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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!
Centro announced an API integration with Microsoft Advertising to automate paid search campaign management and reporting. Centro’s customers that also use Microsoft’s self-serve ad platform now receive real-time performance data in Centro’s Basis platform. Basis is the most comprehensive, automated, and intelligent digital media platform in the market, and is the only software to consolidate digital operations across programmatic, direct, search, and social campaigns.
Microsoft Ads is a leading marketing technology solution, providing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on Bing, Yahoo! and MSN search engines. Bing powers 36.7% of U.S. desktop searches and 11.7 billion monthly searches around the globe. In the U.S., the Microsoft Search Network has 124 million unique searchers. Basis receives data from Microsoft Ads that is standardized and formatted to match a campaign’s analytics and reporting from other sites, channels, and vendors.
According to April Weeks, Centro’s EVP of media services and operations: “Centro understands marketers. When Microsoft Advertising opportunities are being synchronized with omnichannel efforts, Basis eliminates the extra steps necessary to gather and align data from multiple platforms. Basis provides client teams with a holistic view of how their campaign is performing and highlights the parts that need optimization.”
Microsoft’s integration with Basis empowers users to automate cross-channel campaign management, reduces the time needed to assemble and unify reports, and eliminates manual tasks—without compromising quality and accuracy of data. Basis aggregates and rationalizes delivery data from its proprietary demand-side platform (DSP) and major third-party ad servers, as well as search and social vendors.
Media professionals drive efficiency by unifying reports from different tactics and media seamlessly, within Basis. Then, they evaluate Microsoft Advertising performance with all other ad channels holistically, to make informed campaign optimizations. Finally, they assess conversions to attribute how Microsoft Ads interactions affected overall campaign engagement.
Most media management systems and ad-buying platforms do not have automatically standardized data being imported via robust API integrations with major third-party ad servers. Basis users do not have to log into third-party systems, locate campaign data, download spreadsheet reports with dozens of line items, and clean up reports to align them with the campaign’s preferred arrangement of data.
Synchronize your search advertising tactics with all major aspects of your campaigns today! Learn more here.
Marketers today know how critical personalization is to capturing audience attention, engaging them, and influencing them to become customers. That said, the realities and results of investing in personalization are not so simple.
Gartner research predicts 80% of marketers who invest in personalization will abandon their efforts by 2020.
If personalization is so valuable, why let it go?
The issue lies in two key areas:
Here’s what your business can do to avoid these perils and scale your personalization strategy:
There’s a wealth of relevant consumer data businesses can utilize to better target and market to their audience. However major regulations like GDPR and the California Privacy Act have caused many businesses to shy away from using personal identity data from their audience.
This is causing issues for businesses that want to scale their personalization strategy. In fact, 27% of marketers say data is a key obstacle to personalization in advertising.
Utilizing identity data to track leads and personalize your advertising strategy is incredibly valuable. However, you must be prepared to manage your data in a way that complies with consumer privacy laws.
The truth of the matter is, regulatory laws are going nowhere, and marketers need to adapt their strategy so they can utilize all the relevant data they need to effectively target their audience. Instead of relying on walled gardens for audience insights, start considering how you can legally manage your own audience identity data. Start by learning the requirements, then adapting your data collection and management strategy to match.
Securing all necessary audience data isn’t the only solution to scaling personalization. You also need the capacity to personalize content (ad copy, landing pages, and other digital creative). This requires considerable time and resources, making major challenges to scaling personalization. According to an Adobe survey, marketers rank time to create content as the top barrier to personalizing content:
So, what’s the solution?
When searching for more time, the best course of action is to evaluate your internal processes to find ways to improve efficiency. Take a full audit of how your marketing team functions to see if there’s any way to improve time management. Also consider if any tasks can be automated. Even if they don’t relate directly to personalization efforts, freeing up time normally spent on other administrative tasks gives your team an opportunity to reallocate that towards marketing.
