Blog and Article Sharing Corner

[TanmayMathur]

Hey Community Folks!

This space is created exclusively for users who write blogs or articles around Adobe Advertising Cloud/Adobe Media Optimizer/Tubemogul and related technologies. You can feel free to post your genuine content around topics like Search/Display/Social Marketing, programmatic ad buying etc. If we like what you have written, we may well include it in our official Knowledge Base Articles and give you the due credit! If you have any questions before posting you can send me a private message.

Hope to see some great content here!

[TanmayMathur]

The Blog Post below is from Monica Lay, Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Media Optimizer. 

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The Growth of Programmatic Advertising on Social

Seventy-two percent of the US display market will be programmatic by 2017. Staggering? Absolutely. It may seem unusual for some to talk about social networks like Facebook® and Instagram when programmatic advertising is typically associated with demand-side platforms or open exchanges. Well, the way Adobe looks at programmatic advertising centers around three key attributes. It’s automated, transparent, and data-driven. Looking at programmatic from this lens, it’s easy to see why Facebook is a huge force in the digital-advertising ecosystem.

So, where does social fit into the programmatic-advertising world? Well, social-media advertising is a “must-do.” With automated buying, selling, and the ability to reach a precise audience with highly relevant ads, programmatic advertising on social helps marketers run more impactful campaigns. The growth of programmatic advertising is attributed to two factors: efficiency in ad buying and relevancy in ad targeting.

Facebook: A Force Behind Programmatic Advertising
US digital display-ad spend is estimated to top $27 billion in 2017, with 72 percent coming from programmatic. That’s astronomical. That means nearly three out of every four display-ad dollars is spent programmatically.

Programmatic advertising can be complex; it is easier to understand when broken down into two components: Real Time Bidding (RTB) and Programmatic Direct. Real Time Bidding consists of auction-based ads that are transacted in real time at the impression level, mainly comprising of the open marketplace and private marketplaces. Programmatic Direct is the purchase of display ads via an application-program interface (API), whether it’s publisher-owned (like Facebook and Twitter) or facilitated using preexisting RTB technology like a demand-side platform (DSP). Here, buyers typically agree to a set pricing model (CPM) and may or may not agree to a fixed amount of inventory.

Next year, more than half of all programmatic display will be purchased by Programmatic Direct. Even more interesting is that a majority of Programmatic Direct will be driven by the likes of Facebook. Facebook is positioned to represent almost 30 percent of the US digital-display market by 2017.

Why Are Social-Media Marketers Apprehensive About Instagram?
Facebook wasted no time expanding into advertising. By the end of 2014, Facebook branched out to create the Facebook Audience Network, giving marketers access to third-party inventory as well as mobile web. Last year, it launched the Instagram ads API. Obviously, Instagram is hot right now, and marketers are excited, but many are scrambling to learn how to use it as an ad platform, particularly for direct response.

Despite that excitement, there’s still some apprehension. Advertisers often wonder why, if they’re running ads on Facebook, they need to buy on Instagram to reach potentially the same audience. There is also the perception that the content strategy across the two platforms should be vastly different — marketers often assume that they need to spend more time and money creating different assets.

Future Challenges and Opportunities
Digital advertising moves quickly, and the rapid adoption of Facebook in programmatic makes it clear that social advertising is maturing. But, at the same time, it continues to evolve, and better measurement will be the key to proving business value. As gaps in measurement are identified, accessing more robust data and more advanced bidding and optimization across different platforms will likely be a major theme into the future.

In fact, Facebook has been making some progress already on the measurement side with the recent announcement that advertisers are able to run the same ad set across Facebook, Instagram, and the Audience Network. This new feature allows advertisers to reach their target audiences and optimize performances in real time, improve performances for a number of campaign objectives, and provide incremental and efficient reach. Early results to date show positive signs to this new approach to buying and optimization, and I’m looking forward to future whitepapers and case studies from the Facebook and Instagram measurement team.

Today, Instagram and Facebook are destinations where marketers can reach huge audiences on mobile and elsewhere. They’re actually leading the pack in the programmatic space, turning digital advertising on its head. With the continual growth of programmatic on social, social advertising really is a “must-do!” If you’re not currently playing in the social-advertising realm, consider its value and growth as you take a hard look at how it could help your advertising.

Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc.

Read the Original blog post here - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/growth-programmatic-advertising-social/

[TanmayMathur]

The Blog Post below is from Monica Lay, Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Media Optimizer.

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To Pay or Not to Pay: Ad Strategies for Facebook

Whether you spend any amount of time using it, Facebook® has become a valuable platform through which businesses can advertise and build brand awareness and loyalty. One recent example I experienced was a business that wanted to do a promotion around the holidays. They were in the process of releasing a new app, so they ran some promotions and gave new users a 50-percent-off coupon for signing up. They created a huge amount of organic content from the promotion and were very successful with it. Now, we all understand that it’s easier to achieve this type of success around holidays or other big events, but how do you stay successful during the rest of the year?

To answer that question, you have to look at two things: creative and targeting. In a basic sense, with better creative and better targeting, you have better performance. What is less obvious is that, because you have better creative and better ad targeting, you will also have a higher click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate. Directly, that means a lower cost per click (CPC) and CTR, implying you’ll achieve 10 – 30 percent more clicks for the same budget, which translates to better performance in the end.

Creative
When it comes to creative, we always recommend jumping on new things that Facebook releases.

As I agree, when Facebook releases new features, it seems that they give those features extra exposure on the platform because they want them to perform well. This is similar to lead ads; they’re simple and effective. A user will see an ad and click on it. They select what information they want to share, and then the email address is sent to the advertiser. When paired with local incentives or opportunities, it becomes a really nice method for collecting email addresses for businesses in which past advertising performances weren’t that great.

So, it’s good to hop on new Facebook features as they’re released because, if you’re first to adopt — and, thus, get the leverage effect of being the first mover — you will likely have higher performance. What’s nice about this is that an audience network will grow out of this mobile space and into the desktop environment, where you can buy more targeted ads across different devices to continue with your social campaigns.

This is a huge step forward — and a direct response to those who say Facebook hasn’t worked well in the past for advertising — as they continue to evolve and figure things out just as the industry does. Dynamic product ads (DPAs) were once considered only for retail or ecommerce; but lately, we’ve seen other businesses leveraging the dynamic retargeting functionality — even those that are not retail clients such as the travel vertical.

Targeting
Another important concept with regard to targeting is that you shouldn’t overlap. Overlap tends to waste delivery opportunities due to a frequency cap of two per day. In fact, separating your audiences is key to targeting specific users with specific content and not overexposing your content to uninterested people. When it comes to customer audience, one interesting strategy is to use lookalike audiences based on your initial custom audience.

Lookalikes involve choosing an email list that’s derived from your first-party data, and then Facebook figures out groups of people — or audiences — that look similar to the ones that you have. This is also called a tiered lookalike strategy. With this strategy, you start with, let’s say, 1 percent of a target audience, and you bid to the right amount. From those results, you select a second customer audience based on the same criteria, or you select the same customer audience and build a second lookalike tier, excluding the first one. This results in specific tiers containing the 1 percent, the 2 percent, the 3 percent, and so on.

Bottom Line
In the end, when it comes to Facebook advertising, you have to ask yourself, “What do I want to optimize toward?” This could be conversions, clicks, video views, or any other metric that your business is focused on. The next question becomes, “What am I willing to pay?” In this case, you want to ensure that you are receiving true value out of your investment. Here, true value means that you shouldn’t underbid — invest too little and you won’t get the delivery in the ads — but, you also shouldn’t overpay. Make sure you’ve done your research on what is an acceptable price for the intended return on investment.

Read the Original Blog Post here - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/pay-not-pay-ad-strategies-facebook-s204/

[TanmayMathur]

As the digital landscape evolves, the channels that advertisers use become more complex and multifaceted. Increasingly intricate and complementary cross-channel advertising campaigns will become crucial components of an advertiser’s online presence in coming years. In this paper, you’ll learn why understanding the user journey and integrating data and technology is critical for your cross-channel advertising success.

Learn more about:
•    Where search marketing stands in 2015 across the US and UK
•    The recent shift of consumer transactions on their mobile devices
•    What we believe you’ll find is the next big trend in ad spend

Download the Adobe Media Optimizer Whitepaper here - http://www.adobeeventsonline.com/AMO/2016/DigAdvertising/invite.html

[Manu_Malhotra]

By Manu Malhotra, AMO-Consultant, Adobe

[SEM] Keyword Coverage and Match Type Split: Key to Great Customer Experience

Consumer googles!

You are one shrewd marketer – in your Search Engine Marketing account, the keyword coverage is strong.

Exact keywords get triggered as much as 80% to 90% of the times. And, relevant ad copy is served taking consumer to the correct landing page. Much to your delight, consumer converts, Bingo!

Everything falling in place, that’s too fairy, right?

For us, the Digital Marketers, that is exactly what we want. Everything should beautifully fall in place. Practically, that is far from reality and when accounts go big, spend levels increase, structures become humongous as well as complex it is a job easier said than done.

