Month: August 2017

Viewability refers to the likelihood that an ad is viewed by an actual human user. While that may sound strange, up to 57% of ads served are not considered viewable.

What does it take to consider an ad viewable?

Impressions are considered viewable for both desktop and on mobile when they appear within a user’s browser and have had the opportunity to be seen. Industry standards for display ads are as follows: 50% of the ad has to be visible on the screen for at least 1 continuous second. For larger banner ads on desktop or mobile, only 30% of the ad pixels need to be on screen for one continuous second for the ad to be counted as viewed. For video ads, the viewability standard is different, the ad must have at least 50% visibility on screen, and must have been viewable for at least 2 seconds.

Viewability as a key performance indicator

Viewability has become an important metric. Digital marketers want to confirm that ads are seen and their campaigns perform as expected. Beyond validating that advertisers get what they paid for, using viewability as a metric also provides insight into the quality of impressions and evaluates the quality of a publisher’s inventory.

The need to be seen

The increasing demand for 100% viewability may mean that much of publishers’ inventory is no longer sellable. With a drop in the amount of inventory that advertisers are willing to buy, publishers would have to increase the CPMs to make up for the gap in revenue. Delivering 100% viewability isn’t necessarily impossible for publishers; Facebook for example is currently guaranteeing 100% viewability.

However, not all advertisers are demanding 100% viewability; some advertisers report desirable performance results–such as click through rates (CTR)–are coming from inventory with only 60% viewability. In direct response (DR) campaigns, KPIs are independent of viewability, measuring conversions over impressions, using a Cost Per Click (CPC) or  Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) pricing model. But CTR or conversions aren’t as useful of metrics when the campaign goal is to drive awareness.

How to measure viewability 

For both mobile and desktop – banners and videos – viewability is measured through various ad verification strategies by different platforms. Verification strategies are based on industry standards and provided by companies that enable third-party measurement and ad verification.

Digilant is integrated with the top tier third-party measurement and ad verification vendors, including DoubleVerify,  Sizmek’s Peer39 and Integral Ad Science, to block programmatic advertising fraud on a pre-bid basis and to filter suspicious traffic.  Sites with content promoting hate speech or illegal activity are excluded from the market and added to a dynamic block list.

Verification helps to ensure viewability and identify ad fraud — such as nonhuman traffic from bots registering clicks — which is never considered viewable. But viewability alone doesn’t guarantee better performance.

What does viewability do for your campaign?

Viewability doesn’t guarantee increased ad performance, but viewability and performance are linked.

For example, studies have shown that how long an ad is continuously visible has a higher impact on performance than the percentage of the ad viewed.

Players in the ad tech industry such as Integral Ad Science, comScore, and the Interactive Advertising Bureau are all working toward understanding viewability, setting standards and guidelines. However, discrepancies in counting methodologies still exist — both in the final numbers and in the methods themselves.

Summary

It’s helpful to keep some more qualitative factors that improve viewability — and improve performance — in mind. While it’s trickier to define metrics for all aspects of viewability, advertisers should keep certain aspects in mind that might impact their viewability, such as:

• Viewability is defined as a display ad that is at least 50% above the fold, for 1 second – or 2 seconds for video.
• Viewability as a KPI helps advertisers gauge the value of inventory.
• There is an increasing demand for 100% viewability, which could impact pricing from publishers.
• Both measurable and qualitative factors impact viewability, which impacts ad performance.
• Buyers need to keep best practices in mind when buying inventory, like keeping logos at the top of ad creative and avoiding ad clutter.

Ready to optimize your ad performance? Start leveraging viewability metrics to enhance your campaigns and drive better results with Digilant today.

Many brands still don’t take advantage of all the possibilities offered by programmatic advertising, preventing them from increasing the profitability of their media buy and maximizing their ROI.

Instead, if brands leveraged the potential of programmatic advertising they could broaden their audience, reaching twice as many unique users, increasing conversions by more than 36%, and reducing CPA vs. traditional online media buying methods.

Analyzing Campaign Errors

Digilant analyzed nearly 500 programmatic advertising campaigns and identified the seven most common mistakes made by media buyers that hinder performance of their campaigns.

