Lockdown is a prime example of the importance of adopting an agile marketing strategy. Traditional forms of marketing, like advertising billboards and adverts on the sides of buses, proved ineffective in a world where everyone was confined to the four walls of their homes. They simply were not achieving their intended audience reach, leading businesses to adopt a ‘digitise or get left behind’ approach when it came to their marketing strategy.

Consumers are spending more time online than ever before. And whilst this behaviour was initially forced through the Covid-19 pandemic, it is likely that this will become a longer lasting habit. Sales funnels that traditionally started with offline branding adverts and moved to online performance campaigns, now need to adapt if they are to survive and prevent drowning in the sea of brands that have already suffered from not digitising.

The importance of tracking

Performance marketing has always differentiated itself from branding with its more tracking-focused approach. Because of this, one of the biggest gulfs between these two marketing tactics lies in their physical presence: performance being online and brand being offline. Until now…

Tracking is essential when it comes to understanding how customers interact with companies before a purchase is made. Simply tracking first click and last click, which tend to be the most popular attribution models, neglects other aspects of the journey which influence the sale. By adopting a linear approach, all touchpoints in the customer’s journey are given equal credit allowing for better insight into how the campaign is performing from a full funnel perspective.

The rise of the online marketplace

With more consumers embracing online opportunities, businesses have needed to embrace e-commerce opportunities in order to continue to drive sales. Direct To Consumer (DTC) marketplaces are a great way of allowing businesses to open up additional revenue streams, and even prior to the Covid-19 pandemic stood out as one of the top-rising retail trends. 

Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar retailers and e-commerce marketplaces, DTC offers a more effective way of building engagement with customers, resulting in better data-driven feedback and contributing towards more accurate forecasting. It is also fundamental when it comes to building brand loyalty through personalisation and customer reviews, as well as allowing end-to-end control of the customer experience.

Why brand and performance marketing need to work together

Historically many businesses have had a stronger focus on brand marketing, sometimes unknowingly at the expense of their performance marketing. The challenge lies in aligning brand and performance marketing when the two operate at different ends of the sales funnel. This is where adopting a full-funnel approach, identifying Lifetime Value (LTV) adverts and keywords are beneficial in encouraging repeat custom. By optimising a marketing campaign it is possible to identify which elements are producing the best results, and generating high-value customers. It is these performance-orientated metrics which are so valuable in being able to offer a personalised experience.

Building brand awareness and generating leads 

The first step is acknowledging the value of the top of funnel (TOFU) brand building activity and generating qualified leads. Whilst its primary focus is on increasing awareness and audience reach, rather than revenue, it’s important to remember that brand drives performance.

Brand recognition is also key in influencing a sale. A potential customer is less likely to invest in a product they are unfamiliar with, particularly if there is a well-known and recognised comparable alternative.

Strong content marketing through blog posts, or PPC marketing such as Google or Facebook adverts, which link back to relevant landing pages on the website help to encourage customer engagement. Repeated exposure to the same brand creates familiarity, keeping a brand front-of-mind during the research process before a purchase is made.

Having a greater understanding of customer behaviour at the beginning of the journey can lead to greater efficiencies further down the funnel. It also allows for branding to be measured in a more data driven manner than before. By measuring the traffic generated by individual ads, you can see clearer which brand messages work better than others.

How to improve the evaluation process

The middle of funnel (MOFU) is where the customer will spend time researching and considering their potential purchase, through a variety of different touchpoints. For example, a potential customer searching to buy a red dress via a search engine is more likely to click on an advert if it is number one in the ranks. Once visiting the website, it’s likely they will continue to visit other websites whilst going about their day. Through remarketing, a second advert for the same red dress may appear on their social network, encouraging clicks again, leading to a purchase. Two touchpoints. One sale. 

It is at this stage of the funnel where online and offline marketing techniques can work hand-in-hand in terms of offering an all-round experience. For example, if a campaign’s objective is to drive more footfall to a particular store, this can be carried out by targeting users within a certain radius of a store, showing them where their nearest location is, and highlighting any particular sales. 

Conversion to sale

The bottom of funnel (BOFU) is a two stage process – both the sale itself and then the aftersales. Again PPC marketing and SEO are techniques that can be applied here, as well as remarketing. Targeting less ‘informational’ keywords that potential customers search for in the discovery phase, such as “where to buy a mobile phone”, and targeting more ‘transactional’ keywords that users search for when they are ready to buy, such as “buy mobile phone now”, is a good way to grab users at the bottom of the funnel. 

Performance marketing will by nature remain sales-centric, focusing on short-term revenue as part of the conversion process, and so also forms part of the bottom of the funnel process. Therefore, revenue and ROI are the metrics used to determine success instead of traffic. 

Why brand and performance marketing need to be aligned

Ultimately, the online migration was always going to happen, but Covid-19 has made it imminent. What it has highlighted is that brand and performance marketing should not be treated as separate elements of a marketing campaign, rather they should be seen as being interdependent upon each other. A balance that is essential when it comes to business growth.

Adopting a full funnel approach allows an online presence to be considered at all three stages of the funnel – top, middle and bottom – increasing the chances of a sale to be achieved, by creating cohesion across all activity at every point the customer will come into contact with your company. 