In such a time, taking control of keyword match type split – making sure it is healthy makes a huge difference.

What is Match Type Split?

Match Type Split is the Revenue/cost share of ‘Exact’, ‘Broad’ and Phrase (and other) match type in your account. This analysis helps the user evaluate the impact of recent account work on account performance by reporting spend and revenue share of each match type over time.

Why does it matter?

A healthy match type split with strong Revenue/Cost share of ‘Exact’ is desired. It ensures most relevant Keywords get triggered and hence customer will be served with most relevant ad copy resulting in a higher CTR. In my personal experience, I have seen significant improvements in CTR by making sure search terms are being analyzed regularly. Frequency and exhaustiveness of implementation of search term reports depends upon various factors such as lifecycle stage (introductory, growth, maturity or decline) of the branded products –such as iPhone and other electronic devices and overall maturity of account. Initially, when these products are about to be launched – customers tend to search a lot about product specifications and features. That is the time to take control of match type split more rigorously.

How Adobe Media Optimizer makes life easy?

Adobe Media Optimizer, a flagship offering by Adobe as part of Adobe Digital Marketing Cloud which works on portfolio theory makes life easy in many ways. As an adjunct functionality to Adobe Media Optimizer, frontier tool provides a simple yet very impactful tool in ‘Match Type’ “[M]”. It provides spend and revenue distribution across match types over the last 30 days. By choosing portfolios we can easily identify which portfolios need more attention – which portfolios (congregation of campaigns with same objectives) have a poor Revenue/Cost share of ‘Exact’ Match type? Whether broad keywords drive irrelevant traffic is also evaluated.

In addition, it also provides Daily RPC, Daily CPC AND Daily RoI for each match type for last 30 days.

What do you achieve?

Aiming at having a high exact match type share by cost as well as revenue along with a healthy quality score results in

• lower CPC
• higher CTR
• higher RPC
• higher ROI
• And to say the least, A Great Customer Experience.

Do share your own stories about how you are creating great customer experience in Search, Display or Social Media marketing. I will be happy to hear and engage.

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This article may be reproduced without my permission as long as it attributes in full and includes a link to this piece. (https://manumalhotra.in/2016/06/06/sem-keyword-coverage-and-match-type-split-key-to-great-customer-e...)

[TanmayMathur]

The Blog Post below is from Sid Shah, Director of Business Analytics for Adobe Digital Marketing Business.

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Capturing Real-Time Digital Behavior for Programmatic Advertising Buys

There’s a lot of talk about Big Data and who is using it best. Everyone claims that they’re going to tackle data in a new way. But, at the end of the day, behavioral data is only useful if you have a tangible way to make it actionable. One way to make digital-behavior data actionable is to use it to drive your programmatic-advertising campaigns. We have seen a number of brands implement this strategy with very strong results.

At its core, analytics is used to track users’ digital behaviors — where your traffic comes from, which pages a user visited on your site, which page was the last a user visited, and so forth. Data science allows you to understand your customer behavior very well. Data science can apply algorithms to this digital-behavior data that allow you to segment your users into various personas. You can create an almost unlimited number of segments with these algorithms, allowing you to target each of your campaigns to a specific subset of users.

Why Programmatic Advertising?
The purpose of programmatic advertising is to increase the likelihood that someone will purchase from your brand. Programmatic advertising can be improved by using digital-behavior data to optimize your advertising campaigns. With access to behavioral data, you can more effectively personalize your online advertising campaigns to increase sales.

For example, if a user on your site browses for luxury bags around a $200 price point but does not make a purchase, you can use behavioral data to understand what types of campaigns that user may be most likely to respond to. You can look at her demographic information and behavior to understand which segment of users she most closely represents. You can get answers to questions like:

Which other users have been looking at luxury bags at $200 price points?
What did they end up purchasing, if anything?
Which ad were they last shown before finally converting?
What platform were they on when they viewed the ad that prompted their conversions?
Were they likely to shop via mobile?
Did they prefer making purchases online or via brick-and-mortar stores?
From there, you can better understand what types of ads users in this segment respond to, allowing you to carefully personalize your online advertising campaign. This can include specially crafted in-app messaging, discounts for related products, targeted remarketing campaigns, and more.

Programmatic-Advertising Benefits
Ultimately, when digital behavior is used to improve programmatic advertising, organizations see an average additional lift of 18 percent over ads where behavior has not been utilized. You can actually mold and transform the data to display more relevant ads and then display those ads to appropriate audiences in a very customized way. The more data you have access to, the greater your organization’s ability to parse data and get down to a more granular level of understanding. Simply put, the more behavioral data you have, the greater your ability to send the right ad to the right audience at the same time.

The beauty of the technologies at the center of digital-behavior and programmatic-advertising integration is that they get marketers out of the business of manually parsing data. This allows them to focus their energies on more strategic marketing decisions. They have opportunities to reach broader audiences with increasingly more personalized messages. Being able to have a wider reach, while also increasing personalization, essentially means you are reaching more people more effectively and at a lower cost than ever before. With all of that on the table, who wouldn’t want to be able to integrate behavioral data into their programmatic-advertising decisions?

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Read the original blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/capturing-real-time-digital-behavior-programmat...

[TanmayMathur]

The Blog Post below is from Pete Kluge, Group Product Marketing Manager for Media & Advertising Solutions at Adobe

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Programmatic Display: Make the Most of Your Data With Today’s Technology

By 2019, 50 percent of display ads are forecasted to be transacted programmatically. Access to data and technology is driving this growth. Advertisers have access to increasing amounts of data, including site-visitor and partner information, demographic- and business-attribute data, and even offline info such as customer-relationship management (CRM) data — and all that can be used for targeting. Advertisers also have access to advanced technologies — like demand-side platforms (DSPs), ad exchanges, and data-management platforms (DMPs) — that they can use to target users in real time across channels and devices.

In North America, $11 billion is projected to be spent on programmatic advertising this year, with forecasts of $30 billion by 2019. Yet, at the end of last year, when marketers were asked their levels of understanding regarding programmatic, only 23 percent used programmatic actively, 36 percent were aware of programmatic but were not using it regularly, and 41 percent weren’t using programmatic at all. Programmatic is in its early stages, and its level of awareness is still growing.

During a presentation I put together for Adobe Summit 2016, we explored the programmatic world and how it helped Redbox, Chegg, and eHealth meet their advertising objectives. Here are some of the insights we gained:

Redbox: Time Savings and Better Performance Through Site-Analytics Integration
Redbox deploys audience targeting via Adobe Analytics, resulting in time savings and improved ad performance.

Redbox is a movie- and game-rental business that is focused, like many businesses, on driving a greater return on ad spend (ROAS) from its digital marketing programs. They target a number of different audiences — from online users who visited and interacted with the website to entertainment junkies to families — for display retargeting and prospecting programs. This often requires that their information technology (IT) department put relevant, trackable content on their site to build audience segments.

Redbox already used Adobe Analytics, which tracks, organizes, and reports on what different segments of customers do. Instead of deploying new tags for tracking, Redbox leveraged the integration between Analytics and the Adobe Media Optimizer DSP and used the existing Analytics audience segments for retargeting.

This integration saved Redbox time when creating, launching, and testing new segments; and it drove better performance due to access to granular audiences — all while reducing reliance on their busy IT department. Using Adobe Media Optimizer and Analytics segment targeting, Redbox achieved:

A 30 percent lift in return on ad spend (ROAS) for retargeting campaigns,
A 3x lift on ROAS for a specific campaign, and
More than 8 – 10 hours/week of time saved.

Chegg: Using Multiple Data Sources to Effectively Reach High-Value Audiences
Insight from the programmatic process helped Chegg infer and expand its audience segments to improve returns and lower acquisition costs.

Understanding your audience segments is a key factor in programmatic advertising. In the ‘old days’, Chegg — an online business that supplies textbooks, online tutors, internship opportunities, and one-on-one help for students — bought advertisements from specific websites where they assumed students would be. They didn’t have insight into the return on investment they would receive, and they didn’t know what they were getting from their advertising buys. Insight from their programmatic ad-buying solution helped Chegg infer the data they needed.

Chegg wanted to figure out the type of content they had on the site and where students were actually going. For example, Chegg was interested in knowing whether students were searching for and viewing a particular science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) book as well as other relevant information about the students.

Next, Chegg looked at STEM students and student grade levels. They identified both of these characteristics as being worth a certain amount of investment. However, it wasn’t until they merged the information that they actually started finding real value. They found that, while a freshman is worth about 1.5 times the lifetime value of a student, and a STEM student is worth about 25 percent more than that, the group that holds both freshmen and STEM students was found to be worth two times as much — greater than the sum of its parts.

They can now put their different groups into a ROAS curve to determine who they should be spending money on first. Overall, they saw a 22 percent drop in acquisition costs (and when you’re spending millions of dollars in this space, that’s a huge savings). Even better, the students they are targeting have the potential to give them twice the amount of returns or loan-to-value (LTV).

eHealth: Data Transparency and Integrated Ad Stack Drives Smarter Decision Making
In early 2015, eHealth — the nation’s first and largest private health-insurance exchange — overhauled its remarketing program. Since only a small percentage of people actually convert on their first visits, remarketing is very important to them. To achieve this, eHealth needed to reengage with its customers and rekindle the health-insurance conversation.