1. Vague or overambitious campaign goals.

Although digital marketing has become increasingly precise in its targeting, it’s still very common for advertisers to want to cover too many goals or KPIs at once with their programmatic investment. Advertisers should be clear in setting their KPIs to whether for example they are looking to increase brand awareness in a new market, drive online conversions or in-store traffic, or other goals.  That starting point is imperative, the advertiser’s target must be aligned with the most appropriate programmatic tactics, which will ultimately improve campaign performance and ROI.

2. Failure to segment audience data using programmatic technology.

When provided with large volumes of user data, the possibilities of different types of audience segmentation are endless. There are about 200 individual data points associated with each online user, and by using dynamic programmatic reporting, marketers can create profiles that allow for real-time segmentation and thus increased performance.  To capitalize on this enhanced campaign performance, the audience must be segmented at several levels. With each layer, the objective is to filter and eliminate users that do not fit the target audience for that brand.

3. Ranking users without considering their value.

By applying machine learning and using data from advertisers and third party data providers, it’s possible to determine the appropriate user profiles for the advertiser to target in real time that are most likely to convert. Skipping this step puts campaigns at risk for failure. After identifying users’ behaviors, predictive algorithms can be applied to determine the value of each profile and user in real time. Knowing the value of the user will allow the audience to be segmented efficiently and effectively, by focusing the campaign on the right users and increasing the investment on users who will be more prone to make a purchase.

After executing a campaign it’s important to reexamine consumer conversion data to optimize the effectiveness of future media buying actions, as brands can exponentially enhance the returns on their programmatic campaigns by knowing more about their user behaviors and attributes.

4. Delivering the same creatives to customers and leads.

One of the great strengths of programmatic advertising is its predictive ability. It is possible to apply data science algorithms to find potential “new consumers”, not just recycle the same users gained through retargeting.

But it would not make sense to send the same message to the every user. It is necessary to personalize the messages directed to the different profiles that the campaign wants to impact, using technologies like Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) to optimize the ad investment. This level of customization is not done as often as it could be for programmatic campaigns, which can negatively impact performance.

5. Low investment in attribution.

Insights gleaned from programmatic KPI metrics allow marketers to understand campaign performance at a level that is unmatched by other traditional channels such as print advertising or television. The added invested in attribution gives media buyers the opportunity to analyze the results beyond last click, which is a one dimensional view of online marketing and doesn’t allow for full funnel analysis.

Attribution allows you to understand how the media really affect results. For example, actions in the media may be linked to loyalty data or to credit card transactions; So by using attribution technology it is possible to measure the impact of a campaign or a channel on the final conversion of a new customer. In addition, advertisers can also analyze the impact of a campaign on the brand and the perception of users.

6. Campaign reports are not optimized for future strategies.

Programmatic ad buying provides more metrics, information and data than any other advertising medium. Taking advantage of these real-time stats can help brands and agencies discover ideas that are not always intuitive to them and guide the strategy of their next campaign.

For example, a sportswear retailer may be focussed on targeting a totally male audience. However, a programmatic campaign using intelligence gained through data science could reveal that its highest performing audience is actually in the segment of women aged 25-34.

7. Using the wrong marketing channels.

There are many ways to reach an audience programmatically — desktop, mobile, apps, video, native advertising, audio and traditional television, for example.

Each channel offers potential advantages and drawbacks that marketers need to carefully weigh when deciding where to allocate their ad spend. If the priority is to take a low-cost action with a quick return on advertising investment, it’s best to invest your budget in display. Video and audio justify the highest CPM if you pursue better brand recognition.

It is also important to keep cross-device segmentation in mind, as the average consumer connects to the Internet through five or more devices daily.

Programmatic ad buying relies on advanced data science solutions to provide marketers with a comprehensive understanding of their respective marketplace and at the same time gives them the tools they need to set out more precise guidelines for optimize advertising campaigns and increasing their ROI. However, many companies still treat their target audience as one large segment, often employing obsolete tactics without analyzing the consumer’s behaviors, interests and attitudes, to find the right segments within that large audience to target.