The post The Sales Funnel: How Brand & Performance Marketing are Aligning appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Advice encouraging consumers to stay at home has seen the number of Brits avoiding public spaces climb from 14% to 80%, driving a sharp drop in reach for out of home advertising (OOH). At the same time, attention claimed by TV and digital media is rising at its fastest rate since 2014; sending engagement up by 6% and 9% respectively. 

These behavioural shifts will have a huge impact on the media, but simply following the wider trends won’t be enough to ensure sustained success. While it’s likely restrictions on outdoor events will continue to limit OOH conversions, and online media will keep driving higher results, decisions must be made on more than probability. 

Marketers need an accurate understanding of which channels are driving returns, and this will call for an adjustment in attribution that moves away from single event measurement.

Time to break the single event habit 

Attribution has become an essential tool for analysing which touchpoints drive specific conversions and making better-informed spending choices. But its effectiveness in the current climate is limited by a tendency towards the single event model. 

As most marketers know, the single event approach sees all value for the desired outcome attributed to one event in the consumer’s journey — typically either the ‘first touch’ where brand interaction begins or the ‘last touch’ that comes before their purchase. 

This way of assigning credit has its uses, aligning well with direct response and branding campaigns — especially offline. For example, it’s especially useful when marketers are keen to understand things like: How many people saw my billboard? How many sports fans were at the event we sponsored? How many people were exposed to my transportation advertising on the tube? Similarly, it can also be useful for pinpointing which retail outlets or particular e-commerce sites fuel the most sales at the end of campaigns. 

But consumer behaviour in the wider online space is rarely straightforward, with buys often preceded by a complex web of engagement across multiple devices and channels, and that creates sizeable challenges for the single event model. 

Varied activity requires multi-faceted measurement

As ongoing social distancing measures have spurred consumers to ramp up their media consumption, already complex consumer journeys have expanded to include yet more online touchpoints. For marketers, this makes it vital to identify what’s working, and what isn’t, to ensure investment is spread efficiently across the digital spectrum. 

Understandably, the natural urge is to focus on whichever channels fuel the greatest conversions. But this single event mentality is likely to result in increasingly narrow campaign scope and ever-decreasing success rates. 

For instance, say a gardening brand finds that search advertising is performing well, with ads targeted to the keyword “best indoor plants” producing the strongest sales. Upping their spend in this direction will mean they soon start to reach the same individuals repeatedly, and there is one key reason why: the contribution many other digital channels make to feeding the marketing funnel and qualifying consumers with related interests is being missed, whether that’s video, display, social media, or content discovery. 

Enhancing long-term success and purchases means taking into account the diversity of online consumer journeys and establishing the true value of every event, and the best way to achieve that is transitioning from single to multi-event attribution.

Choosing the right multi-event path 

With multi-event attribution, marketers can gain a more holistic view of the purchase story and ensure value is properly assigned to key moments of engagement and interest. The choice of how they do so is up to them. 

Multi-event models take many forms, with ‘even weighting’ the easiest to adopt: a method that keeps things simple by allocating equal credit to all touchpoints. But those in search of further granularity can harness a host of other options. For instance, U-shaped attribution offers an evolution from first and last touch; giving both a larger slice of credit and distributing the rest across mid-level interactions. Alternatively, time decay operates on the theory that value increases as consumers get closer to purchase and assigns value incrementally, while algorithmic attribution allows marketers to assess each event individually using insight into consumer interests and automated analytics.

No matter which route they take, switching to multi-event measurement will not only help marketers avoid one-track investment, but allow them to better link conversions with the varied interactions that fuel them — drawing a unifying line between once disparate TV ads, desktop content recommendations, and social media messages.

Implementation can also be further streamlined by selecting tools to suit varying needs. Google 360, for instance, is likely to be the top pick for marketers keen to take charge of attribution by building models for themselves. Then there are tools for more specific uses, such as Segment’s solution for ensuring data is accessible across organisations, and mobile app specialist, AppsFlyer, which uses data to provide brands with a holistic view of every user journey across platforms, channels, and devices. 

The way consumers interact with brands is constant and fast-moving.  It can be hard for marketers to keep up. But those who revamp their attribution models now will be ahead of the curve during the pandemic and beyond; and not just because many consumers intend to make new habits permanent. As online engagement continues to grow, marketers will need attribution that works with the ever-shifting form of consumer journeys. The wider horizons of multi-event measurement will give them clearer insights into interaction value, allowing them to rapidly adapt to whatever new behaviours come next.

The post Why Now is the Perfect Time to Move Away from Single Event Attribution appeared first on PerformanceIN.

For the affiliate world, that’s what mobile is today: a channel of a thousand edge cases, especially in the app context. From the tech perspective, getting from a publisher’s app to a brand’s app involves factoring in countless variables, including operating system intricacies, device intricacies, whether the user has the brand app installed, and what to do when they don’t. Inevitably, things break, and that’s bad for everyone. 

In contrast, desktop affiliate is absurdly more simple: The user clicks on a publisher link in one browser tab and is directed to the brand’s website in another browser tab.

