There have been no signs of improvement in advertising standards of transparency, brand safety and viewability since January 2017, according to a new report by media and advertising consultancy NewBase.

The findings were laid out in the company’s Marketing Priorities Report, where it claimed survey-based research revealed that 60% of industry professionals said open dialogue around transparency and viewability standards had failed to translate to real-world improvements.

In the wake of a loss of trust in the digital advertising supply chain by high-profile brands – such as P&G, which has cut agency spending by $750 million in the last three years – many members of the display and programmatic industry have made concerted efforts to demonstrate commitment to improving transparency over ad spend and brand safety.

This has been led largely by independent bodies such as JICWEBs (The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards in the UK and Ireland) which aims to ensure independence and comparability of measurement on the web and who most recently certified social video-sharing site YouTube for striving to meet brand safety requirements.

Meanwhile, open conversations around ad standard issues are pressuring companies to publicly acknowledge and adopt such initiatives as JICWEBs’ certification and the IAB Gold Standard in order to maintain a whitehat reputation among clients and new business. Some are even seeing the opportunity to pitch their business on transparency; agency TRUTH, for example, has ridden on the blockchain technology buzz in efforts to provide “100% transparent” ad trading.

‘No more excuses’

Despite this deliberate shift in attitudes, however, some 59% of marketers and advertisers believe that control over brand safety, in reality, remains poor. In all, nearly two thirds (64%) of the sample believed there had been no improvement, or that the situation had actually got worse.

Simon Taylor, regional managing director EMEA at NewBase said: “There are no more excuses for anything but 100% transparency, and topics like this distract from the amazing developments in utilising technology and data in supporting brands in their journey innovation.

“The structures required to enable this are new and replace legacy trading desks that are still tracking media and not business KPIs.”

While efforts are being made across the industry towards transparency, improved viewability and brand safety – and the effects of this progress may be yet to be truly seen – the report would suggest more needs to be done in order to win back the hearts and minds of brand advertisers at a large scale. As such, the commercial opportunity for companies to realign themselves publicly with transparency at the fore still remains.

The post Digital Ad Standards Have Not Improved Since 2017, Finds NewBase appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Google has launched a new unit for AdSense that utilises Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make placement and monetisation decisions for publishers lacking resources to manage them.

The ad tech has dubbed the new format “Auto Ads”, which works by using machine learning to ‘read’ a webpage and decide what advertising will be best placed there, including placement and frequency. In keeping with the ethics of its Chrome ad blocking policy, the ads will also take into account the impact on user experience and expected performance.

Now available to anyone and activated through a single line of code, the service has been released in Beta since Q2 2017; Google claims participants in the early trial saw an average revenue lift of 10%.

“Auto ads leverage machine learning to give publishers the ability to make smart, data-driven decisions automatically, so that they can focus on creating compelling content. With this launch, we’re making it easier for publishers to optimise for both revenue and user experience across their site in just a few easy steps,” said Violetta Kalathaki, Google product manager.

While AdSense already offers a level of automated ad serving, where Auto Ads makes a difference is in taking the task out of selecting placements, the volume of ads served and in choosing the right ads to run.

Crucially, though, the machine-learning aspect doesn’t just come into play when serving the ads; it also analyses the performance of the ads and uses these insights to improve future placements.

According to reports around early Beta tests, some publishers criticised the high number of ads served on one specific page via the service and the potential impact this would have on user experience, however, it’s likely this will be improved and publishers given options to limit the volume of ads served.

The post Google Launches AI AdSense Update for Automated Ad Serving appeared first on PerformanceIN.

AppNexus, the world’s leading independent advertising technology company, today announced the launch of the AppNexus Programmable Platform (APP), the industry’s first programmable Demand Side Platform (DSP).

The group claims the new product harnesses advanced machine learning to help professional traders execute “highly-customised and complex strategies” through a user interface.

“Most demand side platforms today don’t fundamentally differ from the DSPs that were built during the first decade of programmatic, and that’s obviously a problem,” said Brian O’Kelley, CEO, AppNexus.

