case studies. But the company needed to drive traffic to the site, so it turned to Centro for help.

Centro put together a customized audience buying solution, and it produced outstanding results:

To learn more about our digital strategy, read our case study.

We received a lot of questions during our May 3T webinar. Because we like to keep these bite-sized presentations under 45 minutes, we were unable to answer them all, so we've enlisted our fearless speaker, Lisa Little, to answer them on our blog.

When setting budgets, how do you determine your search budget in conjunction with a display campaign?
Typically budgets by channel are determined by a media mix model or historical allocation from a client/brand. According to recent eMarketer stats, in 2016, U.S. digital media budgets were broken out by the following on average: 49.3% (display), 42.1% (search), and 8.6% (other). Budget allocation is based largely on the type of business or vertical and budget you have available. The main goal is to make sure you're not spreading your budget too thin across too many various channels. When divided out and spread too thin, you don't see great performance in any one channel.

Do you have experience with If functions or Ad Variations?
Yes! If functions can be very useful in search when providing more customized ad text experiences. We did not review in this webinar because If functions are a more advanced tactic.

Ad Variations, along with dynamic text, dynamic keyword insertion, dynamic countdown, etc. are all very effective methods to customize ad text to the customer's experience and typically result in higher CTR. The more complex and robust the account, the more important it becomes to leverage some of these dynamic tactics. For basic accounts with 2-3 campaigns, some variations may be considered over-optimizing, but always consider testing keyword insertion to start out.

Any rules of thumb about what budget levels are adequate to reach certain numbers of impressions, audience share, etc.?
This varies significantly between verticals and seasonality. Because search is auction-based buying, the verticals with more advertisers in the auction at any given time require more budget to be competitive and reach the ultimate impression share. Seasonality plays a part because if the keyword is in its peak season, it can become more expensive and require increased budgets.

For example: The keyword 'mother's day gift' is most likely more expensive and requires additional budget in the months leading up to Mother's Day, but most likely won't spend or need any budget in September. The best way to reach ideal impression share is to test out a budget and let the tools in the account calculate what impression share you're gaining and what impression share you're missing out on – due to budget or ad position – and optimize budget from there. The loss IS due to budget, and rank evaluations will indicate if your budget levels are making significant impact in paid search and what sort of optimizations or enhancements you can make to gain more market share.

Could you speak to how paid social advertising (e.g. Facebook ads) play into/impact paid search?
We have seen uplifts in CTR and efficiency when paring search and social. They are very similar channels, as they are both focused on the consumer's behavior, and often users switch back and forth between the channels and devices.

When sharing data, you can get more insight into audiences, demo targeting, and behaviors in both channels. The data also really helps in creating keywords in paid search that you may not have already thought about and for sharing high performing paid search keywords for social to utilize in elements of paid social campaigns.

Also: There's a huge benefit to looking at the creative in social to drive some of the messaging in paid search (and vice versa), so the experience is more seamless for your customers and they can connect the dots for the brand consistency.

As a best practice, is there an average spend per day that you recommend when providing a budget for a potential client?
Much like the answer above, the budget varies significantly by vertical and seasonality. Best practice is to make sure you have enough budget to allow for support of all the individual keyword bids in the campaign and monitor the spending. If you have keywords that average $3.00 CPC and set a $30 budget, then you can estimate you'll receive approximately 10 clicks per day before the budget shuts off. There is no magic number, but the best approach is to collect data, seasonality trends, put some simple math in place to calculate approximate clicks based on the CPC rates at any given time, and be willing to adjust/be flexible with budget. There are tools to estimate spend, but the most accurate estimate comes after the search account is live for a few days so you can measure impression share and lost impression share due to budget.

Can you set a lifetime budget as opposed to a daily budget? What is the best practice?
The lifetime budget or “IO" is for the whole flight and that is what budget Google sees as the ultimate threshold. The daily budget is more a guideline to help you pace the spending more evenly so you don't utilize or run through all your budget in the first few days of the full flight. For example: You can set an IO of $10,000 for June 1 – Aug 1. But if you don't set a daily budget, then there is a possibility you could spend the full budget by July 5 and have almost a month without running. If you set daily budget in this scenario it ensures you use the budget more evenly and as planned to pace for coverage throughout the full flight.

