Digital Media Buying

5 things to know about transitioning from Smart Shopping to Performance Max

  • Aanchal Agrawal
  • |
  • 6 June , 2022
  • |
    • 5 min read

Brands who advertise on Google will now have a campaign type that allows them to access the entire Google Ads inventory for a single campaign. 

Google announced late last year that Performance Max will replace Smart Shopping and Local campaigns in the later half of 2022.

This announcement was parallel to Google introducing this new service in November 2021 as a beta launch to allow brands to get a good grip of it without disrupting their existing campaigns. 

Marketers overall welcomed the new experience and will rely only on Performance Max to run their ad campaigns, replacing the tried-and-tested Smart Shopping.

But, what is Performance Max and what impact does it have for brands? Do also check out our D2C Centre of Excellence, D2Scale for more info.

About Performance Max Campaigns

The easiest way to describe what Performance Max is this: It’s like Smart Shopping but with greater access to Google Inventory across all channels. 

Earlier, brands that used Smart Shopping had to create separate campaigns and creatives to advertise across Search, YouTube, Display Network, and Gmail. However, with the introduction of this new service brands no longer need to put in as much effort to advertise across the board.

Performance Max campaigns extend Smart Shopping’s capability by enabling brands to also access Google’s Discover Feed and Maps, in addition to the aforementioned assets, in one single campaign. So, Google has created this new service to simplify a brand’s efforts to reach their target audience.

So, what kind of impact can brands expect to have using Performance Max? Let us look at some of the benefits of Performance Max.

    1. New Audiences

Performance Max allows brands to personalise their campaign goals that will better help their conversion numbers. This campaign type enables brands to interact with customers across a wider variety of Google channels, as mentioned earlier.  

This would allow them to leverage Google’s AI capabilities towards understanding consumer behaviour, which could help them unlock new audiences. 

    2. Improved performance

This is an extension of the previous benefit as Performance Max takes data into consideration while targeting the right audience. This could help push the audience further down the funnel into conversion. Thanks to its AI capabilities, Performance Max can make accurate predictions for brands regarding which ads resonate with their target audience.

    3. Better Insights

Performance Max insights give brands a better understanding of how their campaigns are being handled by the Google algorithm. Insights on audience segments, their reaction towards the creatives/images, video marketing, and more allows brands to further optimise their current and subsequent campaigns. 

It is integrated with GA4’s Insights Page, thereby giving companies the clarity on what is trending to ensure the campaigns are freshened up as and when required.

    4. Budget optimisation

When brands use Performance Max, it optimises their budget across the different channels the campaign is live on. 

Based on the specific goals and conversion metrics that brands input, Google’s machine learning capabilities will accordingly optimise the campaigns to help achieve the goals more efficiently.  

    5. Simplified campaign management 

Performance Max makes life simpler for brands since it enables launching multiple ads across the Google inventory without having to create different campaigns. Google says this helps boost ad performance without having to input multiple goals and criteria. This reduces time and stress for the campaign owner, since they don’t have to regularly tweak the multiple ads in a campaign thanks to its marketing automation.  

Best Practises

Brands need to conduct a few hygiene checks to extract the most out of their Performance Max campaigns. Some of the guidelines include:

    1) Choose the right conversion goals

Brands should select the right goals in their performance max campaign to better define what success means to them. If it is acquiring new customers then brands can easily define that by choosing the particular option in the Tools and Settings tab. 

Picking the right conversion goals helps better optimise campaigns at a faster rate and more importantly find new audiences.

    2) Choose the right budget and bid strategy

While Google Machine Learning will help optimise a brand’s campaign budget, brands should look at choosing the right strategy that will go a long way towards achieving those goals. 

Google uses Smart Bidding to optimise a brand’s conversion in real time, which allows their campaigns to improve conversions, conversion values, CPA and ROAS. 

    3) Optimise the creative Asset Group

When brands add creative assets to their different assets groups, Performance Max will automatically categorise them according to themes. These assets will then accordingly be allocated to different channels based on the relevant theme of the asset. 

This ensures a brand’s ads are more meaningful to their relevant audience, which could help drive conversions or any other specific campaign goal.

The trick is to add as many iterations of the assets as possible to your group. This is because the more assets are available, Performance Max can create more ads across the different channels. 

Check out Google’s full list of best practices for a Performance Max campaign.

42% increase in sales for a B2C brand - A Case Study

Social Beat deployed Performance Max for a D2C client, which is an online marketplace that wanted to scale up their order numbers outside of the search network. The approach for this goal was simple:

Audience Signals: The strategy was all about targeting the right lower funnel audience signals such as Remarketing lists, Converters, Similar to Converters, Add2cart Audience, Customer Match Audiences and Custom Intent. 

Budget and Bid Strategy: We learnt from Google’s Machine Learning insights and accordingly used the maximise conversions bidding strategy to increase the conversion signals

Features: We used URL expansion to redirect users to the most relevant landing page, which improved CTR and reach

Asset Groups: We created theme-based asset groups based on offers (medicine, healthcare, Christmas, New Year) and products (covid essentials, immunity boosters, sanitizers). 

Creatives Optimisation: We then refreshed the assets based on their performance that allowed the asset to maintain its strength.

On the back of the above strategy, this D2C brand experienced tangible positive results such as:

  • 42% Increase in sales
  • 29% Lower Cost per sale
  • 20% Increase in ROI

Brands will have to embrace the fact that Performance Max campaigns are going to be the new normal in the world of programmatic advertising. It will be quite the paradigm shift from the campaign types that brands are currently using.

However, there is no reason for brands to fear since this new offering has so many benefits that will help them rise to the impossible. Google takes the tried and tested Smart Shopping’s formula and multiplies the capabilities in Performance Max to ensure that brands get the best out of their campaigns; all this while reducing time and efforts.

So, while some brands might fear that automation would translate to lesser control, Google’s Machine Learning module is intelligent enough to work alongside them, not against.


Top Programmatic Advertising Platforms in India to scale your marketing

  • Balaji Surendar
  • |
  • 22 April , 2022
  • |
    • 8 min read

India Steps ahead into Digital advertising with Programmatic:

As we all know, this pandemic situation has pushed most brands to do online marketing in order to reach out to customers. This pandemic situation has changed the way customers reach brands since all physical stores were completely shut, leaving them with only online shopping as a feasible option. 

All brands who do either large scale or small scale businesses in India want a wider reach for their brand and good sales for their products by spending money efficiently on advertising and marketing. When marketers in India looked out for an advertising technique which allows them to explore a wide range of publishers’ inventories and audience available in the market with an efficient budget investment, they arrived at a new hero of an advertising format known as Programmatic advertising

What is Programmatic advertising and why it is a real boon to Indian Marketers?

Programmatic advertising in one line is “ Collecting all data from campaign history and using the data for the betterment of the campaign in future with the help of a system specific algorithm”. Indian Marketers have welcomed Programmatic buying with their arms wide open because programmatic ads help Indian Marketers market their brands online within a very effective budget investment. Secondly, to do any kind of online advertising you need users to be highly engaged online through any of the devices they own.

India has the highest smartphone population than any other country in the world. We Indians nearly spend 180 to 210 minutes engaging with our smartphones using the internet for watching online content and playing online games per day. This user behaviour of Indians gives an upper hand for Programmatic advertising to convince Indian Marketers to adopt it to market their brand online. Due to this, every year, programmatic ads grow at the rate of 70% in India.

That being said, there are many platforms out there to choose from so we have done a quick analysis for your benefit. 

Top Programmatic Advertising Platforms available in India to build your Advertising Programmatically 

The top programmatic advertising platforms in India are

Google Marketing Platform

Google Marketing Platform majorly consists of DSP (DV360), Google Ads, Adserver (Campaign Manager 360), Tag manager(GTM), Analytics manager (Google Analytics), Creative manager ( Studio) and report builder (Data Studio). Google marketing platform provides the marketer a whole new advertising experience. It helps the marketer to do end to end campaign management through all  resources GMP has across digital advertising, campaign management and tracking. GMP offers integrated digital advertising comfort to marketers by giving them everything in one set to run their digital programmatic buying campaigns. GMP is an user friendly tool which gives the marketer a wide range of access in a programmatic ads environment. GMP supports programmatic buying of ad space for all three formats such as Display, Video and Audio advertising. GMP with the help of its integrated analytics and advertising platforms, helps marketers to reach their target audiences and make deeper connections with them to convert them with efficient ad spends and better ROI.

Google Marketing Platform Product Features

  • Demand-Side Platforms (DSP)
  • Display Advertising
  • Marketing
  • Campaign Management

Marketing Analytics 

  •  A/B Testing
  •  Channel Attribution
  •  Mapping customer journey
  •  Dashboard
  •  Performance Metrics
  •  Predictive Analytics
  •  ROI Tracking
  •  Social Media Metrics
  •  Website Analytics

Web Analytics 

  •  Conversion Tracking
  •  Referral Source Tracking
  •  Multiple Site Management
  •  User Interaction Tracking
  •  Campaign Management
  •  Keyword Tracking
  •  Time on Site Tracking
  •  Pageview Tracking
  •  Site Search Tracking
  •  Goal Tracking

GMP Integrated with

  • Datorama
  • Delio Lead Management
  • Fone Dynamics
  • Google Ad Manager
  • Google Ads
  • Google Analytics
  • Google Tag Manager
  • LumenAd
  • MetaRouter
  • Only Mega
  • PlaceIQ
  • Zuuvi

Key Benefits of using GMP:

  1. Enterprise analytics solution in Google Analytics 360 (GA360) 
  2. Better measurement of all marketing efforts 
  3. Insightful understanding of your customers and how they engage with your brand 
  4. Smarter media buying 
  5. Increased marketing efficiency
  6. Improved cross device capabilities.
  7. Smart campaigns powered by machine learning
  8. Better ability to reach the right customers.

