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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.
Social Media Marketing is a necessity for any business, new or existing. Having accounts like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter isn’t just about being visible to potential clients. It also encourages engagement with your brand and can be a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal.
However, if you’ve never used social marketing before, it might feel a little overwhelming and confusing. Here are a few tips to help you get your Social Media Marketing strategy started.
If you’ve ever researched the best ways to start planning your marketing strategy, you’ll have encountered SMART goals:
However, just like you need a social media marketing strategy that suits your business and market, you also need a planning system that suits your individual goals.
Enter the DUMB goal system:
If you need inspiration or freedom to reach your goals, DUMB might be the best way. However, if you’re incredibly task-driven, SMART might be better.
You can also try combining them. Set lofty goals, but give yourself a few tasks to achieve it. Don’t be afraid to dream, but make sure you break it down into realistic, achievable metrics. You don’t want to be demotivated when you don’t achieve your dream of hitting the million-subscriber mark in six months.
Which metrics are the most valuable for your business? Do you need followers, shares and engagement, or comments and messages? It’s easy to celebrate vanity metrics, such as having 100K likes on a post – but how many of those likes converted to sales?
Decide which metrics help you track your progress towards your goal the most accurately, and then focus on those.
What is your competition doing? This question is essential for several reasons. First, you don’t want to replicate exactly what the competition is doing. Second, you can see what works in your industry, and what doesn’t.
A look at your competition’s social media channels can give valuable insight, but you can also use various online tools to get deeper insights.
Obviously, you need to create content to match your brand and engage your target audience. You should have a good idea of who you’re going to be targeting, and you need to adapt your content to your market.
You need to decide which platforms you’ll be posting on and adapt your content for each. Instagram is very visual, while Twitter is for short, quick, and eye-catching posts. You also don’t need to post new content all the time, either. Curated content can make up a crucial part of your social strategy.
You set metrics for a reason – now is the time to use them. Which of your posts achieved the goals you set, and which ones didn’t? Did you get the conversions you wanted?
Use the information and statistics you’ve gathered to work on your social media content strategy. You’ll continuously improve your posts, progressing towards achieving your goals.
Social media is a great way to market your business or brand, but it’s not just as easy as slapping a picture onto your Facebook account. It’s important to set goals and achievable tasks, but don’t be afraid to dream, either.
Remember to keep track of important metrics, so that you can use them to improve your marketing strategy later. It’s one of the ways you can see if you’re using the right methods to engage with your target audience.
With proper planning, sensible goals and tasks, and a dash of creativity, you can use social media marketing to your advantage.
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.
Based on those stats alone, audio is everywhere, which means the opportunities for audio advertising are endless. Below are some quick tips for developing effective audio advertising:
1. Audio isn’t clicked—be visually descriptive and include a strong call-to-action (CTA)
According to Spotify, audio ads outperform display ads with brand recall by more than 24%. Focus on strong visual storytelling. While some audio units include a companion banner, always mention your brand and prompt customers with a clear, concise CTA, to direct them where to learn more, buy now, visit your website or local store, or take another immediate action. If there is a companion banner in addition to your audio ad, make sure to keep it simple. It should complement and not distract from the audio ad.
2. Keep it friendly and conversational
Audio advertising allows you to reach customers 1:1 in a highly engaged setting. They may be listening to voices from a trusted news source, a favorite podcast, or singing along to their favorite song. Avoid abrupt sound effects or loud background music that may distract from your primary message and turn off customers. As you often have only :15 or :30 seconds to communicate your message, make sure to highlight your brand or service upfront.
3. Consider your audience and context
With PMPs or private marketplaces, you can target your audience with precision and reach specific, brand-safe audio environments. There are also emerging creative opportunities with vendors like A Million Ads that allow advertisers to dynamically personalize audio messages based on criteria such as age, demo, language, weather, day of the week, and more.
4. Dive into reporting!
Programmatic audio advertising is highly measurable and valuable. With VAST (the IAB’s standard method of serving video and audio), compliant media partners can allow advertisers to report on in-stream audio metrics traditionally available for digital video – such as quartile or completion rate – and compare performance against other digital channels such as paid display, video, search, or social media ads.
5. Audio Advertising with Basis
At Basis, we have the knowledge and experience of our Media Services Organization, backed by Basis DSP, the industry’s most comprehensive and automated digital media platform.
With the rise of major streaming services like Spotify and Pandora, an abundance of scaled, brand-safe podcasts, and the increasing availability of inventory across programmatic channels, it’s now easier than ever to reach your target customer.