The problem is that desktop isn’t the future – mobile is. Because of this, the affiliate industry needs to take the issues that are holding mobile back seriously and layout real solutions to solve them. 

Here are a few of the big challenges, why they matter, and one big reason why the industry should fix them. 

Brands are missing out on a powerful app acquisition channel

For brands, app installs are hard to come by, and quality app installs are even harder. In 2018, AppsFlyer forecasted that spending on app installs would increase to $64 billion this year, up from $27 billion just three years ago. Brands everywhere recognize the value of app users and are competing with each other to acquire them. The install-to-purchase rate has nearly doubled since 2017, according to data from Adjust and Liftoff. 

The affiliate channel is in a good position to offer brands another way to acquire quality, high-intent users. Last year, for example, based on Button platform data, we saw that 36.4% of people who installed an app also made a purchase (8.5% of people made a purchase directly after installing.)

The reason that installs from the affiliate channel perform so much better than any other channel is because there’s an install added to the purchase path, rather than pushing an install on its own. 

The bottom line is, if we can turn the affiliate channel into an app install channel, it opens up access to millions of high-intent installers. 

Broken links: You can’t get paid for what you can’t track

For brands and publishers, broken links are bad business. 

Unfortunately, broken links are common on mobile, particularly, when users move from mobile web to mobile apps, and vice-versa. 

Why does that matter? Because when links break, so does attribution, which is bad for both brands and publishers. Brand marketers don’t know which publishers are their strongest performing partners (and can’t trace the entire user journey), and publishers don’t get properly compensated for the sales they drive. 

There are big knock-on effects for users as well. If a user clicks a cashback offer and doesn’t get credit for their purchase, then that’s bad user experience. Moreover, it means that publishers have to deal with complaints from users upset that they haven’t gotten their cashback.

Bad mobile user experiences are punishing brands’ most loyal users

Speaking of bad user experiences, here’s another one. 

When given the chance, mobile users would much rather transact in a brand’s app than on a brand’s website. We know this from the data. During last year’s holiday season, for example, users across Button’s platform were twice as likely to convert in apps than on the mobile web and represented over 75% of total orders.

Yet, despite that, when users click on a brand’s affiliate link in a publisher app, they’re more likely to be sent to the brand’s mobile website, not their app. This is true even if the user already has the brand’s app installed on their phone. Why is that bad? Because it results in a lower conversion rate and a lower lifetime value. 

More fundamentally, this is just bad user experience, and it should be the opposite of what brands want for their most loyal users 

Why this matters

I promised I would give you a reason why these are problems we need to fix. Well, here it is – Money.

Through poor user experience and untracked sales, the affiliate channel is leaving millions of pounds on the table every single day. The longer you go without fixing it, the more money you lose. This is a challenge every brand, publisher, and network should be invested in fixing.

The post Mobile Affiliate: Three Ways it’s (Still) Broken appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Marketers are keenly aware that acquiring a customer is more expensive than retaining one. However, they struggle to apply this maxim to existing customer strategies. This is borne from the fact that marketers are inherently focused on return on investment (ROI). They see customer interactions through the prism of whether a sale matches the spending that secured it. 

That said, quite a few marketers are losing faith in ROI as an effective metric. What is needed is a broader metric. On that comprises short-term customer purchases and the value transacted to create them over time. Optimising for loyalty is often a common topic for marketers. But fitting loyalty into the conventional sales formula is challenging.  Moreover, the term loyalty is itself rather deceptive. If a shopper completes two low-value purchases, or only buys discounted goods, are they considered a valuable patron? 

A more valuable metric could be customer retention. After all, this is all about encouraging customers to keep doing business with you, more often and in bigger volumes. A more sophisticated measure is needed to optimise for retention than ROI. Retention needs a dynamic metric that can work out the complete value a customer brings to a brand over their lifetime – Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). CLV amalgamates customer data by gauging the entire customer journey. The data harvested by CLV can be used to develop strategies for personalised customer engagement.

CLV has the potential to become the main marketing metric of the future. By relying on CLV resources can be allocated more intelligently and more invested in higher-value customers – who warrant that investment. Optimising investment in this way means a business is better positioned to improve profitability and enjoy higher growth.  

CLV: New challenges for an established metric

CLV is not a new measurement. In fact, it’s history can be followed back for several years. With this heritage, aren’t all organisations using CLV to fine-tune their programmes? To understand why we surveyed marketers and business leaders over the course of 2018 and this year around how much CLV has been integrated into marketing; and how the measurement has developed. 

Overall awareness of CLV has remained even over the last several years but experienced a spike in those who expressed having a high awareness (43% in 2019 vs 34% in 2018) and also in efforts to monitor CLV (32% vs 24%). We identified a positive level of agreement on the benefits that CLV can drive, including around customer retention, sales and brand loyalty. However, respondents to the survey also expressed some thought-provoking insights around the challenges organisations need to face in order to operationalise CLV. 