Prior to working with Adobe, eHealth was using five different platforms for display advertising. This resulted in reporting challenges such as duplicate counting of conversions, network competition in bidding, and discrepancies on audience and performance reporting. By using a combination of Adobe Analytics, Adobe Media Optimizer, and Adobe Audience Manager, eHealth has a more unified view of its audience and reporting across its media. All of the pixeling throughout the site is done uniformly, so activity is being recorded equally, allowing eHealth to drill down into its audience and form a more granular definition of who they are.

As an example, they’ve taken a look at their “quoter” audience. A quoter is someone who has visited the site and looked at various health-insurance plans but hasn’t actually purchased a plan. By knowing their customers, they’ve been able to segregate quoters who are moms versus dads. This allows them to serve up messages and creative that would appeal more to each audience segment, resulting in higher conversions.

In the end, this newfound transparency into audiences and media buying resulted in efficiencies and cost savings, whereby, eHealth reduced media-buying costs (CPMs) by $.22 during their last open-enrollment period and beat their cost-per-acquisition (COA) target by 19 percent.

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Read the original blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/programmatic-display-make-data-todays-technolog...

[nidhik]

By Nidhi Kapoor, AMO- Senior Consultant, Adobe

Edit: This post has been published as a Knowledge Base Article for Adobe Media Optimer and can we viewed here

Crucial Role of Cost Models: Managing Frequently Changing Budget

Managing a budget is no less than an art. It is a mixture of skill, patience and little creativity with an effective technology.

As managing budget is just not a one shot deal and requires an active monitoring and managing skills as well, technologically strong platform with its guidance can help drive the management in right direction. This is exactly where Adobe Media Optimizer (AMO) and its technology comes into picture and helps in doing the job at its best. Beauty of AMO’s features is that it guides the management of budget in such a way that the conversions/objective would not get disturbed and actually maximized. 

AMO provides various options that can be used in managing day to day spend targets at portfolio level. Such as:

1. Daily spend target
2. Spend strategy
3. Campaign caps and multiplier
4. Auto adjust campaign budget limits
5. Mobile bid adjustments
6. Constraints
7. Learning budgets
8. Models – Cost Model and Revenue Models and their half life’s
9. Campaign bids

In an account where the budget amount varies frequently every month and the history of traffic and conversions inflow has been strong, the ‘Cost Model’ feature of AMO helps a lot in effective budget management. Particularly the case when the budget has been reduced suddenly by big percentage and the history of previous month has been strong. The unexpected pulling interferes with AMO’s gathered information and takes time to get under control. This is where cost models provide the detail information at bid unit level. To recap, the bid unit in AMO at search level is actually a ‘keyword + match type’.

Brief about modelling

Modeling can be understood as forecasting (i.e. predicting performance). *

Based on gathered information, the AMO comes up with forecasts of how the bid unit can be expected to perform and based on the objective, it will optimize the bid for each bid unit, such that the objective is maximized. *

Steps of data collection to produce models

• Advertisers run their campaigns on search engine.
• Campaign’s click and cost data info. gets collected.
• Conversions data is also captured from client website in AMO.
• AMO then processes the data captured to come up with analysis, forecast in the form of models.
• To create models, AMO gathers information at various data points (bid vs cost, bid vs CPC, bid vs. clicks, bid vs impressions, bid vs. position etc.) and predictive modelling technique is used to analyze and generate data.

There are two types of models a) Cost Models b) Revenue Models. These reports and models can be seen on dashboard. Let’s discuss the role of cost model and its contribution below.

Role of Cost Model

Cost Model Accuracy guides how the bid unit is performing as per its predicted performance*.

The model can be accessed through ‘Portfolio cards’ tab and then selecting ‘Model accuracy’ option. It can be studied at following level:

a) Click volume level

b) Bid unit level

c) Device level

d) Mobile by ad group level

Close to 100% cost accuracy is the best figure to have in any account. If it is higher than +10 to +20% depending upon the use case basis, cost model should be studied in detail at all levels to understand from where the major cost is coming from. ‘Bid unit level’ is an important section to focus on in depth. It actually provides a detail on list of bid units where how much cost and click is incurred in actual performance than predicted value. This performance data then can further be analyzed where cost and clicks are higher than the predicted values. Once the list of bid units is shortlisted which are spending more than required then the next step is to study those bid unit’s search terms in detail. To do so, search terms at search engine or AMO level can be evaluated to ensure keywords are matching to right terms particularly of those keywords where our models are showing discrepancies. By setting those terms as ‘exact negatives’ and ‘cross positives exact’ at right ad group level help control the following metrics:

• Inaccurate impressions
• Irrelevant clicks
• Exact match types ratio
• CPC’s

The above action helps in immediate control of spend on irrelevant search terms. This helps not only in controlling the day to day spend but also further metrics such as CTR as it controls the unwanted impressions. CPC’s also get improved as exact match type increases and also the appearance of ads on relevant keywords only. As relevancy increases, it helps in improving the quality score further which in turn improves the CPC’s and avg. position. As a result of these basic metrics improvement, CR also gets better as the cost and the overall relevancy factor are getting controlled.

Therefore, the cost model accuracy information plays an important role in understanding the spend level path and helps taking the optimization action in right direction.

Hope this information helps in analyzing the cost model data, feel free to share your views and engage here.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     *Definition taken from AMO training material from Gauri Bhat.

[TanmayMathur]

The Blog Post below is from Pete Kluge, Group Product Marketing Manager for Media & Advertising Solutions at Adobe

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Taking Programmatic Advertising to the Next Level with Adobe Media Optimizer

Consumers are engaging with brands across multiple devices and digital channels and they’re expecting a personalized, consistent and compelling experience whenever and wherever they’re accessing content. Advertisers have access to deeper data insights about their audience than ever before to deliver relevant content at scale in real-time. The disruption of our computing and business landscape is forcing companies to rethink everything – including the ways they engage customers and prospects through digital advertising. Advertisers need technology that enables them to harness their data to deliver integrated and customized experiences that consumers have come to expect to drive an “Experience Business.”

Adobe Marketing Cloud Audiences Inform Dynamic Ad Experiences

Advertisers can use audience segments built in Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager or Adobe Media Optimizer (AMO) to enable a unique creative ad layout or frame of reference. This allows advertisers to alter an ad’s experience for each audience while maintaining automated granular creative decisioning based on customer intent. AMO Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) automatically assembles creative elements (product, price, image, promotional copy, colors) based on the user and audience.

For example, a traveler may visit a hotel website, and search for a hotel and travel destination. Later as they surf the web, the traveler would see an ad that contains the hotel that they viewed, city, discount price offer and promotional copy – thanks to AMO DCO.

Adobe takes this consumer experience further by personalizing at an even deeper level. Marketing Cloud audience segments built using CRM, site visitor, partner and third-party data can inform more personalized ad experiences. For example, airline or hotel loyalty program status could trigger specials or a rewards-related ad layout. Third-party data may inform luxury hotel content (based on income range), family vacation specials (households with children) or business travel promotion (business attribute data). Also, a marketer could create a segment of high value users (i.e. business travelers) in Adobe Campaign for e-mail/cross-channel marketing and then deliver an engaging ad experience to that audience using AMO DCO.

Through integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Media Optimizer allows advertisers to deliver unparalleled digital ad experiences, with relevant and personalized content, for their customers and prospects. AMO’s integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud offers companies greater cookie coverage and reach into high value audiences due to its cross-channel engagement with consumers.

Complete View of Advertising Activities in Adobe Analytics

We also announced a new integration with Adobe Analytics for display advertising. Advertisers are already enjoying the benefits of the bi-directional integration for search and the ability to reach Analytics audience segments in display. Now the integration is being expanded to be bi-directional for display, giving advertisers insights into display campaign activity (impressions, clicks, cost, conversions) for view and click-based converters from AMO display campaigns in Analytics. With these enhancements, we’re providing reporting insights at the ad strategy level — even for DCO and video campaigns. Adobe Analytics’ engagement metrics for view/click-based converters are available in AMO for optimization and campaign reporting.

AMO display campaign activity for view and click based converters in Analytics reporting

AMO display and search campaign activity in Analytics reporting

Cross Channel Attribution and Path to Conversion Insights

Do you wonder what the impact is of your dynamic creative or video campaigns in relation to your search or Facebook campaigns – or which channel(s) are generating the most revenue? Well, Adobe Media Optimizer helps answers those questions.

AMO uses a common conversion tracking pixel across all channels to give advertisers an accurate view into attribution, as well as insights into the path to conversion – for display (DCO, video, banner ads), search, and social (Facebook, Instagram) channels.