“The next generation of DSPs should leverage machine learning to more efficiently manage an ever-larger number of campaign variables, minimise manual intervention, and deliver superior optimisation tied to marketer KPIs. With APP, the world’s first and only programmable DSP, traders can spend less time on setup and delivery and more time strategising on the intuitive, creative aspects of advertising that change a person’s perception of a brand.”

“We’ve reinvented the DSP”

The launch of APP represents the culmination of a three-year R&D cycle involving over 200 dedicated buy-side engineers, data scientists, and product developers. It also signals AppNexus’ aggressive 2018 go-to-market effort with trade desks, agencies, and marketers.

“If we seemed quiet on the buy-side, that’s because we were,” O’Kelley continued.

“To build a next-generation demand platform rooted in machine learning and data science takes time. In the same way that we reinvented the ad server, we’ve reinvented the DSP.”

APP also challenges what Appnexus calls “outdated paradigms” of cookie-based targeting and impression-based buying. The new product provides deterministic cross-device capabilities for people-based targeting at no additional charge and enables a “viewable-only” buying mode.

It also provides built-in supply path optimisation, which charts the most efficient path to supply when traders are operating Open RTB – a key capability in an environment where header bidding has created a duplicative and noisier supply landscape.

Automatic bid price optimisation harnesses machine learning to shade bids when traders are operating in first-price auction environments, thereby allowing buyers to win auctions at the right market price. APP also deploys a combination of machine learning and human intervention to prevent fraud and ensure brand safety.

“We were determined to reinvent the DSP, and we built a new product from the ground up that transforms the role of the trader. There aren’t enough hours in the day to perform the same calibrations and interventions manually, and APP allows the professional trader to get closer to strategy,” said O’Kelley.

The post AppNexus Launches Industry’s First Programmable DSP with “Machine Learning” appeared first on PerformanceIN.

The display advertising industry is in rude health. It’s constantly evolving and has proven to be a cornerstone of innovation in the advertising world. The display ad landscape offers marketers a wide range of formats and creative options, with benefits like gathered data and flexibility for delivering brand and performance campaigns.

When technology and marketing objectives present challenges, display can offer immense benefits to help advertisers precisely cut through to otherwise difficult to reach target audiences.

Here’s what to expect from display advertising in 2018:

More programmatic

Next year display advertising is gearing up to become even more programmatic, due to the fusion of technology, creativity and data with the adoptive mindset of the advertiser. The ad industry is clearly witnessing an ever-increasing proportion of marketing spend being devoted to programmatic display advertising. eMarketer reported that nearly $40 billion will be spent on this technology in 2018, compared to $32.5 billion for 2017.

Programmatic technology will increasingly be integrated into the creative process. For example, instead of serving a single ad creative to all target audiences; machines can learn to segment, select and display different and relevant creatives according to context, in order to maximise their impact with audiences.

Mobile will eat into more of display’s budget pie

As an increasing amount of time is spent consuming content on smartphones, the volume of mobile inventory that’s available to display ads increases. Launching mobile ad campaigns gives advertisers a great deal of scope to reach audiences. The objective of location-based advertising campaigns is to discover the optimum context to impact the final user, and only mobile devices can do this efficiently.

The rise of native advertising

Native advertising has emerged as a successful ad format, one that connects with audiences in a natural or ‘native’ fashion. Native advertising is attracting a great deal of interest from advertisers because it generates twice the amount of audience attention when compared to traditional display ad formats. Therefore, native generates significantly more engagement and shareability, helping to build strong brand awareness and, often, the influence of native advertising is more significant than original editorial content.

Taking this higher reception and engagement into consideration, there is no doubt that in 2018, investment in this type of advertising strategy will increase significantly. This will be especially visible across mobile, with ever more companies adopting programmatic as a method to buy and serve native advertising. Some researchers report that by 2021, Native ads will drive 74% of all ad revenue.

Emergent ad display formats

Emergent ad display formats such as playable ads (where the ad is an interactive game) will become more mainstream for brands, agencies and publishers. These offer increased engagement, conversion and revenues.