The research uncovered three major gaps that need to be considered: 

Gaps in the business

The business gap links to CLV strategies being siloed and is reflected in a failure to get the buy-in of every stakeholder for the measure. Over half (55%) felt their organisation had a thorough understanding of CLV, according to the 2019 survey. However, there was a marked 50:50 split between respondents who regarded CLV as a high business priority and those that considered it was unlikely to develop into a priority over the coming 12 months. Two-thirds of respondents stated that their organisation could have improved the way it monitored CLV. Specific business challenges that were highlighted included an unsophisticated strategy (20%), lack of buy-in from the senior team (20%) and silos within the organisation (17%). The results of the survey underline the need to get that all valuable buy-in from senior executives and departmental heads if CLV is to be embraced at a company-wide level. 

Gaps in the data 

The data gap comprises issues around locating and leveraging the data required to develop a holistic picture of CLV. Our research indicates that UK marketers are most sophisticated in the way they use data. However, it is found that there were some considerable barriers to drawing the total value from customer interactions and behavioural habits. Key data challenges comprised tracking customers across devices (30%), an inability to harvest data because users were not signed in (23%) and being unable to track single-use products (21%). 

Gaps around skills

The skills gap speaks to the challenge in retaining the required in-house talent or engaging the external support, necessary to operationalise CLV. Our research found that skills in this area are a common problem for businesses. Lacking the in-house skills to monitor CLV was a problem for 40% of businesses, while 27% said it was too complicated to monitor and 18% were unable to implement any learnings from their CLV monitoring. A dearth of talent is a huge problem for almost all industries but is particularly prominent in businesses of over 500 employees or more. With huge demands on data, these types of organisations are usually entrusting some of the decisions in this area to staff members with insufficient levels of experience, which hinders the entire CLV monitoring endeavour.  

Filling the gaps

It is going to be a long-term endeavour to tackle to address these three areas. It will need marketers, senior decisions makers and the heads of department to collaborate in order to enhance organisational awareness and establish CLV as an actionable way to monitor and improve relationships with existing customers and prospects. This demands that they rise above the short-termism and broad-brush strokes of ROI and instead consider the longer-term prospects of each of their customers. In our latest report, Is ROI dead? The state of Customer Lifetime Value 2019, we investigate these gaps in much greater depth and provide extensive recommendations around how a business can start to tackle them within its organisation. 

The post Has ROI Outlived its Usefulness? Time to Measure Customer Lifetime Value appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Mobile phones are not just an item of technology, they’re an extension of us. 81% of people have their mobiles at arm’s reach every minute of every day for anything from texting to shopping, with 92% of users who searched for a product on mobile going on to buy a related product. So, it’s not surprising to hear that whilst ad spend is up 15% YoY, mobile now accounts for 51% of all digital ad revenue. In short, mobile cannot be ignored. 

This increase in mobile use isn’t limited to the B2C space either; the average B2B worker is expected to increase mobile use from 2 to 3 hours a day by 2020 and 50% of B2B executives have bought IT products for their business on mobile.

If mobile spend continues to increase, logic tells us that we will see the number of mobile conversions increasing YoY for both B2B and B2C campaigns. However, whilst it may be this straightforward in the B2C space, B2B marketers should be wary when jumping to make the decision to shift their desktop strategy to mobile. There are multiple nuances that must be considered first. 

Qualifying your campaign conversion

B2B clients will usually treat conversions as either a form fill or a land. In the consumer world, conversions usually qualify as sales and an increase in conversions is directly correlated to money spent on digital mobile advertising and to time spent on mobiles.  

A B2B campaign usually has a significantly higher price point offering products such as IT software, high spec laptops and business investments. If the desired conversion was a 39-page PDF download or to purchase IT software that affects a company globally, it’s unlikely to happen from a mobile phone. But, that’s not to say it will never happen.  

Mobile media: social vs publisher in-app  

It’s important to consider where your mobile traffic is coming through, social vs publisher, Twitter vs LinkedIn. Both platforms can work as well as each other, depending on your objectives or KPIs. 

The B2B nature of LinkedIn means that it isn’t necessarily the best channel for high CTRs, however, it does tend to lead the way with conversion rates. LinkedIn will offer an engaged audience in a business environment. Also, LinkedIn PMPs (Project Management Professional credentials) guarantee high viewability and ‘first-look’ at LinkedIn display inventory, which allows for the delivery of high-quality ads at scale.  

However, the value that social platforms, like Twitter, provide shouldn’t be ignored. Brands can have meaningful interactions with an engaged audience, particularly as business development managers have a much more relaxed mindset on the platform. Unlike LinkedIn, Twitter and mobile go hand-in-hand: business development managers spend 3.7x more time on Twitter per month on their mobile than on LinkedIn.  

The sign-off process  

B2B projects will usually have multiple people involved in the sign-off process, simply due to the nature of the products advertised. B2C sign off can be every few seconds which can result in an aggressive retargeting method; a tactic which doesn’t work and may even be detrimental in a B2B campaign.  

Therefore, if the qualifying conversion is a sale, this will undoubtedly take longer than a B2C project. 

Value of product  

The average value of a product bought over mobile for a B2C campaign is £102, whereas for products in the B2B sphere may reach upwards of six figures. 

