Gadi Eliashiv, Author at Singular

CEO insights: Why creative fatigue isn’t as simple as it sounds

CEO Insights is a new column by Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv focusing on some of the most challenging issues in scientific marketing.

Most sophisticated growth organizations we’re working with are placing an enormous importance on creatives. These companies usually have in-house design teams dedicated for making creatives, plus processes and metrics around the production and launch process.

All of it is designed to ensure optimized results.

These companies understand the power of creative optimization, and distribute shared responsibility for amazing creative throughout the organization. Designers have been educated about performance metrics, and they’re savvy enough to combine their art with science in the form of cold, hard metrics.

These top brands also have periodic meetings (bi-weekly or more) where the design team sits down with the marketing team. Together they carefully examine the performance of various assets, and find a balance between introducing new winning concepts, sustaining proven concepts, and eliminating bad ones.

More advanced marketers also apply particular conventions to how assets are managed and tagged, so that tens of thousands of creative variations can be grouped by a handful of key concepts, which helps identify key trends.

All of these workflows and analysis capabilities are available out of the box for our customers through Singular’s creative optimization suite, and it gives our customers an enormous edge. Click here if you want to learn more about that, or email me if you’d like to see a demo.

So: what is the right process?

One area that was of interest to me was the pace at which companies swap out creative assets.

When asking various companies, I got a range of answers from: “we don’t have bandwidth for that at all” to “we have a constant refresh rate.” Some companies update on a fixed period of time (every two weeks or a month), while others update their creative “whenever design creates a new one.”

Obviously, not all creative costs the same to produce, and some creative is super expensive to produce in time and money like playables and videos. Other assets, however, can be produced quickly and efficiently, and when infused with time-specific context (such as a big concert, or a particular live event in a game) they can produce great results.

A common theme I’ve heard is the following way to run analysis on your creatives:

Cadence
- Weekly or bi-weekly
Data input
- Creative asset performance from all channels (Singular does that out of the box: check out our API)
- Campaign targeting option data, particularly around the major self-attributing networks, to identify targeting methodology (value optimization, bid optimization, etc. …)
- Channel, country, region, plus any other breakdowns that makes sense to you
- Four weeks of data
  - Period A: first 2 weeks of data
  - Period B: second 2 weeks of data
Two simple data outputs
- Check the trend of currently running creatives to detect big drops that might suggest these creatives should be cycled.
  - The drops could be in clicks, installs, eCPM, or any other metrics that make sense
  - For customers using Singular’s attribution, we enable ROI granularity all the way down to the creative level, so you can check for a drop in your main KPI (which is often what the ad engines optimize against)
- Isolate the creatives that did not exist in Period A, but existed in Period B, and identify how they are trending. Learn from new concepts that are succeeding well, and some that are failing to ramp up.

One example:

Creative	Period A			Period B
	CTR	Conversions	eCPM	CTR	Conversions	eCPM
Creative 1	3%	7,500	$9.50	1.5%	3,300	$11.75
Creative 2	n/a	n/a	n/a	3.5%	15,000	$11
Creative 3	n/a	n/a	n/a	1.5%	3,400	$9
Creative 4	1%	2,200	$3.40	2.3%	4,300	$4.23

Creative fatigue and time

As I look at all this data, the questions I keep asking myself are:

When is the right time to swap creatives?
Do companies know those times?
Can they even figure them out?

The answers to those questions, as I found out, are very complex. After dozens of talks with top tier marketers I got literally dozens of answers, and none of them was the silver bullet I was hoping for.

(Mostly likely, there isn’t any one single silver bullet. The techniques that work for one app are different than those that work for another brand.)

The one common thread in all these conversations was the favorite topic of creative fatigue detection. The formal definition of creative fatigue is that consumers/users/customers do not even see your ad anymore. They’ve become so used to it, that it is now just part of the default background for them.

Traditionally, the first thing people think about fatigue is that CTRs drop over time, because people have seen your ad again and again, and those who wanted to click have done that already.

But when I started researching some data, that naive assumption quickly surfaced as being incorrect.

When dealing with optimizing algorithms like Facebook’s and others, they will track the number of exposures each user had seen (frequency) and will cap that at a certain point, because their algorithm understands that it’ll be a waste of an impression, and also lead to a bad user experience.

So FB simply chooses another ad to show.

You can quickly see this phenomenon in the chart below.

In the first chart, CTR does not drop appreciably throughout the campaign. A campaign manager who looks only at this probably thinks that all is well with her ads.

But there is actually a significant problem.