Criteo

Citeo is a programmatic ads DSP that is well known for the use of in-house third party audiences for remarketing and high conversion rate ability. Criteo DSP works on the basis of CPC cost metric and it has a very high click to conversion ratio than any other programmatic platforms. In Criteo no google or first party audience can be used, Criteo DSP is built in such a way that it can run only with the Criteo in-house third party audience data.

Recently Criteo has developed an Criteo’s own API to power the marketers advertising using the Criteo’s custom report builder API, automated Criteo’s Campaign setup API and automatic Bid management API. With this help of the API systems Criteo provides an enhanced opportunity for the Marketers to do full funnel marketing for their brand. 


Criteo Product Features

  • Demand-Side Platforms (DSP)
  • Display Advertising
  • Predictive Analytics

Predictive Analytics 

  • AI / Machine Learning
  • Data Mining
  • Benchmarking
  • Demand Forecasting
  • Sentiment Analysis
  • Data Blending
  • For Education
  • For Healthcare
  • Modeling & Simulation
  • Website Analytics

Retargeting 

  • Conversion Tracking
  • Audience Targeting
  • Personalization
  • Recommendation Engine
  • Geo Targeting
  • Behavioral Targeting
  • A/B Testing
  • Mobile Retargeting
  • Social Media Retargeting

Criteo Integrated with

  • Blendr.io
  • Blueshift
  • Calltouch 
  • Complete the Look
  • Data Virtuality
  • Faraday
  • LogiCommerce
  • Marfeel-Press
  • MetaRouter
  • Polar Analytics
  • ROIVENUE
  • Rivery

Key Benefits of Criteo 

  1. Real-time campaign performance tracking
  2. Prediction algorithms
  3. Personalized retargeting
  4. CPC Bidding Module
  5. Ads across mobile, desktop, email, and social 
  6. Criteo Facebook retargeting and offline conversion tracking

  
Amazon Advertising

Amazon DSP helps advertisers reach their target correct audience from amazon apps as well as Amazon’s website with the help of algorithms run by the system programmatically. It helps advertisers to reach out to the audience via Amazon publishing partners and third party exchanges. Amazon DSP supports programmatic buying of ad space for all the three formats such as Display, Video and Audio advertising. Amazon DSP provides a highly protected advertising experience to the Advertisers with the help of the brand safety advertising  policies of Amazon. The Amazon DSP comes with the both self-service and managed-service option for the Advertisers who want to try Amazon DSP for their programmatic ads business.

The contextual targeting capability of the Amazon DSP has been strengthened by the sources such as Oracle Data Cloud (ODC) - custom predictions and DoubleVerify - Custom contextual. The ODC provides the marketer an upper hand in marketing by allowing them to capitalize on the inventories associated with the trending contents.

The Bidding strategy which Amazon has is totally transparent to the Advertisers. The advertisers can control their budget and spend at any level of their campaign, they can even control their spend towards the KPI goal and campaign performance on its programmatic advertising platform. 


Amazon Product Features

  • Demand-Side Platforms (DSP)
  • Display Advertising

Marketing Analytics 

  •  Reach exclusive audiences
  •  Access unique, high-quality inventory
  •  Appear in brand-safe environments
  •  Build a metrics-based strategy

Amazon Advertising Integrated with

  • Amazon
  • Bionic for Agencies
  • ChannelAdvisor
  • Downstream
  • Kenshoo
  • Listing Dojo
  • MarinOne
  • OrderMetrics
  • PPC Entourage
  • Perpetua
  • Quartile
  • Seller Labs
  • SellerMobile
  • Sellics
  • Tool4seller

Key benefits of Amazon DSP:

  1. Reach audiences outside of other networks such as Fire TV, IMDb and Kindle
  2. A built-in brand safety mechanism that Amazon uses itself
  3. Access Amazon’s first party data and target unique customer groups
  4. Display ads on premium publisher environments

MediaMath

MediaMath provides the advertiser a comfortable and powerful online digital advertising experience with the help of its DSP TerminalOne programmatic advertising platform.  MediaMath helps marketers manage their mobile, display, social, video, audio and native campaigns with the help of an omnichannel global ecosystem.

MediaMath delivers a complete package of campaign handling for the marketers including campaign execution, reporting, targeting and creative management. MediaMath completely focuses on delivering the best results in terms of conversion ratios and  better returns on ad spends. 

Due to the wide range of ability MediaMath holds on Programmatic ads, Disney+ Hotstar has recently collaborated with MediaMath to provide marketers with a highly protected brand safe environment along with premium inventories to do marketing with an extensive audience reach through OTT platform programmatically. 

What is beneficial here for the marketer due to this collaboration of Disney+ Hotstar and MediaMath, is that this successive collaboration between the marketer and advertisers can reach even the narrowest regions of the country with a very high premium inventory on offer through programmatic. Also, advertisers can buy the Programmatic Guaranteed (PG) and Private Marketplace (PMP) deals to target the exact inventories and correct set of targets for their brand.

MediaMath with a huge reach and exact key targeting ability MediaMath is offering the Advertiser to do very exact marketing for their brand even in the regional areas of India through live sports or entertainment events.. With the access to audience based buying techniques in the programmatic buying environment offered by MediaMath, advertisers can have more transparency and control over their campaigns and target the exact required engaging audiences to explore better conversion results for their campaigns.


MediaMath Product Features

  • Demand-Side Platforms (DSP)
  • Display Advertising
  • Predictive Analytics

Predictive Analytics 

  • AI / Machine Learning
  • Data Mining
  • Benchmarking
  • Demand Forecasting
  • Sentiment Analysis
  • Data Blending
  • For Education
  • For Healthcare
  • Modeling & Simulation
  • Website Analytics

Marketing Analytics 

  • Campaign Management
  • Media Management
  • Creative Management
  • Targeting
  • Identity Management
  • Consumer Segmentation
  • MediaMath Audiences
  • Brand Safety
  • Global Scale Targeting

MediaMath Integrated with

  • Bionic for Agencies
  • Cross Pixel
  • Datorama
  • Neustar NetProtect
  • Neustar UltraDDoS Protect
  • PlaceIQ
  • Rivery
  • UltraWAF

Key Benefits of MediaMath

  • A fully transparent, mobile marketing platform
  • Unmatched control to reach your mobile audiences at scale
  • Business outcomes optimization to drive real mobile marketing results

     

Adobe Advertising Cloud

Adobe advertising cloud is a place where a programmatic advertising platform meets all media. Adobe has been a unique ad platform that gathers and automates all screens, data, media, and creativity at some measure. Introduction of programmatic buying with a Adobe Advertising Cloud brings an end to the traditional media buying process. Automated media buying with the help of a Programmatic DSP is the best duo for brands to move their digital advertising strategy one step forward. The DSP will  give you the advantage that you can successfully and cost-effectively implement your strategy accurately by forecasting and predicting the outcomes.This combo will give your customer a delightful experience online advertising. Adobe Advertising Cloud DSP provides the advertiser with the access to any ad inventory for any media practically with best quality control and Measurement.


Adobe Advertising Cloud Product Features

  • Campaign Management
  • Demand-Side Platforms (DSP)
  • Display Advertising

Predictive Management

  • Lead management
  • Database management
  • Email Marketing
  • Multi-Campaign management
  • Channel Management
  • Event Triggered Action

Adobe Advertising Cloud Integrated with

  • Bionic for Agencies
  • Adobe Campaign
  • Adobe Creative Cloud
  • TubeMogul

Key benefits of Adobe advertising cloud:

  • Cross-Channel Planning. Adobe Advertising Cloud is the most comprehensive platform for planning, buying, and measuring advertising
  • Innovative reporting and Insights in real time.
  • Quickly analyze results and improve campaigns
  • Integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365

TubeMogul

TubeMogul allows the advertiser to plan, buy, build, measure and optimize online advertising campaigns programmatically. With a TubeMogul on his/her side an advertiser or marketer can simplify the process of planning and buying ad space across multiple channels, inventories and environment all from a single programmatic buying platform. With a gift of TubeMogul’s consolidated campaign management and  cross-channel advertising software helps the advertiser to run brand campaigns globally using the first and third party data across all the devices with any ad format through the premium inventories.. Along with this TubeMogul provides a platform dashboard with the real-time metrics which gives an upper hand to the advertiser  to track the Ad spend, campaign performance and impact across the lifetime period  of the campaign dynamically at any point.


TubeMogul Product Features

  • Campaign Management
  • Demand-Side Platforms (DSP)
  • Advertising Agency
  • Display Advertising

Adobe Advertising Cloud Integrated with

  • Bionic for Agencies
  • Adobe Campaign
  • Adobe Advertising Cloud

Verizon Media

Verizon’s media group helps the marketer and advertiser communicate and reach most of their audiences through Verizon’s own brands such as Huffpost, TechChurch and Yahoo. Verizon Media with its high technologies such as AI, Machine-learning and XR in hand provides the customer a whole packed programmatic experience for their brands. Verizon Media innovates programmatic ads to a higher level with its premium exchanges and technologies.