Next year display ads will be served much more intelligently, with dynamic creativity. For example, an advertiser will have different iterations of an ad. These different iterations will be served according to contextual factors, and this process will be powered by intelligent learning AI algorithms, which make their decisions based on user and contextual data factors, such as geo-positioning or changes in the weather.

2018 will be a turning point for the display ad landscape, where technology will begin to take over more of the human thinking processes and decision making, helping to optimise investment in advertising for brands, agencies and publishers.

As we’ve seen with the recent launch of the new iPhone X, augmented reality functionality will open up a new universe of advertising possibilities for brands. 2018 may well be the year when mainstream advertising finally crosses the border from reality to virtual.

Viewability

In their quest to maximise ROI and combat ad fraud of their campaigns, brands will continue to highlight the importance of viewability and push the sector into the adoption of universal metrics for it. The viewability metric will emerge as one of the most important measures for publishers to demonstrate themselves as a quality and effective support.

The upcoming year will see display advertising growing significantly in terms of investment and performance. User interactions will be raised to new heights thanks to the adoption of the innovative technologies discussed, enabling brands to become more effective at planning campaigns and reviewing their results.

The post What Will the Display Advertising Industry Look Like in 2018? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Programmatic has always been a technology of two halves. On the one hand, it has brought a slew of benefits: data-driven precise targeting, greater access to low-cost inventory, more detailed campaign reporting — the list goes on. Yet on the other, it has come with several flaws; chiefly latency, and the propagation of irrelevant and uninspired digital advertising that can lack creative flair. 

But that is imminently set to change. As the technology has evolved, so too have its capabilities – now its core components are being harnessed to make programmatic hyper-relevant and engaging, at scale. Now we are about to enter the era of programmatic creative. 

So what has happened to drive this advertising evolution, and is the industry ready?

We are an industry obsessed with metrics

Digital advertising is an industry obsessed with metrics and, on the whole, this is highly beneficial. Clear and accurate reporting is essential for advertisers to be assured their efforts generate real value, and for publishers to effectively monetise their inventory. Yet the problem with measurements is that they can become irrelevant when technologies and user behaviours change, and in an industry like digital advertising, this happens all too frequently. 

For example, rich media ads have so far been heavily restrained as there was no real way to measure their success in terms of viewability and effectiveness. Now the IAB New Standard Ad Portfolio has brought standards in line with emerging technology while maintaining the message ‘campaigns must remain user-centric’.

The industry has also recently rediscovered the importance of understanding individual users, not simply grouping all consumers into the same category. This is partly due to the backlash against the irrelevant, dull ads that have become so prevalent – namely ad blocking. 

When brands stop thinking of consumers as a statistic, we are able to advance as an industry. It should be less about metrics, and more about making ads that are contextual, engaging and non-intrusive, which these new guidelines address.

Data-driven creativity 

With 92% of marketers stating that creative marketing is more important than ever, it is essential that brands investigate new avenues for inspiration. There is a line between being engaging and being intrusive with the user, which the industry is currently tiptoeing around. While programmatic creative is helping, I’ll admit, we still have a long way to go. 

So what does programmatic creative mean for advertisers? 

Combining data and the creative to make messaging hyper-relevant, engaging and interactive across multiple devices, programmatic creative is the new and improved automated advertising tech that is set to transform the industry.

Meeting users’ need for personalised ads — 46% of users prefer them — this new tech delivers data-driven ads that reach individuals in their preferred way – making ads more appealing to the user – improving the quality of the ad and thus, the user experience. 

The benefits of programmatic creative are felt industry-wide, for brands it enables them to tailor messaging specifically to the user, for marketers it allows them to become interactive storytellers instead of just unidirectional narrators – optimising the user journey. And for publishers, a better user experience means higher CPMs.

Programmatic creative also leverages the campaign’s capacity to produce a large volume of truly personalised messages to its target audience, leading to higher conversion rates and well-placed ad spending. But all this can only be achieved if the media and creative agencies come together to automate the data and bring a truly optimised user journey across the sales funnel.