What’s actually happening behind the scenes is that Facebook knows that it has exhausted your chosen audience, and the number of people it is showing the ad to has dropped precipitously:

Creative fatigue … sometimes, Facebook is smarter than you

It’s important to say ads will not always behave that way. That’s why when analyzing fatigue you need to not only know what assets you’re using, but also what ad channels you’re running on, what bidding methodology is being used, and what their algorithms do.

(For example: due to saturation, the algorithm could also start increasing the CPM bid to generate more impressions, which will decrease your ROAS).

In general, even if these algorithms are smart enough to avoid audience fatigue, it is still the responsibility of the marketer to identify it and remedy the situation. You can find new audiences, add new creatives, and so on.

But there can be more going on

Sometimes when you’re looking for creative fatigue you’ll see data that doesn’t make sense at first. For instance, you might have a click-through rate chart like this one, which shows creative gaining strength over time:

Creative fatigue: can ads gain in CTR and conversions over time?

All looks well at first glance. But … if you check impressions, there’s clearly something else going on. The number of impressions is skyrocketing:

Creative fatigue: Oops, impressions are skyrocketing

Something very different is going on here.

Hint: this behavior can be related to changes in bids and budgets … another key thing to think about when testing for creative fatigue. Changing the bid (even if it’s a CPI/CPA bid) will directly impact the amount of money you’re willing to spend on a certain impression, therefore creating more impressions that were not accessible before at your previous bid.

In short: creative fatigue is one of those concepts that seems easy to understand and easy to diagnose … but actually isn’t. To find out if creative fatigue is actually happening, you need to dig deeper into the data than most can or will.

Fortunately, that’s where Singular can help …

What’s next

That’s it for this post. In the next post, I’ll look more at how bids and budgets impact click-through rate, impressions, and conversions.

UNIFY 2019: The growth marketing summit of the season is back!

The room was full of friends, the words exchanged were real, meaningful, and carried lasting impact. At the end of the day, the intimate gathering cheered. As the sun went down in the beautiful Napa sky, the evening came alive with laughter, flowing drinks, exquisite food and energizing music. Memories were created.

I know what you’re thinking… no, I’m not reminiscing on a spectacular wedding (although some did describe it as such), I’m talking about UNIFY by Singular, the growth marketing summit of the season you can’t afford to miss.

After our inaugural summit sold out last summer, we’re ecstatic to announce that UNIFY by Singular is returning for its second year on June 4, 2019 at the highly-acclaimed Estate Yountville – with a completely fresh experience! New discussions, new strategies, new memories, and new friends await you.

Don’t just take it from me, leading growth executives agree:

“UNIFY has been really great. I like the fact that it’s an invite-only conference. It’s not super packed, and you can talk to all the other industry professionals. The panels are very, very informative and interesting…. And let’s not forget to mention Napa. It’s beautiful here.” – Nebo Radovic, N3TWORK

“I loved the intimacy of the conference. It feels like we’re almost at a little wedding, which just removes the barriers a little bit. We can talk and gab and have a lot of fun.” – Jake Bailey, LinkedIn

“I enjoyed the event very much and it had the best learning and networking, bar none. I hope to make it to the next UNIFY, definitely a new industry ‘must-attend’.” – An Vu, Small Giant Games

UNIFY is designed to be an exclusive and immersive experience. You’ll leave refreshed with a rich, new outlook on the future of growth marketing, and feeling inspired by the real tactics and strategy you’ll bring back to your team.

Your all-inclusive ticket gets you access to the sessions and incredible moments throughout the day: from the food to the drinks to the music, the free transportation to/from Yountville, and your overnight accommodations at Hotel Villagio & Vintage House ($579 value) – it’s all built in to your ticket.

It’s a no-brainer. We will sell out again, so grab your ticket before they run out!

See you in Yountville!

35 Tips to Increase Marketing ROI for mCommerce Apps

Apps have become a central part of e- and go-to-market plans. And for lots of good reasons. Not only do apps now command more than half of connected consumer time, but they also enable brands to deliver a uniquely rich tailor-made to the “always-on” lifestyle. That makes them great potential drivers of app marketing ROI.

But with all this marketing ROI opportunity comes a tremendous challenge – how to launch a successful app that drives a profitable long-term relationship with a customer and drives high . Every element of your needs to align to that goal.