Verizon Media provides a streamlined suite of publishing and advertising services to many brands by integrating verizon brands like Yahoo, AOL and BrightRoll in one DSP OATH. This unified OATH DSP provides marketers an additional advantage by providing access to the inventory across MSN, Yahoo, AOL and OATH’s other pre-owned properties. With the OATH DSP offered by Verizon Media,  advertisers can now target the Native and CTV inventories along with the display and video inventories.


Verizon Media Product Features

  • Campaign Management
  • Demand-Side Platforms (DSP)
  • Mobile Advertising
  • Native Advertising
  • Display Advertising
  • OTT Advertising

Verizon Media Integrated with

  • Only Mega
  • AOL
  • BrightRoll
  • Yahoo
  • Verizon Cloud

Key benefits of TubeMogul:

  1. Impression-by-Impression Buying and Valuation
  2. Targeting Technology
  3. Dynamic Optimization and Real-Time Analytics
  4. Transparency
  5. Private Exchange Capabilities and Access to Premium Inventory

Conclusion

Programmatic advertising is gaining dominance over mobile marketing in India. As a marketer you're probably excited to try it for your brand. Most advertisers wonder what is programmatic advertising and how they can set up the online advertising for their brand programmatically. But now you know how.

Most Advertisers initiate campaigns but pause them if there are no immediate results. However programmatic ads, like any other advertising platform, requires machine learning to generate results and generate ROI. Advertisers should evaluate the performance of a campaign not just by direct results but also by the impact it creates in terms of  consideration, remarketing etc 

Now leverage DV360 (Display Video 360) in Self Serve mode

Google offers their programmatic buying solutions only to agencies and not to brands - but there are agencies like Social Beat that offer a self-serve option to brands and other agencies where they can use the existing DV360 access to run campaigns. This is known as a Self Serve programmatic advertising platform. 

 


Interstitial Ads: Meaning, Types and Best Practices.

  • Balaji Surendar
  • |
  • 4 October , 2021
  • |
    • 4 min read

Interstitial Ads: Meaning, Types and Best Practices.

The pop-up ad was one of the most primitive digital ad formats used in the early days of the Internet. Users would notice large windows “popping up” in front of them we don’t see currently. Pop up blockers are created to help remove these ads. This makes the website more user friendly. Using Interstitial advertising can be a useful addition to your programmatic advertising strategy.

 

Due to the improvement of digital media, we see these Pop-ups in the form of Interstitial ads.

 

What exactly are interstitial ads?

 

Interstitial ads are full-screen placements in the user experience of a site, app, or game that appear between standard interactions.

For example, Navigation between two articles on a news media website or the transition between levels of a hyper-casual game can both justify one of these ads.

We can display interstitial ads between two UI views within the app. YouTube, for example, incorporates both pre-roll and interstitial ads into their video campaigns.

We use interstitial ads in video games because of a lack of space. Since video games and in particular, mobile games need a full viewpoint. This is the reason that prevents them from using banner and pop-up ads.

Interstitial advertisements are beneficial to both parties. Some benefits of Interstitial ads are:

  • They are engaging. 
  • They capture user attention. 
  • They are comprehensive. 

Google has outlined a policy to avoid the overuse of these interstitial ads. Make sure to use 

 

Why are interstitials used?

Some reasons why we use interstitial ads are:

  • To improve impression rate: Marketers and developers use these ads to increase downloads and boost your ROI rates. 
  • For brand growth: Many brands have noticed a significant improvement in their growth. 
  • For better gains: Companies such as Pinterest, Airbnb have seen 100% - 300% gains. This was possible due to optimising their interstitials ads.
  • Large sizes make a big impression on users.
  • High impression rates translate into high click-through rates.
  • Increased click-through rates equate to higher conversion rates.

Types of Interstitial advertising

Pop-up ads are the most frequent form of interstitial advertising. We can install these in Javascript and display them in a new browser tab or window. There are many other variants with distinct features depending on the device. 

  • Inline-Interstitials: we display this type of interstitial ad in the current browser window.
  • Flash Layer: Works with Macromedia Flash.

Some of the pros of using flash layer are: 

  • To ensure excellent quality.
  • Functional in all browsers.
  • This type of ad conceals the original content to a transparent browser window.
  • Superstitial: Unicast created Superstitials for interstitial ad format. They are interactive ads and can contain a variety of elements, such as images, sound, and text. As a result, the design of such advertisements has limitless possibilities.
  • Pop-under: It opens a new browser window in the background, which is less intrusive than a pop-up.
  • Prestitial: This type of interstitial can be used in mobile advertising. It appears when you access the homepage or launch an app before the content gets loaded.
  • Video-Interstitial: In-video overlay ads using video clips, are popular. This is especially common on YouTube.
  • IntelliTXT: This is the most advanced and intelligent type of interstitial.  You can highlight the text’s keywords (bold, underline, etc,) for better visibility. Users need to hover their mouse over the window and information will appear. The advertiser can add important links and offers in this window. IntelliTXT also resembles Flash Layers in appearance.

 

Three best practices of interstitial advertising:

  • Making a smooth transition

Interstitial ads work best for linear user experiences. Some key points to note are: 

  • The ad’s beginning and ending points should be clear.
  • The ad should complement the natural flow of user engagement. 
  • Present these interactive ads during expected breaks and user-initiated pauses. 

 

Few tips to remember while placing interstitial ads are:

  • Make sure these ads appear before the broken page. A broken page is the page that usually asks the user to tap a continue or next button to proceed. 
  • Avoid placing these ads immediately after a broken page. This will lead to accidental clicks which will reduce your conversion rate.

 

Another factor to consider is your interstitial creative’s memorability.

  • Create a design that stands out and captures users attention. 
  • Consider the environment before you design in a particular orientation. 
  • Make sure the rendering is adaptable on all devices. 

 

  • Think about the timing and frequency

Ads that are too intrusive are one of the main reasons people delete apps. We should not bombard interstitial ads on users when not required. You might think of increasing the frequency of interstitial ads. This could harm the user experience and shift the focus from using an app to watching ads. Before you add an interstitial ad, place a delay or “loading” screen. It will keep your user from tapping hundreds of times.

 

  • Send targeted traffic to dedicated post-click landing pages

Make sure the interstitial ads you display are understandable and readable. some ways to improve conversion are:

  • Redirect your user to a landing page that can access their ad offer. 
  • Post-click landing pages aid in the conversion of prospects to leads. Create your campaign interstitial to get the most out of it. 
  • Choose a DSP with omnichannel media-buying technology. It will be beneficial if the DSP has integration with a trusted ad network.

 

This approach helps advertisers to reach their target customers. They can advertise in the Mobile Web, In-App, Desktop, and CTV ecosystems at the right time and on the right screen. The platform’s ML and AI algorithms provide automated bidding, optimization and reporting.

 

How to create Interstitial ads?

  • Choose a System

Some systems available for interactive advertising are:

  • Facebook Ads
  • Google AdMob
  • Mopub. 

These are accessible to create interstitial ads with ease. These platforms also provide developers with vital information for integration. 

  • Linear apps that display advertising can tap into interstitial ads. For other types of applications other ad types, such as a banner, may be preferable.

 

In a nutshell,

  • Interstitial ads can deliver high impression rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and revenue. 
  • Interstitial advertisements must be well-designed and planned. 
  • They should have high-quality content tailored for your target audience. 
  • Interstitial ads should be customisable to your goals. 

The same principles that apply to any other form of advertising apply to interstitial ads: an appealing design can reduce the risk of disrupting and losing users. Yet, when used this advertising format can be an effective way to stand out from the crowd and attract attention.


Top Third-party Data Management platforms in India

  • Balaji Surendar
  • |
  • 28 September , 2021
  • |
    • 6 min read

Businesses in India Growing Rapidly with Third-party DMPs:

 

In India, businesses rely on insights from data management platforms to make informed decisions based on facts, trends, and statistical reports. However, with huge amounts of data gathering from the market, it can get difficult to store them. 

Hence, third-party data management is the solution.

Third-party data management collects digital information from various sources such as websites, apps or plugins. External parties will give the organisation rapid access to the main B2B and B2C data suppliers through the use of third-party data providers. As a result, you will get vital audience data for the business. You can use this data to curate personalised content that your target audience will find engaging. Several businesses in India are able to save time and money by adopting a third-party DMP platform. 

 

What is a DMP Platform and why is it important for businesses?

Every business or organization needs audience data to understand the audience's preferences and to improve their customer experience. This is where data management platforms (DMP) come in. A data management platform is the backbone of marketing technology that provides a unified platform to store data related to advertising and marketing. This audience data is collected from a variety of first, second, and third-party sources. Using a third-party data management platform will help us to create a segmented audience.

Importance of a DMP Platform

  • It helps companies to manage available data and organise them effectively. 
  • It helps companies to understand the importance of audience data.
  • It provides companies with a clear picture of their target audience that helps them to attract relevant customers. 
  • It helps companies group customer data based on similar characteristics and compares them with their existing customers.
  • It helps companies to constantly improve on their data management process. 
  • It helps companies to prevent money wastage.