Can we do PPC using Centro's products?
Yes! Our Centro search teams specialize in search for full-service management of search campaigns. Centro Platform self-serve does have some planning elements with paid search as well. Talk to your regional Sales Lead to get more info.

What is the best data-driven digital marketing strategy to pair with SEM campaigns? Display ads with retargeting has been what we're using. Any increase in conversions when pairing with whatever is suggested?
Every channel – both digital and traditional – drives some search activity and has some impact in search performance. We have seen success with aligned and integrated strategies between display and search, as well as search and social. There are also some retargeting options within search – including RLSA, Google Match, and some audience targeting settings.

On the Nike ad example: Are “Women's" and “Men's" that appear under the ad also separate keywords? How does it work?
Those are called 'Sitelinks.' Sitelinks are additional pieces of text you can include under the main ad copy. These aren't triggered by additional keywords; they are just more character space where you can drive each of the sitelinks to various landing pages on the website. Sitelinks are really helpful when the keyword is general and you're not sure what the intent of the user may have been.

The screenshot from the presentation was taken when I searched 'Nike Shoes,' so the sitelinks provide additional detail that a consumer can click if they are for sure looking for men's shoes or women's shoes. Sitelinks provide options for the user and take up more real estate on the page, pushing the other ad listings down on the SERP.

Can you check your quality score and/or see what affects the score?
Yes, you can check the overall quality score on average or QS for individual keywords. The quality score fluctuates depending on the marketing, seasonality, relevancy, website, etc. With keyword quality scores, there is a feature to hover over and see insights behind why Google has rated you with a low quality score and how to optimize.

When it comes to relevancy, how does it work when the keyword is slang or a new and trending phrase that may affect consumer searches?
Slang is taken into account as well. Google is constantly working on their algorithms to include and read various slang, traditions, languages, and nuances in search behavior. There are some tools available to see 'trends' in Google searches to evaluate when certain keywords peak or fall with the interest level of the consumer and how they are searching.

In the swimsuit example, how did they get the "deal" part to appear in the ad?
The example has the discount/deal listed in 2 areas. The first is in the headline, and this is written by the account manager. The second deal line is considered a 'promotion extension.' This is an added feature where you can indicate details about the promotion within AdWords and it will include the deal: extension in the ad copy.

A national soft drink label came to Centro looking to improve regional brand recognition and boost local awareness. The brand was looking to launch a sweepstakes campaign at quick-serve restaurants.

The Centro campaign strategy, which included a combination of audience buying tactics, custom gaming units, and narrow targeting strategies, led to great success for the company:

To read more about our strategy, download our case study.

"Programmatic buyers on the open exchange who think they’re purchasing inventory from ESPN or The New York Times often end up buying from imposter sites instead."

Centro's Ian Trider is part of the IAB group that's creating this solution to fight domain spoofing. Read more in AdExchanger.

What's the deal with fake news anyway? It's become the latest hot topic – especially in the online media industry.

Fake news goes beyond the tabloids you see in line at the grocery store or the funny articles you read in The Onion. It is defined as deliberately published hoaxes, propaganda, and misinformation, masquerading as real news – and often social media is utilized to drive web traffic to amplify the effect for financial or political gain. This spread of false information has presented real problems across several industries in the online ecosystem.

So, as an advertiser, how can you avoid your ads being placed near fake news stories or on websites that carry fake news and perpetuate the cycle?

This all comes back to the idea of brand safety. As we discussed on our blog in March, brand safety is relative to the brand in question. What one company considers brand safe may not be considered brand safe for another company. Whether you are an advertiser, an agency, or a company that handles their own advertising, it's important to establish what you determine to be brand safe and what you do not.

While fake news may seem like it's all over the internet, there are ways to combat it through digital media technology and Centro DSP specifically. We are committed to ensuring your standards of brand safety are met, through a multitude of ways:

Allowed list capabilities: Handpick and target sites and apps that contain approved content. This is recommended for advertisers who have run previous campaigns and have an understanding of which sites and apps work best for them.

Block list capabilities: Select specific sites that you know may not be brand safe or contain a prominent amount of fake news, and choose not to run your campaigns on those sites.