Another important point to add, marketers, need to distinguish the difference between what is ‘viewable’ and what is ‘memorable’. After all, when users are engaged, they are more likely to remember the ad’s messaging, resulting in higher purchasing intent. This was recently demonstrated in a recent Ipsos study, which sought to compare the effectiveness of pre-roll and a premium skin-based out-stream video format. The results showed that not only did 80% of participants find the out-stream ads more appealing, but it also formed a lasting impression on users, with 33% ad recall – as opposed to 15% for pre-roll – and left them feeling more inclined to buy.

But advertisers need to ensure they are ready for this change. As I’ve said before, the whole process can only come together if media agencies and creative agencies collaborate to ensure the user journey has been fully thought through. As new technologies such as programmatic creative come into play, the industry needs to adapt quickly if we are going to persuade users not to install ad blockers and create a genuinely beneficial experience for all parties.

The post The Advantages of Getting Creative with Programmatic appeared first on PerformanceIN.

An eye-tracking study by Artificial Intelligence company GumGum has found that the most widely-used formats of mobile ads were “unnoticed”, as 1,200 trialed users scrolled through web content on their mobile phones.

The mobile ad formats in question were the most commonly-used Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) formats, such as banners, which were only seen for an average of 1.43 seconds.

Banner ads which were permanently fixed at the bottom of the screen were even less effective according to the study, garnering just 0.8 seconds on average of viewing time.

With figures from eMarketer projecting that advertisers will spend over £139 billion on mobile in 2018, the findings highlight that billions of pounds could be wasted on ineffective advertising.

“Old ad standards simply aren’t working because consumers are becoming ‘banner blind’,” said Phil Schraeder, president and COO of GumGum.

“They’re so savvy about these formats, they’re willfully ignoring adverts online. It’s time for advertisers to consider new, rich media formats that are integrated into the content we see online.”

While standardised IAB mobile ad formats did not perform well, the study – which created heat maps as a visual representation of where user attention was most concentrated – showed that ads integrated into the editorial performed best.

Users spent over 300% more on these integrated adverts – such as those dynamically tailored to the page where they are served – compared to the average of the standard IAB ads – and resulted in a 50% boost in consumer brand recall.

The question of whether mobile advertising is matching the pace of a “mobile-first world” was raised recently on PerformanceIN by Marfeel’s Alexian Chiavegato, who claimed the reality of advertising on mobile “trails far behind the glory”.

The post Eye-Tracking Study Reveals Majority of Mobile Ads “Ignored” appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Imagine a supermarket rewarding its staff for selling ice creams during a heat wave, or a retailer launching a massive ad campaign for the latest must-have toy in the run up to Christmas, even though it is continually sold out. 

Both of these situations seem nonsensical given these products will practically walk off the shelves by themselves – when in stock – yet this is exactly what brands are doing every day in their digital marketing campaigns. 

Advertising popular products that are in high demand is an easy win for marketing teams, as these ads appear to perform exceptionally well, driving engagement and conversions. Ad management tools and bidding technologies are programmed to target revenues or margins, which naturally incentivises promotion of top-selling products. But these products don’t actually require advertising, as they will sell regardless. What’s more popular products often sell out quickly, meaning ad budgets are wasted promoting SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) that are low in stock or unavailable.  

With other factors such as ad fraud, viewability, ad placement, brand safety, and audience targeting to worry about, it’s no surprise this particular issue is slipping under the radar for the majority of brands. But it is a key cause of ad budget wastage and – with digital ad spend increasing every year – the stakes are continually getting higher. 

There are two steps that must be taken to avoid misusing ad budget, and to allow spend to be reallocated to products that are harder to shift: 

1. Link inventory data with ad strategy  

The main reason brands continue to waste marketing budgets promoting top-selling products is that inventory information such as stock-level forecasts and SKU availability is not accessible to be actioned by the ad tech stack. None of the advertising or attribution tools currently available take inventory data into account when measuring performance of campaigns.