 

Top 7 Data management Platforms for business growth

The Top data management platforms in India are:

  • Lotame
  • Salesforce
  • Nielsen
  • Oracle
  • Taboola
  • Zeotap
  • Zapr

 

1. Lotame:


Lotame is a global data management platform that provides data from various sources such as mobile apps, campaign data, blogs and CRM tools. Lotame increases customer engagement and unifies data. It helps marketers to create a segmented audience based on demographics, buying behaviour, location and interests. Lotame is best for advertising agencies and marketers for industries such as finance, automotive, CPG, Retail, Travel, and hospitality.

Cost of activation:

The cost starts from $1.00 CPM per segment as a base price. In addition, the CPM price differs with business needs. Contact Lotame DMP (Data management platform) for further details.

Lotame key features

  • 1st-Party Data Integration.
  • 2nd-Party Data Integration.
  • 3rd-Party Data Integration.
  • Offline Data Integration.
  • Mobile Data Integration.
  • Data Export Tool.

 

Benefits

  • Combine audience data from any source.
  • Direct access to 2nd and 3rd party data.
  • Customer engagement on the right device at the right time.
  • Insights on audience demographics, behaviour, and interest.
  • Prevent ad waste with frequency capping.

 

2. Salesforce:

The Salesforce DMP platform, previously known as KRUX, is an excellent third-party DMP for marketers to build customer relationships at a more granular level by capturing, unifying and activating data across multiple touchpoints. Salesforce uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide complete customer data to users. It helps in retaining existing customers through engagement strategy and also brings in potential prospects. 

Cost of activation

The cost of activation differs with business needs. Salesforce has customised pricing for sales, marketing, analytics, experience, success and many more streams. Contact Salesforce DMP (data management platform)for more details. 

 

Key features of salesforce

  • Target Audience Segments
  • 1-to-1 level Engagement
  • Complete Customer Data Profile
  • Consumer Data
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Machine Learning
  •  Device Graph
  •  Unlimited Event-Level Attributes
  •  Trusted Data Sources
  • ·Data Algorithms
  •   Peer-to-Peer Data-Sharing
  •  Actionable Insights

Benefits

  • Building data profiles
  • Collection of data
  • Storing of data
  • Centralize data
  • Withdraw Insights for new data

 

3. Nielsen:

Nielsen Marketing Cloud is a remarkable piece of software for managing, modifying, activating, and analysing audience data. Nielsen DMP has over 60,000 audience groups and allows users to do journey analytics. It delivers targeted advertising and content across all paid and owned marketing execution channels. It gives you a unified view of your clients across all platforms, including offline, online, and mobile. It gives you access to your first-party consumer data as well as the Nielsen audience data collection to help you build precise insights across thousands of consumer behaviour factors.

Cost of activation

The cost starts from $0.75 CPM per segment as a base price and also the CPM price differs with business needs. Contact Nielsen DMP (data management platform)for further details.

 

Key features of Nielson

  • Audience Segmentation
  • Behavioural Analytics
  • Competitor Analysis
  • Customer Data
  • Customer Journey Mapping
  • Data capture

Benefits

  • A single view of the customer in offline, online, and mobile channels
  • Access to first-party as well as Nielson set of data
  • Insights of thousands of different customer attributes

 

4. Oracle:

The Oracle Bluekai DMP is an online, offline, and mobile marketing platform built on cloud-based Big data that provides better results with greater ROI rates. Oracle Data, a 3rd party data management platform, has the flexibility to sell, buy and share data. BlueKai is well-known for efficient integration with third-party platforms. This is also the 2nd largest global platform and is easily accessible to over 300 partners. Marketers may benefit from users’ information on platforms, devices, and domains with high precision. It offers marketers a favourable outcome by delivering campaign data accurately from many platforms, devices, and domains.

 

Cost of activation:

The cost starts from $0.75 CPM per segment as a base price and also the CPM price differs with business needs. Contact Oracle DMP platform for further details.

Key features of oracle

  •  The Data Management Platform.
  •   Mobile Data Management Platform.
  •  The Audience Data Marketplace.
  •  Audience Analytics Suite.
  •  The BlueKai Partner Program.

Benefits

  • Data enhancement in Selligent Marketing Cloud's platform with third party data for better audience segmentation in omnichannel marketing campaigns.
  • Data Enhancement in BlueKai from campaigns in Selligent Marketing  Cloud's platform.

 

 

5. Taboola:

Taboola is a 3rd party DMP platform that provides various types of audience lists from the data provider with a predicted cost per acquisition. Taboola DMP offers its services to advertising agencies, brands, and all businesses. Taboola data management is very transparent and easily accessible to the data of the best companies, Also the performance-based payment for the data when the customer clicks on it and locates the product, content, and landing pages by the data provider you chose.

Cost of activation

Cost starting from $1.00 CPM per segment as a base price and also the CPM price differs with business needs. Contact Taboola DMP for further details.

Key features of Taboola

  •  Retargeting.
  •  Predictive Engine.
  •  Always In Control.
  •  Revenue From Native Advertising.
  •  Maintains Editorial Control.

                   

Benefits

  •  Ads on top best sites.
  •  Wide range of audience over 1 billion.
  •  Unique and Relevant Engagement.
  •  Achieving marketing goal.
  •  Business Growth through leads and conversion.

6. Zeotap:

Zeotap is in partnership with adobe solutions DMP which makes the Zeotap high-quality segments. Zeotap proven On measured demographics On-target percentage and other key performance indicator data are exceeding up to 6 times market benchmark. Zeotap has an integration with Adobe audience manager and adobe audience data marketplace. Zeotap makes it easier for the advertiser to collect the data of the current audience. Zeotap identifies its relevant audience and predicts customer behaviour better with its customer intelligence for the company.  Zeotap offers accurate and verified data with a wider approach for brands to achieve their objectives. Over 1 billion quality data to achieve or overachieve clients from the campaigns run. Zeotap is best for brands, publishers and data partners.

Cost of activation

Cost starting from $0.50 CPM per segment as a base price and also the CPM price differs with business needs. Contact Zeotap DMP for further details.

Key features of Zeotap

  •  Behavioural Analytics.
  •  Customer Profiles.
  •  Customer Data.
  •  Data Matching.
  •  Data Capture.
  •  Data Quality Control.
  •  GDPR Compliance.
  •        

Benefits

  • Enabling 360-degree customer view.
  • Unified high-Quality data.
  • Offline and online worlds.
  • Predictive behaviour model through machine learning.

  

 7. Zapr:

Zapr DMP provides offline and online media consumption-based audience engagement data from Granular Tv and mobile viewership. Over 1000 audience segments for every brand. Zapr works for the media industry such as media owners, broadcasters, advertisers, research companies, and end consumers.

Cost Of activation

Cost starting from $1.25 CPM per segment as a base price and also the CPM price differs with business needs. Contact Zapr DMP (data management platform)for further details.

Key features of Zapr

  •  Audio-content recognition.
  •  Digital signal processing.
  •  Mobile advertising technology.

Benefits

  • Tv Viewership insights
  • 360-degree perspective
  • Reducing marketing Inefficiencies

Conclusion

Finally, choosing the right DMP for the company is important for better ROI . Select the right data aggregator which has a very strong understanding of your business and operations. Buying the Best DMP from the market needs lots of research. First, check the potential DMP provider from the website and contact them directly. Start talking about the marketing needs and the company's vision, and get a demo version of the DMP. 

While choosing a data management platform, remember to choose one that provides:

  • Return on Investments (ROI).
  • Quality data management.
  • Parents/child Architecture.
  • Audience insights and profiling.
  • Campaign optimization.
  • second-party data marketplace. 
  • Access to third party data.
  • Flexibility in storing data.
  • Smooth customer service 

In today's business world every company needs to find an audience that is relevant to their business and collect data that will help in growth from marketing spend. Choosing the right data management platform will help avoid data wastage and provide better visibility of the audience across all the platforms.

 

Lotame Global unstacked Data Solutions


Lotame helps in the collection of data from anywhere and use it in the DMP for audience segmentation. You can select a specific audience to depend upon the demographics, interest, and action you want to target. Get a 360-degree view of audience attributes and behaviour of the consumer purchase. Lotame understands all your business needs with a consultative approach that gives better returns and solutions. Lotame is best suited for marketers, agencies, publishers, and media companies. With Lotame a leading health insurance company got an increase of 93% of customer acquisition. Media corp, a well-known media company in Singapore got a 570% increase in CTR with many other benefits. Last but not least choosing DMP with good customer service provides customer satisfaction which is what Lotame stands for.


Scaling E-commerce Brands by leveraging on Topical content

  • Arshiya Ahamed
  • |
  • 2 June , 2021
  • |
    • 5 min read

Popular events play a vast role in capturing the consumer's mindshare. Brands need to understand how they can leverage the topical season to drive maximum growth.

Why Must Brands Leverage Topical content?

  1. Build the Top of the Funnel: With video and image ads, engaging campaigns for these events can help build massive Top of the Funnel audiences. These audiences are most inclined to conversions when remarketed to, hence reducing the CAC. 
  2. Build Brand Resonance: With massive viewership and following, topical events allow for subtle brand placements to build brand resonance among the masses. With the effective use of Social Media features like Polls, Quizzes, and AR Filters, brands can build a strong resonance of their brand message. 
  3. Low & Affordable Cost of Advertising: Low & affordable cost of advertising allows even SMEs & MSME’s to take part via advertising in such a mega event.