With that in mind, there are also quite a few aspects of ad personalization that can be automated. Using Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) is one example. Available for both Google and Bing, Dynamic Search Ads automatically generate ad content based on your website copy. So if you have a lot of landing pages personalized towards different audience segments, DSAs can help you create relevant ad copy to match them.
Headlines and display URLs can also be dynamically generated, personalizing ads based on the search queries people use to find your business. Automatically generating ad copy can improve marketing efficiency by saving time on the creation of ads. They can also improve campaign performance by delivering a more relevant message and helping businesses fill gaps in their keyword targeting strategy.
Utilizing Google Ad’s internal features to scale your personalization strategy is a start. However, there’s a lot you can also do to improve campaign efficiency and effectiveness using third-party tools as well.
Two key areas to which to allocate budget are analytics and operational technologies. If you’re going to utilize all relevant audience data to inform your targeting and personalization strategy, you need powerful analytics technology to process it.
The more data you utilize, the more opportunities to optimize and scale your personalization strategy. However, this also requires more time manually analyzing data and adjusting your campaigns. The most valuable analytics technologies offer automation features that help marketers analyze data and find the most relevant insights, fast.
Equally important to advanced analytics are operational technologies. These are tools that can help you automate adjustments to your marketing campaigns based on the latest data insights.
The value of your data insights won’t matter unless you can act on them and do so quickly. So make sure you’re budgeting for the right analytics and management tools you need. Having gaps here makes your program less efficient, leaving numerous barriers to scaling personalization.
Personalization in advertising is so often touted as the key to marketing success to a degree that business leaders set personalization goals beyond what they can handle. More importantly, these goals are beyond the scope of what you need to successfully scale your personalization strategy.
Not every single piece of content you create needs to be completely personalized to individual audience members. It’s more important at certain stages of your sales funnel. With that in mind, you can set up strategic objectives to prioritize personalization at key points along the customer journey.
Personalization in advertising doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing strategy. Start by taking a hard look at your marketing goals and decide what you need to personalize to achieve them. Over time, as you learn how personalization strategies influence your unique audience, you can adjust your strategy and scale it as needed. This is the most important factor that can help marketers illustrate ROI from their personalization efforts in the short and long term.
Personalization is a complex marketing strategy that won’t drive much ROI for businesses unless they break down barriers to scaling it. Using the right approach, it’s possible to avoid these pitfalls and maximize the value of personalization to reach key marketing goals. Just remember to use all relevant data you can, improve the efficiency of your marketing program, invest in the right tools, and set realistic goals for success.
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To learn more about how our omnichannel DSP can empower you to implement unrivaled levels of personalization throughout your campaigns, get in touch with our digital media experts today.
CTR, short for click-through rate, is one key indicator of how a campaign is performing. Depending on the campaign and industry, there are different ways to understand the rate in which users are clicking on your ads. As large agencies try to move away from this performing metric, advertisers still try to get the most valuable information out of their campaigns. CTR can be calculated by dividing the number of campaign clicks by impressions followed by multiplying by 100 in order to get a percentage. CTR can always be adjusted mid-campaign by following a few simple steps but first let’s discuss what defines a “healthy CTR”.
There are different studies for marketers to determine if they have a healthy CTR. Usually, running a more conversion-based campaign can likely generate a lower click-through rate, while running an awareness campaign, can typically lead to a higher one. A high CTR indicates that your ad or web page is engaging and highly relevant, while a lower one could possibly be due to poor copy and/or creative. If you look at CTR across different industries, the numbers vary. According to Oberlo, for B2B search ads, the average CTR is 2.41%; for eCommerce, the average CTR is 2.69%; and for home goods, the average CTR is 2.44%. Percentages tend to dip a bit for display advertising—for B2B, the average CTR is 0.46%; eCommerce, the average CTR is 0.51%; and home goods, the average CTR is 0.49%.