To really understand how ad campaigns are performing, marketers must integrate inventory data with ad tech tools, so it can inform advertising strategy in real time. Ad spend can be increased for high-stock products that need a little help to sell, for instance, or suspended for products that are about to sell out. Many brands already have a similar process in place where inventory data informs pricing strategy – prices are reduced when product stock levels are high – and this thinking could easily be applied to ad spend.  

2. Replace revenue with yield-based KPIs  

The success of ad campaigns is currently measured by their impact on revenues or margins, which inevitably incentivises marketers to promote the highest-performing products. Ads for products that are in high demand will generate boosted levels of engagement and increased margins, which looks great on those all-important marketing reports. The fact that the product would have sold just as well without advertising, and that the ad spend allocated to it would have been far better invested elsewhere, is largely ignored. 

Rather than relying on revenue and margins to measure advertising performance, marketers need to come up with a new yield-based metric that takes account of stock levels in determining success. The industry has yet to devise an exact formula for determining yield, but it might be on a scale of zero for products that will sell easily and can’t be reordered, to the full net sales price for high-stock products that will be tricky to sell. Optimising to yield-based KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) will ensure ad strategies focus on products that are hard to sell rather than those in high demand.      

It may not get the media attention of ad fraud or viewability, but promoting popular, high-performing products is a major cause of wastage in digital advertising and is something brands must address. By making inventory data actionable in the ad tech stack and adopting new yield-based KPIs that reward the promotion of hard-to-sell products, brands can make their budgets work harder and allocate ad spend to the SKUs that really need it. 

The post Why You’re Wasting Ad Spend on the Wrong Products appeared first on PerformanceIN.

When you work in advertising it’s not unusual to have friends and family who struggle to appreciate what it is we actually do at work. With the rise of new disciplines like performance marketing, you can understand how our loved ones struggle to keep up with an industry that is close to the forefront of technological change.

Occasionally an inquisitive person will ask me to elaborate a little on my role as a performance planner. My standard response is to say that most practitioners spend their day to day life looking at a lot of numbers. They are generally tasked with building media plans that deliver either a low cost per acquisition (CPA) or a high return on investment (ROI).

When the channels we use get discussed – typically search, programmatic and social advertising (across desktop and mobile) – most do not talk with much warmth or affection about the ads they see. While most would be too polite to say, I can tell that their summation of our conversation is along the lines of “he pushes bad advertising, but I suppose that stuff must work”.

That supposition of bad advertising ‘working’ is incredibly interesting to me as this is a huge assumption that I feel is negatively impacting both real world consumers as well as brand shareholders.

Billions of dollars are poured into bad digital advertising year after year. It shows no sign of losing pace. Most of us see it every day, but ever increasing numbers of people are demonstrating their dissatisfaction to opt out via ad blockers.

Even those people that do see the bad advertising barely notice it at all. Our brains are trained to filter out the ads we see, and we end up paying little to no attention to ads that surround the digital content we wish to consume. Eye-tracking studies back this up, where the vast majority of users pay a fraction of a second to each digital ad they ‘see’. As a result, very few of these ad interactions are memorable and even fewer will impact consumer behaviour in a way that the brand intended. There is simply not enough time or headspace to take on-board the marketing message.

So why is this happening at such scale? I think one of the main reasons lies in bad digital measurement. Bad ads look like they work – but they don’t.

Questionable impact

The reason they look like they work is that the majority of brands calculate CPA and ROI in a digital silo. They use a digital attribution model that assigns credit to digital media touch-points that are observed prior to an online sale being made. Every other possible explanatory reason behind why a sale is made is ignored.

To be seen as ‘working’, digital media needs to be clicked or seen in the days leading up to a purchase being made.

Digital algorithms make it fairly easy to predict the behavioural signals users give off prior to making a sale. And users make it even easier by giving off fairly obvious signals – they search on Google, they browse review sites, they look for deals, they talk on social, they search for your brand and they visit your website.