Now that we know why it is important to leverage the season, let’s look at some of the topical events brands can leverage this year

Key Events & Topicals in 2021

  • The Olympics 2021: Holding a massive Indian viewership of 5.6 million (Source: Brand Equity, 2020), the Olympics is a great event for brands to leverage on. Brands can use key highlights of the games, the opening & closing ceremonies, and even star athletes of the tournaments. 
  • T20 World Cup- India is a nation where cricket is nothing less than a religion. Scheduled to begin in October 2021, brands can inculcate content of top players like Virat, Dhoni, Rashid, etc, team-specific conversations, and constant highlights about your offers during matches.
  • UEFA EURO 2020: Scheduled between 11 June and 11 July 2021, brands can focus on relevant engagement-focused activities such as quizzes, polls, and contests relating to the matches, winning moments and even base their communication on team players.
  • Other Events: Brands can also look at non-sporting events that have huge traction in India. For instance, last year 18% of the Indian consumers were occupied by the reality TV show Big Boss and 9% of them enjoyed the Femina Miss India event. 

(Source: Facebook & InMobi, 2020). Focusing on these events can enable brands to push their audiences into the marketing funnel that eventually leads to conversions.

  • The Festive season: Moreover brands can leverage the upcoming 4 month-festive season that ranges from Diwali to Christmas. These festivals hold a positive sentiment for businesses as the consumer buying process has facilitated a new way of online shopping, aiding online shopping sites. A few shopping categories that usually dominate this season include apparel, home appliances, gadgets, home furnishing, and gift packs.

Let’s explore some of the key platforms & ad formats businesses can leverage to sell online and drive sales.

Leveraging Disney+ Hotstar 

In 2020, Disney+Hotstar was able to scale 86.8M total paid subscribers with 30% of them belonging to India (Brand Equity, 2020).

  • Brands can now focus on creating short videos in the form of Pre-roll & mid-roll ads, streaming before and during the topical content to drive awareness of their products. Marketers can then leverage the intent of these audiences and remarket to them to drive sales.
  • Remarketing to these audiences during the consideration stage serves fruitfully to the brands as audiences that have watched the videos would already show an inclination towards the brand. 

Leveraging Facebook:

  • Your brand content can revolve around the top players and teams that can drive Engagement through this to build an audience and re-target this engaged audience to boost sales
  • Make use of different short and catchy creative formats on facebook to push your fast-moving products like short videos, gifs, thumb stoppers, instant experiences, etc, that are attention gripping. Create different audience clusters and remarket them accordingly.

Leveraging Instagram:

  • On Instagram, video scripts for influencers can promote sales with the use of unique coupon codes or exclusive offers during the topical season along with brand integration. This would increase brand credibility & value hence push your audience into the consideration level of the funnel.
  • Engagements lead to brand awareness and eventually to conversions hence make sure you keep content as engaging as possible using various formats like contests, Q&As, quizzes, and polls with the topical theme, leverage cashback offers to make it more enticing for your audience to participate and win exciting prizes. Eg: have a poll with 2 products “this or that” with a swipe-up link to the offers or Announce winners/offers with Tap to reveal stickers.

Leveraging YouTube

  • Behind the scenes content, highlights, key moment videos of the events are popular videos with extremely high viewer retention rates. Leveraging these on YouTube could help the brand gain visibility.
  • TrueView in-stream ads are one of the known heroes in the video format field. The diversity in the lengths of the ads (i.e Communication Strategy offering 10s, 20s, and 40s Ad messaging) maintained engagement, avoided creative fatigue, and ensured higher CTRs.

Leveraging Twitter

  • Twitter is most crucial to leverage moment marketing content. These Twitter moments can include news, entertainment, or even fun topics. For example, brands leveraging on the 2020 Superbowl performance
  • Creating twitter campaigns with a blend of statics, gifs, and relevant hashtags can be fruitful to brands to increase brand awareness and eventually drive sales.
  • Brands can also focus on the ‘website clicks’ or ‘conversions’ objective that Twitter has to offer to boost sales. 

Getting creative with the formats

-Playable ads: It offers an interactive preview of the app with playable ads thereby creating an immersive experience and engaging the audience. 

-3D Swirl: 3D Swirl is an immersive ad format and it runs across Google Ad Manager. Swirl Ads allow the user to have an immersive experience as the users can rotate, zoom in and expand the creativity in the ad. 

-Flipbook: Flipbook ad is an outstream video format for the mobile web. It provides an interactive experience to the audience. The video played in a flipbook ad pauses & plays as per the viewer's scrolling movement. 

- Branded content ads: Branded content ads are ads where the creators on Instagram can allow the business partners to promote their post or story and turn their content into an ad. The ads can be run through Ads Manager. 

Case Study- boAt

Creating an integrated digital marketing strategy for boAt during the topical event -IPL:

Key objective- To drive an increase in brand and ad recall.

Our Strategy 

Via Video Sequencing on YouTube, our team was able to retarget the audiences that engaged with the video in the first sequence to view the next and so on. We leveraged catchy GIFs on Google Display Network to run ads for maximum clicks that directed to the amazon product page to drive sales. With the help of leveraging YouTube Trueview for Reach, we aimed to reach maximum people over time. 

Key Results

Through our strategy & execution, we were able to achieve 44.4 Million+ Impressions, a 15.5% increase in product lift, a 59% decrease in cost per click, 3.9 Lakh+ clicks, and a 158.7% increase in brand interest. 

Conclusion

In the E-commerce industry, brands have immense potential at gaining visibility through topical posts. They must utilize the same for awareness, reach, recall & conversions. Leveraging relevant platforms with creative ad formats in their strategies would help the brands get a 360° understanding of their campaigns to gauge the impact on driving growth & sales.

Sources:

https://www.socialsamosa.com/2020/10/e-commerce-brands-youtube-strategy/

https://www.InMobi.com/2020FestiveSeasonGuide

https://www.facebook.com/business/news/festive-insights/


3.7x Transactions at 66% Lower Cost – Programmatic Case Study in Gaming

  • Sreekar
  • |
  • 30 November , 2020
  • |
    • 3 min read

Programmatic advertising or Programmatic marketing is an automated technique of Real-Time bidding on a specific inventory for a specific set of people. The ad marketplace runs the auction for the ad slot available on a specific publisher’s webpage (and apps) and selects the one with the highest bid to place their advertisement on the virtual space. Programmatic advertising has emerged as the future of online advertising due to the immense possibilities it holds.

While there are multiple programmatic platforms, Google Marketing Platform (GMP) has a powerful suite with GMP’s DV360 (Display Video 360) being the market leader. The advantages of leveraging programmatic advertising through DV360 include delivering faster and smarter marketing based on Google Marketing Platform’s machine learning algorithms, gaining control of your investments, and understanding the audience at a granular level.

What is Fantasy Cricket?

Most of you might already know what fantasy cricket is and how it works. But for a better understanding, fantasy cricket is an online game of betting on the players who are playing the actual game of cricket and we will be rewarded with cash in terms of points based on the performance of the players we bet on during the actual game.

About Gamezy

Gamezy is the latest offering from Gameskraft – India’s fastest-growing gaming platform. This app is a fantasy cricket platform designed for the user to select their choice of eleven players from both the teams in a cricket match. Based on the performance of the cricket players in the real game, the users of the app will be rewarded with cash prizes. 

How is Gamezy different from other apps?

Gamezy allows the user to change the playing XI at the end of the 1st innings based on the actual performance of the cricket players.

USPs:

-  Available in 8 languages

- Players can be changed before the 2nd innings starts

- 5-a-Side (an option to play without having to choose 11 players a side)

-   Daily Contests and Head to Head games.

 

Campaign Strategy

  • Platforms Used: On Display and Video 360, which is a Demand Side Platform (DSP) on the programmatic space, we have leveraged both display and video networks. Display network with static and GIF format creatives were run initially followed by YouTube which has worked well with different video categories that helped in increasing the number of installs and in-app actions.
  • View Through Conversions (YT): Videos have played a major role in scaling up as well as improving the performance of the campaigns. View Through Conversions refer to the installs that happen after a person has watched our video as an ad on YouTube. We have seen a significant rise in the number of purchases or Add Cash through the View-Through Conversions.
  • The most important targeting which has helped the performance of the campaigns is the targeting on DV360 through the interest category of “Fantasy Games”. By selecting this, we were able to relax all other demographic filters applied.
  • One important feature to mention is the accuracy of the post-click conversion numbers on DV360 was far better compared to the numbers on Google Ads. This was the power of insight-driven marketing.
  • Different creatives (Animated/Influencer): As mentioned, the different categories of videos which were used include Brand videos, User Generated Content (Influencer Videos). Animated Videos, USP based videos, Event/Theme-based videos etc.,

Themed Influencer Campaign refers to an example where we have used a “couple as influencers” to talk about how to earn money on Gamezy which makes it easy for them to buy their Valentine’s day gifts.

USP-based videos where the advantages of using Gamezy over other competitors like 8 Languages, 5-a-Side, and 2 Innings were shown as short stories or a slideshow to increase the Install rate.