Learn more about Audio Advertising with Basis.
https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/customers-shopped-record-levels-holiday-season-billions-items
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamrowe1/2019/07/16/us-audiobook-sales-neared-1-billion-in-2018-growingf-25-year-over-year/#576e69be6050
https://www.emarketer.com/content/spotify-to-surpass-pandora-listeners-by-2021-sooner-than-expected
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2019/11/18/podcasting-is-going-mainstream/#4b0e92ea1699
https://www.statista.com/topics/3170/podcasting/
https://www.spotifyforbrands.com/en-PS/insights/the-power-of-audio-chapter-2/
https://www.iab.com/guidelines/digital-video-ad-serving-template-vast/
In the Breakthrough 2020 webinar series, Centro features clients who have gotten creative in times of uncertainty. Our guests share the challenges they’ve faced, the tough calls they’ve made, and how it’s all played out against the backdrop of 2020.
These stories will show how leaders are expanding their services, winning new business, adopting automated processes, realizing the benefits of remote working, and more.
Part 4 features Eric Myers, President of Belo + Company, who shares how traditional publishers can reinvent themselves through the expansion of services, while building trust and delivering results for local clients.
Digital marketing is a double-edged sword: you have the data to make the decisions you’d otherwise have to guess at in offline channels, but you also have access to so much data that even deciding which decisions to make is difficult.
As you navigate the latter, you may wonder whether you can afford to make the wrong decisions. But I would argue that you should question whether you can afford indecision. One of the most critical decisions for which to avoid analysis paralysis is choosing how to optimize your campaigns.
Particularly for programs oriented toward generating leads or for membership-based services where a new registration doesn’t reach revenue maturity for a delayed period of time, there is no doubt that every conversion is not created equal. For the performance marketers running campaigns driving traffic to these types of businesses, optimizing to conversions—in these examples, leads or registrations—is the easiest and simplest first step to launch campaigns. But stick to that optimization strategy for only as long as it takes to get the campaign off the ground because it comes with sub-optimal performance. You’ll over-value some conversions and under-value others, meaning that you’ll also over-pay for some that you could have earned more cheaply and miss opportunities for higher volumes of other more profitable conversions.
Forward-thinking digital marketers know this and instead look to link their campaign performance to the true sales and revenue data often housed in CRM systems or other back-office systems that don’t natively tie back to the advertising data stored in publisher platforms.
Recently, you’ve no doubt heard about Google’s promotion of Offline Conversion Tracking, which allows, with some restrictions, advertisers to tie offline data back to gclid identifiers (Google Click ID) and see the data within the Google Ads interface. It also enables advertisers to use certain offline data as optimization targets. Facebook offers similar offline conversion tracking functionality.
As a founding team at QuanticMind (now QuanticMind by Centro), we’ve been living and breathing the concept of offline conversion tracking going back to our time at NexTag, formerly the web’s largest comparison shopping search engine. There, as early as 2004, we helped retailers, financial institutions, universities, travel providers, automotive sellers, and other leading advertisers connect their sales and revenue data back to the ad units they purchased from NexTag. This helped advertisers keep a clear understanding of their NexTag ROI and we, as NexTag, argued that it helped us optimize the traffic being sold to the advertisers to meet performance goals. That’s true—we did that—but we also used the data to ensure that performance thresholds were fully utilized.
For example, why would NexTag sell traffic that could tolerate a 200% Return on Ad Spend KPI at a 300% ROAS? If NexTag could sell more traffic and still meet the baseline performance threshold, there’s no question that’s the decision that’s in NexTag’s best interest.
Like NexTag did almost two decades ago, Google and Facebook will undoubtedly use this data for their own benefit, whether to alter your traffic mix or even develop competitive offerings. And maybe that’s OK for your business, maybe it isn’t. But if you don't want to share that “last mile” data with the company selling you traffic (and potentially competing with you), there are plenty of alternatives you can explore to connect advertising data with your offline revenue data (including QuanticMind by Centro).
Regardless of how you choose to do it, you should be optimizing your digital campaigns to the metrics that define business performance. Conversions usually don’t get put in the bank, so optimize your digital marketing campaigns to the metrics that do.
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!
As The Industry Reinvents Itself, Diverse Perspectives Have Never Been More Critical
A lack of diversity in experience, knowledge, and perspective has hindered healthy development and balance in the industry. The debate that will shape the future without third-party cookies is getting bigger beyond the usual boundaries and focusing on web standards. As an industry, it’s important that the right mix of voices represent all the needs and challenges.
Equity & Inclusion In Action – Advancing Beyond Conversation
The 4A’s has created a document that is designed to start, advance, improve and assist in conversation around diversity, equity, inclusion and race. In this document, you’ll find definitions & impact, building strategies, culture design framework, culture of inclusion, addressing diversity, recruiting for success, social impact, the 4A’s Foundation and professional development resources.
Why Brands Aren't Running Ads On Black Lives Matter Content
Keyword block lists are sometimes thousands of words long, and are designed to keep brands away from bad news, atrocities, and violent crime, so as not to be damaged by association. But a new list of terms have also found their way onto these block lists, depriving publishers of a way to monetize their painstaking coverage of some of the biggest news stories in a generation.