Adobe Transforms Programmatic Advertising

As businesses reconsider their approach to engaging customers in the rapidly changing digital environment, and consumers expect more compelling, personal experiences, we’re continuing to innovate our programmatic ad buying platform (Adobe Media Optimizer) with industry-leading dynamic creative optimization capabilities and integrations with Adobe Marketing Cloud. By connecting Marketing Cloud audiences to programmatic advertising, Adobe Media Optimizer is redefining digital marketing and advertising to drive consistent, compelling and customized experiences across digital touch points.

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Read the original blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/amo-update-emea-summit/

[TanmayMathur]

The Blog Post below is from Giselle Abramovich, Senoir & Strategic Editor, CMO.com

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5 Things you won't believe about Programmatic Advertising 

Brands and agencies alike certainly appreciate the efficiency that programmatic brings from a pricing standpoint. They also like its scalability, the way it brings in immediate returns, and that it clearly shows how messaging is optimized.

But the truth of the matter is, programmatic isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, and much is often left unsaid. Until now. CMO.com reached out to the industry to get perspective on some of the unspoken truths behind programmatic. Here’s what they told us.

1. Brands Are Starting To Bring Programmatic In-House
An AOL study from October found that 68% of brand advertisers plan to bring programmatic in-house in the next 12 months. 

“That’s a massive number and a massive undertaking,” said JoAnna Foyle, AOL’s SVP of client services and operations. “It’s a massive undertaking because you need to be rethinking how you structure your advertising spend, your organization, and how you set up your technology stack and manage your data.”

According to Tim Waddell, ‎director of product marketing at Adobe (CMO.com’s parent company) and the company's resident programmatic expert, the lack of transparency in pricing is one of the reasons why brands are now bringing programmatic in-house.

“We are seeing a lot of interest from customers to bring advertising management in-house and running it on their own," he told CMO.com. "This is because they want more insight into the costs of technology and media vs a black box scenario. Agencies are recognizing this trend and realizing that transparency is a critical topic in the market."

2. Setting Up A Private Marketplace Is No Small Feat
Some companies jump into programmatic, and especially private marketplaces, thinking it’s easy. Many companies think the efficiencies abound and costs plummet after the initial setup. This is not the case, according to Joe Laszlo, VP of industry initiatives at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). Many companies think that private marketplaces, in particular, are turnkey solutions, he said. However, a lot of fine-tuning needs to happen.

“In real life, private marketplaces can be incredibly beneficial for buyers and sellers alike, but there’s a lot of work that goes into setting up a private marketplace correctly so that you get those efficiencies,” Laszlo told CMO.com. “The IAB actually put out a checklist last year that goes through all of the things that buyers and sellers alike need to do in the process of setting up data, a private marketplace, just to remind everybody that it’s not like you flip a switch and the cost savings start rolling in. It takes a lot of planning and a lot of effort and a lot of thought to use them successfully.”

3. Programmatic Isn’t Transparent
Programmatic, while it does aim to make things a lot more efficient, doesn’t necessarily make them more transparent and, in some ways, makes the process of transacting, buying, and selling ad inventory more opaque. That’s a challenge, IAB’s Laszlo said.

“It shouldn’t dissuade anybody, but I think it’s something that people need to keep in mind when they think about maximizing the value of programmatic,” he told CMO.com.

This “opaqueness” comes up the most when it relates to location data. When a company is transacting programmatically and a piece of ad inventory with location data is appended to it, there’s an automatic mistrust of that location data because you don’t really know where it’s coming from, Laszlo said. It could be accurate, generated by the GPS on a device and routed with the end user’s knowledge, or it could be somebody knows they can get a slightly higher bid by making up a latitude and longitude and sticking it into the RTB description of the piece of ad inventory, he said.

“At the end of the day, automation is bringing all sorts of new data streams online that can make a buyer much more confident that they’re reaching somebody who’s going to be likely interested in their message,” Laszlo said. “But you don’t always know where that data is coming from. There’s a level of trust that’s still needed between an ad buyer and the DSP that they’re working with, between the DSP and the various DMPs that it’s working with, and all the different acronyms up and down the chain.”

4. Programmatic Is Complex
Many brands view programmatic as a “magical solution” that solves all of marketing’s challenges, Adobe’s Waddell said. But programmatic requires a lot of technology, data, and audience building.

“The No. 1 issue is making your programmatic technology work together with existing technology,” Waddell told CMO.com. “Operations, IT–everyone’s got to be involved to some degree. And for those companies that are bringing programmatic in-house, it’s even tougher. I’ve seen discussions out there on the market where it’s hard to find the right people. There’s not a huge mass of them just sitting out there waiting to be hired.”

And the trouble doesn’t end once the technology is all set up and ready to go. There’s also the issue of data. With programmatic, data is key, but marketers are still struggling with harnessing the right data. According to Waddell, marketers need to be using the data to build audience profiles they’re looking to target.

“Once I’ve got the audiences defined, I’ll need a DMP and someone who knows how to run programmatic for the business, whether it’s someone in-house or at an agency. And I’ll also need the analytics system as well,” Waddell said. “Now that I know the people I want to reach, I actually need to reach them. Should I  use search, display, social, email, TV? Or maybe video and mobile? Maybe I’ll decide to dabble in each. Well, guess what? Now I need technology that connects to all those different data sources.”

5. Programmatic Won’t Ever Replace The Human
Media buying will never completely become a machine-only function, according to Warren Zenna, EVP, managing director at Mobext.

“It's always going to be easier and more effective if you go at it from a direct-buying approach, particularly if you are really interested in not only the message, but in the environment in which the message resides,” Zenna told CMO.com. “So even though we have these programmatic PMPs that do, in fact, close out a lot of inventory that you distribute across–let’s call them nondesirable publishers–it’s still not as good as directly tying right into the publishing networks in a way we know is successful and consistent.”

That’s also why programmatic, while it works well for direct response campaigns, is not as effective for branding, he added. “We’re finding for many of our clients who are more interested in branding than direct response, automated buying doesn’t really work for them to get the kinds of outcomes they want,” Zenna said.

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Read the original blog post at - http://www.cmo.com/features/articles/2016/2/10/5-facts-no-one-wants-to-tell-you-about-programmatic-a...

[TanmayMathur]

The Blog Post below is from Shay O'Reilly, Business Analytics Manager for Adobe Media Optimizer at Adobe

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Five Ways to Use Programmatic-Display to Move Your Business Forward

You can buy ads nearly anywhere on the Web nowadays, and being able to scale your ad-buying program is a key component of driving your business forward. However, it’s one thing to say you can successfully execute a programmatic program — and quite another to actually make it happen!

The essential formula for executing a programmatic campaign is reporting, analysis, and action. In this post, we will look at how to measure that formula against the components of success: scale, using data to discover opportunities, and decision making.

Five Tips for Successfully Executing a Programmatic Campaign
Natalie O’Brien — from eHealth, a business operating at the intersection of e-commerce and healthcare — shows us some actionable techniques that can help you and your business launch a successful programmatic campaign. Here are five key takeaways from her session at Adobe Summit 2016.

1. Programmatic Is Not a Black Box.
It’s about not only scaling your buying power, but also understanding the site visitors you attract through ads and what to do with them once they’ve made it to your site the first time. Adobe Media Optimizer (AMO) and Adobe Audience Manager (AAM) help with that by making sense of the middle part. We know when people visit your website, when they convert, and when they leave. Now, with AMO and AAM, if customers leave and then return later to convert, we can begin understanding what happens during the time they are away. It’s not just about using tools to scale your buy; it’s about a cohesive campaign that allows you to also scale the way you digest and execute on data. You must step outside of the box to do all of these things well. This helps you successfully reach the universe of people you can truly retarget.

2. Organizational Buy-in Makes all the Difference.
There are two crucial aspects that are most helpful when diving into programmatic marketing. First, you must have an analytics team — not one that just has a presence at the table, but rather, a team that really leads the conversation. Second, the PR team, the content team, and the product team must all be together at the table so that everyone at every level of the organization is represented and on the same page.

3. Personal Information Is the Holy Grail of Data.
At eHealth, a lead may begin filling out an application, get partway through it, and learn some important information from the application form itself that they can begin using. You know that the lead visited the site seven days ago, which is valuable information. It’s not only one day ago, but it’s also not 14 days ago. Knowing when users last visited your site gives you a sense of whether you can reach them again, and if so, how likely that is to result in conversions.

You also have users’ previous search histories and search terms, which are good indicators of their intentions. You’ve stitched together their devices, so you know some users visited your site from their mobile devices and later from their desktops. All these data points are in there, and they’re popping up just from this one person on an ad exchange. If you’re unable to distill that information or capture it, there’s a good chance you’re wasting money on a dimension. If the marketer is unable to see any difference in performance on a more granular level, he or she is likely wasting money by pushing irrelevant ads to that particular audience.

4. Automation Is Necessary to Scale Analytics.
Automation is critical for doing analysis at scale. Techniques such as auto-targeting combine the targeting dimensions mentioned above. You can explore what categories worked, and it automatically comes up with a list of categories you should target, giving you the confidence needed to push ad spend at these subsections of the overall campaign. Updated constantly as new data and data points are received, this is something that just cannot be done manually at scale.

