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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!

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

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DMP 101: Basics for Brands, Publishers and Agencies

The Internet is a very different place today from what it was just a couple of years ago. The explosion of personal devices, especially mobile ones, now has people using up to six screens every day. And, although Internet users remain diverse, they are quickly becoming uniform in their desires for seamless, amazing experiences that connect them with your brand. If they don’t receive personalized, contextually relevant, real-time experiences, they are more than happy to visit your competitor.

During one of this year’s Summit sessions, participants learned the most common data-management platform (DMP) jargon as well as the differences between a true DMP and basic segmentation features, and they looked at use cases and strategies for deploying a DMP. Following are some highlights from that session.

Too Much Data From too Many Sources
To provide the experiences that today’s customers expect, organizations are faced with collecting lots of data from different sources so they can get to know their audience at every touchpoint and on every channel. Sources and formats of data from Web-analytics providers and customer-relationship management (CRM), point of sale (POS), and shopping-cart systems have to come together so you can figure out how to properly target a specific audience segment. The prime goal for everyone is to understand the customer journey to gain a 360º view of customers’ interactions and behaviors. Once you figure that out and define audience segments, pushing a campaign out to different platforms and responding to the results can be a nightmare if your processes are spread out among different providers and formats.

Putting all this data collection, segment generation, and campaign implementation together is confounding marketers today. Those who attempt to do all this manually by using a variety of siloed systems are finding the task far from optimum — and sometimes nearly impossible!

It is in response to this situation that the DMP has come into its own.

Forrester defines a DMP as: “A unified technology platform that intakes disparate first-, second-, and third-party data sets, provides normalization and segmentation on that data, and allows a user to push the resulting segmentation into live interactive channel environments.” It is the backbone of the modern-day marketing challenges we all face in a world where information is coming at everyone from every direction.

Most marketers are dealing with more data and data types than they know what to do with. It can be challenging to interpret first-party data collected by your company (such as CRM, transactional, and call-center data), second-party data you receive from partners (such as loyalty-program and spend-pattern data), and third-party data you might purchase (such as geographic and demographic data) that is spread out over different systems.

An integrated, uniform data-management platform can combine all these pieces to help you design the experiences your customers have come to expect. Here’s why you need a DMP:

  • To Avoid Mixed Messaging: Fragmented data sources, multiple databases, and different data formats are probably resulting in fragmented messages since the people managing each of those data sources may have different ideas about how things are defined. This is likely resulting in disjointed experiences for your customers on your different channels.
  • To Cater to Unique Audiences: Each of your systems has its own audience that should be managed individually. The audiences of your analytics platform, your testing and operations efforts, your multichannel campaigns, and your media and ad-buying efforts all have their own needs and interests.
  • To Deliver True Relevance: You need to deliver contextually relevant messages and experiences. If your content is irrelevant, customers cannot relate, and you will lose customers.
  • To Eliminate Privacy Concerns: You need robust and consistent security, eliminating the privacy concerns you face when your data is stored in different systems, servers, and databases.
  • To Automatically Create New Audiences: You need to have the ability to say, “I need more people like that!” and automatically build a new audience based on desired criteria.

Adobe is uniquely positioned to serve its clients’ data-management platform needs because it has a single, unified platform based on world-class security standards with no outsourced capabilities. The customer experience is assured to be consistent across all channels, and all digital assets are coordinated with ongoing marketing campaigns. Whatever DMP you choose, make sure it can give you the 360º customer view you need.

It is very challenging to manually interpret fragmented data to gain a 360º view of your customers and understand their journeys with your brand. For example, without an automated DMP, you will have a very difficult — if not impossible — time determining:

  • When spouses are using a shared home computer (cookies will not help you here),
  • When potential customers are visiting a partner site on their smartphones,
  • When users have logged off and started browsing,
  • When customers visit your brick-and-mortar store.

An integrated DMP will allow you to:

  • Understand the difference between customers and prospects,
  • Recognize your customer on every platform — a 360º view,
  • Become smarter about your customer-acquisition efforts,
  • Develop a robust retention strategy,
  • Suppress campaigns when needed (such as when a customer buys something and should be taken off the prospect list and put on a support list), and
  • Create brand awareness around customers’ wants and needs.

Choosing a DMP as part of your organization’s digital transformation can seem daunting, but there is tons of experience out there to help you navigate what can be an opportunity to increase your conversion rates by providing the dynamic experiences customers are demanding.

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Read the original blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/s208-dmp-101-basics-brands-publishers-agenci...

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

 

Smart Bulk Actions feature of AMO Social

 

In this article, we will discuss about using the bulk actions feature of AMO Social mainly cloning of Facebook ad sets using which you can create or clone 1000s of Facebook campaigns, ad sets and ads with just click of a few buttons and the Formulaic bid changes.

You can create new Facebook ad sets by cloning the settings from existing ad sets. You can optionally include clones of all of the ads in the existing ad sets, and either apply all of the existing labels to the ad sets/ads or change the labels.

There are 2 options to either clone the ad sets in the same campaign or create a new one. The new ad sets are created in the same campaigns as the existing ad sets, but you have the option to create new campaigns for them. When you clone the selected ads, they have the same settings as the existing ads, including the same ad group names, but naming conventions can further be tailored.

Clone Ad Set/Campaign

  1. From the main menu, click Social > Campaign Management > Facebook, and then click the Ad Sets tab.
  2. Filter out the list to include specific ad sets by selecting the check box that you want to clone.
     
  3. As shown in the below toolbar screenshot, click Bulk Actions.

  1. A Bulk Edit window will open, where you can choose the following:
    1. Clone Ad Set/Campaign
    2. Create new campaigns
    3. Formulaic bid change
    4. Budgets
    5. Change status
    6. Labels
  2. Follow these steps to clone or create new campaigns
    1. Specify whether or not to change the status of the source campaigns:  Do not changePauseDelete, or Activate.
    2. Specify the status of the new campaigns:  PauseDelete, or Activate.
    3. Specify the naming conventions for the new campaigns:
      1. Append original name with “-clone” — To specify the naming conventions to be used for new or cloned ad sets/ ads.
      2. Append “Time/date stamp” — To append the time and date at which the new campaigns are created.

 

  1. Creating or Choosing Labels
    1. Add new label(s) - To create new labels to assign to the new ad sets, select the check box and then enter the new label names.

 

  1. Add existing label(s) - To assign existing labels to the new ad sets, select the check box and then enter the existing label names.

 

  1. Inherit labels from source adsets/campaigns - To remove inherited labels from the new ad sets, select the check box next to Remove label(s) and then enter the inherited label names to remove.

 

  1. Preview or apply the changes
    1. To immediately post the new ad sets and ads to Facebook, click apply.
    2. If there will be any errors, they are visible under Social > Campaign Management by moving the slider on the upper right from Live to Staged.
    3. To just preview and not to post the changes to Facebook, please click Preview. The staged view will be displayed.
    4. When you are previewing unposted ad sets in the staged environment you can also do any of the following changes:

i.Edit the ad set settings orad settingsif necessary.

ii.Post thead setsoradsto the social network.

  1. If any ad sets or ads under them cannot be posted, the" Post Status" column for that ad set or ad indicates the error.

 

 

 

Formulaic bid changes

 

Follow the same first 4 steps which we discussed above to access this option and then follow the below steps:

 

  1. The currency, optimization goal and billing event will automatically be displayed for the selected ad sets.
  2. Choose from the below 2 options

 

 

  1. Enable Facebook Auto Bid – This option allows Facebook to set bids automatically. With this option, the ad set budget must be at least 5 USD, and you won’t enter a bid. Facebook will bid as low as possible while making sure to spend the ad set budget in the specified time.
  2. Action - If you will uncheck the auto bid functionality, action feature will be enabled and it can be used to increase or decrease the current bids for the selected ad sets by x% or x$ as defined by the user. Furthermore, you can also set threshold levels for bids or set all ad sets bids to a particular amount.

 

 

Using bulk actions feature of AMO not only saves time when we have to create and push thousands of ad sets and ads, with settings which are similar or different, but also helps us in automating naming conventions to use for our campaigns, changing or adding new labels, updating the status of the campaigns and automating bids for thousands of ad sets and ads in one go, which otherwise would have taken 3 or 4x extra time in any other user interface such as Power Editor.

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Use of dynamic parameters in AMO Social

 

Dynamic parameters are the best way to track and automate when building ads in AMO social. Utilizing the dynamic parameter functionality, you can give automatic naming conventions to all the ad sets and ads which you are creating picking/from the assets already uploaded in the AMO.

For example, 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 both
  • 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

 

   

Stage 1: AMO Bulk Ad Creation Workflow

 

Following are the dynamic parameters which are available in AMO for use in ad sets and ads names:

  • {ef_adtype}
  • {ef_agemax}
  • {ef_agemin}
  • {ef_country}
  • {ef_date}
  • {ef_time}
  • {ef_fbcampaign}
  • {ef_gender}
  • {ef_image}
  • {ef_placement}
  • {ef_label}
  • {ef_region}

 

Stage 2: After using this functionality for campaign creation following are the results as seen in Facebook Power Editor:

We can clearly see that AMO automatically appends related naming conventions for use by picking it from assets defined earlier in stage 1. In the above example we chose dynamic parameters – {ef_gender}, {ef_agemin} and {ef_agemax} for ad set, and {ef_image} for ads in the below screenshot.

 

 

 

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.

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

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15 Years of Defining Programmatic

Programmatic ad buying growth continues to explode. The online advertising ecosystem can be complex to navigate but for those that have embraced it programmatic simplifies the online ad buying, management and optimization process.

Looking back on how the industry has evolved, offline direct marketing tactics and principles have been applied to online ad technology and have now come full circle connecting the offline and online worlds. Because of these changes advertisers can now track and target audiences, and measure performance results across channels on and offline.

How did we get here? Looking back 15 years.

For today’s internet based businesses, online advertising channels like search and display are top channels used to acquire new customers. However, that wasn’t the case for us back in 2000. During the dot-com boom and crash, I was managing direct marketing programs for new customer acquisition at the “first online grocer,” HomeGrocer.com (Amazon was an investor, and it was later acquired by Webvan). We tested various direct marketing channels at HomeGrocer.com. Interestingly, we found that direct mail was the most efficient channel for us to profitably acquire new customers at scale (~$20M annual spend).

A lot has changed since the peak of the internet bubble in 2000 for advertisers. Here is a snap shot of today’s common direct marketing channels as they were used 15 years ago.