This is why nearly all purchases are being made on mobile are from a B2C audience so it’s important to identify what you’re treating as a conversion. What’s ‘normal’ for a B2C campaign shouldn’t be the benchmark when running a B2B campaign. 

Website design  

A poorly designed website will lead to clunky and slow user experience, frustrating the consumer and limiting conversion.  

If a site can be easily navigated and options such as autofill are offered, not only does this make it easier for the consumer to purchase, download or fill in a form but, it can help to capture minimal prospect data. By asking for a simple work email address to offer gated content in return, with consent, this will allow you to extrapolate most other fields – name, company, sector and so on.  

B2C sites are better at this – the nature of their products and the reality of ecommerce make this necessary but, B2B sites have come a long way and most clients understand the mobile experience is as important as the desktop experience. 

We’re inevitably going to see an increase in the number of conversions from B2B audiences on mobile devices, especially as mobiles are bigger these days, being used where desktops once dominated. But it definitely depends on what we’re classifying as a conversion first and foremost, and then the numerous variables that play into whether an individual will convert successfully or not. 

The post How Do B2B Marketers Embrace Mobile to Drive Conversions? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Fraudsters are finding new and sophisticated methods to defraud advertising efforts – all while trying to remain imperceptible and unscathed.

But as fraudsters evolve, so do advertisers. Advertisers stay up to date and have a highly-analytical, data-driven approach to fighting fraud, always looking for the best tools to help them stay safe from fraudsters.

In this post, we present you with the top 10 signs that help you identify if your user acquisition campaign is being compromised.

1. Organic traffic takes a big fall – a sign of attribution fraud

As you monitor your app’s performance, you must be wary of dramatic falls in organic traffic. Fraudsters tend to use attribution fraud, also known as organic stealing, to attack ad campaigns and commit theft by exploiting the last-click attribution model. The intent is to steal your organic installs and attribute them incorrectly by using click spam and click injection.

2. Abnormally high rates of post-install activity – a sign of incentive traffic injection or smart bots

When you see a high rate of post-install activity and are ready to high-five yourself, hold off on celebrating just yet. Abnormally high post-install activity may be a sign of incentive traffic injection or smart bots. In both cases, fraudsters analyse all advertiser post-install events and KPIs, and train bots or motivate users to perform the required in-app activity.

3. Abnormally low conversion rate – a sign of click spam

Based on the nature of click spam, fraudsters try to “spray” clicks with their tracking link on as many users as possible. Fraudsters flood with as many clicks as possibles to deliver the last-click prior organic installs and assign these installs to themselves. But fraudsters can’t affect whether users install the app or not after a click, so the conversion rate can drop abnormally low, which is a red flag for click spam.

4. Abnormally high conversion rate – a sign of incentivised traffic or bots injection

High conversion rates are another reason to celebrate – and while we don’t want to rain on your parade, we recommend that you investigate if you are the victim of incentivised traffic or bots injection. If users are installing the app at an abnormally high pace, it could mean that fraudsters are injecting incentivised users or bots into your app without being caught. 

5. High rate of paying users – a sign of fake financial events

If you see an unusual amount of paying users in your app for no demonstrable reason, you may be the victim of smart bots making these payments.

Smart bots are a very sophisticated and dynamic type of fraud with constant reverse engineering. Unlike classic bots, smart bots cannot be detected by manual analysis of abnormal post-install activity and require a detailed analysis of post-install events using Machine Learning and Big Data techniques.

6. Disappearance in retention and return of a large number of users – a sign of smart bots

An abnormally high retention rate may signal smart bots, and fraudsters find ways to manipulate the retention rate within each daily cohort so they don’t look suspicious. For example, an unexpected loss of a specific group of users for several days, and its subsequent return in a rather high amount (e.g. retention: 18 days – 20%, 19-21 days – 0%, 22 days – 15% in a specific cohort) could mean your app is attacked by smart bots.

7. Large fragmentation at a sub-publisher level within the source – a sign of click spam

Usually, you need a cohort of at least 15 conversions within 1 sub-publisher for accurate traffic analysis. Large source fragmentation is a fraudulent attempt to prevent marketers from properly evaluating a specific group of users for fraud due to the small number of installs within one sub-publisher. This method is used by click spammers and the level of fragmentation can reach 1 install per 1 sub-publisher. 

8. Concentration of installs with similar hardware parameters – a sign of device farms or bots

Fraudsters purchase a large number of cheap devices with real hardware parameters and use them to create device farms to increase the volume of paid traffic, all through fraudulent installs to get paid for them.

If you notice a suspiciously large amount of installs with the same or similar “hardware” parameters – device, browser version, old OS versions, IPs, etc. – we recommend further analysis of install fraud.

9. Abnormally low drop in retention rates – a sign of incentivised traffic or bots

As a user acquisition manager, it’s an accomplishment to see a high level of retention. But first, you must analyse and discover the real reason behind an abnormally low drop in retention rates for specific traffic sources, in comparison to organic or other sources, as it could be a red flag for a fraudster attack via bots or incentivized traffic.