5. Use Data to Make Business Decisions.
With the fine-level detail available to marketers for using programmatic ad buying to address audiences and people, there’s a distinct need to roll all of the information into business decisions. Unless you use the data you are collecting and analyzing to drive your decision making regarding ad spend, then it is wasted information. This data can lead business decisions from the top down if you have the organizational buy-in mentioned previously.

Take One Step at a Time
Putting these five takeaways into action can help you begin piecing together your own programmatic campaign. It takes a lot of components to make a successful program — tools to scale buying and analysis, management buy-in, etc. — but, taken one step at time, any organization can successfully try its hand in the programmatic-display engine.

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Read the original blog post at -  https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/five-ways-use-programmatic-display-engine-move-...

[TanmayMathur]

The Blog Post below is from Kirill Kronrod, Senior Global SEO Manager at Adobe

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How to Optimize for Google Quick Answers

In September 2014 Google introduced a new method of presenting content relevant to “how to…” or “what is…” queries, called “Quick Answers.” With this feature, Google takes snippets of content from specific webpages and features it in the “Quick Answers” box just above the first organic result in the search engine results page (SERP), and just below the paid listings. In addition to the content, Quick Answers also provides a link to the source page.

In some instances, Google also adds an image from the page, in the top right corner of the Quick Answers box. We noticed images appear when logged into a Google account (a history of visiting a site triggering it), but sometimes even without a history, probably as a part of Google testing.

Pages that Google selects for Quick Answers on our site are high authority pages with quality, well-structured content that is theme-relevant and optimized for a great user experience. This content also answers specific questions that closely match the query.

Below is a sample page that is featured in Quick Answers. This page was created to answer specific questions that users might have about a particular feature, and has variety of quality content relevant to the theme of the query.

The page was optimized for a great user experience: with a well-structured “how to” guide (marked in red), a video tutorial, a detailed explanation of the feature and its applications, links to related features, PDFs, and other resources including help and support outlets.

From the technical SEO standpoint, we need to ensure that a page is a part of site structure, is referenced from other pages with theme-relevant linking, and is included in XML sitemaps for better crawling (please use HrefLang XML Sitemap if pages are present in multiple Geos).

Measuring the impact of “Quick Answers”

Usually a page that is ranked #1 in the organic results would also be featured in Quick Answers. However, we also observe instances when our pages are in the Quick Answer box, even when these pages are not top-ranking pages in Google, and ranking on positions two to four. In such cases, our pages are preferred for Quick Answers listings when they compete with authority pages that don’t have theme-relevant content and are not well structured.

When Google first introduced Quick Answers and we started to see our pages appearing there, we tried to measure the impact in terms traffic and CTR from the SERPs using Adobe web analytics tools and webmaster tools. Not surprisingly, we saw a solid increase in traffic.

What we needed to add is a more formal (and easier) tracking method sthat would allow us to understand how many of our keywords in the “how-to” theme are ranking in Google Quick Answers. BrightEdge Content Performance Platform is now enabling us to do just that.

“Quick Answers” ranking report is now a part of the “Keyword” report, where we can measure aggregate rankings of a particular keyword group.

The same report also provides details for each keyword in the group.

How to Optimize for and Rank in Google Quick Answers:

1. Select a topic that is interesting for your users
2. Create quality content relevant to the theme
3. Structure the page with the user experience in mind
4. Provide useful information that can include videos, PDFs, details, and links to other relevant topics
5. Yes – and don’t forget to provide a “How-to” list
6. Measure the impact

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Read the original blog post at -  https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/search-marketing/how-to-optimize-for-google-quick-answers/

[Manu_Malhotra]

TanmayM wrote...

Hey Community Folks!

I am creating this space exclusively for users who write blogs or articles around Adobe Media Optimizer and related technologies. You can feel free to post your genuine content around AMO or topics like Search/Display/Social Marketing, programmatic ad buying etc. If we like what you have written, we may well include it in our official Knowledge Base Articles and give you the due credit! If you have any questions before posting you can send me a private massage. 

Hope to see some great content here!

The Blog Post below is from Manu Malhotra AMO Consultant, Adobe

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The product marketer in me cannot stop appreciating Craig Nevill Mannings innovative and new approach towards product search. What he imagined in 2002 is now a reality. Product search and Google shopping campaigns are an integral part of contemporary Digital Marketing Strategy.

Well, I am sure most of you are already putting Google shopping campaigns to best use. In this blog, I intend to cover some of the industry best practices in managing google shopping campaigns feeds. To sum it up, here is what you can expect

• What are the various feed types which one to use and when
• Tips for efficient Creation, management and updating of feeds
• Automation! Is there a way to automate the process, in part or in full?

Well first things first!

What are the various feed types which one to use and when

There is no one path that takes you there!

Choose the Feed type basis your objective. Resort to Regular feed when you are updating your inventory. However, for changes in price and availability use online Product Inventory Update Feed. Its quick and efficient.

How, is more important.

Broadly there are two ways to go about the process Manually submitting Google Sheets or Unicode tab delimited or xml sheets. An intelligent and a programmatic way is through shopping content API. This needs developer intervention however, it is one of the most efficient ways.

Tips for efficient creation, management and updating of feeds

He: What should I do? Me: Well, it depends on where you want to go

Keeping a checklist handy is the simplest thing that can ensure good quality. Make sure you have following check points ready

• Required Attributes make sure you have provided all the mandatory attributes
• Shipping Options specifically check that you have mentioned mention shipping options
• Google_product_Category provide this as well as color, gender, age_group and size attributes when selling apparel products
• Mobile URL- needed if there isnt a mobile redirect already in place
• Feed scheduling / updating make sure that the feed is updated timely, ideally as soon as the inventory is updated

In addition, watch out for disapprovals. Some common reasons which lead to disapprovals can be easily avoided.

• Price and availability Feed data vs landing page. This is very important since it directly impacts the user Experience. If the two dont match, your dear customer will never like it
• Landing page Under Construction
• Images water marks
• Not having a clear Return/Refund policy
• Not having Secure check out
• Policy Disapprovals

To make sure you are managing disapprovals review the account errors and warnings Diagnostics tab and update technical contact info on Merchant Center Settings tab. A very intelligent and smart way to manage feeds is through Google Sheets add on. Using this, you can easily check if any entry in the feed row is incorrect or requires modification.

Automation! Is there a way to automate the process, in part or in full?

Answer is, why not!

Enabling automatic item updates settings allows you to update your items on google shopping based on the information present on the website. For this option to work for you, you need to annotate your website with schema.org microdata.

Folks, that is all that I intended to cover. You may also like to explore data transformation with feed rules which is particularly helpful in correcting errors in attribute names and implementing custom labels.

Overall, I have had a good time enjoying and working on the shopping feeds. Do share your own views and real life experiences in managing shopping feeds.

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Read original blog here: https://manumalhotra.in/2016/07/07/best-practices-in-managing-google-shopping-feeds/.

This article may be reproduced without my permission as long as it attributes in full and includes a link to this piece.

[TanmayMathur]

The Blog Post below is from Emiko Matsumoto, Search Marketing Manager at Adobe

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Do You Question the Effectiveness of Search Marketing?

There has been a lot of chatter online regarding the true evaluation of search marketing. Current discussion surrounding ROI attribution models has given cause to question the effectiveness of search marketing as well. There are many reasons why industry experts may feel that way, but consider this: The nature of search marketing is undergoing change, but that’s not news. That’s always been the case. The resiliency and relevance of Search in gaining the trust of the web user is borne out of the ability of search to adapt and adjust. Search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search advertising (PPC/SEM) are integral to any marketing strategy whether separate SEM and SEO lead generation campaigns are conducted or SEO and SEM best practices and techniques are used within a more comprehensive enterprise-level campaign. The marketing objective and messages all have SEO and SEM elements contained within.

Search Engine Architecture and Infrastructure

Let’s examine the purpose and objectives of search engines regardless of who owns and operates them. It could be the traditional search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu or Yandex, or the emerging power of retail and social media search engines such as mobile app stores (iTunes/Google Play), Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Periscope, Instagram or Snapchat, to name a few.

The fundamental objective of a search engine is to represent the consumer and provide a trusted service in displaying only relevant, authoritative, and quality content in response to a search query. The algorithm’s used are designed to ensure that. The search engine is where search marketing plies its trade. The building of trust with the consumer results from SEO and SEM best practices applied to all brand web content and is inherent in that content being discovered, indexed, and displayed in the search engine results pages (SERP). The transference and maintenance of that trust in the brand rests squarely on the shoulders of keeping that web content discoverable, fresh, and of value to the consumer.

CMO.com provides a bevy of interesting statistics that demonstrates the power and effectiveness of search. There are 15 listed, but here are a few of the more significant ones.

Eighty-five percent of retailers surveyed said search marketing (including paid and SEO) was the most effective customer acquisition tactic.
Seventy percent of agencies predict client SEO budgets would increase this year; 47 percent of respondents said there would be a significant or, at least, some increase to their SEO budget.
Overall search spend in the USA has grown by 9 percent year-over-year, with most of the increase coming from click growth.
 

