Wesley Farris, Author at Digilant

During the WWDC Conference in June, Apple announced iOS 14 – an operations systems update that will be coming to iPhones this fall. The update brings a variety of new features to iPhones and iPads, most notably for marketers are some major changes to privacy features. New features will protect users against location tracking and tracking on apps and websites.

When iOS 14 goes into effect, mobile apps will need to request and receive permission from users via a pop-up opt-in to access a device’s Identifier for Advertisers or IDFA. IDFA is a device identifier that Apple uses to identify a user’s device without revealing Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Many advertisers rely on IDFA to find target users, deliver customized advertising, measure campaign performance, and more.

The IDFA is not going away officially, but it’s critical that marketers start preparing for an IDFA-less world. It’s estimated that the majority of users will be wary of sharing data and will NOT opt-in – with only 0-20% of users expected to be willing to opt-in to IDFA tracking.

In an IDFA-less world, for marketers to properly track mobile attribution, users will need to have opted-in to tracking on every app where ad impressions were served.

As a result, fingerprinting and probabilistic attribution will become even more important and mobile measurement vendors like Kochava and AppsFlyer will respond with continued investments to innovate and deliver high demand solutions.

One drawback to probabilistic methodologies is that they are more susceptible to fraud. Bad faith actors will see Apple’s privacy changes as an opportunity to deceive marketers on attribution. so marketers and strategic partners will need to focus heavily on fraud and brand safety measures.

Looking Ahead To First-Party Data

If there is a single takeaway for marketers from Apple’s iOS 14 announcement it’s that the risk has never been higher for marketers who rely heavily on IDFA and other third-party data identifiers and tracking sources. Alternatively, the door to opportunity will open wider for marketers that are staying closer than ever to first-party data.

While the IDFA is largely going away, marketers will still have access to the Identifier for Vendors or IDFV. The IDFV ensures that companies with their own app(s) can use an identifier to access first-party user data and to understand the audiences within the app(s) they own.

Today, marketers can activate these first-party audiences and push them to many platforms for activation and media buying via the IDFA because it is universal. With the release of iOS 14, marketers will need to focus on identity resolution around hashed emails or households to integrate first-party data seamlessly into activation channels like Facebook and Google.

The importance of first-party identifiers and data has steadily increased over the years, and Google’s Chrome and Apple’s iOS announcements have sent it forward exponentially.

Next Steps

If you want to learn more about how to set your brand up for success in an IDFA-less world or you just want to chat through some of your concerns related to the iOS 14 release, contact us here.

By Wesley Farris Director of Partnerships at Digilant

Programmatic has evolved considerably. What was once an experimental technology, has now morphed into a cross-channel, data-driven ecosystem with unlimited opportunity and strategic value. In fact, U.S. programmatic spending continues to rise – it is expected to surpass over $27 billion by the end 2017, according to e-marketer. Today, the question is no longer “Will we use Programmatic?” but rather, “How will we use Programmatic?”

Despite programmatic’s growth and widespread adoption, many marketers still struggle with how to best leverage it to maximize ROI. That’s not surprising considering its vast menu of options — programmatic can leave many marketers wondering where to begin. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Below are five tips to help you navigate your programmatic options today:

1.Identify A Goal

Before diving into programmatic, it’s important to first understand and acknowledge the objective of your effort. Is the goal of this campaign direct response or branding? Are you trying to drive people to a physical location or convert online? Are you trying to better understand your audience or learn when and where they are converting?

Identifying the goal of the campaign will enable the selection of the best programmatic tactics. For example, if your campaign goal is direct response, your programmatic efforts should include retargeting. If your goal is branding, focusing on domains with high impact ad units and domains with historical high viewability scores are good starting points. For instance, you might work with a partner who can measure viewability and Limit Fraud to ensure ads are highly visible. Overall, aligning your goal with your programmatic tactics will deliver better performance and improved ROI.

2. Identify The Right Marketing Channels

There are many ways to reach an audience programmatically: desktop, mobile, mobile apps, video, native, audio, and TV, just to name a few. But how do you choose the right channels?Each channel has its pros and cons, and you should carefully weigh them when deciding where to spend your budget. For instance, desktop display tends to be affordable and flexible, but won’t drive as many clicks. Conversely, video and audio can drive high viewability, have better ad recall and are strong branding performers, but they come with higher CPMs.
So, if the goal is a low cost per action or return on ad spend, you are better off spending your budget on desktop and mobile display. If you are looking for better brand recall, video and audio might justify the higher CPM. Cross device targeting is essential if you are trying to drive conversions/sales in order to reach the target audience during all phases of the purchase cycle. In general, if you want to get more value from your programmatic media buys, don’t underestimate the importance of carefully selecting the channels you’ll use for your campaign.

3. Identify Data Layers

With the growth of programmatic, we’ve also seen the proliferation of audience segmentation and big data, both of which can be used to enhance and optimize campaigns. A great way to visualize the data selection process is to think of audience segmentation as various layers of data. With each data layer, the goal is to filter and remove users that don’t fit the target you are trying to reach. For example, let’s say you want to target women who will be in market to
purchase maternity clothes.

First data layer might try to segment the entire user population to identify pregnant women. This could be accomplished by looking at a combination of demographic data and apps on the user’s device.
Second data layer might look to identify pregnant women who have shown an interest in maternity clothes, or behavior to purchase them. A marketer could target them on search history, contextual content, and their physical location history. These two data layers will help you establish a baseline for pregnant women who have shown an interest in purchasing maternity clothes.
Third data layer could be the audience of users who have viewed specific products on a maternity clothes brand’s website and are retargeted.

Overall, a layered data strategy enables you to filter out non-applicable users, and focus on your ideal target audience. Doing so will boost the ROI of your programmatic effort.

4. Attribute Performance

It’s important to know what is performing in a campaign and why? Programmatic media allows marketers to understand performance at a level that is unmatched when compared to other traditional media such as print or TV. Today, there are no longer limitations to properly attribute a programmatic media campaign, and marketers don’t have to rely on CTR or first/last click attribution. Instead, attribution allows marketers to truly understand — on a 1-to-1 level — how their media affected their bottom line. For instance, tying media to physical in-store traffic is a great way to take an abstract media metric and apply it to real world performance, and is readily available in the marketplace. Media can be tied to loyalty data or credit card transactions as well, so marketers no longer need to guess if a campaign made an impact on the bottom line. And from a branding stand point, marketers can just as easily tie a media campaign to the impact on their brand and how consumers perceive it.

5. Optimize

Fortunately, programmatic media provides more metrics, insights, and hard data than any other form of media. Tapping into this data can greatly help you uncover insights that aren’t always intuitive, and improve the performance of your next initiative.

For example, if you are a retail marketer focused on sports apparel, you might assume that your audience might skew male. However, a programmatic campaign might reveal that your top performing audience is actually females 25-34. Be sure to examine your programmatic campaign insights for learnings that will help you fine-tune future efforts. Doing so will ensure increase your ROI and bottom line performances.

There will always be ways to improve a media buy, and programmatic’s flexible capabilities allows for that continual optimization. Pre-flight, mid-flight, and post-flight analysis and strategy can ensure campaign performances continues to improve. When mapping out programmatic efforts, be sure to take the time to apply the the above 5 tips to boost success.

Author: Wesley Farris

Apple iOS 14: What It Means for Marketers and First-Party Data