  • Display – The first click-based banners were sold on HotWired.com in 1994. In 2000, display buying was done primarily through direct placements. Yahoo, AOL and MSN were the big portals around. Advertising.com, the ad network, came around in 2000 and was acquired by AOL in 2004.
  • Search – Overture and Google were just getting started in 2000 with the auction-based, pay per click (PPC) model. Google launched AdWords in 2000, began offering PPC in 2002 and went public in 2004.
  • Social – Facebook didn’t exist in 2000 and was founded in 2004 the same year they ran their first ads.
  • Email – The perception on email marketing was low due to poor performance and offshore spammers clogging up inboxes with non-relevant content. The Can SPAM Act of 2003 helped to legitimize email marketing with clear opt-in and opt-out requirements.
  • Direct Mail – Direct mail was a scalable and effective direct marketing channel. From magazine subscriber files to those compiled from warranty registration cards and phone books, advertisers had access to hundreds of marketing lists to test for performance (and all appended with demographic data). Database marketing was popular and allowed an advertiser to efficiently manage their prospect lists and direct mail communications.

With the growth of the internet and access to more audience data, the industry has progressed. Search, social and display channels have had tremendous growth and are now primary direct marketing channels for many businesses. Today we have a lot more options for online advertising.

Advertising 15 years later

Advertisers now have access to massive amounts of audience data, everything from online site activity and web analytics data to offline customer data, and 3rd party data. Offline CRM data and email marketing data can now be linked to programmatic ad buying platforms. Audience targeting can be done more efficiently now than ever before.

Today advertisers have access to advanced advertising technology platforms to help them manage and optimize their online advertising campaigns. Everything from search bid optimization, display ad buying and audience management, to site optimization and marketing automation tools.

All channels have shifted to programmatic (or automated) ad buying with a focus on audience-based buying. In display, audiences can be reached at the impression level through real-time bidding. Facebook enables social advertisers to reach custom, website and search retargeting audiences. In search, advertiser can now target audiences for their campaigns via RLSAs (Retargeting Lists for Search Ads).

Display Advertising 15 Years Later

For display advertising channels specifically, the industry has changed completely.

Ad exchanges revolutionized the industry. The ad exchange allows a publisher to sell their ad inventory in an auction environment, and an advertiser to bid on ad inventory in real time. The auction determines the fair price for the user impression. This process is similar to the stock market with buyers and sellers, but with display ads instead of stock.

Demand side platforms (DSPs) permit advertisers to plug into the ad exchanges to bid in real time on their key audiences at the user impression level. The DSP optimizes for the advertisers performance objective. The advertiser can bid what they believe to be the right price for each impression based on the available data they have about that user.

Data management platforms (DMPs) enable advertisers to consolidate audience data from various sources, identify and segment high value audiences, and activate those audiences for cross channel marketing on external ad targeting platforms like DSPs and site optimization platforms.

Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) allow advertisers to reach granular audiences with flexible ad creative that is personalized in real time to drive user engagement, conversions and integrated experiences.

Everything is in real time (or close to it). The entire real-time bidding process takes less than 100 milliseconds. When a user visits a website, before the ad appears, an ad call goes to an ad exchange which sends bid requests to participating demand-side platforms (DSPs). The DSPs in play then evaluate available data on that impression (audience, category, time of day, geo device, etc.) and send back bids based on what they know about the user and the likelihood they’ll convert for the advertiser. The ad exchange holds the auction and the highest bid wins. The ad served on the website was the highest bidder of the real time advertising auction. All this takes place in less than 100 milliseconds.

Real-Time Bidding Process

PK RTBAre we coming full circle between the offline and online advertising worlds?

Many traditional offline direct marketing tactics and principles are still in practice and have been applied to ad tech and the online world.

In 2000, marketing databases were popular with offline direct marketers. These databases allowed for consolidation of various audiences down to individual user profiles, and expanding of audiences using 3rd party demographic, business attribute data and look-alike models. It gave the advertiser deeper insights into their audiences, enabling them to identify high value audience segments and deliver them to vendors for direct marketing channels. Does that sound like a Data Management Platform in the online world?

Direct mail letters were laser personalized with creative content (offer, message) based on the audience segment.Sound like Dynamic Creative in the online world?

We have come full circle and connected the offline and online advertising worlds by allowing advertisers to take their offline data (CRM, call center, POS), consolidate it with their online data (site visitors, web analytics) and use it for online targeting of ads.

Today marketers can meet their objectives more efficiently with Programmatic

Manual processes have given way to automated buying. CPM based selling models have moved to transparent pricing models. The massive amounts of online and offline data that is available to an advertiser can now be easily harnessed for ad targeting and optimization. Programmatic enables advertisers to buy more efficiently, reach more granular high value audiences, and as a result drive better performance.

Here is how Adobe views programmatic and some key characteristics of programmatic today.

Automated buying of ads across channels and devices

Many think of display advertising and real-time bidding (RTB) when they think of programmatic but it includes the automated buying of ads on any digital channel including Search and Social.

Data driven

Data powers programmatic ad buying. To gain the most from programmatic, it’s all about using and applying data. This includes online and offline data, and 1st, 2nd and 3rd party data. Data powers the following benefits of programmatic:

  • Enables an advertiser to build and reach high value audiences
  • Fuels performance optimizations
  • Powers personalized dynamic experiences
  • Drives automated ad buying decisions across channels and devices

Transparency

Advertisers have financial transparency into media costs by ad inventory source, and visibility into where their ads are running.

Advertising has come a long way

Today’s advertisers have access to integrated buy side tools – from audience management (DMP) to media buying (DSP) to dynamic creative optimization (DCO) – to help them most efficiently meet their online advertising objectives.

Programmatic ad spend continues to grow at a fast pace. According to IDC, global programmatic display spend will grow from $10B in 2014 to $70B in 2019. 60% of display transactions will be programmatic by 2019.

For advertisers that are embracing programmatic ad buying and leveraging their businesses audience data, the result is more efficient ad buying, better audience targeting across channels, and better performance results.

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Read the original blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/15-years-of-defining-programmatic/

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By Ritika Mahajan, AMO - Consultant, Adobe

AMO : The Digital Marketer

What Does Digital Marketer Do? Often we come across this question, a simple answer to the question is

“A Digital Marketer prepares a plan based on the business objective, execute it and then analyze the Performance”.

However, it’s definitely easier said than done, the vicious circle of digital marketing involves a lot more. Some key things that a digital marketer do are:

  • Understand the business objective
  • Define KPI’s to measure objective’s success
  • Strategize to achieve the objective
  • Identify the prevailing market competition
  • Allocate appropriate funding to each channel
  • Create campaigns and Track performance in terms of defined KPI’s
  • Analyze each channel in order to identify what worked and what didn’t etc.

 

It sounded like a lot to me until I learnt Adobe Media Optimizer. AMO does a lot of these things automatically and efficiently letting the marketer’s look after their business strategies.

The Efficient AMO Technology have made life easy for Marketer’s. Marketer’s just need to define the objective and KPI to measure its success. SEM advertising has always been the most important channel for marketers. AMO Technology looks after all the activities under the SEM umbrella right from Budget Allocation to Bidding, tracking campaign performance to analysis. Everything available with the one stop shop of AMO.

Media Optimizer automates and optimizes bid management for ad campaigns across search, display, and social media channels within the boundaries of an advertiser's business objectives, metrics, budget, and other business constraints. The Technology constantly monitors an advertiser's keywords and ads, dynamically adjusting bids and positions as the marketplace changes.

At Every Stage of Digital Marketing Circle AMO becomes a handy tool for Marketers to get things done quickly and in most efficient manner. For instance, Once Marketers have decided on the total SEM Budget, AMO Can help them divide this budget within the three channels through one of its feature called Spend Recommendations tool.

The Spend Recommendation Tool helps you to identify the optimal spend distribution across optimized and active portfolios with the same objective and currency in order to maximize revenue for the portfolio set.

In Digital Advertising space as marketers we would always want to achieve maximum revenue for each penny being spent. This is the principal of AMO Technology known as Portfolio based Approach through which AMO automatically allocates budget to the best performing entity.

 

Portfolio Based Approach: Portfolio theory uses mathematical models to maximize the return on a portfolio by weighing the risk and return for each asset across numerous variables. The Media Optimizer mathematical algorithms are dynamic, automatically adapt to changing marketplace conditions to ensure optimal performance even in times of high uncertainty and volatility. As a result, Media Optimizer is able to efficiently manage large marketing campaigns with millions of keywords and ads, not only streamlining and automating the bid process but also delivering significantly better ROI.

 

AMO also realizes that the Marketers should be kept informed about the campaign performances so as to help them in instant decision making. This is easily done through the Feature of Spreadsheet feed in AMO, once the SSF is setup on AMO it can be scheduled to land into our email box at regular intervals.

Spreadsheet Feed: Spreadsheet feeds provide daily performance data for all basic reports in a custom spreadsheet format. Media Optimizer automatically refreshes each spreadsheet with new raw data that is aggregated daily. The raw data will populate any columns and graphs you've included in the spreadsheet template.

 

AMO also helps marketers in analysis of their accounts through its Advertising Insights feature. This Feature provides different analysis such as Match Type analysis, setting audits etc. in form PowerPoint presentation or report that are easy to read and understand. These reports are in readily sharable format and can be used via marketing team to decide actions.

Advertising Insights: Advertising Insights present visual, actionable data about your optimized and active portfolios that contain search campaigns. Each insight is generated on demand, and the output is either a Microsoft PowerPoint file or an Excel spreadsheet that you can download. You can delete generated instances of insights.

AMO Platform thus helps the marketer to make easy, fast and reliable decisions in the most efficient manner. It is a handy tool for Marketers to do their daily chores easily and saves them time to do a lot more things that are beneficial for the business.

 

*Material taken from AMO Help Section.

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The Blog Post below is from Maria Stalz, Senior Manager of Social Media Analytics at Adobe

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Top 3 Reasons to Take a Second Look at Your “Vanity” Metrics

Measuring social media’s impact on your business is critical. Yet, identifying the right metrics and tracking and analyzing social media’s impact can be challenging.

In the early days of social media, when measurement was new and available data was sparse, most businesses relied exclusively on so-called “vanity metrics” to quantify success. Classical engagement — the number of “followers” or “likes” that social media channels collected — was the primary metric considered. Fast-forward a few years, and strategists had quickly realized they needed more informative metrics connected to meaningful key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflected their business objectives. They needed to determine social media’s impact on the bottom line to demonstrate social ROI.