There are different ways to improve your campaign’s CTR. For display advertising, make sure your creative catches the intended audience’s attention and that all copy/creative is relevant to what you’re marketing to consumers. Creating a thinner, or less broad audience can help as well. Make sure to layer each individual targeting parameter to narrow down your audience. Simply targeting people interested in an industry will not be enough to improve CTR performance. Another adjustment to make is by adding site links to every ad. According to Google, adding several site links that are related to your initial ad can vastly improve your CTR by about 10-20%. A simple, fine-tune can rapidly increase your CTR.
Making display advertising more specific may also help your click-through rate. This is especially crucial if you are selling a product or service where there is a more saturated market. In many instances, a simple creative refresh can easily improve campaign performance. For search campaigns, focus on audience and keyword targeting—find different keywords that coincide with your brand.
Questions on how to improve your CTR? At Basis Technologies, we have the knowledge and experience of our Media Services Organization, backed by Basis—the industry’s most comprehensive and automated digital media platform.
Learn more about Display Advertising with Basis.
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 2 features Mary Ellen Dugan, CMO of WP Engine, who discusses how digital experience creators need to quickly adapt to serve the masses and help businesses of all sizes press ahead.
Tracking customer interactions is one of the biggest challenges for businesses today. Especially as the number of relevant marketing channels continues to grow.
There’s no denying the value of investing in numerous marketing channels to find, nurture, and convert leads. According to the 2020 Omnichannel Statistics Report, campaigns using three or more channels perform 287% better than single-channel campaigns.
Most businesses understand the importance of investing in omnichannel campaigns. However, few businesses manage to track all of their customer interactions across these channels. Failing to do so makes it challenging to maximize the true value of omnichannel marketing.
If your company can’t track all customer interactions, you’re missing out on a lot of insights that improve sales, marketing, and overall business processes. Here are a few of the top opportunities you have when you can track all customer interactions:
The most immediate benefit of tracking all customer interactions is learning more about them. You’re able to track how your audience interacts with your website, products, social channels, in-app, across devices, and so on. With detailed behavioral data, you can get a deeper understanding of audience demographics, preferences, which channels they favor, and more. It’s possible to build accurate, in-depth buyer personas, then develop a more relevant marketing message and targeting strategy.
When you prioritize updating your customer information, you ensure your marketing and sales teams have the most recent and relevant information about leads to work with. They can utilize this information to adapt their strategy and convert leads more quickly. Missing even a single interaction in a lead’s profile leads sales teams to make sub-optimal decisions because they don’t have the full history for this lead.
Once you understand how audiences interact with your business across platforms, you can identify user experience issues that you might not otherwise notice. For example, you might discover that people who visit your website on their desktop are more likely to purchase compared to those that use your mobile app. With this information, you can identify potential UX issues with your mobile app and improve it for a better customer experience.
Tracking all customer interactions includes monitoring support tickets and complaints from unhappy customers. It’s common to send complaints to an array of customer service representatives. However, with a complete log of the customer’s complaints, representatives are better prepared to solve problems.
Improving customer service has the added benefit of minimizing negative reviews and publicity for your business. Solving issues before unhappy customers voice their frustration on social media or review platforms is better for everyone.
According to UCToday, 9 out of 10 consumers want an omnichannel experience with a business, no matter their channel of communication. In other words, if someone interacts with a chatbot and gets referred to a sales agent over the phone, they expect that agent to know all about the conversation they had with the chatbot.
Lots of businesses can't offer this kind of seamless experience, which frustrates consumers and makes them want to leave. However, when a business offers an omnichannel experience, consumers are much more likely to stick with the brand and become repeat buyers.
The best way to track audience interactions before and after they become customers is by using customer relationship management (CRM) software. CRM software helps you manage your customer database, regularly updating customer profiles with the latest information.