  • Managed Placements: Optimizing the placements on YouTube Channels/YouTube Videos to exclude the junk placements and run separate campaigns with top converted placements. This helped in improving the overall performance.
  • Retargeting is not possible on Google ads for Real-Time Money based businesses to run campaigns but it is possible on D360 due to the server-to-server integration.

Results:

Within a period of 2 months, we were able to see a 226% increase in Installs with a 50% decrease in cost per Install. Since this is a real-time money based application, ‘Add Cash” is one of the most important in-app events to achieve. We have been successful in getting a 378% increase in Add Cashes with a 66% decrease in cost per Add Cash.


Beginners guide to programmatic advertising & DV360

  • Aarthi S
  • |
  • 20 August , 2020
  • |
    • 7 min read

What is programmatic advertising?

Programmatic advertising is not as complex as it sounds. It is a way to buy automatically & manage digital campaigns, rather than buying them from publishers directly.

Programmatic advertising is an automatic approach of RTB, which will be used on a particular inventory for a particular set of users. 

Demystifying the Jargons of Programmatic Advertising:

Real-Time Bidding (RTB): Buying and selling of advertisement space online through real-time auction that occur in milliseconds. 

Demand-Side Platform (DSP): A software which is utilized by publicists to purchase advertisements consequently. A portion of the main DSP stages are Turn, MediaMath, Invite Media, and DataXu. 

Supply-Side Platform (SSP): Technology stage utilized by distributors to sell publicizing space consequently. A portion of the main SSP stages are Google, OpenX, Right Media, and PubMatic. 

Data Management Platform (DMP):  An information stockroom that is basically a product that has data about purchasers and clients. DMP holds data principally through cookies that are utilized for publicist focusing on.

Ad Exchange: Digital commercial center where publicists and distributors purchase and sell advertisements. A portion of the main advertisement trade stages for automatic publicizing are OpenX, The Rubicon Project, and Google. 

First-Party Data:  First-party data comes legitimately from the source, either the computerized distributer or the stage holder. For example, in the event that you decide to publicize on Facebook, you can get data about the crowd to tailor your campaign. 

Third-Party Data: Third-Party Data is any data gathered by an element that won't have an immediate relationship with the client the information is being gathered on. More often than not, It is gathered from an assortment of sites and stages and afterward is bunched together by outsider information suppliers, for example, DMP.

Self Serve Programmatic: Google offers their programmatic solutions only to agencies and not to brands - but there are agencies like Social Beat that offers a self serve option to brands and other agencies where they can use the existing DV360 access to run campaigns. This is known as Self Serve programmatic advertising.

Types of programmatic advertising

  • Programmatic RTB: 

Like Google ads calculate the bidding in real-time for all advertisers, the same applies to Programmatic RTB.

RTB is done programmatically and the highest bidder's ad is displayed. Below are the steps on how it works -

  1. The User visits a website
  2. The Website communicates with an ad exchange/SSP
  3. SSP offers information to DSPs
  4. Advertisers place bids through a DSP
  5. Highest bid wins the ad
  • Private Marketplace (PMP):

Private marketplace works as RTB in similar sectors, which is available only to advertisers that require invitation. Usually publishers block or reserve premium ad inventory for some selected advertisers. Most of the demand side platforms have their own private marketplace which is exclusively available to DSP customers.

  • Preferred Deals:

This is a type of deal where the advertisers chooses the ad inventory even before displaying in the private marketplace by open auction at a fixed price.

This is also called spot buying as the purchase and negotiation happens on the spot and targeting, pricing etc are agreed by both the parties.

The advertiser also gets to see the publisher’s ad inventory which can help in deciding whether or not to make a purchase depending on the ad impression.

  • Programmatic Guaranteed:

This type of deal follows the usual path of media buying, where publisher & advertiser is given a chance of negotiating on one-on-one basis. Bidding process is not followed in programmatic guaranteed. Once the negotiation is over the inventory is sold to the advertiser.

Programmatic guaranteed is also called programmatic direct or automated guaranteed.

How does programmatic ad buying work?

Step 1: User clicks on a Landing page or website

Step 2: The owner of the site puts the ad up for auction

Step 3: Advertisers including competitors offer bids for the ad impression

Step 4: Highest bidder in the step 3 wins the auction

Step 5: winning ad is served on the website to the user who clicked on the ad

Last Step: Hopefully the user who clicked on the ad, converts!

The framework will assess the client examination once an advertisement is purchased on a portion of the measurements which is Behavior, Social commitment, Engagement level, Time per visit and Location. 

The above information from the measurements will help the framework in arranging, estimating and choosing what setting would be applicable to a particular client. In like manner the promotion would be shown as an advertisement on the applicable situation. 

For instance, when clients filter a few web journals which are identified with "Wellbeing and Fitness", The advertisement tech framework assesses and gauges the client conduct and shows a promotion that is identified with "offers on GYM Equipments" or "Sound eating routine food diagram". 

Through the above measures we can focus on the correct promotion to the ideal individual at the perfect time which reflects in expanding the proficiency of an advertisement campaign. While Google only offers their programmatic solutions only to agencies and not to brands - there are agencies like Social Beat that offer a self serve option to brands and other agencies where they can use the existing DV360 access to run campaigns.

Key Benefits of using Programmatic Advertising:

-Programmatic advertising works towards targeting your KPIs more closely which results in improving and increasing your overall ROI.

-With Programmatic advertising, advertisers have access to adjust metrics such as CPMs, CPCs, CPVs etc. which helps us in cost-effectiveness.

-There are a lot of things which we can explore on this platform. Gaining customer insights is one of them, and will enable you to take the learnings through programmatic technology and apply them across all types to improve overall advertising campaign performance, which results in a comprehensive marketing approach.

-Programmatic helps you to achieve your goal by reaching a larger audience which results in diversity and scalability

Frequency Capping Across Platforms

Control the frequency and analyze the performance of ads across multiple channels like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Native, OTTs and Publishers with the help of campaign manager and DV360

-Avoid overexposing ads to the same user across platforms 

-Acquire a wider pool of audience within the same budget. Thus, programmatic can help you get the best ROI.

-Get a single view of your audience across platforms 

Innovative and Interactive Ad Formats:

Create exclusive, interactive ads like Parallax, Flipbook, Cue Cards, and Audio banners

-Give your audience a better experience

-Drive engagement with your target audience 

-Helps increase CTR and boost Ad Recall

Premium Inventory & 3rd Party Lists:

-Access a more premium inventory and expand your reach across various publishers, OTT’s, audio streaming services, and third-party lists.

-Leverage 3rd Party Lists to reach niche audience segments relevant to your business

Improved Tracking on Programmatic:

-With improved targeting, you can optimize budget allocation with efficiency and produce elevated results

-Track impressions served to a single user across platforms

-Gives a view of the entire customer journey and overlap of audience across platforms for better Media Planning decisions

-Run Sequenced Messaging campaigns even on the Display Network to drive your audience down the marketing funnel 

Comprehensive Targeting:

-With comprehensive targeting options paired with audience insights and mining, you can optimize campaigns to deliver maximum results 

-Improved targeting using AI & Machine Learning with advanced bid strategies and data-driven creatives to deliver personalization to a target audience

-Leverage Combined Audience - Create a combined audience using Google Audience, 1st Party Audience & 3rd Party Audience to target even niche audiences effectively. 

Example - Your target audience is a CEO/CXO of a company size between 200-1000 in the US? 

That can be done!

The benefit with First-Party Data:

- As some of you might know, third Party Cookie tracking will be depreciated from Jan 2022 from Chrome (and soon other browsers). This is going to lead to many brands trying to build their first-party data and programmatic is best suited to manage this and build on your existing user data.

YouTube Trueview via DV360:

-Provides precise tracking with extensive targeting abilities 

-Explore Google Audiences, 1st and 3rd Party Data, also create combined audiences to reach the right target audience 

-Track post view and view through conversation for large scale trueview and bumper campaigns

-Leverage AI & ML for better-optimized campaigns

-Track Completed views and CPCV and not just views and CPV. 

Few Disadvantages of leveraging Programmatic Advertising:

Transparency from your agency: Since programmatic is usually executed via the agency, it’s very important to have access to the dashboard to understand key metrics. Most programmatic platforms also allow partners to add a % of their fee to the media cost (screenshot from DV360 below). It is known as Partner Cost in DV360. For example, if the CPM is INR 200, the partner can add a 20% margin on it wherein your dashboard would show a CPM of INR 240 (20% higher than INR 200)

Privacy issues: Privacy concerns have arisen as programmatic ads are based on individual internet user's information. This applies to most forms of digital media advertising.

Ad blockers: Most internet users complain about how the ads pop up then have resorted to using ad blockers or using search engines like DuckDuckGo and this trend is likely to increase.

Create a Programmatic campaign in just 3 steps:

Step 1 — All about Strategy

Firstly select your marketing campaign goal, then choose the type of programmatic ad campaign which would be suitable to your goal and strategy and lastly in the first stage would be to sign up for the right demand side platform.

Step 2 — Execution

First step in the execution is to set the estimated budget of your advertising campaign. Next would be selecting the basic targeting options. Last option is to select the creative type and upload the same.

Step 3 — Optimization

-To optimize the campaign the first step is to Receive Real-Time Reports and Analyze the data.