Massive Competition – Massive Marketing ROI Challenges

There are many challenges to your driving maximum marketing ROI through a on mobile. Your app will be competing for attention with a tremendous number of other apps. 2.5M on the Android side and 2.4 million on iOS. Even some of the more niche app stores offer consumers more than 100,000 apps. Standing out in that sort of an environment requires both brand awareness and a compelling brand story.

Game apps often focus a great deal of attention hitting the top of the popularity charts in the and Google Play. By “gaming” the charts, these entertainment apps can go a long way toward sealing their fates as a popular application. The challenge, of course, is that the most well-funded games are using the same tactics as other games to crank their popularity. That can sometimes create a lot of noise without a lot of result.

don’t need to crack the Apple and Android top 10 to be successful. What matters in apps even more than download popularity is staying power and frequency of use on .

eCommerce App Rankings

Retailers do compete to be at the top of rankings, like Google Play’s category, but the number of is often at least an order of magnitude smaller than for gaming apps. For an app to be successful, it needs to get downloaded by a critical mass of customers and then used with a reasonable frequency so it can generate strong revenue per customer with strong .

While most of those apps are not focused on transacting and , your offering is still competing with a tremendous number of choices. In fact, according to Nielsen, the average in the US has more than 90 apps on it, but less than a quarter of those are regularly used. So how do you ensure that your app is regularly used and a strong marketing ROI driver?

There are 1,001 online tutorials on how to get a game into the top ten. But the app side of the category is far less well-served regarding tips and advice. That’s what this post is all about.

Without further ado, here are 35 tips for more effectively marketing m-commerce apps to drive maximum marketing ROI.

TIPS 1-6: APP MARKETING PLANNING

1. Codify the App Business Objectives

There is a slang term among digital marketers – GMOOT. It’s short for “give me one of those,” a phrase many have heard when new shiny objects have appeared in the digital space. The most common GMOOOT? When your boss runs into your office with the revelation that a competitor has launched something shiny, and demands that you create the same sort of shiny object immediately.

GMOOT makes people pursue actions that are reactive rather than strategic. That can be a significant hindrance when it comes time to measure the marketing ROI of your app marketing efforts. By codifying a business objective BEFORE you begin working on app marketing plans, you go a long way toward ensuring that GMOOT doesn’t result in a lot of wasted, non strategic effort.

One example here would be if the purpose of your app is primarily as a companion experience versus a transactional one, such as with an airline passenger app. In such a case, it would be important to remind the team of this BEFORE your organization spent a great deal on acquisition under the assumption that those investments would drive profitable ticket sales.

2. Spell Out the Real Value Proposition

You developed your app to be something unique, powerful and different. Before you go any further in crafting your marketing campaign for it, make sure you write down exactly what makes your app so special and different. Here are a few questions that may help you get that process focused:

If you already have an e-commerce site, catalog, retail outlets or another means of buying from you: Identify what is different about the buying experience of your app that helps to ensure that it will grow your business.

Is it all about new buying occasions, or reaching and connecting with the next generation of customers, or a new way to showcase your offerings?

Whatever your app’s value proposition is, that’s a key part of what makes it an asset to your brand and business. Assess the advantages (and disadvantages) that your app offers over competing app experiences. This assessment may help you define what you emphasize in your marketing messages and materials.

3. Distill Your Elevator Pitch

Think succinct, clear, intriguing and inspiring. Something that really sets your brand apart. Boil your story down to its essence. Spend some time here, as this statement will form the backbone of all your future communications.

4. Carefully Research Your Target Audience

Even before work began on your app, your team chose (or should have chosen) a target audience for your app. That’s because understanding both the value the app offers…and to whom that value is most relevant…should have been key drivers in its development.

As you plan your marketing efforts and set your marketing ROI goals, it’s important to align all marketing strategy and tactics to attracting that desirable target audience. It should guide your digital marketing messaging, app store page content, creative, media programs and more. Also, carefully communicate your target to all your media partners so they can plan and optimize quickly and easily.

5. Recognize m-Commerce App Marketing is a Marathon

When people think of app marketing, their minds usually go to the hype tactics that gaming companies use to get their offerings to the top of the App Store and Google Play popularity lists. For an m-commerce app to be successful, it needs to get downloaded by a critical mass of customers AND used with a reasonable frequency to generate strong revenue/marketing ROI per customer. Doing that calls for an entirely different set of strategies and tactics than for game or utility app marketing.

For m-commerce, one needs to focus first on how many quality users you are attracting, versus focusing solely on raw install numbers. That’s because success in m-commerce metrics like revenue and marketing ROI comes from optimizing toward those objectives, not simply maximizing your total installed base.