Third-party technology partnerships: Centro DSP partners such as DoubleVerify can scan pages to make sure advertising runs on appropriate content. DoubleVerify specifically has a brand protection segment called “Inflammatory Politics & News (Fake News)."

For more information on DSP technology or on Centro DSP, visit our website or email [email protected].

At Centro, we know that keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends can be tough and time consuming. To make that easier, we've compiled all the articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy our latest list below!

What in the World Is Causing the Retail Meltdown of 2017?
While overall retail spend continues to grow steadily, hundreds of shops and malls are shuttering. But several trends — including the rise of e-commerce, the over-supply of malls, and the surprising effects of a restaurant renaissance — have conspired to change the face of American shopping.

Amazon Will Stream NFL's Thursday Night Games
The NFL has reached an estimated $50 million agreement with Amazon for Amazon Prime customers to stream 10 “Thursday Night Football" games. Will this be a touchdown for both the NFL, who has faced declining ratings in recent years, and for Amazon, who continues to invest in content to grow and retain their user base?

Instagram's Growth Speeds Up as it Hits 700 Million Users
Instagram has doubled its user base, to 700 million monthly actives in two years, fueled by Stories and an improved desktop web experience. While it's now twice the size of Twitter and on pace to be double the size of Snapchat (375 million), it's still shy of the billion user club that includes Facebook (1.8 billion) and WhatsApp (1.2 billion). Also, important to note that Instagram has over 1 million active advertisers, and has plans to add more data, targeting, and measurement.

Desktop and Mobile Ad Revenue Surpasses TV for the First Time
The IAB/PwC's 2016 Internet Advertising Revenue Full-Year Report was released, and it recognizes some impressive growth numbers for the industry. Digital advertising pulled in $72.5 billion revenue in 2016, a 22% upswing from the previous year, surpassing TV's $71.3 billion. Mobile took the lead over desktop – accounting for roughly 51%, or about $36.6 billion, of all digital ad revenue reported in 2016.

Mark Zuckerberg Just Signed the Death Warrant for the Smartphone
At this year's F8 conference, Zuck doubled down on the company's ambitious 10-year master plan, where Facebook plans to turn artificial intelligence, ubiquitous internet connectivity, and virtual and augmented reality into viable parts of its business over the next decade.

Google Home Solves Major Flaw for Advertisers
Google is looking to solve for a flaw that many advertisers have seen in the smart home advertising: The device's inability to separate voice queries for the various people in a single household. Google is now offering the ability to identify up to six different Google accounts in a single household that will enable advertisers to attribute voice searches to specific users of the home.

Creating a More Human Conversational UX
With voice assistants liked Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Google Assistant rapidly growing, brands need to learn how to craft conversations that feel natural and authentic. This article discusses three critical concepts in mastering the art of humanizing these conversations.

Neuroscience Says Listening to This Song Reduces Anxiety by Up to 65 Percent
In collaboration with sound therapists and a UK instrumental group, “Weightless" incorporates carefully arranged harmonies, rhythms, and bass lines to help slow a listener's heart rate, reduce blood pressure, and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. And for everyone working in this industry, I'd highly recommend you follow the Spotify playlist of the Top 10 Most Relaxing Songs.

May’s DIAL is also available as a PDF. Download here!

We received a lot of questions during our April 3T paid social webinar. Because we like to keep these bite-sized presentations under 45 minutes, we were unable to answer them all, so we've enlisted our fearless speaker, Amy Rumpler, to answer them on our blog.

How do you improve on your relevance score for Facebook ads?

Since the relevance score is based on the amount of positive or negative feedback your ads receive, you want to minimize the amount of times someone hides your ad. A few easy ways to address this issue:

What's your opinion on the new 'Snap-to-Store' Snapchat feature that will be able to tie ad vies to in-store visits/purchase? Will that be compelling enough for advertisers to jump on board with a clearer path or track ROI in place?

I certainly hope so, but it's unproven at this point. What we do know is that Snapchat has good offerings already tied to local events and activation (like their filters and lenses), and they can use ambient Wi-Fi, beacons, and other data (check-ins and posts) to know within a reasonable doubt when someone is in-location. Unfortunately for Snapchat, so does Facebook. And Facebook still wins in terms of scale, reach, data implantation, ad products available, etc. Not to mention that Instagram (owned by Facebook) is offering Instagram Stories as a direct competitor to these Snap Ads. I think for the right advertiser looking specifically for that younger audience, it may make sense. But for the vast majority of advertisers, they'll continue to lean toward Facebook/Instagram for ROI.