Today, vanity metrics have a bad rap because they do not have a direct tie to revenue. Traditional vanity metrics include Facebook “likes,” Twitter “followers,” and “page views” or “unique visitors” for blog posts. While obsessing over the number of Facebook likes you collect won’t necessarily win over a buying customer, vanity metrics do have their place when used alongside other metrics.

Following are some thoughts regarding the role of vanity metrics and how aligning traditional engagement metrics with more strategic business metrics can provide the insight you need to make informed decisions about your social media strategy.

Aligning Social Media Vanity Metrics with Business Metrics — and Achieving Results
Successful social media measurement focuses on the KPIs that are linked to business objectives, with vanity metrics playing a role in rounding out the big picture. Is Facebook growing at the same rate as Twitter? How is the community responding to different strategies and different types of content? Insights from vanity metrics can help identify whether organic strategy is working or it’s time to implement a larger paid strategy across channels. Bottom line? Understand how to use them to complement KPIs, and you’ll know what’s moving the needle for you.

How to Make Vanity Metrics Work for You
Let’s look at a few metrics and the insights they can provide.

1. Focusing on Followers
You spend a lot of time and money building up your following across the multitude of channels and networks. If you monitor your follower growth over time, it will be invaluable in helping you understand what is working when it comes to community growth.

Is your organic growth picking up or slowing down? Many factors influence growth rates, but by tracking follower growth, you can pick up on revealing patterns in your data. Does certain content cause sudden drops in your number of followers? Are you reaching the right people? Digging deeper into the demographics of your followers (on platforms through which that data is available) will allow you to determine whether your followers really represent your target demographic.

Does your brand have too many accounts? Comparing growth rates on multiple accounts may allow you to assess less-active or compelling accounts and make decisions about whether account consolidations or additional paid strategies would be beneficial. It’s also important to look at other metrics to evaluate whether stagnant accounts are still performing well in other aspects such as engagement or click-through rates, traffic, and conversions.

2. Evaluating “Likes”
Analyzing customer engagement can be one of the most important ways to gain insights into your content strategy as well as your followers. Of course, all those shares, video views, and comments should yield a positive ROI for your business; however, if you know what type of content works best for your audience on each channel, it will help determine your investment strategy.

Do people “like” your content but not share it? Not all interactions are created equal, and some are definitely more valuable than others. Categorizing your content by media type, subject matter, or objective will allow you to look at which category drives the most bang for your buck.

Do your videos receive a lot of views but low completion rates? Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn now auto-play videos by default. This makes it rather challenging to analyze video performance. One way to look at it is through completion rates rather than total video views. Which videos compel your followers to stop scrolling and watch long enough to reach that all-important call to action and link?

Is there a correlation between the drop in followers and the content you published that day? Sudden follower drop can be as insightful as follower growth. Understanding the correlation between your followers who are bailing out and the particular types of content you are showing or your posting frequency can help to ensure you keep those fans you worked so hard to attract.

3. Analyzing Page Views
On the surface, page views — counting the number of “hits” your webpage or blog gets — is another vanity metric. No, by itself, it will not reveal how your content on the page is moving the needle for your business. For insight like that, you will need to explore not only what happens further down the conversion path, but also the contribution of the page view to the desirable user behavior on the site. However, using page views alongside smart segmentation and a few additional metrics will help you assess the quality of the page’s content.

Does some of your blog content attract ongoing traffic while traffic to other pages tapers off quickly? This could either indicate that some pages are better optimized for search engines (look at your persistent traffic sources!), or that some content is compelling enough for people to continue sharing (check out your social shares on various platforms). It could also indicate that some content types are more relevant to your audience, so grouping your pages by content type or topic, and then assessing average lifespan for each, may give you insight into what you should focus on in the future.

How many of your page views were “bounces?” If a visitor landed on the page but did not interact with any content or visit a different page, he or she may have found the page content irrelevant or not known how to navigate to content that may be of interest. Segmenting your bouncers according to devices used may shed some light on whether your pages perform well on mobile devices or have loading issues on some browsers.

What is the best referring channel? Do people who are visiting from different sources behave differently? Perhaps one source yields more bounces than average, and a different source drives more conversions down the line. Segmenting traffic can help you fine-tune content that is targeted toward different customer segments and identify where your target customers roam free.

A Multi-Tiered Approach to Measurement
We know there’s value in social media marketing, but being equipped with the right tools to demonstrate how and why has never been easy. With only 15 percent of today’s marketers able to demonstrate the quantitative impact social media has on their businesses, it’s clear that measuring what matters is tough. Business metrics tied to objectives may be seen as more strategic, and they are certainly instrumental in showing how social media is creating value overall. But, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet — vanity metrics are useful for uncovering the reasons behind trends. And, when used in conjunction with business-oriented metrics, they can offer powerful insights into the details necessary for fine-tuning larger strategies at a tactical level.

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Read the original Blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/really-measuring-matters-social-media/

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The Blog Post below is from Kyle Morehouse, Sr. Solutions Consultant, Audience Manager

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Increase Ad ROI With Audience Suppression

Perhaps one of the most critical techniques for building a brand through advertising is audience suppression. Audience suppression involves removing specific people or groups from an advertising campaign based on whether they make conversions.

For example, if you are advertising a product and a customer purchases it, it would be great to know so you don’t spend money continuing to advertise that product to him. You’ll want to remove him from the product campaign and, perhaps, add him to a different campaign instead that advertises complementary products or value-added services for the item he’s already purchased.

It’s important to consider how it may affect your brand if you continuously present customers with ads for things they are no longer in the market for. Talking about products that have already been purchased not only reveals to your customer that you are trying to personalize your marketing — but more importantly, that you are not succeeding in your effort. Thus, your customer becomes annoyed with needless ads and receives a negative perception of your brand.

Being unable to suppress users also results in precious advertising dollars being wasted. If you’re spending money on impressions and opportunities to continually retarget an already-converted user, all those impressions are being wasted. Being able to prevent those recurring ads from reaching that user can drastically improve your ROI because, now, you can use that ad dollar in a more effective way.

Suppression Challenges
As important as audience suppression is, it’s not perfect. Following are some ways in which your efforts may be foiled as well as how you can overcome those challenges.

1. Cookie-Based Targeting
Cookies typically alert you to retarget ads to people who leave your site before making a purchase. Sometimes, however, people clear their cookie histories, implement blocking software that prevents this type of advertising, or simply use a different browser. Cookies tend to have short shelf lives, and that can prevent you from knowing the result of your customer’s journey. Further, when customers do make a purchase, you may not know and could unnecessarily continue to retarget them with your campaign.

2. Un-Segmentation
Let’s look at another scenario. Let’s say, a customer doesn’t make an immediate purchase, and retargeted ads are initiated. Then, after further consideration, the customer ultimately makes a purchase. However, now, the retargeting has already been configured, and the marketer doesn’t have logic in place to stop the targeting platforms. The condition that causes users to exit specific audience segments is called un-segmentation — and many companies, nowadays, don’t do it very well. The key here is to be able to make real-time calls to say, “The purchase has been made. Stop targeting this campaign.”

3. Offline Conversions
Another issue is that many conversions happen offline; people are known to walk into physical stores and buy things. In those cases, a data-management platform (DMP) can help you incorporate the offline retail data to make a suppression call — even if those purchases didn’t happen on your website.

Suppression Techniques and Processes
In addition to overcoming challenges, there are a few proactive practices you can adopt to improve your audience-suppression processes.

1. Use Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
Many advanced businesses are using APIs to conduct suppression in real time, which eliminates the need to drop a file and wait for it to process. Daily processing might take 24–48 hours to notify the DMP to say, “This person has purchased that product; please stop marketing to her.”

2. Suppress Audiences Across Devices.
A good process to understand regarding audience suppression is how to do it across multiple devices. When campaigns and retargeting efforts are based on cookies or device IDs, the ad is based on the device and not really the person who might be using it, resulting in different experiences for the user on different devices.

Let’s say we have reason to stop advertising to a specific consumer. Without being able to tie multiple devices to that user, we may end up retargeting her anyway because she is on a different device. Another issue could be that we’re running two campaigns simultaneously, resulting in a user receiving different offers for the same product on different devices.

However, if we can understand the device graph and how devices are connected to people, we can target much better and coordinate offers and messaging much more accurately. We can also suppress much more effectively because we’re not basing it on a single cookie that exists in a device.

3. Know When Not to Retarget.
There may be scenarios in which you don’t want to retarget ads to a customer. One example would be retargeting ads for a hotel visit because a person stayed in that hotel previously. If the customer is a business traveler, she may return to that city soon and want to stay there again. However, if the hotel was classified as vacation travel, the customer typically won’t be booking that hotel again for a while, making retargeting an inefficient use of ad dollars.

Different products have different lifespans and are typically purchased in a variety of intervals. For instance, I might buy a new car once every five years or switch my cellphone plan once every two years. For products like these, suppression is based on the frequency of those types of sales and the likelihood that person would buy the product again.

Use Audience Suppression to Improve Ad ROI.
Audience suppression is a valuable advertising tool that can yield impressive ROI while reducing media spend. By understanding some of the potential challenges to implementation and utilizing smart processes regarding who you retarget and how, audience suppression can be easily implemented and managed to boost your advertising strategy and minimize wasted ad dollars.

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Read the full blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/increase-ad-roi-audience-suppression/

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The Blog Post below is from Tim Wadell, Director of Product Marketing for Advertising solutions

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The Programmatic Revolution — How Technology Is Transforming Marketing

“Change is neither good nor bad. It simply is.” That’s what Don Draper says in the third season of the TV series Mad Men. The fictional creative director of an advertising firm in New York could have been speaking about any number of seismic shifts in his industry. And yet, if he’d known the extent of the upheaval caused by the technology boom of the early 21st century, there’s a good chance he wouldn’t have sounded so nonchalant.

Could Mr. Draper have ever imagined a machine that makes millions of personalized ads based on where people shop, what cars they drive, or which cities they live in? Probably not. After all, he worked in an era when advertisers negotiated deals on cocktail napkins. The thought of automated advertising (also known as programmatic advertising) — in which social, search, and display ads are bought and sold through machines — was still a long way off.

Technology is transforming traditional marketing, and programmatic advertising is leading the way. With programmatic, the computer does what it does best, and so do you. So, what are the benefits that marketers stand to gain? Who is doing it well? And, is there a downside?