Search Marketing Strategy Explained

SEO, organic search, and SEM, paid search, exist in a co-optimized environment within search marketing.

SEO is a long-term lead generation strategy built upon keeping all brand web content discoverable and relevant on all web properties, including product websites, landing pages for various campaigns, and information websites for white papers, case studies, and community outreach. There is a technical, website coding element to SEO as well as a content format and presentation element. SEO monitors the performance of these websites through the collection and analysis of data gathered from visitors to those web properties. Each web property has at least one key performance parameter and associated metrics that measure performance. The results are measured over the long term and adjustments made as performance dictates.

Paid search, or SEM, is a short-term strategy that is compatible and co-optimized with the SEO strategy. The ads developed are paid in order to attain a favorable position on page one of the various SERPs. The idea is to obtain immediate results to measure the most effective way to reach a segmented and targeted audience.

The fundamental tools of SEO and SEM are the use of keywords and phrases that represent what people searching on the web use regularly that identify with your products and services. Data analytics is a key tool used to test various keywords and phrases in the decision-making process, followed by live testing in a test audience environment to validate the results of what the data says.

The results of paid search performance and the keywords used then feed the long-term SEO strategy in making adjustments and adaptations to the SEO or inbound marketing strategy.

The Future of Search Marketing

As I said at the beginning, search marketing is a discipline affected by numerous changes and the need to adapt to those changes. Many of those changes are coming because of the shift to mobile devices and wearables at the expense of using desktops and laptops to do their online searches. The bottom line here is that the display real estate to show search results is extremely limited.

For example, as Google’s Knowledge Graph improves, fewer and limited search results pages are becoming a distinct possibility. This is why Google built the Knowledge Graph. If Google knows the answer to your question, it wants to surface the answer to you quickly so you don’t have to search around on a website.

Mobile apps are another game changer for search marketing. In reality, mobile apps published by brands circumvent the search engine infrastructure altogether. App store optimization (ASO) in that vertical environment is a future SEO development. Search engines are trying to disrupt that through the development of the ability to do deep linking to mobile app content so that the mobile app online presence can be indexed and content displayed on the SERP to increase discoverability. These are indeed interesting times for SEO professionals.

What Really Matters

The point I’m making here is that search marketing is here to stay.  It will never die.  Adaptive processes, procedures, and best practices may alter the marketing strategies in using SEO and SEM capabilities, but they will always be in use.  Even in our ever-changing business environment, search marketing will continue to evolve to those changes as well.  Therefore, as online marketers, we will need to not only adapt to new developments and technologies, but strive to stay ahead of the curve, anticipating what the future may bring.  It is this staying up-to-date, remaining knowledgeable, and building trust that enables the continued effectiveness of search marketing.

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Read the original blog post at -  https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/search-marketing/do-you-question-the-effectiveness-of-searc...

[Manu_Malhotra]

By Manu Malhotra, AMO-Consultant, Adobe

Edit: This post has been published as a Knowledge Base Article for Adobe Media Optimizer and can be viewed here 

Analysis Made Easy: Advertising Insights

I am consulting an international apparel and accessories brand which is a leader in its space. Often times, I am asked to improve customer experience, better the ROI and adjust spending levels to achieve the targets. Raising the game, day on day is a norm. Many of you, my fellow passionate Digital Marketers might resonate with it, right? This is what most of us are engrossed with.

However, for all this to manifest, we do tons of information download in excel and csvs of the world. God forbid, at times it gets to zipped files and txts, pivots and charts and then the presentation gets curated to be served in a way that makes the pitch impactful.

Are you going to hug me if I said that certain pieces of checks and analysis that we do on a regular basis is available on a click of a button in Adobe Media Optimizer? Yes, that’s right!

Advertising insights is a very interesting and impactful tool at the behest of a Search Engine Marketer.

Day of Week Spend

Do you find yourself managing optimal spend levels by Day of the Week? If yes, this is one stop destination to determine day of the week targets.

Match Type

I am sure you are interested in knowing whether broad keywords drive irrelevant traffic. Also you would like to quantify it, right? Match Type analysis helps the user gauge the bearing of recent account work on portfolio performance. It reports cost and revenue share of each match type over time.

Campaign Caps

You won’t mind checking the portfolio settings at regular intervals to achieve best possible return on investment, would you? Campaign caps report helps you check if the media spend is limited by budgets.

Portfolio Pre/Post

So, you made well thought out adjustments and carried out optimization tactics, and now is the time to evaluate them. Get your hands on this section – it gives you a quick comparison of portfolios that you select, up to five in one go, and reports their performance over two time periods.

Quality Score

In checking the overall health of account, quality score and its effect on CPC plays an important role.  This tool returns an analysis of portfolio's impression-weighted Quality Score trend over the last 90 days. The presentation provides a grid view of keyword counts in good, average and poor quality score brackets along with weighted revenue in each bracket.

Mobile Optimization

Mobile Bid Adjustments, custom creatives, mobile landing pages…you have done it all. But you still want to check device performance and gauge the current settings of mobile-specific optimization features. This is where you get more insights.

Settings Audit

Don’t miss any of the alarms – learning budgets set more than 10%, cost model half-life and revenue model half-life set beyond recommended levels, undesirable impact of constraints, and unassigned campaigns, all this and much more in a click of button is made available to you.

Location Target Performance Report

Reporting on clicks, cost, and weighted revenue for each location target in a portfolio is available in the Location Target Performance Report.

Perhaps, these tools will come handy as you plan and execute the digital marketing strategies to improve RoI and achieve digital marketing objectives for your clients.

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This article may be reproduced without my permission as long as it attributes in full and includes a link to this piece. (https://manumalhotra.in/2016/08/23/analysis-made-easy-advertising-insights/)

[nivedank6663043]

Edit: This post has been published as a Knowledge Base Article for Adobe Media Optimizer and can be viewed here 

Changing Objective through Bulksheets

• Objectives can only be set for new campaigns built through Bulksheets , it cannot be modified once the build is in place.
• We need to update Column L – L3 Campaign Objective to change the objective as per requirement and delete all the IDs from column FS to FV as new Campaign,Adsets and Ads will be created.
• For all the be below mentioned objective we need to change the following in bulksheet , Column FY- optimization Goal.

                                         

L3 Campaign Objective	Optimization Goal	Promoted Object
WEBSITE_CONVERSIONS	Required	Required
WEBSITE_CLICKS	Required	NA
MOBILE_APP_INSTALLS	Required	NA
POST_ENGAGEMENT	Required	NA
VIDEO_VIEWS	Required	NA
PAGE_LIKES	Required	NA
LEAD_GENERATION	Required	NA

• For objective Website conversions we need to assign Pixel in following format and for others this field should be blank

{“pixel_id”: “6027919878144”}  ( Promoted Object column – GI).

Trackers

• The method by which destination URLs are generated for the account:
  • EF Redirects are generated by default for all the builds through AMO for Social
  • Only agency account managers, Media Optimizer account managers, and administrators can change this value from the default.
• View tags and URL tags are generated per Ad in Bulksheet – VT tags are not generated for Custom audience targeting.
• Pre-Sync : Instructs Media Optimizer to synchronize its files with the specified campaigns to ensure that all data is the same.
• This functionality can be used to generate the tags after the build is complete is case of the missing tags
  • We just have to download bulksheet with presync functionality Checked and upload it again without changing anything in the bulksheet
  • Example where Presync can be used to Generate tracking tags:
    • Campaign created with placement selected as news feed
    • 
    • Ad set created for Custom Audience but later assigned interests in Power editor

Changing Ad copy

• Changing any of the Ad properties will create a new post in Power editor
• First step here would be to remove the Link object ID – Column FO

• Changing Ad properties
  • Changing Body Text can be done by changing Column Q- Message ( Column P also contain the same text however can be left as it is)
  • Changing Image need Image properties and should be uploaded in the system
  • Changing URL – need to edit the URL in column T (Base URL).
  • Need to change the URL in same format as present in bulksheet.
  • Headline, Display link, Description and Call to Action need to be edited in their respective column W,X,Y and Z.

Example: To create Two Ad sets with three Ads each

• Follow steps mentioned in slides 2-3 to download Bulk sheet of already created Ad set with three Ads
• • Change the name of Ad sets in column D
  • IDs need to be removed from Column FT to FV the creation of Ad, Adset or campaign
  • Column FP – FR Show status , should be Active or Paused.