So now we know who is likely to buy if we can target advertising at these users it means we can get some sales credit and begin to start ‘delivering’ sales from a campaign. But we also want to get a low cost per sale – and unfortunately, the most efficient way of lowering CPA is to reduce the cost of the ad in reaching the same user. In real terms, this results in smaller ad units or ads served outside of the user’s view. After all, ads with low viewability tend to be pretty cheap which helps reduce CPA. We still drop a cookie on the user and can therefore still claim a contribution towards the sale. This doesn’t affect the CPA calculation because virtually no brands can distinguish between viewable attributed sales vs. non-viewable ones.

Unfortunately, almost all low CPA performance marketing involves targeting users with a high organic propensity to purchase. Our advertising plays a much lower impact in driving these sales than we would like to realise. Rather than counting total sales, we should instead be examining the uplift that our advertising is creating as therein lies the true value of lower funnel marketing.

And CPA measurement also impedes good digital advertising that genuinely helps positively change consumer behaviour. Behaviour change comes over the long term and is cross device, and rarely happens instantly after being exposed to a single piece of branded communications. Attribution is essentially the quantification of the benefit of advertising. The benefit of good advertising is rarely a single direct sale – it is much longer term than that.

Performance planning success comes from identifying where media can make a positive influence in accelerating the customer journey from awareness to loyalty, using timely behavioural nudges – recognising that this is rarely a quick or linear journey. Performance marketing is well placed to deliver on these ambitions with the breadth of targeting options available and an ever increasingly addressable marketplace.

But to achieve this success we need to re-adjust our expectations of what performance marketing is and what the metrics we use are really telling us. If we understand that low CPAs are often not changing much consumer behaviour, and high CPAs should be expected where behaviour is more fundamentally changed, we will start to make better campaigns that gain stand out and resonate more with our customers.

Indeed, when used alone, applying CPA metrics to all digital channels actually harms delivery of your total CPA. You end up preaching to the converted to the neglect of your future customers.

We have never before had so much data to both target and measure the success of our efforts. Rather than spending so much time looking at our digital attribution numbers, perhaps we should spend more time talking to people that actually consume our ads before assessing if our campaigns are really working as we intended.

The post Aidan Mark: Low CPAs Are at the Root of Bad Advertising appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Most advertisers understand the importance of careful targeting and clever messaging in crafting a successful paid social campaign. Nevertheless, setting and implementing a well-considered bidding strategy is an equally essential element, allowing companies to narrow in their budgets on top-performing ad formats and users, optimising spend and ultimately boosting results.  
 

Pick the right objective

In order to create a seamless and effective bidding strategy, it’s imperative to start by interrogating the brief and defining the campaign goal. Most social platforms tend to set a linear relationship between objective and bid type, with the former informing which of the latter will be available to the user. It’s vital that the correct objective is chosen at the time of deployment.

To break this down further, let’s take a look at two different types of campaigns.

Where a brand is looking to raise awareness of a product or service, with a focus on feeding the top end of the funnel. Therefore, we would suggest leveraging Facebook’s brand awareness objective – and bid specifically on awareness. This uses a combination of real-time proxy metrics, including reach and relative attention, to serve ads to users deemed most likely to engage.

On the other hand, where the brand’s key objective is to drive sales, towards the bottom end of the funnel. In this case, we would suggest honing audience efficiency by utilising conversion bidding – a tactic which allows advertisers to bid specifically on a conversion event, such as “purchases,” using insight collected by the Facebook pixel. By using onsite ‘intent’ data, we can optimise delivery towards the portion of the target audience the algorithm deems most likely to convert at a given bid price. And by doing so, we are ultimately improving delivery and conversion efficiency.

Invest in creative

The auction system created by Facebook, based on the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism, is built in a way where bidding is only part of the equation. Creative quality is an equally important variable as the model aims at serving users ads with which they are most likely to engage. By building a system that isn’t solely based on cost, Facebook has created a model that is impossible to ‘game,’ delivering true value to both the advertiser and user. 