Managing the Campaign-Buying Process Manually Is Becoming Less Acceptable.
Advertising to targeted audiences is nothing new. But, the depth to which marketers can identify highly specific groups is. As the number of variables and data sources intensify, it’s becoming less reasonable for brands to manage the ad-buying process manually. Consumers access brands across multiple devices, screens, and channels; and with a wider range of inventory and ad choices, personalization at scale requires an algorithmic, data-driven approach. Competitive markets require real-time optimization, and the future of ad-buying will, inevitably, be automated.

The Role of Marketers Is Changing.
As digital advertising matures, the move toward programmatic makes sense. There simply isn’t enough time for marketers to shake hands and clink glasses with each potential partner — millions of publishers offer access to highly targeted, high-value audiences. Add to that the fact that consumers interact with multiple channels en route to making purchases, and it’s next to impossible to imagine not heading toward a digital marketplace.

Creative is still king. However, assets are more specialized, and delivering targeted, custom messages to granular audiences based on recent interests in real time is the new norm. The key is to discover an amazing algorithmic strategy — optimizing your system to deliver the best results and then capitalizing on the patterns, trends, and opportunities that emerge.

Programmatic Advertising — The Good, the Bad, and Those Who Are Doing It
Entrusting campaigns to an automated process can be tough and may even require reengineering marketing teams. In programmatic campaigns, machines buy and sell ads, and success depends on the quality of the strategy and data — the creative that is served to the customer. There’s certain to be a learning curve in terms of gathering and analyzing the data needed to power an effective programmatic system. And, of course, it won’t be easy to fight a negative perception spurred by poor transparency, as marketers struggle to see exactly what the machines are purchasing or to view transaction details.

Nevertheless, despite its drawbacks, programmatic marketing enables greater precision as well as more time to be precise. Understanding customers ensures relevant and consistent experiences. Done well, programmatic offers a granular view and a fast, clear picture of consumer behavior, allowing businesses to better anticipate the appeal of their messages with different audiences and resulting in better performance.

Brands that successfully use programmatic are seeing exceptional results across a wide range of quality inventory, channels, and devices.

Chegg
Textbook-rental company, Chegg, used programmatic buying to perform extensive audience testing so they could compare the different types of students. The company’s data-management platform optimizes around groups that are responsive to various campaigns, taking advantage of one of programmatic’s chief selling points — the ability to target highly specific audiences. The result was a new understanding of Chegg’s most valuable audiences. With a 22 percent reduction in cost per acquisition and a 100 percent increase in lifetime value per customer, Chegg’s decision to automate enabled them to reach a higher-value audience at a lower cost.

Redbox
Insight into the best-performing audiences isn’t the only benefit from a programmatic strategy. Redbox used programmatic to learn about potential new customers and second- and third-party data to reach new audience segments. Redbox monitored the behaviors of existing customers and then used that data to identify new audiences with similar traits and predict messaging that would resonate with these groups, resulting in a 300 percent increase in return on campaign-ad spend.

In Sum
A programmatic revolution is underway. Research predicts that, by 2019, global programmatic-ad spend will reach $37 billion — accounting for half of all display and video expenditures — and it’s easy to see why. Programmatic delivers:

  • Clearer Data — Simplifying the process of gathering and unifying customer data, programmatic is a very useful tool for marketers. Fed through a powerful analytics engine, an exceptional customer view becomes reality and sets the table for smarter planning and execution.
  • More Strategic Planning and Analysis — Automation empowers advertisers. A cross-channel programmatic solution can help gauge campaign performance for planning and capitalizing at scale.
  • Smarter Decision-Making Capability — In a unified, cross-channel programmatic world, decision-making is informed by not only more data, but also a broader context. Decisions can be made at speed, at scale, and with confidence.

This is good news for marketers. With fewer rule-based tasks, there’s more time to devote to higher-level skills that determine a campaign’s success or failure: targeting, testing, and analyzing audience segments and campaign performance. Clearer data, easier analysis, and smarter decision-making mean marketers can do their jobs better. As the reach and influence of programmatic expands, advertisers everywhere will be compelled to adapt. Those who don’t will find themselves working harder than ever before to process orders of increasing complexity and specificity.

To learn more about The Programmatic Revolution, check out this whitepaper.

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Read the full blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/programmatic-revolution-technology-transforming...

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The Blog Post below is from Asa Whillock, Principal Product Manager for Adobe Marketing Cloud

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Devices don’t buy products; people do

As the number of gadgets in each household proliferates, contributor Asa Whillock discusses the benefits of marketing to people rather than devices.

The rise in the number of devices used by individuals has created new challenges — as well as opportunities — for marketers wanting to target their audiences consistently. A typical household utilizes more than seven different devices, and the average person within that household uses about half of them.

As a marketer, you want to have compelling, consistent and continuous conversations with your consumers. Perhaps your consumers have registered for your site from both their phones and their laptops, providing you with added insight into who those individuals are. However, if companies track, let’s say, 10 percent of their interactions with consumers this way, that means that nine out of 10 times, they aren’t communicating with them in a seamless way.

Today, there are two approaches to addressing this — one of which is the Google and Facebook approach. Using this method, we can say that we saw a Google or Facebook login on three different devices, and therefore, reasonably assume that all three of those devices belong to the same person, thereby increasing our advertising value and informing our strategy.

The challenge with this deterministic approach is that it’s oriented entirely around purchasing media with a specific company. Now it’s no longer the marketer’s customer, and you’re locked into buying media on their channel.

Another approach is probabilistic. In this scenario, you may not have logins connecting all of a user’s devices, but you can see that certain devices from the same IP address appeared on the advertising exchange.

While this approach is useful and doesn’t rely on media purchases, marketers are concerned about the confidence level with this method. Also, there is no concrete evidence confirming that just because they use the same IP address, or have similar HTTP header data, they belong to the same person.

The key here is to combine the best of both worlds: observances and algorithms. You also need the most deterministic data available to increase your confidence when tying devices to people — and to achieve confidence in your results while also being able to scale.

The benefits of advertising to real people
The benefits of marketing to people rather than devices are pervasive across a marketer’s role. The first area to look at is measurement. Advertisers are saying, “Give me confidence in the data that I have about the people who visit me, not just a pile of devices.”

When simply looking at impressions, the numbers can be misleading. Being able to accurately assess how you are reaching the people in your audience is critical.

Cross-device identification also helps advertisers detail a consumer’s path and understand how a two- or three-step journey across different devices changes how consumers interface with their brand.

For example, consumers who see display advertising on mobile and desktop may convert at triple the rate of consumers who only see desktop advertising. This not only affects your analytics, but also impacts how you might segment your audiences and what types of messaging you decide to put in front of them.

The alternative to cross-device identification is that the consumer feels that the brand doesn’t really know who they are. Imagine starting from square one with a merchant every time instead of one that recognizes you and caters to your preferences.

Being more aware of what a particular person is interested in — and then delivering a consistent experience across their devices — leads to a significantly improved outcome. People-based marketing can enable customization of all devices a consumer uses to consume your brand, allowing you to deliver relevant and personalized experiences on every visit.

The key is to expose content to people across all the devices they use, which can save companies from spending money on additional unnecessary ads. You may reach customers five times across the five devices they each use, and then cap further advertising if they’re not necessarily interested.

Perhaps the consumer has converted on one of those devices and you can suppress further ads or sequence ads about an additional offering. This provides opportunities to sell value-added services or other similar products.

This scenario has proven to be dramatically more effective for both the marketer and the consumer. In fact, we’ve found that advertising to consumers on two or three of their devices allows you to use half as many ad impressions to convert them.

Transparency in people-based marketing
People-based marketing is becoming a critical part of advertising. Marketers want to feel confident in their data and be able to speak directly to their consumers with competence and accuracy. However, transparency is a key component of people-based marketing.

Transparency is about empowering the consumer while simultaneously leveling the scales and empowering the marketer. Consumers want to know what kind of data is being used to represent them, as well as what devices are being connected with them or their activities. They not only want clarity regarding how their devices are linked, but also control.

Consumers want the option to say when they don’t want certain devices linked to the others. Transparency is a good practice that benefits consumers and marketers alike.

By utilizing a practice that is clear and well understood for the consumer, marketers can leverage sustainable and hygienic data for their organization that is gathered with the highest levels of consumer transparency and trust.

We’ve found that when you have this level of transparency and can educate the consumer, they become more comfortable with the experiences. Growing this confidence is perhaps the most critical part of the process, as it brings consumers on board with the business activities and improves their overall experiences with the brand.

As the advertising industry paradigm shifts from marketing to people instead of devices, it’s critical that advertisers stay ahead of the curve to provide their consumers with a better, more consistent and personalized content experience across digital touch points.

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Read the full blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/devices-dont-buy-products-people/

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The Blog Post below is from Brett Wilson,VP, GM of Advertising at Adobe

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Advertising Fraud: What We’re Doing

Seemingly every few months, a new report on digital advertising fraud hits the newswires. What often follows is sadly predictable: journalists publish scathing articles quantifying billions of wasted ad dollars. Fatigued marketers scramble to ensure they are not exposed, with frantic calls and emails to hold partners accountable. Advertising technology companies respond by putting out press releases and email blasts arguing that their proprietary technology or third-party integrations make them immune – “it’s not us; it’s the other guy.” Finally, everyone goes back to business and it’s not a priority – until the next botnet is uncovered.

Wouldn’t it be nice to put this to bed once and for all for advertisers? Adobe’s TubeMogul thought so. That’s why TubeMogul launched the Non Human Traffic Credit Program last year. Under the initiative, TubeMogul platform customers automatically receive monthly refunds for any traffic identified as fraudulent by White Ops across desktop video and display.

Here is a report card on the initiative on its one-year anniversary:

  • Refunds issued to over 100 customers, totaling over $700,000 to date.
  • 16,000 websites identified, blacklisted and blocked.
  • Additional integrations made beyond White Ops FraudSensor™, such as DoubleVerify to provide an additional layer to isolate sophisticated invalid traffic.
  • Partnerships with eight inventory partners to refund TubeMogul clients for invalid traffic.

“We have always said that one fraudulent impression is one too many, which is why we are proud that our industry-leading adoption of brand safety tools effectively protects our clients from suspicious traffic,” noted Brett Wilson, vice president and general manager of advertising at Adobe.

Ultimately, recurring headlines with the words “advertising fraud” undermine trust in the industry, particularly the perception of programmatic buying. It’s up to marketers to demand greater transparency with all partners – not just on ad fraud, but also in fees and measurement.