If you utilize a CRM tool for this purpose, it’s possible to automatically eliminate errors in customer profiles, fix double submissions, and fill gaps. Doing this manually takes a lot of employee time. Automating the process of tracking customer interactions frees up internal teams to work on other tasks, improving operational efficiency and productivity in the process.
Tracking customer touchpoints gives you a fuller understanding of the customer's path to purchase. This makes it possible to better measure and attribute sales back to specific types of content, campaigns, and marketing channels.
When you’re tracking every customer touchpoint, there’s no need to rely on simplistic attribution models like first or last click. You can assign unique value to every important touchpoint on the path to purchase, getting a better understanding of how they impact conversions. Accurate attribution brings key performance insights that can help you make smarter decisions to improve your marketing investment.
It’s possible to track all customer interactions using the right tools. Yet plenty of businesses don’t bother because they don’t have the budget or don’t think they need to. However, the reality is that competitors in every industry are taking advantage of tracking all customer interactions. They benefit from better audience insights, improved operations, better UX, better customer service, and better marketing campaigns. Businesses like yours need to do the same if you want to stay ahead of the competition.
If you don’t track customer interactions on even a small part of the customer journey, you’re missing a huge piece of the customer puzzle. There’s so much you can do to improve your business, marketing, and sales strategy when you have a complete understanding of the customer experience.
The business-customer relationship is so complex that you simply can’t effectively digest it without investing in a marketing intelligence platform. A comprehensive marketing intelligence platform surfaces important insights you can use to improve your business in a lot of ways.
Working from home has many benefits. However, it's common for remote workers to struggle with maintaining connections to coworkers. In an office setting, it's so easy to connect over small conversations in the break room or at your desk. In a home setting, you've got to get creative!
In my opinion, the single biggest thing you can do to is to embrace your webcam. It's very easy to simply turn off the camera and, but that will really prohibit your ability to connect with coworkers. Trust me—none of us care about the state of your hair, makeup, clothing choices, pets interrupting, or children jumping into the frame.
“Be available online at all times. Schedule 1-on-1s more frequently. Add your cell # to your signature. Ensure internet is working and if it goes out, have a plan to continue to stay productive!” – Alana Putterman
“I always chat my team first thing every AM to open that dialogue. Also, I like to pick up the phone and call about something that could be an email or chat, just to have that chance to actually connect.” – Alyssa Brown
"I really like having team meetings over FaceTime or Teams Video. This gives me the human connection with my team.” – Amanda Wallman
“Call your mom! Seriously. I think I talk to my mom more since WFH than before. I call and chat before work, during lunch, after work. It's a great way of engaging in social activity during the few minutes you have free and your mom will love it. Trust me (just be careful, if you forget to call during lunch you might get text spammed with 'Are you OK?').” – Andy Alvarado
“Say 'Good Morning' via Teams the same way you would walking into the office.” – Ben Smith
“Set up a group text with your work friends. Pick up the phone and call someone if it is going to take 5 emails.” – David Lempp
“Schedule daily status calls with your team, utilize IMs, phone calls and video conferences. Oddly enough when I listen to podcasts, I feel more ‘connected’ than if I just listen to music.” – Kami Lentz
“Check in with clients, managers and teams more often than you typically might to prioritize relationship building. Picking up the phone more often helps big time.” – Kelly Wittmann
“Feel free to pick up the phone and give someone a call! Whether that's your team, clients, etc., not only does it feel good to have an actual conversation with someone, but you'll be surprised how much quicker/easier it is to talk through something vs. go back/forth on emails!” – Rich Brown
“Schedule a 1:1 with a colleague or co-worker for a mental health break. Try to mirror what would be a walk to the kitchen (if in office) with a quick chat.” – Holly Maine
“Call your team!! Think about how much you chat in the office. That doesn’t have to go away just because you are home. Pick up the phone and have a real-life conversation.” – Alyssa Hamm
Interested in joining our team? Check out our careers page.