It’s also important to understand how the app rankings work. Recognizing that rank matters less for m-commerce apps than games, learn more about the inputs that drive app ranking so that you focus your effort in the most productive places.

6. Take a Data-Driven Approach to App Marketing

The vast majority of downloads and usage go to the apps in the top few slots of the rankings. We’ve repeatedly seen in our clients’ metrics and data that one of the big differences between leaders and also-rans is their interest and investment in the entire buyer journey, not just the install. Here are a couple of ways that brands make that investment:

Measurement and Attribution: Make sure you have the data to evaluate your various marketing partners on their ability to drive quality users and engagements for your marketing campaigns. When you and your brand take the time to fully measure marketing — including uncovering rich marketing roi insights, you take an important leap into driving maximum value from the marketing channel.

In-App Engagement: Also ensure that you are tracking all the critical customer actions (“events”) that take place in your apps so you can optimize your customer experience over time and identify customer trends and characteristics that yield better return/marketing ROI.

TIPS 7-9: ADVERTISING AND MARKETING SPEND DECISIONS

7. Right-Size Your Acquisition Spend

You need to balance your marketing investment between acquisition goals and post-install metric KPIs to drive maximum total return on investment.

As recently as a year ago, many of our clients were spending 90-100% of their budgets on acquisition. But that has changed as better measurement and analytics have shown that downloads and installs are only the first steps in a longer customer engagement process. Post-install sales are what really drive marketing ROI.

8. Apportion Your Budget Against 3-4 Critical Tasks

Our marketing analytic data have shown that there are four significant hurdles that brands must clear with each user for them to become a high-value customer:

Go to the app store and download the app
Launch and engage with the app
Make a purchase
Make subsequent purchases

Not all your customers will require four distinct efforts to convert and become regular buyers, but it can be useful to think about the challenge of establishing a regular customer in the context of these four tasks.

9. Include a Website in Your Planning

Your app needs a web presence beyond its store pages to thrive. If your app is an extension of an online commerce business, create content specifically about your app and develop a destination on your site to feature it. If your business is a standalone app business, invest in an attractive web presence to tell your story and attract new users. And festoon those presences with links to your download pages.

TIPS 10-17: APP STORE IDEAS AND SOCIAL MARKETING

10. Tell Your App Story in Very Human Terms

In your marketing messages, “speak” directly to the prospective downloader and explain why the app can help them/is worth downloading. Avoid silicon speak and focus instead on words and claims that will be most relevant to your target audience. How will the app improve THEIR daily experience?

11. Invest the Time to Deliver Effective App Store Pages

Your app store page is like a shop window – a key driver for purchase/download. Make sure you spend enough time making it as strong as you possibly can. Use Google AdWords tools (make sure you first set the Keyword Tool to Mobile) to identify the most popular search terms in your category. Include exciting and appealing screen shots. And consider video – more and more app developers are creating and including video content in their pages to bring the features and benefits to life.

12. Optimize Your App Store Pages Over Time

As you learn more about customers, what they like, how they use your app, etc., make changes to your download pages to clarify communication and enhance appeal. Make sure, for example, that if you give the app a facelift, that you update your screenshots with the most appealing images possible.

13. Claim and Establish Your Social Media Pages

With the amount of time people spend in environments like Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat, it would be crazy not to create and leverage social accounts specifically for your app. It may make sense to establish these pages long before your launch to begin to build buzz for your offering.

For brick and mortar companies, leverage your pre-existing brand pages to hype the app to your follower/believers.

14. Tap Your Team’s Networks

You’d be amazed at how many people can be reached in social media if everyone on your team gets behind publicizing an app. Ask your team to promote the app on their personal brand presences on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram Snapchat, Pinterest and more!

15. Consider Specialty Store Apps

While Google Play and the Apple App Store are the largest libraries of available apps, it may also make sense to feature the Android version of your app in other specialty app stores if there are ones that are appropriate to your offering. While all iPhone apps must be installed from the App Store, Android allows apps to be downloaded from other locations online. Do some searches for specialty stores that attract your target audience or are relevant to your category.

16. STRONGLY Encourage User Reviews

Use your in-app and CRM experiences to request reviews from users. More and more positive reviews can significantly improve your download rate over time.

Target notifications to your most loyal users at moments when they are likely to be excited about the app and anxious to evangelize.

17. Monitor User Feedback

Customer comments and reviews provide an amazing set of in-market information that can help you refine your message and improve your offering. Make sure you monitor the stores, social media presences and leverage social listening tools to keep abreast of what your users are saying about your app.

