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Native advertising allows brands to put themselves in front of their desired audiences while fitting in with the rest of the content on the page. Once you have grasped native advertising, it’s time to understand how it fits into your channel mix. Below are three use cases where native drives performance:
When the campaign goal is to drive traffic to a landing page, native advertising is a great format to include, as it is a strong click driver. Running native display improves CTR by an average of 2.5X compared to a standard display ad. Native is used to complement other traffic-driving tactics within campaigns, usually with the aim to increase website visitors.
B2B audiences respond well to ads that look reputable and fit the look and feel of the site they’re on. Native advertising provides more real estate (i.e. headlines, copy, etc.), to convey your offering and key differentiators. Another implementation strategy is to run native advertising alongside contextually relevant content to reach customers in the research phase.
In a conversion-focused campaign, native advertising is best used as a mid-funnel tactic. Native assets provide key information for users and are used to drive them to the site to learn more. It's recommended to retarget this audience with another asset that includes a strong call to action in order to drive the user to the final purchase or desired action.
This works well for both display and video native advertising assets. Plan to retarget users who click on the native ad with another unit. By implementing this strategy, you will continue to get in front of users who have shown interest in your product or service.
Native advertising as a creative asset drives performance when used correctly. Native ads are best used to reach site traffic goals, B2B brands, and for conversion campaigns.
Learn how Centro can help incorporate native advertising into your campaigns.
Determining how to set appropriate budgets for social media advertising is not as simple as it sounds. Every social campaign strategy varies based on individual business goals, desired target audience and creative messaging plan.
All of these factors play a role in setting budgets, as do related elements like seasonality, competitive share of voice, other marketing promotional schedules, whether or not this is your first time investing in social ads, and inside business data such as sales figures or profitability. In short, depending on the circumstances, social ad budgets can vary from hundreds of dollars a day to hundreds of thousands (and then some.)
When your company begins budgeting for social media advertising, it's important to set the business goal and KPIs you are trying to accomplish first. For example, if you want to sell 100 widgets a month, the average price of a widget is $100, and you need to maintain a positive ROAS (return on ad spend): a starting goal of $10,000 a month might make sense.
However, let’s say your overall digital marketing budget for the month is only $10,000 in total and that also needs to cover creative production or campaign management assistance (in other words, it can’t all be considered ad spend). In that case, you'll need to adjust your paid media budget down to accommodate those fees.
While doing so is certainly possible, it will mean the performance of the media strategy is even more important than before, in order to meet your goal of selling widgets for under their $100 price point. A good strategy starts by identifying the right platform for the job.
While many social networks offer advertising opportunities, it’s often best to invest your time, resources, and budget into a select few. Select the platform that is most likely to be frequented by your target audience and the one that you have the capacity to design ads for. (For example: if video is not your strong suit, you might want to avoid TikTok for now.)
Speaking of target audience, it’s important to consider them before setting your paid social budget. Finding a very small, niche group of potential customers might cost more than if you’re targeting a very broad base of national users.
Those people could be in high demand from other advertisers (or competitors), who will drive up the price required to win an impression from them in the ad auction—however, in some cases, it may be worth it. If the only people likely to buy your widgets are within that target audience, it’s probably worth paying more to get in front of them.
At the same time, you’ll want to avoid spending money on cheaper impressions if they are wasted (meaning those individuals are not converting as you’d hoped). Take elements like reach and frequency into account, to project out how much budget will be needed in order to create impact within your target audience or market. Many of the social networks offer reach estimates for certain audiences in their planning and buying tools.
Finally, one of the most important factors in a successful social media campaign is the creative. Designing mobile-first ad formats that encourage engagement and action on the first go-around can be tough! By A/B testing different versions of ads within your campaign, you can gain insight into what motivates your audience to act.
While it’s important to brainstorm and test several options for each ad, if your overall paid social budget is limited, you’ll want to be thoughtful about keeping the volume of creative you run at any one time to a controlled amount.