With this in mind, creative can make or break a campaign and brands should think about the audience they are targeting and follow best practice guidelines. In order to deliver the best possible result, it’s recommended that a creative testing strategy is implemented in order to gain actionable insight and inform ongoing delivery. By understanding which creative delivers best results, advertisers can maintain campaign efficiency by ensuring the same bids will win more auctions. 

Match it up

Similarly, the relevance of targeting will have a significant impact on your bid strategy and this can generally be matched to the stages of the user journey. Ads that are more engaging will receive preferential treatment in the auction, resulting in lower costs and better performance. Bidding correctly at each stage of the funnel will further improve results. 

Generally, advertisers can bid with greater confidence towards the bottom end of the funnel as learnings from earlier on in the campaign mean that targeting has been refined to include only the most engaged consumers. When bidding on a retargeting audience, for example, it’s often wise to focus specifically on impressions as these users have already shown intent to purchase through previous visits to the brand’s site. 

Naturally, peak shopping events such as Valentine’s, Mother’s Day, Black Friday and Christmas are more competitive as the volume of advertisers competing for a share of voice increases. As a result, inventory cost can rise as much as 100% during these periods, but don’t be afraid to bid aggressively. While there may be a significant premium attached to competing, remember that you’re reaching users when purchase intent is at its peak. 

For example, Adaptly ran a campaign for a major e-commerce client during last year’s Black Friday period and despite spikes in CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and a 10x budget increase, the company was able to yield 5% lower CPA and ROAS consistent with their usual always-on activity.

In fact, there is a broader lesson to be learned. Onsite results such as impression or traffic cost aren’t always indicative of off-site performance. A consumer that is more likely to convert may also be more expensive to drive through to the site. For example, analysis across Adaptly’s e-commerce clients suggests that there is very weak correlation between traffic and conversion cost. Therefore, it makes sense to disregard onsite metrics, such as cost per link click, and bid more aggressively on best converting audiences in order to deliver the most cost-efficient conversion results. 

Overall, a successful paid social strategy is all about finding the optimal mix of platforms and tactics. Bidding, while rarely spoken about, is arguably one of the most important pieces of the process and if done correctly, can help maximise results without increasing spend.

The post Three Ways to Optimise Your Paid Social Campaigns Through Bidding appeared first on PerformanceIN.

When it comes to the magnitude of the ad fraud crisis, the numbers speak for themselves – last year alone, eMarketer reported that fake impressions cost advertisers globally $7.2 billion, including over £600 million in the UK alone.

As if that wasn’t enough to keep marketers up at night, the World Federation of Advertisers claimed that ad fraud might develop to become one of the most serious forms of organised crime, right after cocaine and opiate market scandals.

The figures seem to paint a bleaker picture every year, but that’s not to say the industry has given up the fight. Standard authorities such as JICWEBS now seek to certify those enforcing combative measures, while more and more businesses are rolling out their own verification tools, and specialist companies increasingly emerge to capitalise on demand. It’s a first step in the right direction as businesses become more aware of the problem and actively seek to solve it.

One of the companies committed to putting an end to fake clicks is digital marketing platform Impact Radius. Having strengthened its position by acquiring anti-fraud solutions business Forensiq, the group is taking serious measures to fight fraudulent ads, and claims to be the industry’s first company to have integrated an ad fraud detection specialist into its platform.

PerformanceIN caught up with Impact Radius’ Julia Smith, director of communications, and Hannah Beanland, director of technical operations, to find out why ad fraud thrives, what the consequences are for the industry globally, and what companies can do to stop it.

Watch the full interview above, or to skip to a particular question, just use the timestamps below:

00:00:38: When did ad fraud become a problem?

00:02:05: Why does ad fraud thrive?

00:03:45: How is the industry tackling the issue?

00:06:40: Did the industry make much progress is tackling ad fraud in 2016?

00:08:35: Do people understand why fraud detection technologies are so important?

00:10:57: What are the future trends in advertising?

The post Watch: Where Are We with Ad Fraud? Impact Radius On Fighting Fake Clicks appeared first on PerformanceIN.