Adobe TubeMogul, a leader in video advertising that enables brands and agencies to plan and buy video advertising across desktops, mobile, streaming devices and TVs, was acquired by Adobe in December of 2016. Learn more about the acquisition here.

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Read the full blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/advertising-fraud-what-were-doing/

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

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Brilliant Advertising: Unlock the Power of Programmatic Advertising With the Right Creative

In 1976, Jhane Barnes designed a pair of pants that made men look so good that even John Lennon wanted a pair. Within two years, she bought a loom and, inspired by fractals — yes, fractals — became a force in the textile market. Fractals are comprised of one pattern that is repeated infinitely to create some of the most beautiful designs in nature. In 1992, to create beautiful fabric without having to spend years drawing the thousands of tiny details on her designs, Barnes applied the concept behind fractals to fashion.

She began by collaborating with mathematician Bill Jones (who specializes in software that creates patterns for wearing) and physicist and software developer Dana Cartwright (who translates Jones’s mathematics). The tools they created enabled Barnes to zoom in on nature’s fractals until she found an image that interested her. Then, she could set that image on repeat to create more intricate designs. Lastly, she swapped out background colors and weaves to add dimension and a feel to her fabrics that would resonate with her target consumer. In the process — though Jones’s and Cartwright’s software helped develop different design variations for target consumers — all the images derived from one design, helping Barnes retain her unique “Jhane” look.

Fractals Come to Advertising.
Programmatic advertising began as an automated way to buy and sell ad inventory through exchanges that connected advertisers with publishers. Nowadays, it’s a common tactic for most advertisers. Last year, Chris Breikss, president and cofounder of 6S Marketing, tweeted something that intrigued marketers. He wrote that he was, “Learning about the Mandelbrot set, fractals, and self-similarity at the Programmatic Insight Summit.”

On the surface — like in fashion — the connection between fractals and programmatic advertising isn’t obvious. But, when the underlying concept of fractals is applied to programmatic advertising, it makes way for a revolutionary concept: scalable mass personalization. Similar to Barnes’s fractal designs, creatives can develop infinitely similar ads and then swap out ad components — images, copy, pricing — in real time to create ads that are sure to resonate with the target consumers who receive them.

Because of these new customizing capabilities, the implications of programmatic advertising have become far-reaching for brands that are striving to maintain a competitive edge. Enthusiasm has grown, as targeting capabilities have become more apparent, and in 2016, US programmatic digital-display ad spend topped $22 billion — comprising 67 percent of all digital-display ad spend in the US. Ultimately, programmatic isn’t about ads at all, but rather, giving each customer a personalized, holistic experience — even if there are thousands, or even millions, of individual consumers. And, as with Barnes’s designs, programmatic done well is the scalable melding of art, math, and science that enables brands to deliver on customers’ wants and needs.

Make the Switch to Programmatic Advertising.
Marketers now have a tool that empowers them to match ad execution to the needs of media while allowing them to optimize in real time, manage multichannel campaigns, and target consumers with personalized ads throughout their customer journeys — all the way through to purchase. Done well, programmatic saves time and money and improves engagement and conversion performance. Following are three steps to help you apply the power of today’s programmatic advertising to your brand.

1. Unlock the Beauty and Power of Programmatic — Break Down Organizational Silos.
In school, Barnes was never great in math. Nowadays, though, by collaborating with those who are, she is able to scale her design process and delight target consumers. Likewise, the divergent groups that make up the list of stakeholders for programmatic advertising are worlds apart, but their collaboration can achieve great impact.

The CMO understands the brand and the focus of products; the head of digital advertising combines analytics and creativity to implement marketing campaigns; media buyers make decisions on ads and budgets; creatives produce custom ads; and marketers develop relevant, integrated, compelling messages across channels. Planning and analytics — often the instigators of data-driven advertising — drive results from digital efforts. And, if they all succeed in working together, the ultimate result is smarter, more effective campaigns that better resonate with consumers. For this reason, brands are finding it’s well worth the effort to bring all these groups together.

To drive acquisitions of a premium credit card, the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) wanted to reach Canadians who were interested in travel. The marketing team assembled a group that comprised the creative group that was handling production, the media-buying team, and data analysts who defined the test and established performance reports. Working in collaboration, they developed a matrix of various product-benefit messages that were tested against an awareness control message. In doing so, they came up with one message — no seat restrictions — that led to a vigorous performance uptick of 28 percent in conversions.

2. Bridge Art and Science for Spot-On Customer Experiences.
Now that you’ve broken down silos to enable a collaborative approach, the next step is to take the immense amount of data available across your organization and find meaning that allows you to build a complete picture of each customer’s wants and needs — the perfect melding of art and science — so you can then deliver on them with personalized experiences. Without data, creative insights come only from intuition. But, like a fractal — whose beauty is defined by simple, yet powerful, mathematics — successful programmatic creative is fueled by data.

Big Data can be the inspiration behind stories that connect you with the right prospects — the trick is finding a message that resonates. After all, the best creative in the world is meaningless if it doesn’t serve a purpose; and creative that triggers emotion, but doesn’t increase engagement, doesn’t achieve the marketing goal. The solution is to identify the variables that impact results. In other words, if you’re going to send a personalized ad, test to learn which variables — including product, description, price, image, offer, location, dates, deadlines, and whatever else you can come up with — have the greatest impact.

L’Oréal sought to build a campaign over the summer to showcase two sunscreen products — one sunscreen for women and another for children. To create relevant ads for each segment, the company used audience-targeting lists to reach women both with and without children. By swapping out the images and copy, L’Oréal targeted the right consumers in real-time with creative that was personalized to drive engagement and conversion.

3. Embrace the Similar.
For most marketers, customizing multiple versions of one campaign, serving up real-time ads with strong creative, and making adjustments based on consumer reactions is challenging. For programmatic success, marketers and creatives must create simple, powerful pieces of content with modular elements that can be adapted to create the ads they want. Templated creative reduces development time, as you only need to produce the key assets that power creatives.

The ability to quickly make changes can be a factor in deciding how to produce an endless number of iterations of your ad. With dynamic creative, you have one ad layout with variable attributes that can be generated in real time. Barnes was able to apply software tools to her designs — swapping out colors and weaves — to create designs that grabbed attention in her target markets. Likewise, being able to grab images from your data assets and update ad components — price and copy, for example — through a data feed makes it easy to change ads without going through the creative process again.

Once you’re able to mass-produce ads, quickly test and optimize creative components to improve campaign performance. Identify the best ads to serve to customers and adjust those ads to improve performance. Use your data to create options and technology to select the best. By using a dynamic creative template, content-feed options, and digital assets, you can create relevant, personalized, and timely ads that are deliverable to large audiences — complete with a 1:1 personalized feel. Dynamic creative allows you to reach granular audiences with flexible ad creative that’s personalized in real time to drive user engagement, conversions, and integrated experiences across devices.

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Read the full blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/brilliant-advertising-unlock-power-programmatic...

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The Blog Post below is from Keith Eadie, VP, Advertising Revenue and Partnerships at Adobe

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Adobe and Sling TV Bring Real-Time Advertising to Live Streaming TV

Adobe and Sling TV have opened the streaming TV service’s premium live video ad impressions to all Adobe Advertising Cloud U.S. clients. Sling TV’s programmatic debut on partner platforms including Adobe marks an industry first. Never before have advertisers had access to a distributor’s live linear TV impressions, bid on and delivered in real time.

And Adobe advertisers are jumping in. Days before opening tipoff, brands broke into the NCAA tournament – a marquee advertising event famous for selling out months in advance. Within the Adobe Advertising Cloud, clients gained quick access to basketball fans during live tournament games and surrounding sports coverage on Sling TV.

Adobe and Sling TV’s partnership enables marketers to bid in a private marketplace environment via the same platform they already use to manage their cross-channel advertising initiatives.

“Through real-time bidding and delivery, an Adobe client could seize an opportunity to air a live linear ad during must-see events as early as primetime tonight,” explains Adam Lowy, general manager for Advanced TV, Digital and Analytics with DISH Media Sales, which operates direct and programmatic sales for Sling TV. “This type of availability is a total mind-shift in how TV can become part of a dynamic digital ad buy.”

Sling TV ads reach consumers wherever, whenever they’re watching with the full screen viewability of traditional TV and the advanced targeting, reporting and controls of the digital world.

Ads can be geo-targeted in real time, targeted by platform or even by specific device so that advertisers can drill down to smartphone viewers during their daily commute, or only those watching in their living room on a Roku. Adobe Advertising Cloud clients can also target specific Sling TV audiences by demographic, daypart, network, genre and more.

Earlier this week at Summit, Adobe unveiled the Adobe Experience Cloud to an audience of more than 12,000 digital marketers from across the globe. Learn more about Adobe Summit here.

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https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/adobe-and-sling-tv-bring-real-time-advertising-...

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

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Keeping Customer Trust in an Era of Brand Safety Concerns

It may take years for a brand to earn a customer’s trust, but it only takes minutes to lose it. An example of this is when a brand’s ads appear alongside extremist, hateful, or inappropriate content. Brand safety is not a new issue, but it’s one that’s on the rise — and it’s keeping advertisers awake at night.

In just the past two weeks, major companies all across the globe have pulled advertising spend or significantly limited display advertising because their ads have appeared next to undesirable content such as that containing hate speech, extreme violence, and other extremist content. In February alone, DoubleVerify reported that eight million ads were blocked from appearing on pages it classified as containing hate speech — up threefold from January.

Adobe’s Commitment
As a leader in digital marketing, we believe that we have an obligation to provide our customers with solutions that are secure, transparent, and in accordance with their values. In advertising, Adobe is committed to helping marketers achieve their goals without compromising brand safety, media quality, or transparency.

Digital marketers and advertisers are understandably worried. According to a recent survey conducted by Adobe Digital Insights, 58 percent of marketers report that their concerns about digital ad fraud have increased in comparison to 2016, and one-half of media buyers surveyed identified “media quality” as the biggest challenge facing the industry.

Enhancing Brand Safety Through Third-Party Integrations
With that in mind, today we’re enhancing our brand safety capabilities with the integration of yet another trusted third-party anti-fraud technology — Grapeshot. Grapeshot provides pre-bid filters that scan for objectionable content on a page before an ad is placed there. It joins Adobe’s existing third-party brand safety and fraud integrations with Integral Ad Science, Proximic, and White Ops to offer maximum brand safety for advertisers.