This is important to avoid overwhelming the real-time algorithms that these platforms use to determine which ads are likely to generate the best response. While A/B tests are great, too many ads with too little budget behind them will produce little learnings for your creative team and could potentially damage the performance of your campaign.
Ultimately, the best formula you can use to set a paid social advertising budget is the one that takes into account general market conditions, business goals, target audiences, creative strategy, and additional fees you may need to cover as part of your advertising investment.
Interested in using native advertising as part of your social advertising strategy? Learn all about Native Advertising with Centro.
Retargeting ads use data to reach customers who leave your website without converting. They're highly effective because the potential leads they target are already engaged. Retargeting ads can help you reach your campaign goals by engaging potential customers with highly-relevant ad content.
It’s best to utilize retargeting ads when you have a well-defined KPI (Key Performance Indicator). Cost per click (CPC), cost per acquisition (CPA), and click-through rate (CTR) are all measurable KPIs that are well-supported by retargeting campaigns. In each of these cases, there is specific user behavior that can be easily tracked in order to measure the success of the campaign.
E-commerce campaigns can also benefit from retargeting ads in cases where online sales are driven by promotional messaging. For instance, Basis DSP can help you reach customers who have abandoned a shopping cart, and might come back to complete the sale if offered a discount.
It can be difficult to determine a reasonable ROI for a retargeting campaign.
For retargeting ads running against a CTR goal, ROI can be expected at between .08% and .12%
For retargeting ads running against a CPA goal, ROI will vary depending on the desired conversion. To maximize ROI on CPA campaigns, it’s best to optimize the website so that the conversion activity requires as little as possible of the customer once they’ve arrived at your website after seeing the ad.
Finally, there is no blanket benchmark that can be universally expected for an e-commerce campaign where return on ad spend is the KPI, as spend levels and product costs can vary widely.
It’s important to keep those factors in mind when planning and evaluating the success of a retargeting campaign. To learn more about retargeting with Centro, click here.
When it comes to changing the position of your website in search results, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a long game. Changes made for optimization can take months to bear fruit and start showing ROI via click-throughs and conversions. When I began my career as a SEO manager, I leveraged an Excel template to document changing search engine results. Over time, I migrated this template to Google Sheets and added custom components that made sense for the goals of specific clients. At one to two hours a month per client, SEO reporting isn’t as onerous as that of fast-moving PPC campaigns, but those hours quickly add up with a full client roster. The introduction of an automated SEO dashboard that gives accurate results on demand is time-saving and eliminates data-entry errors.
In this blog post we delve into four key dashboard components that every SEO manager should use in their dashboards to track their progress.
Overview:
The most essential component you should have displayed on your dashboard is a snapshot of the historical monthly organic traffic for the website. When it comes to organic traffic and SEO, slow, steady change is common. However, when a major shift happens due to an algorithm change—for example, Google’s October 2019 BERT update—you can see the gain or plummet in traffic clearly.
This simple month-by-month bar chart helps you swiftly identify organic traffic trends and changes as they happen. Additionally, a simplified bar chart can provide an overall, year-to-year view of SEO campaign effectiveness:
Overview:
Focusing on channel segmentation, this dashboard offers clear insights into the volume of traffic for each originating method. It allows you to see, at a glance, how well different promotion methods have resonated with your audience.
For example, a large social push bumped the yellow Social line significantly in July and August 2020, illustrating the effectiveness of that campaign. The teal Organic line shows considerable traffic gains over the three-year period, as the content gains position and popularity in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Overview:
This dashboard component often causes panic because the common perception of Bounce Rate is that higher rates are bad. Yoast’s Annelieke van den Berg explains that having a high bounce rate can mean one of three things:
In this particular dashboard example, Bounce Rate increases with the amount of content on the blog that ranks in search results. Since we know from our other SEO dashboard components that the site is well-regarded in the SERPs and gaining in authority, option #3 (the page answers the visitor’s query) is the most likely conclusion.