-According to the Analyzed data optimize the campaign settings

-Customize the targeting based on the analysis and Retarget the users who didn't convert

Optimization Secrets:

  1. Allow the campaign time to collect enough data so you're able to take a data-driven approach, Try not to optimize excessively fast 
  2. Similar to the previous point, Try not to optimize too often or too rarely as this will again not give the system enough data to collect. Always give enough time, spend & data between the changes.
  3. It is important to monitor all the progressions made even if it’s a small one. This record will help us to see what changes produce what results so that you can measure and alter the changes accordingly

Deep dive into Display & Video 360

DV360 is the extended version of DCM (DoubleClick Bid Manager), Campaign Manager, Data Studio & lastly Audience Center. This tool acts as a single tool which can be used for planning, organizing, designing, finding inventory, buying inventory, measuring & optimizing campaigns. Find out how we achieved a greater brand reach for a BFSI client using DV360.

What can be done in Display & Video 360?

-Collaborate across teams

-Gain transparency and control

-Get faster, smarter insights

Display & Video 360 is grouped around five integrated segments:

  1. Campaigns: 

This is where you build and execute the media plan. You can create, optimize & monitor the campaigns, Line items & Insertion orders.

  1. Audiences:

This is where you manage your audiences. Audiences can be set based on frequency caps, Audience bucket can be created & Audience profile analysis also can be made in this segment.

  1. Creatives:

Here, you tie your creative strategy to your data and your media plan. There are different variations of creatives, below are the following-

  1. The ad Canvas: You can design the ads visually with real-time previews on the Ad Canvas
  2. The Format Gallery: You can discovery new innovative formats, experiment them on Ad canvas & also browse Google Web Designer templates for custom solutions

c: Data-driven Creatives: You can create a variation of your message which suits with different audiences

  1. Inventory:

This segment allows you to discover and manage high-quality inventory from top broadcasters and publishers, which also includes exploring new opportunities in Marketplace and negotiating deals

  1. Insights:

All the campaign metrics can be found in this segment which helps in analyzing and measuring the performance across Display & Video 360 and take action on those results.


Is IPL advertising a hidden opportunity for Indian Marketers?

  • Arifa Rafeeq
  • |
  • 18 August , 2020
  • |
    • 4 min read

With the deadly virus and the national lockdown upon us, there has been very little to look forward to during this year. But thanks to OTT (Over the Top) platforms and the nation’s undying love for cricket, we are now anticipating the return of the fun-filled Indian Premier League (IPL) in the second half of this year. The 2020 IPL, like so many other events this year, will be held like never before. For one, the stadiums won't be packed with tens of thousands of passionate fans, as the tournament will be conducted in UAE with limited spectators. More importantly, the advertising engine that drives revenue for the IPL will be largely limited to digital platforms. OTT platforms like Hotstar are in prime position to capture even greater audiences and thus, have become the sole focus for brands. If you want to grab eyeballs during the 2020 IPL, a keen understanding of advertising on OTT platforms is crucial. 

What are OTT platforms?

OTT platforms are one of the fastest-growing networks of today’s Indian online marketing world. With more people turning to digital platforms for all their needs due to the lockdown, these platforms have witnessed a tremendous spike in the last couple of months. With the current speed of growth, it is now roughly estimated that by the end of 2023, the Indian OTT marketing world would have a whopping 500 million viewers online. 

One of the nation’s very own OTT platforms that is also the most-subscribed app in India, is Hotstar. Hotstar is owned by Novi Digital Entertainment, which is a subsidiary of Star India. As of May 2020, there are 8 million paid subscribers and 300 million active subscribers on Hotstar alone. Since IPL streaming is a service provided to paid subscribers, we think it is safe to say that we can expect another spike in the number of subscribers for the sake of the Indian Premier League.

 

But as marketers and advertisers, is Hotstar just a mere OTT platform and the IPL, just a game? Or a spectacular opportunity for advertisers to create brand awareness?

 

Ultimately, video advertising is one of the most effective forms of advertising. An average person in India spends approximately 3.5 hours on video streaming on smartphones. In addition to that, 69% of internet users have one or more entertainment or video applications downloaded on their phones. With more than 95% of Indian households being single television households, the video-in-hand demand has made a huge difference to video advertising. This is probably why the 2019 IPL broke viewership records with up to 462 million viewers watching the game online and upto 300 million viewers watching it on Hotstar. 

 

Why should brands advertise on Hotstar in the 2020 IPL?

The following are some of the reasons why brands should advertise in this nation’s most awaited game on Hotstar:

  1. Higher viewership:

    After last year’s record-breaking viewership of 462 million viewers (300 million from Hotstar alone), this year we expect an outstanding increase in the viewership rate owing to the lockdown as well as the Disney+Hotstar audience pool of 250 million viewers.

  2. Lower IPL advertising rates:

    With the previous IPL advertising rates being expensive and affordable only to the biggies of advertising, many small scale businesses could not advertise in the IPL. This year, however, the IPL offers a starting package of 1 lakh INR only - which means more brands will be advertising on this medium.

  3. Hotstar audience interest:

    As per the audience interest, 66% are annual travelers, 60% are monthly online shoppers, 40% are degree/diploma holders, 70% are investors of stocks and MFs, and 90% have paid subscriptions. This opens up a vast variety of opportunities for brands to reach their audiences. 

  4. High Ad inventory:

    With around 56 matches, each match has around 2,300 seconds of ad inventory. 

  5. High Engagement:

    Hotstar advertisement in  IPL 2020 offers remarkable engagement from viewers right through Pre, as well as Post live show updates and Highlights. 

  6. Option to choose from different ad formats as per your marketing goal.
  7. Option to filter your potential brand audience through location, gender, interests, etc.
  8. An increasing number of viewers on Disney+Hotstar applications each day.

 

Who must absolutely advertise on Hotstar IPL 2020?

  • Brands that want to boost their sales after being sidelined by the lockdown.
  • Brands that want to introduce new products/services to a larger audience
  • Brands whose target audiences are young, digital-first, and/or urban.

 

Best Advertising Options for Hotstar IPL 2020:

Since the public will not be able to physically attend the matches this year,  the IPL experience is going to be different from the previous years. The same goes for advertising in IPL. Some of the most popular Hotstar advertisement practices in IPL are as follows:

  • Billboards:

    Similar to an outdoor advertising billboard, a billboard is a big banner of your brand that can be in the form of an image, video, or a series of images as a photo carousel. A billboard may be placed on any content page such as the home page, news, sports, movies, etc.

  • Midrolls:

    10-30 seconds of unskippable ads that play during live match breaks/between programs. This is the most popular form of advertising used by a larger number of brands.

  • Features:

    These ads are non-clickable ads that pop up during the crucial moments of the game. This ensures high engagement and visibility that offers a remarkable boost to your brand.

  • Branded Cards:

    These are banners that carry the brand logo and their message and are placed right below the live streaming of the match in the social live feed.

 

IPL Advertising is a great opportunity for both moderate as well as high budget advertisers. It is used by a variety and a large number of brands in order to reach their target audience. Since Hotstar is the most subscribed application and IPL is the most-watched game, the two put together a remarkable number of viewers and a large audience of different likes and dislikes. With reduced rates and higher user engagement after the Disney tie-up with Hotstar, now is the best time to invest in advertising on Hotstar!


How we achieved a better brand reach for Sundaram Mutual with DV360

  • Veena Mahbubani
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  • 29 June , 2020
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    • 2 min read

Branding Campaigns with YouTube Trueview on DV360

 

YouTube Trueview campaigns on DV360 provide more precise tracking with comprehensive targeting abilities. Advertisers can leverage Google audiences, 1st Party and 3rd Party data and create combined audiences to reach just the right target audience. It can track even view-through-conversions along with click-through-conversions at scale, completed views and the cost for a completed view while automatically optimizing for lower CPCVs and higher view rates using AI & ML. 

 

About Sundaram Mutual

 

Sundaram Mutual is an Asset Management Company that manages funds that cater to the investment needs of investors with different risk, reward and liquidity preferences. It is committed to making mutual funds accessible to everyone and is backed with a strong research team and robust processes. It is also an innovative thought leader that is the first to launch funds in new themes like Mid-caps, Capex, Leadership, Rural India, and Micro caps and Services that enhance value for stakeholders while upholding the highest degree of ethics. 

 

Campaign Objective

 

Sundaram Mutual wanted to launch a new fund called Sundaram Equity Fund and wanted to maximize the awareness of the NFO. It also wanted to increase consideration for the fund and drive conversions with the audience created in the branding campaigns to push them down the marketing funnel. 

 

Objective for TrueView Campaign on DV360

 

  • Maximize brand awareness and reach 
  • Drive more views on the video at a lower CPV
  • Effectively measure the impact of the campaign 

 

Campaign Execution and Optimization 

 

Tested different videos - In the beginning we created the campaign with 2 videos; one with a voiceover and the other without a voiceover. We ran the campaign for 2 days and evaluated which video had a higher view rate at a lower CPV and then directed the budgets of the campaign to that video.

 

Leveraged various audience types and optimized budget allocation - We leveraged broad upper funnel audiences like Google audience lists, created custom audiences of competitors and investment platforms, alternate investments, 3rd party lists and combined audiences. After this, we evaluated which audience lists worked better and directed more budgets to that audience list.

Automated Bidding - We used an automated bidding strategy of “Maximizing Views” to leverage AI & ML to drive more completed views at a lower CPV and higher view rates. 