The Full Scope of Adobe’s Preventative Measures
In addition to these integrations, Adobe Media Optimizer demand-side platform (DSP), part of Adobe Advertising Cloud, provides customers with proprietary brand safety features, including automated tools to prevent ads from appearing alongside objectionable content and a manual site-screening process performed by a team of quality assurance specialists.

The full set of preventive measures Adobe provides for its customers’ protection includes:

  • Site- and app-level screening performed by a specialized team of experts who review quality and content, excluding any unsafe inventory (e.g., pirated content, malicious content, etc.);
  • Contextual targeting that enables advertisers to target only pages containing content that is relevant to their ads as well as exclude those containing certain topics;
  • Pre-bid filtering to proactively detect and prevent ads from being delivered on pages with objectionable content before the website or app loads — a crucial point because it proactively protects the brand’s image and prevents their ads from appearing alongside hateful and extremist material; and
  • Third-party brand safety and fraud integrations (noted above).

We’re also asking advertisers to put these features to the test by offering Grapeshot’s filters and other brand safety technology integrations at no cost through the end of June 2017. The technology is available on Adobe Advertising Cloud’s DSP across desktop video and display inventory.

Adobe’s focus is to do what’s best for marketers, and as such, our DSP automatically refunds purchase impressions identified as fraudulent by our partner White Ops. But, as Brett Wilson, VP and GM of Advertising for Adobe, notes, “making bot traffic immaterial is only one piece of the puzzle; contextual brand safety has always been equally paramount. We’re proud that the adoption of our brand safety tools is effectively protecting our customers from both.”

About Adobe Advertising Cloud
Adobe Advertising Cloud, which launched at Adobe Summit last month, is the industry’s first end-to-end platform for managing advertising across traditional TV and digital formats. The platform already manages roughly $3.5 billion in annualized ad spend on behalf of more than 1,000 global clients, including Allstate, Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft, Liberty Mutual, L’Oréal, MGM, Nickelodeon, and Southwest Airlines. Learn more about Adobe Advertising Cloud.

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Read the original blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/keeping-customer-trust-in-an-era-of-brand-safet...

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

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Why Do Audience Match Rates Matter?

Why do match rates matter? Because audiences matter. Whether your business does offline direct marketing or online programmatic advertising, the ability to reach the right audience is fundamental to achieving your marketing goals.

In digital advertising, reaching a higher volume of a high-value audience gives an advertiser more opportunities — through leads, sales, and revenue — to drive performance. Nowadays, many online advertisers use a data-management platform to consolidate audience data — for instance, site visitors, offline customer relationship management (CRM), partners, and third-party demographics — and end up with robust, individual, anonymous user profiles they can use for audience segmentation and targeting across the web.

So, What Exactly Is a Match Rate?
The pursuit of data-targeting at scale has popularized the match-rate concept, which usually refers to the percentage of users that a demand-side platform (DSP) recognizes within a given audience segment. Data naturally leaks throughout the various stages in the activation progression — from data-onboarder to data-management platform (DMP) to demand-side platform (DSP) to inventory. In the activation process, lost profiles directly correlate to decreased match rates, reducing the targeted scale advertisers can achieve.

As the graphic below illustrates, four distinct data matches occur during the media-execution process:

Offline ‣‣ Online Onboarder;
Onboarder ‣‣ DMP;
DMP ‣‣ DSP; and
DSP ‣‣ Ad Exchange/Inventory.

Let’s look at match rates within the context of one of the more popular real-world use cases: retargeting site visitors — users who have demonstrated both high interest in an advertiser’s brand and intent through their actions while on the site (abandoning shopping carts, visiting specific product pages, etc.). Retargeting is an evergreen (or “always-on”) tactic for many advertisers because these audience segments are the low-hanging fruit that consistently drives performance. For most advertisers, these coveted, high-performing audience segments can never be too big or have too many members. Fortunately, advertisers can gain more from this limited group of high-value users by working with integrated data-management and media-buying platforms that deliver greater audience matches.

But, Do Match Rates Really Matter?
To illustrate why match rates matter, let’s look at an example of the impact for display advertising by comparing the reach of different DSPs within one DMP. Using our previous retargeting scenario, we’ll take a more simplified approach, assuming a frequency of one ad view and each DSP’s consistent synchronization of cookies with ad exchanges.

  • The advertiser wants to reach their best-performing audience segment — shopping cart abandoners.
  • One-million users in the DMP can be targeted.
  • Advertiser pushes the retargeting segment to three DSPs, including the Adobe Advertising Cloud DSP.
  • Three DSPs have three different audience sizes and match rates with the DMP segment (90 percent, 70 percent, and 60 percent).
  • The result is a significant impact on the number of converters and the revenue.

Advertisers often work with many different technology platforms, and a common challenge they face is that sharing data and audiences across the different layers of their technology stack is often difficult — or even impossible. When building a stack, one of the primary considerations for marketers is whether the advertising layer is tightly integrated with the other platforms. Can data and audiences be shared easily across platforms? How high are the audience match rates? These are important questions that should be asked early in the planning phase — not after the ink has dried.

Can Adobe Advertising Cloud Help You Increase Audience Match Rates?
Adobe Advertising Cloud is the first independent end-to-end platform that unifies audience data, media execution, and creative personalization to enable full-funnel ad-buying and optimization — from lower-funnel performance tactics (e.g., search, display) to upper-funnel brand tactics (e.g., video, programmatic TV). Our focus is on achieving the highest audience match rates possible. We’ve been able to achieve match rates exceeding 90 percent for first-party audiences ported from Adobe Analytics Cloud into Adobe Advertising Cloud DSP.

And, what about the end viewer? Consumers demand relevant ad experiences. In a recent survey, 78 percent of respondents said they want relevant ad experiences, but only 28 percent feel they are actually receiving them. By reaching more high-value audiences, an advertiser can better personalize experiences across display, video, and other channels.

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Read the original blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/audience-match-rates-matter/

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By Ritika Mahajan, AMO - Consultant, Adobe

AMO: Conversion Tracking

 

In today’s dynamic digital marketing space, it is very crucial to track the conversion, this helps us to quantify our marketing efforts into Return on Investment (ROI). Industries which do not track conversion assume that if the sales increase during the run time of the ad copies it is due to the ad copies however there is no data to back this assumption and it may or may not be the case.

 

An intelligent marketer would always setup a conversion tracking system and make all his marketing efforts quantified assets of the business. Another myth regarding conversion is considering conversion equal to a purchase. This is not always true. Any action that a visitor takes on the advertiser website that results into benefit of the advertiser is a conversion.

For instance, in services industries specifically B2B Business there is no purchase instead a call made to the advertiser’s call center results into revenue for the advertiser. Does that mean Digital marketing is not for Services industry at all, the answer is No, A Service industry advertiser can have different ways of tracking conversion like offline conversion or tracking chats on the website through analytics.

Being A marketer it is absolutely critical for us to define the conversion and set up an achievable target – AMO hits the bulls eye here. With the Portfolio theory of AMO it is very easy to set up a target and let the optimizer work towards the same in order to maximize the ROI.

 There are three types of conversion tracking that can be done through Media optimizer, based on advertiser’s need we can choose one:

  1. Pixel tracking
  2. Feed tracking
  3. Combo tracking

 

Media optimizer tracking if enabled will have a unique click tracking code in the URL of the Adcopy, keyword or a placement in each campaign managed by media optimizer. It is through this code the technology will track ad impressions, clicks and conversions.

Pixel Tracking —  In this type of tracking, you must include either a 1-pixel x 1-pixel transparent image or a JavaScript tag on the conversion page, with information embedded in the tag to note the transaction data and send it to a tracking server.

This type of tracking must be used for advertisers whose conversions are online and no offline calculation is required for the same. Also they won’t delete augment, or correct previously-reported conversions.

 

Feed Tracking —  In case the business requirement is to track conversion data from a different method, Media optimizer provides an option of sending a daily feed file with conversion data.  This data can be either aggregated daily by keyword or consist of individual transactions.

This type of conversion tracking can be used by advertisers who already has a conversion tracking system in place that provides conversion data at a keyword level. Also, the advertiser wants to be able to delete, correct, or augment previously-reported conversions (such as when orders are canceled, rebates or partial refunds are applied, or applications are converted to loans).

 

Combo Tracking — Combo tracking is a combination of both pixel and feed tracking methods and can be used to track online conversions, and capture offline conversions using another method. To accomplish this method, it is necessary to include either a 1-pixel x 1-pixel transparent image or a JavaScript tag on the conversion page and send a daily feed file with transaction-level conversion data that was captured by another method for the offline conversions.

This type of tracking can be used by advertisers where the customer completes one phase of a transaction online (for example, applying for a loan), but a second phase in the transaction (such as the application approval) occurs offline. Also, in the cases where purchase products online but discounts, credits, or other adjustments may be applied to the transactions in an offline process.

Most of the event types are easily tracked with the Media optimizer conversion tracking. Also, it is absolutely essential to switch off Google's Conversion Optimizer or ECPC Option to let the optimizer do its job in the best possible way. However, the optimizer lets other tracking methods track conversion as well by adding extra piece of code in the URL of the entity being tracked for instance keywords, ads placement etc.

Based on the business requirement the advertiser can choose anyone of the conversion tracking methods and start gaining insights on what is working for the business and what not. Also. This would help digital marketers to get more customers and improve the ROI of the business.

Be the digital marketer with intent and insights, track your conversion and let each of the marketing effort count.

 

** Data Taken from AMO Help Section.

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

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5 Reasons Now Is the Time to Implement Dynamic Creative

Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) was introduced to marketers a decade ago, but after the initial excitement, the implementation and delivery of use cases didn’t match the expectations. However, today, DCO is riding a new wave of adoption by advertisers and agencies.

Gartner shows DCO rising on the “Slope of Enlightenment” for its July 2016 Digital Marketing and AdvertisingHype Cycle. According to Gartner, this is the phase where “more instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more...” We believe several factors contribute to this newfound enthusiasm.

Internal Image - 5 Reasons Now Is the Time to Implement Dynamic Creative

Five Reasons Why DCO Is Back and Stronger than Ever

1. Programmatic Advertising Powers DCO and Retargeting
Before demand-side platforms (DSPs) and real-time bidding (RTB), media for DCO was bought directly from the publisher or an ad network. Getting sufficient scale and unique reach could be a challenge—an advertiser had to buy media on multiple publishers or ad networks. Reaching many small and granular audiences required a manual and cumbersome set-up process. This lacked efficiency and there was no way to de-dupe user targeting among the different inventory partners.