However, this dashboard component also indicates where your team can make user experience improvements to the site to increase the interactions and lower the Bounce Rate.
Overview:
As illustrated by the first two SEO dashboard components, the organic traffic for this example site is quite healthy. This visualization, though, reveals that the conversion rate for organic traffic is at 0.8%, which indicates there is work to be done with regards to calls-to-action.
While Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) isn’t necessarily a part of a SEO manager’s day, the two jobs do go hand-in-hand. What is a good conversion rate? It varies significantly depending on your industry and the type of content. However, Neil Patel says it best:
“What is a good conversion rate? One that’s better than the rate at which you’re converting prospects today. It’s that simple.”
Many people frequently ask me if SEO is worth pursuing. The slow turnaround and amount of effort SEO requires often gives it a negative reputation. This negative spin is why I advocate the consistent use of a SEO dashboard: it takes long horizon reports to show the trends, trajectories, and ROI.
(It should also be noted that, thanks to tailored search results, typing your keywords into a search engine and judging its position is inconclusive.)
It is especially important for SEO managers to document a starting point for their work, and continuously track and record the trajectory of their search engine results. This is where an automated SEO dashboard becomes a key reporting tool for SEO managers.
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Our universal reporting and analytics technology is instrumental in driving consistent growth for marketing teams large and small. See for yourself how powerful it can be.
Centro has always focused on the wellness of the people who work here. The energy and resources we apply to our team directly affects the energy our team puts towards Centro’s customer, partners and peers. This is a key reason we’ve been able to grow year-over-year and maintain business momentum.
Investing in employees has been part of Centro’s essence since the onset of our company. And after celebrating our 19th anniversary in October this year, it is clear that Centro’s approach towards employees is also manifesting into gratitude they are showing outwardly for the company.
Most recently, Centro was named by Fortune as the No. 52 Best Medium Workplace nationally in 2020. In the month before that, Fortune named Centro the No. 15 Best Small & Medium Workplace for Women. The lists are part of a series of rankings by Fortune and Great Place to Work, a people analytics and company culture research firm, and are based on employee feedback. Earlier in the year, Great Place to Work named Centro the No. 4 Best Small & Medium Workplace in Chicago.
Despite the numerous business challenges we faced in 2020, Centro was bestowed by other organizations with recognition for our workplace. These include:
Centro is prescriptive in supplying our team with resources they need to grow and develop. As we look towards 2021 to envision the future Centro ‘workplace,’ we recognize that the many factors that contributed to positive employee experiences (team engagement, benefits, office perks, etc.) are changing. Continuing to build energy and enthusiasm from our team will require imaginative adjustments while we all stay physically apart. Our challenge is to deliver on the new requirements that professionals are calling for.
Nevertheless, Centro is more than workplace awards and recognition—there are humans behind our technology, and we wouldn’t be able to function without them. We offer flexible digital advertising solutions built on our technology, Basis, that unifies planning and buying across programmatic, direct, search, CTV and social.
We’re hiring! Learn more about our culture and current open positions here.
As you may know, social media platforms are some of the most popular websites and apps people use online today. With 3.6 billion people worldwide logging into social media networks currently, and an estimated increase to 4.4 billion by 2025, it’s safe to say that social media isn’t going away anytime soon.
Paid social advertising consists of any advertising across platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, Reddit, and more. When placing an ad on these social networks, you can optimize your campaign toward media goals that align with your business objective, such as:
Social media ads are effective and efficient in allowing advertisers to reach current and potential customers with engaging messaging. With over 3 billion users engaging and sharing via social channels, you can imagine the level of audience data and insight available for advertisers to tap into with just a press of a button.
The meteoric rise in social media usage has also increased the level of sophistication these advertising platforms offer advertisers by way of more in-depth conversion tracking, detailed targeting segments, and integrations with 3rd party data providers.
Leveraging experience with over 350 brands to date, Centro’s Social team is comprised of subject matter experts across the country who are well-versed in advertising across any and all social media platforms.