 

Frequency and View Caps - We leveraged campaign level frequency caps to avoid over-exposure of ads to a single user across multiple targeting options and maximized the number of unique users reached with the budgets. 

 

Results 

 

87% of the views were completed views 

63% decrease in CPV which drove 0.6x incremental views 

66% decrease in CPM which drove 0.7x incremental impressions 

50% higher views compared to YouTube Masthead in the previous campaign 

161% increase in brand search queries on Google Search 

 


How can you make the most of your marketing budgets with Programmatic Advertising

  • Veena Mahbubani
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  • 15 June , 2020
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    • 7 min read

Programmatic advertising leverages the power of automated bidding for inventory in real time, which helps advertisers in delivering faster and smarter campaigns. India has seen exponential growth in programmatic advertising with 80% of the advertisers seeing efficient gains due to its effectiveness and the control it gives. The adoption of programmatic advertising in India is projected to grow by 52% till 2021. Programmatic advertising is the future of advertising in India and it is about time that advertisers start leveraging programmatic advertising to make the most of their advertising budgets. In this blog we’re going to talk about 

  • How programmatic helps advertisers make the most of their marketing budgets 
  • What advertisers can do to help programmatic drive maximum ROI 

How Programmatic helps in making the most of your advertising budgets

  • Automated & Smart Bidding 
  • Data-driven creatives for personalization
  • Brand Safety
  • Advanced Targeting Options on DV360
  • Advanced Tracking with DV360 and Campaign Manager
  • Transparency in PG deals 

Automated & Smart Bidding 

Programmatic Advertising through DV360 offers bid strategies that leverage machine learning to improve campaign performance by serving impressions or increasing bids for users based on the likelihood of achieving the KPI set by the advertiser. DV360 gives advertisers control over setting a goal for their campaign example CPA goal - 500 and tell the system what to optimize for example - maximize clicks/conversions and also choose what to bid on example - spend the entire budget while minimizing CPA or set a target CPA. 

Advertisers have various goals to choose from for Branding which include CPM, Viewability, and CTR while optimizing their campaigns for maximizing their impressions or minimizing their CPM and Performance campaigns include goals like CPA, CPE, and CPI while optimizing their campaigns for either maximizing clicks or conversions with bidding strategies focusing on a specific CPC/CPA or spending the budget while achieving the CPA/CPC the system can achieve.

Use the right bidding strategies for your campaign to show ads only to relevant users helps to make the most of our budgets and maximizing results 

Pro Tips 

  1. Start with CPC as a goal for a performance campaign, optimizing for maximum clicks and bid on spending the entire budget while minimizing the CPC/maximizing clicks, to let the system gather learnings for better optimization. Once you have enough conversion data in your campaigns, move to smart bidding strategies like setting a CPA goal or maximizing conversions. Starting with bidding can have an impact on the delivery of the campaign or will not have enough data to bid smartly to generate desired results. The same strategy method can be used for branding campaigns as well. 
  2. Leverage OBB (Outcome Based Bidding) to only pay for clicks and not to impressions served to save campaign budgets.

Data-driven creatives for Personalization 

Programmatic advertising campaigns on DV360 lets advertisers leverage the power of personalization with data-driven campaigns and creatives paired with rich media formats for increased performance and engagement. 

Advertisers can choose from various formats, upload images and copies suitable for different personas of their target audience and set the target audience for a campaign. The system automatically serves the most relevant combination of images and copies for each user based on machine learning. It involves using data to sub-segment audiences showing the right creative to the right audience at the right time instead of going the traditional route of showing one ad to an entire audience segment. This enables personalization and automation at scale, which means we don’t have to work on 10 different creatives with different copies and create different campaigns for each audience segment. Instead, we can easily do that with data-driven creatives on DV360 paired with interactiveness which helps maximize relevant engagement with the target audience and increases ROI. 

An example of personalization with data-driven creatives 

Brand Safety 

DV360 offers various brand safety control options to advertisers to prevent their ads from being displayed on sites with content that is not good for the brand’s image like Adult, Drugs etc. and tools like Ad Fraud prevention which can be used to exclude either High Risk or Medium Risk or High and Medium Risk Websites. Excluding high risk has worked the best in terms of minimizing ad fraud, however, excluding high and medium might impact the delivery of the campaign or increase the CPC. TRAQ Score is like a credit score for a website, the higher the TRAQ score, the safer the website. The scores range from 250-1000. Using scores between 500-1000 has worked the best for our campaigns, which helped prevent ads being displayed on spammy websites in just a few clicks without a huge impact on the cost for each click. 

This helps advertisers make the most of their advertising budgets by reducing irrelevant clicks which in turn reduces wasted advertising budgets and gets more clicks from relevant users.

Advanced Targeting Options on DV360 

DV360, one of the biggest digital innovations in recent times, offers various targeting options to advertisers to choose where they want their ads to be served to who they want to and do not want show their ads

Placing Ads - Advertisers can pick the environment like website or apps, categories and placements, choose specific apps or app categories, browser, viewability on the browser, above or below the fold, devices and even the connection speed of the browsers. The ad exchanges can be used to eliminate environments that are not relevant or generating ROI. Example - If ads placed on apps are generating too many accidental clicks and reducing the ROI, apps can be excluded in just a few clicks. 

Audience Targeting Options - Along with Google Audiences and custom audiences, advertisers also have access to 1st party lists, premium 3rd party lists and created combined audiences of any Google Audience, Custom Audience, 1st party or 3rd party list. For example, if you want to target CEOs of companies with employees of more than 5000, we can target those audiences using a combined audience of 3rd party lists. This helps advertisers reach the most relevant audience however niche it is and save impressions served to users that might not be relevant.

Audience Exclusions -  Exclude any 1st or 3rd party list, Google audience and also create an audience of users based on impressions already served to exclude them from your campaigns. For example A user has been served 3 impressions for one offer. You can create an audience for this and exclude it from the other offer to avoid overlap and save impressions and clicks which can be used to engage with more users. 

Advanced Tracking Options using DV360 and Campaign Manager

Programmatic advertising offers advertisers advanced tracking options when Campaign Manager is used. A few of these are:

 

Tracking Frequency & Journey across Platforms

Campaign Manager lets advertisers track the number of impressions a user is served across platforms like Google, Facebook, OTTs, Publishers and cap it across all platforms. This helps advertisers get a single view of a user and track the entire journey across platforms and avoid overexposing ads to a single user, since they are tracked as different users on different platforms, save wasted impressions and reach more users in the same budgets. 

Audience Overlap

Campaign Manager lets advertisers evaluate the overlap of audiences across platforms and helps make better media planning decisions. Example - we ran campaigns on two different platforms but the overlap of the audience on both the platforms is 85% which means the audience on both the platforms are the same and one of these can be removed from our media plan for the next campaign. 

Transparency in PG Deals 

Leverage programmatic advertising for placing ads on different publishers like Moneycontrol or NTDV has several benefits that can lead to optimizing the efficiency of campaign budgets:

  1. Tracking a user across platforms and capping frequency at a user level
  2. Programmatic offers 100% transparency of impressions served and clicks received, whereas in a direct deal, advertisers have to depend on reports shared by the publishers. 

What advertisers can do to help Programmatic drive maximum ROI 

  • Set clear objectives 
  • Use the targeting options in the best way to reach your audience 
  • Test, evaluate and optimize
  • Give the system time to learn and start working for you 

Set clear objectives

Setting clear objectives before starting the campaign helps in better optimization. The objective of the campaign shapes the entire structure of the campaign right from the goal, what we are optimizing for, the bidding strategy, the audiences that are targeted and creatives that are used. Making too many changes to these elements of the campaign can have a negative impact on the learnings. 

Use the targeting options in the best way to reach your target audience

With so many targeting options available on DV360, we can target even very niche audience segments to reach relevant audiences, paired with the relevant placement of the ads with data-driven creatives to be as relevant and interactive as possible. 

Test, Evaluate & Optimize 

Check which creatives work - Leverage rich media creatives and see which format and communication works better 

Check with audience works - Test different custom audiences, combined audience, look at the audience analysis report to check which audience list has an overlap with your 1st party list and define your target audience

Check which frequency works - With advanced tracking options advertisers can analyze which media platforms and which frequency works the best to drive ROI and optimize campaigns accordingly. 

Check which publishers have an overlap of the audience and choose the one which is more cost-effective - Analyze data from existing campaigns to make better media decisions and budget allocations based on the cost-effectiveness of each channel to reach the same audience.

Analyze Campaign Performance - Check all elements of the campaign like which environment, age, geo, day of the week, time of the day, placement, ad exchange, position, the bid strategy works the best for increasing ROI from a campaign. 

Give the system time to learn and start working for you 

A lot of times, advertisers initiate campaigns but pause it if there are no immediate results, however programmatic advertising, like any other advertising platform, requires machine learning to generate results and ROI. Advertisers should evaluate the performance of a campaign not just by the direct results but also by the impact it creates in terms of the consideration a campaign creates, how does the remarketing to this audience work in campaigns, etc. 

Now leverage DV360 (Display Video 360) in Self Serve mode

Google offers their programmatic solutions only to agencies and not to brands - but there are agencies like Social Beat that offers a self serve option to brands and other agencies where they can use the existing DV360 access to run campaigns. This is known as Self Serve programmatic advertising.


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