 

• L3 campaign ID with remain As it is , this denotes the campaign ID
• Copy Row 2-5 in bulksheet to create As many Ad sets or Ads , for this example we are creating two Adsets with three Ads
• We will copy and paste row 2-5 just below in the rows 6-9.
• Save the bulksheet and Upload
• This will create Two new Adsets with three Ads in each for the same campaign.
• Example Bulksheet to be uploaded

Bulksheet Layout

• Taking example for Facebook Bulksheet here.
• Structure of this bulksheet assuming a campaign with one adset and one ad
• To simplfy steps , I have broadly classified Bulksheet Columns as below

                                           

		Column
Row	Ad set Properties
	Ad properties	P – AA	Post properties
		AB – CW	Carousel Ad properties(Multi product Ad details)
		DD – DH	Tag details (View tag and URL Tag)
		FM – FV	ID
		FW – GB	Ad Specs linking in IDs

• To make new campaigns through Bulksheets
• Name of campaign should be unique for account
• IDs need to be removed from Column FS to FV depending on the creation of Ad, Adset or campaign
• Column FP – FR Show status , should be Active or Paused.
• Save and post.

Bulksheet

A bulk sheet is a file that contains campaign data in a specific format and can be used to quickly create new or modify existing campaign structure data and ads.

• Creating Bulksheet :
• Click the Social tab. In the submenu, click Bulksheets.
•  
• 

• In the toolbar, click Download Bulksheet.
• 
• • Specify the bulk sheet settings:
    On the Selections tab, enter or select information in the fields.
•  

• (Optional) On the Filters tab, indicate criteria for specific ads to include in the bulk sheet:
  Select a parameter (account, campaign, or ad group name or ID; or any element of an ad), select an operator, and then enter the applicable value.
• ClickDownload.
  When the task begins, the file is listed on the Bulksheets tab. When the file is created, you will receive an email notification with a link to the file; depending on the amount of data being compiled

Introduction

Media Optimizer supports your marketing efforts on social networks by allowing you to track and manage your Facebook campaigns — as well as your campaigns across all of your other online marketing channels — in one place. You can perform all campaign management tasks and bidding tasks, and optionally add your ad sets to optimized portfolios so Media Optimizer can optimize their ad set budgets.

As you make changes to campaign data, Media Optimizer immediately pushes the data changes to the social network. Media Optimizer also pulls campaign structure data from the social network account once a day (or more often when new campaigns are detected) and on demand as requested. Media Optimizer also pulls click and user engagement data from Facebook hourly.

For this Blog I will be mainly focussed to the best practices  assuming we all have little Idea of using AMO for our Social marketing work

[rahulbhatia1]

Edit: This post has been published as a Knowledge Base Article for Adobe Media Optimizer and can be viewed here 

Use of dynamic parameters in AMO Social

Dynamic parameters are the best way to track things and automate when building ads in AMO social.

For e.g. If we need to build a campaign with 10 different ad sets having 50 ads. It is easy to create 50 ads in one go, but can be quite painful to create or change names of 50 ads which are different in terms of creative as well as changing names of ad sets which differ in details such as age and gender targeting etc.

• Dynamic Parameters can be used for Ad Set Names and Ad Names
• Access them just by entering “{ “ (bracket) while typing the name of your AdSet or Ad
• Dynamic Parameters automatically append naming conventions from 12 different parameters and pick them including image name, placement, gender and device

AMO Bulk Ad Creation Workflow

Results after campaign creation in Facebook Power Editor:

This automation activity saves a lot of time and enhances productivity. In our example above, we can save around 10 - 15 minutes if we have to create 1 campaign – 5 ad sets – 50 ads.

[TanmayMathur]

The Blog Post below is from Tim Wadell, Director, Product Marketing at Adobe

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Cross-Channel Advertising With Adobe Media Optimizer

A decade ago, marketing options were limited on digital platforms. The focus was largely on search and banner ads. Things have changed greatly with advances in data collection and management, audience segmentation, numerous social-media platforms, video and mobile ads, and the ability to attribute value to the various touchpoints a consumer engages along the path to an ultimate conversion event (not just retail).

And, when you realize that marketing departments always have limited budgets — especially when unable to tie their efforts to ROI — it highlights the importance of understanding which channels are working. It is also vital to realize which types of ad campaigns and collateral work on which platforms and for which audiences.

Of course, this is easier said than done. As agencies and customers attempt to understand, return on ad spend (ROAS) or return on investment (ROI) can be tough to confidently quantify. It can be even tougher to drill down for further insights. To prepare your organization to receive cross-channel insights on your advertising campaign, you need the following foundation:

Data-Capture Mechanisms: If you are not capturing data on your campaigns — including clicks, visitors, users, and the demographics that go along with these things — it is virtually impossible to determine whether your campaign is effective. At a bare minimum, an organization needs to capture the results of their campaigns before they can begin to get actionable insights regarding what is working.

Clean Data: Tied in with the first point, if the data you are analyzing is not clean, your insights will not be as valuable as they could be. Clean data can mean a number of things: ensuring that data is being pulled from all the correct sources, is mapping to the correct fields, or even that it is being collected in a standard format. For example, if you want to understand whether you have more customers in New York or California, you would likely run a query to find out. However, if the data in the “state” field in your database contains values like NY, New York, CA, California, or Cali, this query is likely to miss customers and be inaccurate as a result. Clean, standardized data is a must when it comes to gaining insights.

Cross-Channel Analysis: Once you have hit these first two items, it is critical in today’s digital landscape to be able to understand that the majority of your customers will have multiple touchpoints with your brand before they convert. All brands need a mechanism for understanding what is happening across various digital channels.

Now that you have taken the necessary steps to be on all the appropriate platforms available, make sure that you also take the steps to understand where your efforts are most effective. In this paper, we explain the key points that all marketers should consider in their deliverance of cross-channel advertising.

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Read the original blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/cross-channel-advertising-adobe-media-optimizer/

[TanmayMathur]

The Blog Post below is from Pete Kluge, Group Product Marketing Manager, Adobe Media Optimizer

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Adobe Media Optimizer Accelerates Display Advertising with New Cross-Device Capabilities

Today, Adobe continues its innovation in programmatic ad buying by announcing cross device attribution, reporting and targeting capabilities at Adobe Summit. We announced the new Adobe Marketing Cloud Device Co-op and Device Graph Core Service, which will be available to Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Media Optimizer customers. Through its connection with the Co-op, customers of Adobe Media Optimizer (AMO), our programmatic ad buying platform, will be able to track, target and report on campaigns across mobile, tablet and PC.

Industry statistics cite fifty percent of display ads are expected to be transacted programmatically by 2019. Worldwide programmatic display spend is forecast to almost triple from $20B in 2016 to $56B in 2019. Most of the growth is driven by mobile and video.

It’s a multi-device world and digital marketers are adjusting their advertising strategies accordingly. AMO is rolling out a torrent of new features continuing to build on its industry leading display offering.

Cross Device Attribution, Reporting and Targeting

Digital marketing has historically looked at each user and device combination as a “unique visitor” rather than as an individual person using many devices. The Adobe Marketing Cloud Device Co-op will connect devices to people, allowing advertisers using AMO to scale their cross-device campaigns for true people-based marketing.

AMO customers that opt into Adobe’s new Co-op will have a complete picture of the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns. Instead of attributing revenue from customers converting on a single device, an advertiser will be able to track how users interact with their brand across multiple devices and accurately attribute revenue and conversions. Additionally, an advertiser will be able to target those customers throughout their journey as they travel across multiple touchpoints, reaching them with relevant experiences.

 

Growing Video Channel to include Real Time Bidding

Much of the growth in programmatic ad spend will come from video over the next five years. Video is expected to be the primary ad unit by 2020, according to some sources. AMO already connects with Facebook video through the social channel, taking advantage of Facebook’s massive user base of 1.5B and 8B daily video views.

We’re pleased to announce that AMO is now ramping up its video offering by connecting to real-time bidded video inventory on the Google Ad Exchange and other exchanges. The key benefits to our customers will be the ability to:

• Buy and optimize in-stream and in-feed video ads with transparency, efficiency and control
• Target high-value Adobe Marketing Cloud audiences
• Reporting and attribution to understand impact across display, social and search channels

Connecting Analytics & Audience Manager Segments to Dynamic Experiences

AMO dynamic creative optimization (DCO) allows advertisers to reach granular audiences with flexible ad creative that is personalized in real-time to drive user engagement and conversions. It offers a broad range of campaign and audience targeting options to meet a brand’s specific needs and goals with flexible, custom ad layouts, allowing for real-time optimization of creative content and ad elements for all device types.

Newly announced at Summit, AMO DCO is now connecting with Adobe Marketing Cloud audiences. This means an advertiser can now use audience segments from Adobe Analytics, Audience Manager and Adobe Media Optimizer to define and inform a dynamic creative experience.

The audience segment triggers a unique creative theme or layout, and DCO automatically renders the dynamic content with elements like price, product, images, locations and promotional copy.

Adobe continues to Super Charge its Industry Leading Programmatic Platform

Adobe is redefining digital marketing and advertising by connecting its Marketing Cloud audiences to programmatic advertising, and offering a comprehensive buy-side ad stack with the industry’s most advanced cross-channel programmatic ad buying platform. According to Forrester’s Digital Experience Platforms report:“Adobe’s integrated platform leads the market. Adobe has established a platform of best-of-breed technologies that support marketing activities.” (Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2015)

With the new Adobe Marketing Cloud Device Co-op and Device Graph Core Service, we are addressing the needs of agencies and advertisers to prepare them for the forecasted explosive growth in mobile and video programmatic ad spend over the next five years. Adobe is addressing advertiser needs for the management, buying, and delivery of programmatic advertising in a multi-device world by providing a complete picture of the user for targeting, attribution, and reporting across devices.