In addition to being certified through programs like Facebook Blueprint and Twitter Flight School, Centro’s Social team has premium agency partnerships with some of the largest social media companies. Through those partnerships, Centro has access to dedicated platform account managers, premium alpha/beta opportunities, and early access to product updates and consultations.
To learn more about social media advertising with Centro, take a look at our managed service solutions.
When it comes to online advertising campaigns today, there are countless metrics that could be monitored, and if you’re a marketing manager drowning in a sea of Google Analytics jargon and social media buzzwords, then you’re certainly not alone. As both the number and consumer adoption of digital channels continues to grow apace, so, too, does the number of tools a marketing organization needs to accurately map the routes and experiences that drive revenue. We’ve jumped from only 150 tools as of 2011 to over 8,000 in 2020 according to Scott Brinker’s now renowned MarTech supergraphic, equating to an extraordinary growth of 5,233%.
The fastest-growing category in this technological explosion is Data. This makes perfect sense, of course, as more channels ultimately mean more data. With the global datasphere predicted to grow to 175 zettabytes by 2025, increasing percentages of that are becoming accessible to marketers who own the right tools and mechanisms to manage and parse it. The fundamental organic signals of page views, unique visitors, session duration, email open rate, and more are joined by paid signals including impressions, click-through rate, conversion rate, and revenue per click. All of this has recently been augmented by location data from mobile and wearable devices. Then you have preference data from social media and enriched personal data that comes from first-party sources such as account and purchase history.
Everything considered, modern marketing is all about metrics and numbers. But which numbers provide the real value? We’ve reached a point in marketing where the focus is shifting from data collection to data consolidation. For marketing managers, it’s time to double down on the ability to bring together the right data - the kind that provides actionable intelligence to fuel next-level growth.
That is why dashboards are critical today. With meticulous curation, marketing decision-makers can utilize them to remove any irrelevant data from their line of sight and really hone in on the key parameters at stake in a campaign that can be evaluated conjointly for better forecasting. This guide looks to help marketing managers understand the increasing importance of using best-in-class dashboard frameworks with examples of data sets that can expose real areas of opportunity.
Yearly big picture trends interest executives and daily performance fluctuations concern analysts. Midway between, looking at campaign numbers at a monthly level ultimately delivers more insights than anything else and therefore represents the perfect timeframe for middle management. Weekly reporting is certainly important as well, but the channel bringing in the most traffic is not necessarily the one capturing the best quality leads in the end - that you cannot understand until a number of weeks have passed.
Monthly overviews present a broader feeling of how campaigns are fairing and with a rolling review, marketing managers are afforded access to data that can empower them to adapt future forecasts to reflect the very latest industry, economic, and business changes. This, subsequently, enables decision-makers to reduce risk and allocate resources more optimally in pursuit of financial objectives.
Overview:
Format: Single Value Tiles
Time Period: Trailing 30-days
Metrics: Impressions, Clicks, Conversions, Cost, Revenue, Profit
The most valuable dashboard component a marketing manager can have is a snapshot of the metrics most important to their business. This simple table brings together all the pertinent digital marketing performance metrics from the past 30 days and enables the user to quickly see and understand aggregated advertising investment, volume, unit economics, and campaign efficiency. The layout here is also designed specifically in this way to help the eye move from left to right seamlessly: Impressions lead to clicks which lead to conversions. Cost leads to revenue which results in profit.
Overview:
Format: Horizontal Bar Charts by Area
Time Period: Trailing 30-days
Metrics: Daily Spend and Daily Revenue by Publisher
For marketing managers interested in monitoring performance trends for different marketing segments, then this component is a must. Here’s a sample set of dashboard widgets showing top-level metrics trending segmented by publisher. With marketing campaigns becoming increasingly complex, these stacked bar charts offer a birds-eye view of how strategies have been playing out over the last 30 days and how an investment portfolio is breaking down. If any one of Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or Microsoft Ads start to trend against expectations, or if certain investment criteria are not being met, these visualizations will expose that and afford marketing teams the opportunity to rectify the problems before they evolve.