10. Stable, large volume of installs over a long period of time within a single source – a sign of smart bots

It sounds like a dream for any mobile marketer, but you must be concerned. All traffic sources tend to “burn out” because target audiences for each source are limited and it’s normal that after a period of time, the volume of installs gradually decreases. This usually happens starting from the second week. If you experience a large volume of traffic within one source that performs consistently for over a month, your user acquisition campaign may be the target of smart bots and needs to be double-checked. 

Final thoughts: taking effective, immediate action

Fighting ad fraud is an ongoing battle – as soon as advertisers find ways to neutralise one type of fraud, fraudsters are already hard at work to come up with new, more sophisticated threats – and not in vain as losses caused by app-install ad fraud are estimated to reach $12.6 billion in 2019.

As an experienced user acquisition manager, you understand the importance and the crucial need for a comprehensive and powerful anti-fraud tool. 

Arm yourself with the best technological engine and stay insured against fraud.

The post 10 Signs Your User Acquisition Campaign is Being Compromised appeared first on PerformanceIN.

US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin recently said that Amazon had “destroyed the retail industry across the United States,” and arguably it has had an even more destructive impact on the online retail industry. Where does that leave the Affiliate industry that relies on online retail? Under serious threat, unless it adapts rapidly.

Amazon is now the most valuable brand in the world, and it has gotten there through a heady cocktail of customer-centricity and competitive aggression. First, it disrupted the global publishing industry with its Kindle device and platform, exerting monumental pressure on hitherto unchallenged industry powerhouses. Then, it sought to expand from being the go-to place to buy books, into the go-to place to buy anything, with innovations like next, or even same-day delivery across a vast product range. It repositioned itself as a retailer-cum-wholesaler, offering scale, affordability and convenience to its millions of users. And finally, it turned its sights on the home device market with its monumentally successful range of Alexa-enabled devices. 

Throughout this expansion and evolution of its business, Amazon has used a number of not-so-secret weapons to continue its growth, in the absence of more conventional marketing campaigns. Its web platform is possibly the case study in massively scaled search engine optimisation for an ecommerce site, as it is set up and optimised radically towards appearing in searches for specific products, rather than higher-trafficked “generic” terms. This strategic approach focuses on the bottom of the funnel where its money is made and has psychologically positioned it as the end-point of the shopping journey for most consumers., who will research elsewhere, but end up on Amazon to buy, for its sheer convenience.

This psychological positioning has resulted in consumers increasingly going directly to Amazon as their first port of call when searching for products. In fact, studies have found that more than 46% of product searches begin on Amazon. With this mental primacy now firmly established in consumers’ minds, Amazon has begun to flex its considerable financial and technological muscle, rolling out a wider range of advertising options. This play targeting Google’s bottom line by going after their primary source of revenue (ad spend) is still in its infancy but is only going to increase in scale and importance to modern marketers.

What does this mean for the affiliate model?

So where does this leave the traditional Affiliate model? Under a fairly significant threat, it could easily be argued. While the use of Google search and the traffic it generates for Affiliate partners at the top of the funnel (in online search terms at least) is not likely to go anywhere or diminish any time soon, the more product-driven, purchase intent led volume is already being captured by Amazon. More significantly, a sizable, and rapidly growing, percentage of consumers are starting (and finishing) their purchase journey on the Amazon platform, and the data suggests that once on Amazon, consumers tend to stay and purchase there, with Amazon Prime customers converting at a frankly ridiculous 74% rate. This means these consumers are not even entering the pool of potential traffic for Affiliates. As Amazon’s product range continues to expand, this threat will only increase.

However, with every threat, there is a potential opportunity for those bold enough to take it. There are broadly two possible options for existing Affiliates.

First, they can diversify the range of brands they work with, targeting higher-end and service-led brands. After all, not everything is sold on Amazon, and are not likely to ever be sold on Amazon. By working with these brands, the importance and relevance of Amazon’s disruptive power is massively lessened. This is not necessarily realistic for many Affiliates, in which case a more radical solution is required.

That is to say, the second option is for Affiliates to “ride the tiger” and jump into bed with Amazon, to take advantage of its outstanding conversion rates and enormous user base. What this means for each Affiliate could mean anything from providing tracked amazon links on brand pages to setting up their own Affiliate-branded stores within Amazon’s platform that acts as a third-party storefront for the brands they work with, which means a move towards more traditional retail that the Affiliate model.

Either option is hugely risky, but simply ignoring the problem will not make it go away. One thing that is absolutely certain, and that every Affiliate needs to start taking into account right now is the radical shift in consumer expectations of online experience that Amazon has driven with its website and app experiences. The Amazon site is notoriously fast, with the oft-cited claim that an increase of 1s in load speed equates to $1.6bn in lost annual revenue. Its app provides an equally seamless experience, which has fast become expected from consumers in their shopping journeys. What this means is that Affiliates must invest in high-quality website and app experiences that are as easy, or easier, to use. A great example of this is Quidco, whose app is brilliantly designed and easy to use from an end-user point of view.

In conclusion, the relentless growth trajectory of Amazon presents the Affiliate industry with steep challenges that must be rapidly adapted to, if the threat they represent is not to prove terminal.