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Read the original blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/amo-display-video/

[nidhik]

By Nidhi Kapoor, AMO- Senior Consultant, Adobe

Edit: This post has been published as a Knowledge Base Article for Adobe Media Optimizer and can be viewed here 

Bid & Average Position Constraints - Substantial Support in Competitor Strategy.

In a day to day marketer’s life word ‘competitor’ plays an important role. Some part of success for a marketer lies if he/she can steer their marketing efforts through the turbulent marketing environment by doing it better than competitors.

As we all know there is no mantra to be positioned always ahead in marketing efforts or value proposition than competitors but yes there are some smart moves that can be tried to enhance all marketing efforts.

In Search marketing we all know how competitive the industry is. With changes from Google for right hand side ads, it has gone to extreme competition now from bid/CPC to ad position. This in turn contributes to overall conversions efficiency.  In such an environment if some great tool and a feature can help us expedite our search marketing efforts and stay ahead from competitor’s ad position can be very useful.

Average Position on search ads has a good weight in fetching traffic and brand awareness. Maintaining the position is also not that easy. Yes, this is where Adobe Media Optimizer’s (AMO) ‘Bid & Position Constraint’ feature can support in maximizing the efforts.

Case Study

See a case study as an example of performance below where the brand generic search ads were fluctuating from the position 1 and securing the competitive impression share. Though the impression share was higher than competitors, however, as the keywords included brand terms, it was expected to maintain the position 1 with good impressions and outranking share.

To ensure the longer appearance in a day and at ad position 1, daily budget limit was increased as the first step. Despite that the average position was fluctuating throughout the day and competitor’s ads were seen at ad position 1 occasionally.

In such case, a ‘Bid & Position’ constraint feature of AMO was advised to be tested. It is a simplest type of constraint option in AMO which allows to restrict optimizer’s keywords bids to a bid and position range specified.

A test for two weeks was run to see if that helps in maintaining the position ‘1’ and increase in impression share to some extent. Following were the results secured after two weeks compared with previous weeks and helped the case with some improvement in its metrics.

• Impression share increased by 15%.
• Ad’s avg. Position improved by 20%.
• Outranking share improved by 70% from the immediate competitor.
• Impressions decreased by 13% WOW, however, with improved avg. position, overall traffic increased by 97%.

So by setting up the AMO’s bid and position constraint as 1 and assigning the max. bid value to it, helped the case and keywords to maintain their ads’ position during the test period and secured improved results than its competitors.

How did this happen, what are these constraints and how do they help? Let’s see below.

What are Constraints?

Constraints are bid rules that can restricts bid on bid units (keyword + match type) to a specific range or position range to support in maximizing the objective*.

Constraint’s rules are an optional feature AMO provides to support and maximize the objective. It can be applied to bid units associated with label.

What are Labels?

Labels are a group of entities under a common name for the purpose of reporting, management and constraining*.

Any entity such as keywords can have multiple labels. Also, any label can have multiple entities such as Keywords, ad groups, campaigns etc.

How to create a constraint?

1. A Label needs to be created first. To create a label, following steps are to be taken.
2. Create a label or select a pre-existing label and assign to entities.

For e.g. Click on Search            Campaigns           Labels              Create Labels following screen will appear.

3. Once the label is created by executing above steps, go to the entity level such as keywords in search tab and select the keywords by selecting the check box and assign those to the created label and save changes.

4. Once the above step is done, label tab should be visited to see the entities assigned to the label and also to create a constraint further.
5. To configure the constraint:

• Click on the cog beside the label created.

• Define Keyword level conditions. Multiple conditions can be applied for each constraint. These conditions can be evaluated as ‘And’ or ‘OR’.

• Select constraint type from the drop down option and set values if applicable.
  • Bid & Pos. Constraint (It is covered in this article where ‘Min Pos’ ‘Max Pos’ and ‘Min and Max Bid’ were advised efficiently)

• Variable Bid & Pos. Constraint (Create a single constraint that has different min/max bid and/or min/max position constraint values for each keyword associated to the constraint*)
• Context Sensitive Bid (Keywords can be bid to the average CPC of the portfolio, campaign, or ad group it belongs to*)
• Incremental Bidding (Bid keywords incrementally from their current bid to a target bid*)
• Search Engine Minimum Bid (This constraint will use the minimum CPC bids set by the search engines as the optimizer’s minimum bids*)
• Performance constraints (This constraint is based on bid unit’s performance)
  • CPA Target
  • ROI Target
  • Margin Target
• Bid Shift (The Bid Shift constraint allows you to shift bids up or down from the current optimized bid for all constrained keywords*)

• Define run period, outside that optimizer will have full control of bids.
• After configuring the constraint, click on the ‘Save’ button.
• Once the label has been constrained, the label will appear with an icon to show that it is constrained label in the left navigation panel and in the label drop-list.

It is not always guaranteed by setting up the constraints such as in the above case the ‘Bid and Position’ constraint, the ad will appear at position 1 always. This could be of various reasons such as if the daily budget limit is reached then it will be difficult to maintain the constraint positioning for rest of the day. However, by setting up these we are actually prioritizing the rule in AMO and directing technology to action accordingly. 

 *Definition taken from AMO training material from Gauri Bhat.

[TanmayMathur]

The Blog Post below is from Cici DeWaal, Social Advertising Manager at Adobe

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Getting the most from your marketing dollar isn’t as straightforward as it has been in the past. Social media has changed dramatically over the past few years, and marketers have had to quickly learn the art of using social advertising as part of an effective digital strategy.

Why have social platforms evolved? Simple: They need to make money. And most of the big ones—Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, for example—are turning to their communities to secure advertising revenue. Paid social media is a fantastic avenue to reach your desired audience, but if you’re not smart about how you go about it, you could lose ground quickly. New to the pay-to-play space? Try these tips to get started.

Develop The Skill Set For Paid Social
Doing social advertising well on the major platforms requires a basic foundation in ad buying and bidding. Part of your learning strategy can include borrowing skills from other departments within your organization. The search or SEO team likely has experience bidding on different platforms, using handy techniques for setting up paid campaigns on social channels. Audience targeting is another useful skill for serving your social ads to the right audience.

Many of the social networks are beginning to publish their own resources—check out Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. A lot of the learning will start as you begin to test and create your own campaigns. Though each of the networks have slightly different terminology and set up, a lot of the functions are similar.

Learn From the Platforms Themselves.
In the absence of available formal strategies for implementing paid social, the platforms themselves are improving resources for those just starting out. Facebook and Twitter have comprehensive resource centers—and occasionally, helpful training webinars—with information on how to create and manage paid campaigns. Of course, if you spend enough money, many of the platforms will assign your company its own representative. LinkedIn also has a helpful section on marketing solutions for the beginner looking to implement paid features.

How Paid Social Works: What Can You Expect?
Getting started with social advertising is a relatively simple process. Navigate to the ads dashboard and login; this is where you set up your account and create and fund your campaign. You usually begin by defining your target audience and then creating content to be promoted. Within each platform, you have the ability to manage your campaign—whether checking on live content, promoting content more aggressively, or creating new content altogether.

To make things easier, Twitter has six or seven predesigned campaign types that can be helpful if you’re just starting out. Twitter designed these to help optimize your campaign whether you want to gain more video views or increase engagement. While it can be tempting to set and forget, staying actively involved in your campaign is good practice.

When funding a specific campaign, or “bidding,” be sure to set a maximum campaign budget. A defined maximum amount will automatically stop the platform from spending when it reaches your bid amount. Setting an upper threshold will save the campaign from going over budget if you forget to turn it off or pause it. Lowering your bid can also help set the pace. Bid high to start and then drop the threshold as you see it beginning to gain traction.

Build Paid Social Skills In-House.
Do companies need dedicated teams of paid social media experts to be successful? The way the industry is going, yes! Ultimately, the goal of your campaign will depend on what you want your audience to do—read an article, download a whitepaper, watch an empowering video, or something else altogether. However, it’s helpful to have a group of people within your social team—even if it’s an extension of your organic team—to handle social media advertising. They know which content performs well, and building this skill set in-house, rather than with a third party, creates more value within your social team.

Put It all Together!
As social becomes even more pay-to-play for brands, more challenges emerge. Securing a budget large enough to make a meaningful investment in paid social is still an uphill battle for many social marketers. The techniques involved in paid social aren’t excessively complex, but gaining that knowledge is more difficult, as the industry still lacks a single go-to resource to gain the necessary skills. On the plus side, paid social is a convenient and proven way to reach your desired audience. Unlike many traditional marketing campaigns, social media advertising makes it possible to see exactly where the money went—and what value it drove! 

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Read the original blog post at - http://www.cmo.com/opinion/articles/2016/8/11/a-beginners-guide-to-social-media-advertising.html#gs....