Typically, brand safety tools cross-reference URLs for keywords on block lists. But without greater context, and with many marketers erring on the side of caution, the web is being shaped into an unsustainable place for numerous types of media.
Facebook Tightens Its Policies On Hate Speech In Ads As More Brands Join The Boycott
Over 100 brands have publicly committed to halt advertising in the US, as civil rights and activist groups pressure Facebook to stop the spread of misinformation and hate on its platform.
Will People Actually Opt In To IDFA Tracking?
Starting with iOS 14, which is set for release in September, developers must get permission from users before tracking them with the IDFA on an app-by-app basis. Apple dropped the news recently. A new permission dialog will ask users to allow or deny tracking for advertising before any tracking occurs, either at first launch or before using certain app features.
With The End of Browser Cookie Support, What Will Happen To Measurement And Attribution?
In less than two years, we will all need to re-learn how to track and measure advertising. The three most important things in the latest Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox are: Post-impressions and post-click attribution may be supported after all, will be aggregated data only, and scheduled reporting will be controlled by the browser.
The solution will be RegTech for ad tech. This will have to be a technology that serves the customer first, rather than servicing the advertiser first. It will require a new way of thinking about the advertiser/consumer value exchange and not only will it have to work efficiently, it will have to deliver something that might not be easy to turn into a programmatic algorithm–trust.
Advertisers Must Think Local As The Economy Reopens
The largest local broadcast television group in the United States, Nexstar Media Group, is well positioned with local advertising, and finding smart ways to offer audience extension through digital media for national and local advertisers.
YouTube tests short videos as TikTok threat grows
YouTube started testing an app feature this week that lets mobile users record and share short videos, a key feature of rival TikTok, TechCrunch reported. The Google-owned video-sharing platform announced the test in a blog that provides updates about experimental features.
In the Breakthrough 2020 webinar series, Centro features clients who have gotten creative in times of uncertainty. Our guests share the challenges they’ve faced, the tough calls they’ve made, and how it’s all played out against the backdrop of 2020.
These stories will show how leaders are expanding their services, winning new business, adopting automated processes, realizing the benefits of remote working, and more.
Part 3 features Jay Salyers, SVP at Miles Partnership, who shares how travel and tourism agencies can support industries hard-hit by COVID-19 to accelerate recovery.
Ad servers support the core function of digital display advertising – they serve ads! For marketers, an ad server manages (or “trafficks”) creative assets, landing pages, or any tracking elements – and produces standardized ad tags.
These tags can then be set-up in a DSP or sent directly to publishers to monitor delivery and track campaign performance. Since creative assets are hosted by the ad server, a marketer can make real-time updates to their messaging and effectively manage and optimize rotation of ads across all media partners.
They also have a unified, holistic view of performance instead of relying on reports from multiple partners. Major ad servers include Google Campaign Manager (formerly DoubleClick), Sizmek, or FlashTalking. For publishers, ad servers handle the decision-making, targeting, and placement of ads on their website or app. They can also provide reporting on available ad inventory or basic performance reports, such as the number of impressions, clicks, or click-through rate (CTR).
Over time, certain functionality has been enhanced or integrated into other parts of the ad tech ecosystem. Ad servers often offer rich creative design functionality allowing users to author ads directly in the UI. Some can often integrate directly into tag management or analytics systems, for better workflow and reporting outputs.
If you are thinking about onboarding an ad server, here are a few recommended thought-starters:
Ad serving fees are generally variable costs based on your expected volumes and the creative formats being served. Certain ad platforms may also carry licensing fees or initiation costs. There may also be upcharges for certain formats or accessing certain data.
While most ad servers offer helpful documentation, many are only hosted and self-guided. If you need 1:1 support for your teams, ask about onboarding, training, and ongoing customer service. Some platforms offer full managed service or other technical services at additional cost.
Ad servers should indicate their uptimes and provide sufficient notice for any planned outages or downtime. While many platforms offer self-service reporting, some formats or data is available by request only.
As ad serving systems are often utilized by multiple teams – from creative and operations, to reporting and finance – it’s best to involve those teams in the process, so everyone knows how it works and where they can find the information they need.
Most common ad servers offer real-time delivery, but we recommend ensuring data is regularly audited and follows industry-standard guidelines for measurement. The Media Ratings Council provides an updated list of which ad servers are accredited here. For security, multiple users may need to access campaign data for different reasons. Be sure to confirm that reporting can be scheduled or selectively permissioned.
Thinking ahead, examine how an ad server can improve your workflow. Many offer open APIs that can automate or remove repeated tasks for your team. For example, Basis platform has a two-way integration with Google’s Campaign Manager. This automates the trafficking/setup process and syncs reporting.
Do you have more questions about how to leverage ad servers as it pertains to your display advertising? At Centro, we have the knowledge and experience of our Media Services Organization, backed by Basis—the industry’s most comprehensive and automated digital media platform.
Connect with us today to improve your display advertising campaign’s performance!