The post The Impact of Amazon Ads on Traditional Affiliate Traffic Sources appeared first on PerformanceIN.

More people are consuming digital audio than ever before, including digital radio and podcasts – where podcasts are now racking up to 7.6 million weekly listens in the UK, up by a quarter in just a year. As a result, 86% of agencies and 66% of advertisers surveyed now see digital audio as an important part of most media strategies.

According to The Rise of Digital Audio Advertising study from Global-owned digital audio advertising platform DAX, three-quarters (75%) of advertisers plan to increase ad spend in podcasts this year. DAX surveyed 215 manager-level or above employees at media agencies and advertisers in the UK. 

By device, 75% of digital audio is still consumed on PCs and smartphones, with 17% now being consumed on smart speakers, creating new opportunities for advertisers.

“The rise of smart speakers has led to a surge in brands and advertisers prioritising digital audio as an essential part of their campaigns. Digital audio is already an important part of many listeners daily habits and advertisers are eyeing further opportunities to reach even more listeners, with the rollout of 5G enabling widespread adoption of connected cars,” said Ollie Deane, director of commercial digital at Global.

Digital audio is increasingly perceived by agencies and advertisers as a rich creative medium, with 78% of survey respondents stating that listeners are highly engaged with digital audio because of the great content that’s available.

Effective measurement needed

However, despite the positive outcomes of digital audio, there are some challenges around the effective measurement and attribution of the channel. 53% of respondents said that streaming audio enables them to target the right people at the right time. However, those surveyed also said they lack awareness about the availability of measurement and attribution tools.

It is evident that further industry education is required to ensure that advertisers understand how to attribute a return on investment to digital audio and digital audio’s potential as a powerful advertising medium is recognised. 

“The report identifies the growth of podcasts as a key factor for driving change around the way audio is planned and bought. Contextual advertising across a range of verticals – from sport to business and well-being – coupled with a range of different ad formats, has presented advertisers and agencies with many different options suited to a wide variety of brands,” Deane added.

The post 85% of Advertisers to Invest in Digital Audio in the Next 12 Months appeared first on PerformanceIN.

One of the key talking points in the affiliate community in recent weeks was the announcement of R.O.EYE‘s new platform solution, SingleView, which provides unparalleled insights into the customer journey, digital marketing touchpoints and channel interactions. Along with their strategic partnership with Awin, which will allow publishers to easily access the platform via the Publisher MasterTag control panel, R.O.EYE looks set to continue their momentum in disrupting the attribution channel. 

With the spotlight firmly on them, we spoke to R.O.EYE founder Mark Kuhillow to get a deep-dive analysis into SingleView itself and why it was set up, in addition to his thoughts on the last-click model and what this means for the affiliate industry going forward.

Hi Mark, first of all, congratulations on the launch your multi-touch attribution platform SingleView. For those who missed the announcement, could you give us a brief breakdown of the product and what this means for the attribution space in general?

Mark Kuhillow: The product was initially designed to answer one simple question “Where should I invest my next £,$ or €?”; which is exactly what it does. It does this by doing something which sounds counterintuitive – looking at the non-converting journeys across a website. By looking at these (which account for the vast majority of user journeys) we are able to effectively create a pulse, or baseline for the business. By measuring how each channel influences this baseline, we can look at its incremental contribution which we can then use for predictive purposes. In terms of what it means for the attribution space in general, there is finally an attribution tool on the market ‘built by media buyers, for media buyers’. We aren’t about detailing huge hypotheses through endless charts and reports, simply put, we highlight the actionable changes which advertisers can make to either a) optimise their activity or b) efficiently increase their media budgets. 

In addition, you also confirmed a strategic partnership with Awin which will allow their publishers to utilise the platform. A key part of this is using a data-led approach to determine the vital points in the customer journey. As part of the partnership, how will this process be executed?

MK: Awin has proven themselves to be an excellent partner on a number of levels. Firstly, they really want to understand the contribution of affiliate traffic on a data-driven multi-touch basis. Whilst many of us believe that a last-click model is biased towards the affiliate channel (which I can tell you, it is), if we don’t look at how this happens, the conversion differences across publisher types, ad opportunities etc… we’ll never know how to optimise the affiliate channel in today’s world. This is the journey which we’ve been on for the last three years and one which I’m delighted to say Awin is on too. In terms of how this will be executed, again, it’s pretty simple (I like simple!). SingleView has been embedded within both the Awin Advertiser and Publisher MasterTags. For advertisers who wish to start seeing multi-touch attribution insights, there is no integration needed before they start seeing insights. For publishers, not only can they start to immediately measure their contribution at earlier stages in the purchase consideration cycle, but they can also do so on a post-impression basis. 

The ease of integration for both audiences is what makes this such an exciting opportunity for the performance marketing community. 

It’s been quite a journey for R.O.EYE. What inspired you to build your attribution platform and did you ever think that it would disrupt the space as it has done now?