Advanced segmentation, especially adaptive segmentation allows you to identify the most essential existing audiences for a brand and uncover new key segments. It is as important to spend time with your media buyer to find the right tactics and channels for a programmatic campaign, as it is to learn from the results. The flexibility provided by programmatic advertising allows a continuous optimization during and after a campaign. The analysis and strategy prior, during and after the campaign will ensure that future media buys will have better results for the investment made

Summary 

• Too many campaigns are executed without having properly analyzed the value of each user, which is essential to effectively segment the audience, thus improving performance: investment should be increased in clients more prone to conversion.
• The second most costly error: do not apply algorithms or look alike models to find potential “new consumers” by recycling users gained through retargeting. The messages are not targeted to the different profiles that the campaign wants to impact, and the investment is therefore not optimized.
• Unclear objectives, mistaken marketing channels, inability to identify adequate data layers, poor measurement of objectives and not optimizing the information obtained are other frequent mistakes.
• Properly using the potential of programmatic advertising allows advertisers to broaden their audience, reaching twice as many unique users, increasing conversions by more than 36%, and reducing CPA versus traditional online methods.

Video has a lot to offer digital marketers and consumers. In 2017, video will account for almost 70% of all internet traffic. With additional advances in connectivity and mobile technology, streaming big video files is no longer prohibitive, enabling users to share a wide array of content.

Buying YouTube Advertising

As a medium for marketing, video requires more time and effort to produce than a Instagram Post, Tweet or Facebook Status Update, but the overall payoff can match or go much beyond the investment. Once efforts to produce content are made, marketers attempt to gain the most from their creative content by leveraging social media to make sure it gains visibility and recognition so they can earn return on their investment (ROI).

Of the top seven social media platforms, YouTube ranks as the 4th highest in usage by consumers, and of those seven, it’s the only platform specializing in video.

Topping the list of online video platforms, YouTube has made it easier for marketers in many ways by offering:

• An easy to use format for posting and sharing videos on any social media channel
• A wide reach and plenty of traffic: 1 billion users, who spend millions of hours watching videos daily
• Global reach in over 70 countries and 76 languages
• The ability to go anywhere the user goes – over 50% of video play comes from mobile audiences
• A truly social video channel with options to share, like, comment and subscribe which helps to drive interest-based traffic
• Search features makes videos the answers to consumers’ questions

And that’s all just a part of setting up a YouTube channel.

Brand Advertising Campaigns

When it comes to using the YouTube platform as a mechanism for brand promotion advertising campaigns, there are two ways to go about paid advertising:

1. In-display ads: appear in YouTube search results, as related videos, or on websites that belong to the Google Display Network.
   • These display as the results of a search or appear on the right hand side of a video being viewed as related content.
2. In-stream ads: appear as pre-roll before a video plays.
   • Pre-roll ads may have a “skip ad” or a “Your video will play in 10 seconds” notification to let viewers know the ad’s duration.

Advertising Targeting on YouTube

To target audiences for these ads, advertisers use a variety of targeting options that are also found within programmatic campaigns such as keywords, location, time of day, network, language and device type. While video offers marketers the opportunity to engage and provide value through things like demos, testimonials, and “how to” content – it’s not as easy to produce as a tweet, blog or white paper.
When setting up these campaigns in a programmatic self-service platform, advertisers set their maximum bid price even with no guarantee that the video will be viewed in its entirety.

Best Practices for Video Advertising 

Marketers need to keep in mind that with video, quality matters. Not only do the audio and visual components need to be high quality, but the content should follow as well. If these factors fall short, and your video isn’t useful or engaging, it’s not valuable.

For both advertising and brand channel pages, YouTube provides reporting analytics that help to quickly assess and optimize the posted video and it’s targeting on your programmatic platform. These video metrics give marketers a lot of insight into how much of the video is being viewed or engaged with. This information can be used as a way of gauging intent signals, for example, a video that’s been completed can indicate a qualified marketing lead and is also a re-marketing opportunity.

Best Practices Summary

• Video is on the rise, and YouTube tops the list of online video platforms.
• YouTube also ranks among top social platforms and provides real social features such as share, like, comment and subscribe.
• Marketers can get a big return on investment by creating quality video that engages and provides value for users.
• Video gives marketers insight into intent signals and the opportunity to drive qualified traffic from YouTube to sign up or purchase pages.