Being able to retarget ads to consumers who show interest in products and services through their online behaviors is an important application of DCO and RTB technologies. Combining DCO with real-time audience-based buying through a DSP addresses key challenges around scale and unique reach. The DSP is integrated with many ad inventory sources for maximum scale and has controls like frequency capping across all the inventory, allowing the advertiser to better manage scale and reach. Advertisers now have access to vast amounts of data and advanced technology platforms to apply that data to display advertising campaigns.

2. DCO Moves Beyond Retargeting
Early on, DCO was used primarily by the retail and travel industries for retargeting high-value consumers with advertising. Given the large number of possible ad permutations for retail and travel (thousands of SKUs or origination/destination combinations), these are the logical verticals to be the first to adopt DCO. But advertisers now grasp how DCO can be used beyond retargeting for campaigns across the marketing funnel and across verticals.

While DCO campaigns at the lower end of the funnel—like retargeting and loyalty programs—have always made sense, DCO is also now being applied to top-of-the-funnel prospecting and awareness campaigns. Even if very little is known about a user (for example, from a geotargeted prospecting campaign), DCO can algorithmically optimize the ad content to drive the best performance for the advertiser. DCO evaluates all possible ad permutations and optimizes creative elements and delivery to the best-performing option for the advertiser’s objectives. Any vertical that has granular audience data can benefit from DCO.

3. It’s All about Experiences
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 brand content. This is truer today than ever before. The fact that ad blocking is on the rise sends a clear signal that consumers are demanding better ad experiences.

DCO is the solution advertisers need to deliver a better experience for their consumers. Advertisers have access to deeper audience insights than ever before and DCO allows advertisers to deliver relevant and engaging ad experiences, and in turn drive better engagement and performance.

4. Data Feeds Are Everywhere
A key component of DCO is the data feed. This is the content that is used to populate a dynamic ad in real time. In a change from just a few years ago, many advertisers are now using data feeds regularly to power their online advertising.

In addition, DCO technology has become more flexible in ingesting data and it no longer requires a third-party vendor. For example, a Google Merchant Center feed can easily be translated for DCO and an Excel file can be mapped for DCO.

Digital advertisers are generally more comfortable using data feeds and customer files to power their advertising campaigns, and they have a greater awareness of how data feeds support DCO.

5. Creative Flexibility
While early DCO vendors required an advertiser to select from a set of predefined and inflexible templates, today’s DCO solutions offer an agency and advertiser complete control and flexibility over the creative layout design. Dynamic ad templates can be custom built for the advertiser so they have control over how their brand is conveyed and experienced by the consumer. The ad layout can include features like a promotion countdown clock, drop-down box, search form, and product carousel, and can be delivered on mobile and across devices.

What does the future hold for DCO?
As DCO approaches the “Plateau of Productivity” on the Gartner hype cycle, it will attain mainstream adoption. We will continue to see advertisers better understand how DCO works and what it can do for them. Access to data and ad-buying technology combined with DCO enables advertisers to deliver relevant and personalized ads to drive better performance and improved ROI.

Last year, Adobe acquired Tumri from Collective, adding DCO to its advertising technology stack alongside Adobe Media Optimizer, a cross-channel programmatic ad-buying platform, and Adobe Audience Manager, a data management platform (DMP).

This is the first in a series of five blogs on DCO. Stay tuned for blogs on what DCO can do for advertisers.

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Read the original Blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/5-reasons-now-time-implement-dynamic-creative/

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The Blog Post below is from Manu Malhotra, Consultant for Adobe Media Optimizer at Adobe

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

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Dealing with Model Inaccuracies

AMO technology predicts performance based on data models it builds over a period of time. However, at times, it is very challenging to get the models accurate. When models go off because of various factors changing in the eco system, it results in uncertain performance. Hence, it is very important to keep a close eye on model accuracy.

What is Model Accuracy?

Model accuracy shows how precise the cost and revenue models are which are being used to optimize bids. In simple terms, model accuracy is a comparison of predicted performance and the actual performance. You can check model accuracy by clicking on Portfolio Cards > View. Day on day break down of accuracies is listed in the table.

The model accuracy reports for multiple portfolios can also be easily accessed in AMO by clicking on Reports > Create Report > Model Accuracy > Forecast Accuracy

Why is it important?

If model accuracy is off, it simply means AMO doesn’t have as much information as is required and hence the bidding on the bid units is not resulting in expected impactful returns.

Why do I have inaccurate cost models and what can I do to correct them?

  • Following a large scale account audit, check if you have changed a large number of landing pages / ad copies. In such a case it might result in cost model inaccuracy. It should take some time for quality score to build again.
  • Nature of the business – Check if there is a case of seasonality or a big event such as Olympics or change in competition such as a new entrant or aggressive strategy by competition. This can bring in cost model inaccuracy. Though AMO will adjust and adapt to changes but it may take time. In such cases try reducing the cost half-life to make AMO take more consideration of recent change in eco system.
  • New Additions – If new campaigns and keywords are getting added, this will impact cost models.  In such cases, you might like to add the new campaigns in active state initially in a separate portfolio. Else, wait for some days and AMO cost models will stabilize.
  • Significant changes in settings – Any changes in campaign settings such as geo targeting or match type strategy at search engine level can result in cost model inaccuracies too. You can either wait for next sync cycle for AMO to fetch the changes from search engine or you can make changes directly from AMO so that the technology is very much aware of the changes.
  • Significant changes in budget: This is a tricky scenario, try sticking to small and incremental changes in budgets. However, if you do have to make drastic changes because of business requirements, be ready for cost model inaccuracies. To handle it, try reducing the half-life.
  • Changes beyond your control: Bing updates its search algorithm, google decides to do away with right side ads, what do you do? Try reducing the half-life and technology should well adapt swiftly to the change.

How to handle Revenue Model inaccuracy?

  • Special promotions: The rate of conversions will see a jump and models might take some time to adapt and learn from the changes. It is suggested to reduce the half-life for models to adapt and learn quickly.
  • Market competition: In case of competition getting aggressive or new entrants bidding high results may differ from forecasted. In such a case resort to reducing revenue half-life for models to catch up.
  • Lag in revenue numbers from feeds: This can happen for operational as well as other business reasons. In such a case try increasing revenue half-life to accommodate the lag in reporting revenue.

Apart from these scenarios, at times there are pixel tracking codes issues where in pixels aren’t firing for some reason on the web properties. It is best recommended to highlight such an issue to AMO and the client team to troubleshoot it.

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The Blog Post below is from Nidhi Kapoor, Senior Consultant for Adobe Media Optimizer at Adobe

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Bulk Edit Feature to Support Manual Bidding

 

‘’Manual Bidding” is the most common and important step seen in case of newly created campaigns. This method let the advertiser set the manual CPC for keywords as per its targets and enhance their exposure.

AMO has its competitive bidding technology with which it takes the control and automate bids on bid units (keyword + match type) using its algorithm such that it maximizes advertiser’s objective.

The process being followed in AMO for newly created campaigns is that when they are new should be kept under ‘Manual Portfolio’ first for few days before getting assigned to the ‘Optimized Portfolio’. This is to ensure that they build good performance data history around them before getting under AMO’s technology. In an Optimized portfolio, bid units are bid automatically by the technology as per its algorithm.  The factor history plays an important role in bidding technology of AMO as it helps in generating the models (cost & revenue) and therefore calculating appropriate bidding for bid units.

Usually the common method seen among advertisers for manual bidding regularly for keywords in bulk are through the bulk sheet method. In this, keyword's bids are modified as per their performance, business requirement or some best practices such as for example:

  • Keywords with conversion and avg pos worse than position 3 = +20%
  • Keywords with conversion and avg pos between 2 and 3 = +10%
  • Keywords with no conversion and avg pos worse than 3 = +30%
  • Keywords with no conversion and avg pos better than 2 = -10%

These increases or decreases are made as per the bids in ‘current bid column’. This method requires downloading the current status of keywords first in a bulk sheet format and then making changes and posting the modifications later on through AMO on search engine.

There is also another way to execute and expedite the manual bidding is by using AMO’s ‘bulk edit feature’.

To use the ‘bulk edit’ feature, visit the keywords tab, create a filter to select the keywords to perform the bid increase/decrease action. To start with, use the ‘Add Filter’ option, select the date range of the data on which the analysis will be appropriate for keywords and then filter the keywords on the basis of their conversions/avg. position data etc.

Select those filtered keywords > click on the ‘bulk edit’ option on the left > select the ‘available actions’ such as ‘formulaic bid change’ in case of ‘manual bidding’ and then increase or decrease the percentage depending upon the data, best practices, budget targets and requirement of exposure. In case of increase, it’s always good to set the max limit and in case of decrease, the minimum bid limit to avoid the sudden increase or decrease. Click ‘Apply’ then to execute the changes.

Changes made will be available under ‘bulk edit status’ link under the ‘filter’s row. This is one of the quickest method to avail the option of manual bidding in bulk, change the ‘status’ of keywords, ‘create’ and ‘Find & Replace’ in bulk.

Depending upon the number of keywords to be manual bid, filter requirement and the frequency of changes to be made, a choice can be made between the options of bulk sheet or bulk edit to be used.

 

 

 

 

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

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Creating Relevant Ad Experiences Without Thousands of Ad Units

Consumers are frustrated with the number of irrelevant advertisements they have to deal with daily:

  • According to Infolinks, only 2.8 percent of study participants thought ads on websites were relevant.
  • Adobe and PageFair found that in the United States, there were 45 million monthly active users (MAUs) of ad blockers during Q2 2015—equal to about 20 percent of Internet users, according to Strategy Analytics.
  • According to PageFair, 33 percent of Internet users find display ads completely intolerable because they are not pertinent or interesting.

To rebuild consumers’ trust and drive better engagement, businesses today need to build more personalized ads.

Many advertisers still use static ads for their display advertising. This means that the actual content within the ad doesn’t change and therefore a different ad must be created for each audience segment. For any brand that is interested in delivering personalized ads to highly segmented audiences, the number of static ads necessary becomes a nightmare for the creative and traffic teams. The result? Impersonal ads that don’t engage the customer.

On the other hand, dynamic ads use a single ad layout (or dynamic template) that can be populated on-the-fly with predetermined personalized content.