MK: I’m a great fan of the concept of ‘the law of unintended consequences’, which in this case led us to build an attribution platform virtually by accident. As a business which has managed affiliate programmes since 2004, we knew that we must move beyond a last-click basis if we were to articulate the value of our work to clients. We set about building a platform which did two things – justified the trades we were making whilst informing our account managers where budgets should be invested. It was only after a quarterly review with a client we realised that we had built a platform which measured every single conversion, touchpoint and assistance of a user journey right down to a transactional level. By realising the true potential of the data we were capturing, we then built and trained an algorithm to evaluate the value of each touchpoint and predict its best use, moved the tool onto a SaaS platform and began to scale the solution.

The real SingleView value has come from the education we have enjoyed as a business having used insights from the tool for over two years. Taking a wider view of how affiliates, keywords, social platforms, or DSP’s influence and effect conversion has now simply become part of ‘what we do and how we do it’. We now want to help the wider industry enjoy this perspective too, in the safe comfort that their CEO’s, CFO’s, CMO’s and CIO’s will be on the journey with them and most importantly, will have the understanding and comfort to retire the 25 years stalwart which is holding them back; the last-click attribution metric. 

Aside from attribution, what other key trends or developments have you seen over the course of 2019? Incrementality was one you referenced recently, but are there any others we should take note?

MK: That’s a tough question, we’ve been so focused on ‘shining a light in the dark’ through attribution and the client insights we’ve been uncovering that I haven’t had a huge amount of bandwidth to consider the wider world. What have I been keeping ‘half an eye on’? ITP 2.0 is something we would ignore at our peril, no-one should be too complacent about the data they have and assume they will always have access to it in its current form (first-party cookies may not be the safe-bet we thought they were. Interpretation of GDPR is something I also keep a very close eye on too. The biggest development I’m looking at today is the changes in behaviour, attitude and working practice which an enlarged dataset and, in turn, results and bottom line contribution will bring through bravery, courage and the curiosity to drive change through innovation. 

Lastly, as we’re now in the second half of 2019, what are you most looking forward to in the coming months?

MK: Rolling out SingleView internationally and then chilling out with my family on a beach at Christmas; the only time when my inbox, newsfeeds, Trello boards and Slack channels actually go quiet. 

The post R.O.EYE Founder Discusses SingleView, Moving Beyond Last-Click and Journey to Date appeared first on PerformanceIN.

It’s getting boring hearing everyone criticises the digital marketing power held by the duopoly of Facebook and Google, or should that now be a trilogy with the rise of Amazon?

Performance marketers need to stop the criticism and accept these giants created much of the digital media landscape. Then, once they have accepted that this is the market they operate in, they need to move forward in two ways.

First of all, they need to carry on getting the most out of a digital marketing landscape dominated by the duopoly. The good news is, they already know how to do this. Performance marketers are experts at selling on in-market audiences for more than they cost to buy. It’s how the sector operates. 

Secondly, they need to simultaneously start weaning themselves off this reliance on the duopoly. They need to innovate and provide services customers want to come back to directly.

Again, there is good news here too. Regulation means digital marketing is having to shift to transparency and consent that comes from open, honest and first-party relationships. At the same time, antitrust investigations and massive fines mean the smaller guys should find themselves muscled-out a little less when it comes to ‘owning’ the customer. 

Less reliant on giants

The first half of delivering on this twin strategy to complement and supplement the duopoly is by far the easiest, and it paves the way for the second, more challenging task.

Performance marketing is the branch of the digital marketing industry that understands, probably better than any other, how people buy products and services online. This is the key to unlocking a future for the sector that is less reliant on paying for clicks and earning money through arbitrage alone.

All too often, the process ends when a customer is passed on, and that’s a real shame. This hand-to-mouth existence, based on passing on traffic, has to be transformed to accommodate loyalty. If it doesn’t, performance marketers will be the ultimate case of a niche that always pays to eat out but never learns to cook for itself.

Maintain attention

The key here is to corral an audience. Rather than just sell them on and bid them a good journey, performance marketing has to keep people coming back to a marketer’s sites. 

There are some obvious techniques here but getting people to sign up for offers, coupons and exclusive news are simple steps towards building a more loyal user base. These people can be connected to an affiliate’s sites through newsletters and encouraged to engage with content, polls, competitions and views on them, as well as on social media. Compelling content that shows the site as a trusted resource on their subject is also a must.

By keeping an audience’s attention, by encouraging loyalty over arbitrage, performance marketers will find that they are better able to generate repeat business from a nurtured audience. 

Regulations show the way

It’s time to start this now because digital marketing is moving away from third-party data and cookies. We are in a mobile-first media landscape where there are no cookies and hence it will come to an as little surprise that Google has joined Apple in dropping third-party tracking codes. 

At the same time, GDPR has brought in an era of greater transparency and content-driven marketing in processing customer data. This will be reinforced, in terms of using stored customer data to reach out to prospects, when the Privacy in Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) is replaced, possibly next year, by the ePrivacy Directive. 

Marketing is moving towards full and transparent consent and so first party data is more important than ever.

Smart performance marketers will tap into this clear future direction and not rely solely on feeding off arbitrage techniques that have got them to where they are today but will struggle, on their own, to get the most out of where the future will take them. 

The post Is the Future of Performance Marketing Shifting Towards Loyalty? appeared first on PerformanceIN.