Are you able to order campaigns with a certain number of impressions on Facebook? How about the other platforms?

Ads are purchased in a real-time bidding environment, like a lot of programmatic exchanges. So, you bid for ad space/inventory based on how much you're willing to pay for impressions. You can usually back into a projection of about how many people you expect to reach, and based on average frequency for how often the ads are served, determine a benchmark for expected impressions. It's not a guarantee, however, that you'll receive those impressions. A lot of other factors are at play, such as:

With Instagram, how are people getting so many followers with only a few posts?

It depends! Ads could be the cause. You can still pay for additional page likes. There are other not-so-reputable sources and programs people use to buy fake page likes, too. I've even heard of people following pages of influencers and other bigger brands in their space – actively commenting and participating in engaging with their content – as a means to piggy-back on their community and attract followers. I do think in these cases, it's hard to keep those followers. I encourage you to think beyond followers/likes and look toward “harder" metrics as evidence of how pages are performing (and ads) to drive business – things like engagement rate, clicks on links, conversions, or ad recall, to name a few.

With Facebook ads, I usually just have them pick the bid automatically. Is that a best practice?

Sure! It's where most of us start. The advantage in doing so is that you let Facebook optimize the rate you're paying in the auction based on the type of ad you're buying, targeting you set, etc. Theoretically, Facebook will give you the best value they think they can.

But: As your campaigns progress and you start to get a better idea of what you think you should be paying for a CPM or a click or a lead generated, I'd encourage you to test manual bidding, too. With a little experimenting, it's definitely possible to drive just as efficient of results at a lower cost.

When talking about optimizing a post and submitting a bid, is that different than just boosting a post? If so, how?

Yes. Boosted posts are the most basic forms of advertising you can run on Facebook. They take content from your Facebook page (something you posted organically) and amplify it to a specific audience (reaching more of your current page fans, or an additional audience). The goal with those posts is usually just to get more people engaging with your content.

Facebook's ad products are more advanced, and allow you to tailor the ad content to a very specific audience – and they're designed to meet your specific campaign goal. They do not appear in your page's news feed at all. The auction we referred to and bidding types that are available (CPM, CPC, optimized bids) are used in the ad auction. Boosted posts are priced on reach – and how much you're willing to pay to have more people see your content.

Can you talk about your approach to promoted posts vs. paid ads and when to use them?

I think promoted posts are a good place to start if you've never spent money on social before. Boosting or promoting posts is very simple. You use content you've already organically posted to your page, and put paid spend behind it to increase the reach of that content – either to people already following your page or to another targeted audience. Promoted posts are useful when promoting short-lived events, for high-funnel awareness, or to grow engagement with your content.

Ads, on the other hand, are more complicated and more feature-full. To name a few benefits: We have many more targeting options available through the ad placement process, and you can custom design the creative to help drive toward your goal (for example containing clear call-to-action buttons to drive to a website; featuring multiple products/offers/images in a carousel format; or generating specific outcomes like downloads of a whitepaper, purchases, ticket sales, lead generation, form completions, etc.).

Ads also give you more options in terms of bidding optimization (paying for the specific outcome you want). Paid ads are where you probably want to go for campaigns that require certain outcomes, budgets, targeting strategies, or creative control.

What is the best way to gauge how much money you should be spending on a FB ad?

Work backwards based on the outcome you're trying to achieve. Set clear goals and be realistic about what success looks like to you. If your goal is to drive 1,000 sales or 10,000 clicks, understand that your budget is going to have to support that effort. If you want to test 10 different targeting tactics, you need enough budget allocated to each ad set to collect effective results. At the same time, understand that you have to start somewhere. You can always test, turn off what isn't working, and scale what is – growing the budget as you go.

With Facebook, it's a safe bet to use their automatic bid setting initially to get an idea of what your CPM or CPC should be coming in at, and then manually adjust from there. When you select the manual bid option within the Facebook platform, they'll recommend a range they think you should bid within to be competitive, based on the length of your campaign, your overall or daily lifetime budget, and the audience target parameters you've selected. And as a side note, Facebook requires your daily budget to be 5 times your bid rate. So if you bid $4 a click, factor on spending a minimum of $20 a day.