Introducing Dynamic Creative Optimization
Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) allows advertisers to drive better engagement and performance from their ads by delivering the most relevant experience to the user in real time. DCO uses an ad layout with several dynamic elements that change depending on who the user is or which audience is actually seeing it. The content changes can include things like the product description, image, price, and call-to-action (CTA). Promotional copy can also be switched dynamically.

Retargeting campaigns is currently the most common use for DCO. It requires an advertiser to maintain a data feed with the dynamic outputs used to populate the ad at the time of the ad call. The ad is assembled in real time to deliver the most relevant content for any user. But DCO is not only for retargeting. It enables advertisers from a variety of verticals to deliver personalized experiences for consumers across the marketing funnel.

internal-image-creating-relevant-ad-experiences-without-thousands-of-ad-units

Elements of a DCO System
DCO works by combining several elements to output a real-time and relevant ad. Here’s a primer on some terms and definitions related to dynamic creative:

Dynamic Triggers: Pixels on a brand website capture retargeting values (i.e., product SKU) and are used to trigger outputs from the content source—such as data feed or API—to populate a dynamic ad. Other elements that can trigger dynamic ad content include geolocation and audience segment data.

Content: In the case of DCO, content refers to the advertiser feed, API, XML, business rules, offer grid, or product catalog that the dynamic trigger references for outputs to populate fields in the ad template. Content is provided by the advertiser, ingested by the DCO system, and output in the dynamic ad.

Dynamic Outputs: These outputs are ad elements that can be referenced by a dynamic trigger in the content source. Examples include images, URLs, and copy that are referenced in a data feed.

Variable Attribute: Variable attributes are dynamic elements within ads that are not referenced from the content source by a dynamic trigger. Delivery of the ad element is based on business rules (like A/B testing) and is not feed based. Examples include CTA, background color, and offer. Some items, such as copy or CTA, can be either a dynamic output or variable attribute, depending on setup.

Ad Layout or Dynamic Template: In DCO, these elements are the shell design that houses the dynamic content.

Experience: An experience is created by the combination of one ad layout and one or more content sources.

(No Cookie) Default Ad: The default state of a dynamic ad occurs when cookie targeting is missing or does not match the content source. Advertisers predefine defaults for each dynamic output. For example, if the DSP makes an ad call and there is no matching DCO cookie or if the dynamic trigger does not match the content source, the default experience will be generated.

DCO Delivers
Delivering highly personalized ads improves your campaign effectiveness. DCO can help manage the expense of ad creation and production by using an ad template and data feed to create infinite ad combinations without infinite time and money.

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Read the original blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/creating-relevant-ad-experiences-without-thousa...

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The Blog Post below is from Lauren Friedman, head of Global Social Business Enablement at Adobe

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5 Examples of Influencer Marketing Done Right

Influencer marketing is big business. In fact, according to a recent study in Adweek, 75 percent of brands engage influencers as part of their core advertising strategies. Brands recognize that today’s consumers are savvy — and not easily swayed by traditional ad-speak. And, consumers look to their peers to help them make purchase decisions. The solution? Using influencer marketing to leverage the power of trusted and respected experts in your field is a smart, effective way to increase brand awareness, build an audience, and improve your bottom line.

Five Shining Stars of Influencer Marketing
While it seems everyone is jumping on the influencer bandwagon, there are certainly some shining stars. Following are five examples of influencer-marketing campaigns done well and what we can learn from the companies that are doing it right.

1. Sephora — Creating Authenticity Through Unbiased Reviews
The health and beauty industry may have an advantage when it comes to influencer marketing, simply because it’s cost-effective to send sample products to influential people to have them try them. However, too often, brands reach out to influencers with an agenda: “Try our product and write a glowing review.” With transparency and authenticity in mind, Sephora has taken a different approach. They built Beauty Talk: a community of insiders who leave honest product reviews, help other consumers make decisions based on their needs, and share their findings. Anecdotally, Sephora sends free samples to beauty vloggers/bloggers and other influencers, but the reviews they receive in return are always authentic and genuine. The community is successful because Sephora gives influencers the freedom they need to be unbiased, which in turn, fosters a genuineness that consumers appreciate. Sure, parameters still exist — but asking for honest, unbiased opinions has been extremely effective.

2. Nikon — Choosing the Right Fit
The Nikon brand launched a social-sharing campaign to showcase its connected camera offerings during the Warner Sound Festival. The company quickly created buzz — using #NikonWarnerSound — which trended on Twitter all three nights of the event. Partnering with Warner Music Group, Nikon presented roaming photographers with Nikon cameras to use throughout the event to take and share pictures with their personal Facebook communities. By giving established photographers access to these cameras, Nikon turned their product over to their best advocates — the photographers themselves — and created instant credibility.

3. Birchbox — Cultivating a Mutually Beneficial and Highly Lucrative Partnership
Birchbox — an online subscription service for beauty supplies — partnered with lifestyle blogger, Emily Schuman of Cupcakes & Cashmere, to customize one of their beauty-supply boxes. With carte blanche to choose products she knew would resonate with her fans, Emily showcased Birchbox to 300,000 followers on Instagram. It was the perfect partnership: Emily aligned with Birchbox — a very reputable brand — to share something of value with her audience. In return, Birchbox was exposed to an enormous, relevant audience. The benefit was both mutual and highly lucrative.

4. Boxed Water — Remaining True to Brand Values
Boxed Water may sell water, but the company also touts conservation and renewable resources, which is why its influencer campaign, Retree Project, was such a success. With help from the National Forest Foundation, Boxed Water was able to spread the word about their philanthropic campaign. For every Instagram photo that was posted using #Retree, Boxed Water agreed to plant two trees. The brand reached out to known Instagram influencers — those who had already attracted hundreds of thousands of followers each — asking them not only to post in support of the campaign, but also to encourage their community members to repost. Leveraging the power of Instagram influencers to raise brand awareness — while remaining true to brand values — was brilliant.

5. Buick Automobile — Gaining Fresh Perspectives
Buick’s influencer campaign called on nine of the most prominent Pinterest influencers — often referred to as Pinfluencers — in the fields of style and design to help create a brand image surrounding its new Encore luxury model. Rather than partner with influencers who are respected in the automobile industry, they chose outsiders so they could align the brand with experts from a different sphere. Pinfluencers shared their visions of how the exterior and interior of this new luxury model would look, encouraging consumers to revisit the brand with fresh perspectives.

Conclusion
What does an audience look for in an influencer? What attributes create a sense of trust? Most people see through advertisements, realizing that companies are likely saying whatever they think you want to hear. Add a familiar, trusted voice, and suddenly, marketing has credibility. When a respected voice of authority makes a suggestion, it feels authentic and believable.

Of course, creating a successful influencer campaign takes much more than just finding an expert who will post a blog touting your product or service. It’s critical to pick the right influencer — preferably someone with an established audience in the area of expertise into which you are looking to expand or with an entirely new segment you’re trying to reach. The best campaigns are genuine and contain messaging that stays true to your values as a brand. The right “fit” is everything — without it, even the best spokesperson will leave your audience feeling disconnected.

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Read the original blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/5-examples-influencer-marketing-done-right/

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The Blog Post below is from Cory Edwards, head of Adobe’s Social Business Center of Excellence

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Virtual Reality and Social Media: Are We Ready for Dynamic Social?

Research conducted by Goldman Sachs forecasts that, by 2025, virtual and augmented realities will become an$80-billion market. That’s just eight years from now! Is it time for your company to invest? Brands across a wide range of industries — from entertainment to education to online shopping — are using virtual technologies to create deeper, more meaningful interactions with customers and enhancing their experiences. What do virtual and augmented realities bring to the table, and what should brands be thinking about when considering these new technologies?

What Is the Difference Between Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)?
Both virtual reality and augmented reality create immersive experiences, but the main difference is how immersive. With VR, the experience is total, meaning the goggles or the viewer that you’re using completely shuts out the real world, and everything within the viewing parameter is entirely virtual. With AR, on the other hand, the experience is not wholly immersive. Instead, images, videos, and other visual stimuli are layered over reality, allowing the user to supplement the real world with virtual content.

How Are Brands and Industries Benefitting From VR and AR Technologies?
There’s tremendous opportunity for businesses who choose to utilize VR or AR technologies as mediums for improved customer experiences. From support and service to basic entertainment, virtual realities enable brands to provide experiences that were previously impossible.

The Super Bowl is a perfect example of the potential here. The NFL has a limited number of stadium seats available for fans who want to watch the game — everyone else (without tickets) must tune in to watch it on television. In a virtual world, stadium seating is infinite, and unlimited numbers of fans enter into an immersive football experience on game day — one that is both visual and auditory. Similarly, VR and AR could also be used in the movie and entertainment industries, as movie-production companies are not only investing in virtual and augmented realities, but also have major players in these technologies supporting them.

Gaming is yet another industry that may be changed forever by AR and VR with the recent release of Pokémon Go. The popular mobile app overlays a map of your unique physical world — your house, office, and everyplace you eat, for instance — with the world of Pokémon. Everywhere the user goes, images of an augmented world appear through a camera viewfinder.

More traditional retail marketers, as well as online retailers, also have unique opportunities to capitalize on virtual technologies by creating more immersive shopping experiences. Whether it’s trying on a pair of hiking boots in your living room or having the same experience in the middle of the rainforest, savvy marketers are taking advantage of VR and AR technologies, offering consumers chances to experience products and services in novel, exciting ways.

Where Does Social Media Meet Virtual Technology?
To date, social engagement exists primarily in a two-dimensional, screen-based world where text is heavy, and imagery and video are occasional. While engagement occurs in real time, true interaction is limited because it’s so often based on text. Now, imagine not only experiencing products as you never have before, but also journeying into corporations to meet the humans behind your favorite products.

AR and VR will change how consumers communicate with brands, creating truly social interactions with companies and their employees. As a result, traditional social-media departments will likely transform from groups of writers who string together interesting tweets and posts — hoping for text-based interactions — to groups that facilitate virtual interactions with customers for more dynamic experiences.

As we approach the second wave of hype surrounding VR and AR, there are high expectations for these emerging technologies. Facebook created a social VR team, Google has invested over $500 million in AR, and many technology vendors have released AR and VR headsets. Yet, many brands remain hesitant because these virtual technologies both require tremendous resources and costs. Deciding whether to invest is challenging. Be realistic, take a step back, and ask whether these technologies will, ultimately, help you achieve your business objectives.

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Read the original blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/virtual-reality-social-media-ready-dynamic-soc...