Overview:
Format: Line Graph, Pie Chart, Horizontal Bar Charts
Time Period: Trailing 30-days
Metrics: Daily Efficiency, Spend by Publisher, CPA by Device
While your most recent performance snapshot gives you a fast summary of performance, there are also some important efficiency metrics you’ll want to pay close attention to. You can do this by creating a component that includes line charts detailing trends in key metric performance over the past 30 days.
Every business has unique goals and key metrics that drive marketing performance. Custom dashboards offer a flexible solution digital marketing managers can utilize to maximize the performance insights they need.
You can get access to these dashboard templates and a dynamic framework to build your own from every marketing data source you have using the reporting and analytics tool available within Centro’s intelligent automation platform, Basis. Our easy-to-set up, easy-to-use technology helps marketing organizations unlock the power of their data and extract deep insights into the behaviors, and needs, of their target audiences.
After weathering a significant drop in marketing spend, the loss of thousands of agency jobs, and radical shifts in production and remote work, agency and technology professionals are seeing a comeback.
But don’t expect agencies and clients to get back to business as usual. Agencies will swarm their talent with more technology and automation to make smarter marketing decisions and facilitate stronger partnerships.
Join guest speaker, Forrester Principal Analyst and former agency executive Jay Pattisall, for a conversation about how agencies and marketers will evolve their relationships and performance in 2021 and beyond.
4A's (American Association of Advertising Agencies) and 614 Group, a digital advertising consultancy, recently assembled forward-thinking industry leaders via a Think Tank to tackle the most pressing challenges in advertising and marketing—automation solutions and identity management. The guidance from the group was published as white papers (download here). This is the second phase of a large-scale initiative by The 4A's to understand and shape the future of programmatic and automation.
Participants in the Think Tank included Sony Entertainment, RPA, Horizon, Cramer-Krasselt, Fitzco, Starcom, and Geometry, Matterkind, UM Worldwide, Canvas Worldwide, AKQA, Hearts and Science, 451 Degrees. The work of the group is underwritten by Centro, Media.net, Facebook and IBM Watson.
The first phase of this project started in 2019, resulting in an in-depth examination of programmatic advertising and agency automation. Centro also showcased the work in our Future of Automation webinar.
The recent white papers help brands and agencies with media teams navigate two important issues that they are facing now and will likely face throughout in the next 12 months. Noted below, are important points and main takeaways from these companion papers:
‘Moving to Simplicity and High Value: A Call to Action for Workflow Automation and People Augmentation’ gives guidance on what aspects of an organization could be automated. From the report: “The Think Tank determined that one of its priorities is the development of guidance on how best to achieve workflow automation. Lack of automation hinders speed and efficiency on the part of marketers, agencies and publishers. Automating workflow will permit simplicity, speed and efficiency in how digital media and audiences are planned, activated, measured, analyzed, optimized, post-analyzed and billed.”
This paper notes that,
‘The State of Identity Management: How Did We Get Here and What Comes Next?’ provides an update of industry efforts to manage user identities for targeted advertising amid the loss of third-party cookies. The report states, “Identity management lies at the heart of digital advertising. Accurate and reliable identification enables relevant, one-to-one communication based on a host of recipient attributes and actions. Conversely, an inability to correctly identify ad recipients in many cases leads to a poor user experience and wasted ad dollars. …by initiating an honest discussion about the pros and cons of identity management, we will be able to create a more positive and beneficial environment for advertisers, publishers, and consumers alike.”
This paper notes that,
Centro has already taken action to address these challenges. Our Basis platform automates all the major aspects of an agency’s business or media team’s functions—we’ve also been exploring alternatives to cookie-less targeting with customers. As we near the end of a tumultuous year and prepare to enter a new one with plenty of uncertainty, our customers can be rest assured knowing that Centro is actively collaborating with the industry to keep a pulse on the needs in this space.