TIPS 18-20: LEVERAGING THE PRESS

18. Craft a Great Press Kit and Pitch

Online, print and even television outlets can be very helpful to promote your app if you have a good story to tell. Start by thinking about the kinds of media that are popular with your target. Include both traditional media and popular blogs in this evaluation. Create a press kit containing the core information about your app, and include some great high-resolution screenshots. Provide promo codes so journalists can install and use the app easily. Personalize your pitch to each leading media outlet based on the kinds of stories that they cover.

Where possible, present your app as an extension of a recent story idea or topic that the journalist has covered. Above all, make it easy for them to try and then write about your app.

19. Spread the Word About the Press You Get

When you succeed in driving coverage of your app, use your web presences/social media/etc. to publicize a link to the coverage. Journalists and bloggers live and die by the traffic their stories attract. Make it worth the person’s while to have covered you.

20. Reach Out to App Review Sites for Coverage

The more people that have been exposed to your app and message, the greater your potential audience. The effectiveness of this strategy will ultimately relate to the innovativeness of your app. Many sites are focused primarily on games, though you can find quite a few that cover interesting m-commerce apps, especially those with unique buying experiences.

TIPS 21-25: CHOOSING MEDIA PROGRAMS AND PARTNERS

21. Remember that All Installs are Not the Same

If you think that most people who install an app do so because they wanted the app, you may have another think coming. A substantial portion of app installs is paid for on a CPI (cost per install) basis, meaning that media vendors are incentivized to get as many people to download the offering as they can, regardless of the actual level of interest “in the app itself.”

CPI tends to have a very poor correlation with average revenue per user, but strong media vendors can attract great users with that model. It just depends, and that’s why having an attribution platform from the outset of your app launch is so important. By ensuring you have the attribution data from the outset, you can compare your vendors based on their ability to generate revenue, marketing ROI and long-term engagement.

Also, you can work with your winning vendors to improve CPI campaign metrics based upon downstream customer activity.

22. Unlock the Power of Social Media Advertising

Social media consistently proves itself to be highly effective at driving quality customers for e-commerce businesses. Test a variety of paid advertising approaches across the leading social platforms to determine which work well for your brand.

23. Optimize to the Metric that Matters – Marketing ROI

Getting downloads and installs is great, but what’s most important to an e-commerce app is attracting paying customers. While individuals need to download your app to transact on it, download counts alone may not be the best way to compare the results delivered by different media vendors. Instead, focus on their ability to deliver people who transact, or who take actions like putting items into their carts that demonstrate a likelihood to transact in the future.

24. Be Aware of Incentivized Downloads

Incentivized downloads refer to situations where people are rewarded to download an app they may or may not have an interest in. Often, the person is given some virtual good, like gold in a game, in exchange for downloading. As you can imagine, the percentage of people who use an app that they downloaded because of an incentive tends to be rather low, though it varies considerably.

Reputable vendors can deliver great potential customers this way, but this segment of the media business also contains some bottom feeders. Again, the key to using CPI vendors effectively is having data that enables you to understand the value of the installs they bring you.

In short, there are no hard and fast rules about CPI and user quality, only correlations.

25. Insist on 3rd-Party Attribution/Reporting

Third-party reporting reduces or eliminates the likelihood of double-counting of marketing results, thereby saving you time and money. Third-party reporting creates peace of mind among all parties.

There are at least two other benefits here as well.

Third parties usually have extensive sets of existing partnerships with media vendors, so there won’t be a need to install an APK every time you test a new vendor.

The best measurement companies also provide enhanced, enterprise-grade security for your data.

Independent third-party reporting for downloads and re-engagements helps ensure a level playing field for all media vendors and apples-to-apples performance comparisons.

TIPS 26-28: DOWNLOAD, INSTALL AND BUYING EXPERIENCE

26. Make Registration Easy

Most m-commerce apps have a registration process, either when you first install or when the user transacts. Mobile retail tends to lose more people during this process than PC-based retail because data entry is more difficult on a phone. Take proactive steps to make registration and transacting as easy as possible.

Consider registration via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Then, be sure and offer to remember the person’s details for subsequent transactions. That will reduce friction for future purchases.

27. Create a CRM Program for Your App Users

Don’t overlook any opportunity to communicate with people who download your app. An opt-in email program helps you deliver targeted communications to your install base – messages that can drive them to launch and transact.

28. Deliver Push Notifications

Being able to deliver push communications to apps helps remind the user of why they downloaded the app in the first place and keeps it more top of mind. It also offers the opportunity to deliver important product news to those who might not opt-in for emails.