At Centro, before recommending a budget to our clients, we start by clearly outlining the campaign objectives, flight dates, and tactical plan. Then we test the audience size available in that target set – to make sure our budget recommendation is aligned appropriately.

Can you talk about the methods you use to estimate ad performance prior to launch?

We regularly log in and test audience size by creating a test campaign that is not activated. You can build out “fake" ad sets and vary the geographical area, demo targeting, or interests you layer on to see how your audience availability is affected.

Once we know about what our daily reach potential is, we can use an estimate of ad frequency to calculate impressions. Due to the high-volume of campaigns we run on behalf of our clients, we also have access to historical campaign performance data that breaks down by client vertical, by ad objective, and by creative type. Our team uses all of those past performance metrics to help indicate what our CTR, CPC, CPA, etc. should be.

The best way for agencies or companies just getting started to establish those same kinds of benchmarks for your campaigns is to test. Once you get started, track performance across each campaign you run, and use that data to help optimize future campaigns.

When talking about KPIs, how do you measure brand effect or ad familiarity?

Facebook has an algorithm that calculates it for you. They utilize metrics like number of people your ad reached, time spent with the ad (dwell time), and historical information from over 300 Nielsen brand studies that indicate the types of ads people are likely to remember.

You can also look like metrics like Ad Relevance, and the amount of positive/negative feedback your ads are receiving to measure how well they're connecting with your target audience.

What creative do you recommend to use on Instagram in order to get the most user engagement? I have found that it's difficult to get users to engage with posts because Instagram is such a scroll-heavy platform.

Any kind of video! Seriously, if you're not using videos, you should be. And they don't have to be complicated or overly produced. There's a great example I like to share from Inspiralizer, who used the Boomerang app to show one of their spiralizers turning a sweet potato into cool spirals. It was simple to produce, but highly engaging, and it linked directly to their website where you can buy the product.

Is it possible to over-saturate your social audience with ads, especially if you are targeting to one specific geographic area?

Definitely! Ad wear-out is a very real thing. You can avoid wear-out by running a few different versions of your ad creative concurrently, and rotating in new creative from time to time (monitor your results and be aware of drop-off in response).

Also consider mixing things up with a full-funnel objective strategy. For example, a brand awareness campaign that is “always on" and a website traffic or video views strategy to promote specific events/promotions.

For some of the Instagram ad options: Do you need to build and set up within Instagram instead of Ad Manager for Facebook?

No. All Instagram advertising is now managed through the Facebook Ads Platform (Ad Manager or Power Editor).

Any tips on how can I leverage Facebook platform to generate leads effectively?

The best ad options for this goal are typically conversions ads (driving to your website) or lead ads. Lead ads let you collect lead information directly within the platform without having to click off-site. They can be highly effective for businesses with non-mobile-optimized or non-user-friendly websites.

There are also lots of great targeting tactics that can be used effectively to drive additional lead generation, such as retargeting people who have visited your site but didn't fill out the form; people who opened your lead ad but did not complete the form; or conversion look-a-likes, which can reach people who are similar to people who have filled out your form previously.

Does Instagram's shoppable/tagged product feature potentially take away some of those same buyable pin ad dollars from Pinterest? Or will advertisers focus more on direct targeting on Instagram, vs. the less targeted discovery option on Pinterest?

The shoppable products on Instagram are currently only an organic offering – meaning you run into the same constraints as you do with any other organic post (only a small percentage of your organic followers will see that content).

If/when these expand into a paid offering, they will definitely compete with Pinterest. Where Instagram will win is on scale – even though Pinterest does a good job of reaching a certain percentage of the population, Instagram has way more reach in every demographic.

What are the minimum spends for the vertical video Snap Ads?

Our recommended starting budget is $30,000, although the strict minimums that apply to other types of Snapchat ads (filters/lenses) don't apply to this format. We've found that it takes a substantial investment to achieve reach and collect meaningful insights. The ideal investment depends on the market and audience you'd like to reach, of course, but in general, we haven't seen great results from campaigns spending below this amount.