Custom or personalized push notices can also be a powerful tool to drive individuals to take specific actions. A marketing automation platform can make a tremendous level of personalization possible here.

TIPS 29-35: LEVERAGE VIRAL DISTRIBUTION AND WORD OF MOUTH

29. Bake Virality into Your App Experience

Your customer base can be an outstanding means through which to spread the word about your app on social. Baking in social media features in the experience can dramatically increase the potential audience of your app. Other features like the ability to create and share wish lists and message other users can be incredibly helpful here.

30. Brick and Mortar Retailers: Unlock the Power of Your Real-World Touch Points

Brick and mortar stores have tremendous potential awareness and marketing advantages when it comes to publicizing apps. Consider adding references to your app on receipts, signage, roto circulars, catalogs, website, estore, bags and anywhere else that offers a little real estate for a “download the app” message.

In some organizations, it can be a challenge to unleash these touch points because of logistical issues. But remember how free email platforms Yahoo and

Hotmail brought themselves to preeminence? By appending little “get an account” messages to all the emails emanating from their platforms. Using receipts and the like for driving your app business relies on the same principle.

Remember also that apps can enhance retail experiences, so the benefits can and should go both ways. By incorporating features like store maps, product scanning and an easy way to collect and use coupons, the retail experience can be enhanced.

31. Cross-Promote Your App

If your business already has an app, look at the user base as a natural set of people to attract with your new app. Cross-promotion is free and very powerful.

32. Create a Referral Program

Friends and family of m-commerce app users are more likely than the average person to appreciate the same app. By creating a referral program, you can leverage those networks while rewarding loyalists for evangelism. Just make sure you reward behavior related specifically to a core KPI. For instance, rewarding users for recruiting people who make a purchase versus a referral program that rewards a download/install is far more likely to drive meaningful revenue growth.

33. Leverage Retargeting to Close Sales

As we discussed in the budgeting section, your job is far from over when a customer installs an app. To create long-term customer relationships, you need to constantly think of ways to engage app users and bring them back to your app. Retargeting advertising can be extremely effective here.

It’s also great for incenting lapsed users or converting those with demonstrated product interests.

34 Analyze and Speak Directly to Your High-Value Users to Define

We all know that more personal messages tend to drive better results than mass blasts. That’s why it’s so important for you to collect rich customer purchase information – so that you can deliver precise, personalized messages at the perfect moment to drive maximum sales.

To get this kind of customer insight, you will need to leverage both a robust mobile app measurement solution and a mobile-first data management platform to collect, manage, enhance, segment and export customer audiences and data. Get more information on these topics in the Singular website resources section.

35. Use App Customer Data for Cross-Device Marketing

Apps represent the majority of connected consumer time, but they are by no means the only places people spend their time. By collecting in-app customer data and using it as the foundation for customer profiles in a mobile-first DMP, you can define and export audiences. Your audiences can also provide critical insights for look-alike targeting, which can help you acquire more high-quality customers to your app.

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.

Market share and the exciting future of Singular

I was recently speaking at a mobile marketing conference in San Francisco and saw a competitor’s booth.

In the booth, the competitor showed the relative market share of the various mobile attribution providers. Predictably, theirs was highest. Other players didn’t show very well, and Singular was one of them.

I loved it. Because they don’t understand what we do.

Playing a different game

Mobile Attribution is a very critical piece in a much larger puzzle.

That’s why we acquired an MMP, re-architected it as part of a holistic solution instead of a point solution, and that’s why we are winning over a massive number of tier one customers.

In fact, Singular has more customers, bar none, in the top 100 grossing apps on Android and the top 100 grossing apps on iOS than any of our competitors. 46% of the top 100 grossing iOS apps are Singular customers (and 50% of the top 50) and 46% of the top 100 grossing Android apps are Singular customers (and 50% of the top 50).

That’s because we offer something different.

Something bigger.

Singular is a marketing intelligence platform. Our mission is to provide actionable insights to our customers, the best scientific marketers in the world.

We do that by solving the massive problem of data explosion and fragmentation in the marketing ecosystem across mobile, web, TV, offline, as well as paid, email, push, organic and any other form of marketing. We go beyond the confines of mobile advertising and mobile attribution, and are the only single pane of glass for all your marketing activity.

Every company in the world needs this.

Looking to the future

Today, we unify the biggest spectrum of more than 2,000 marketing technologies. And it’s just the beginning.

To echo Jeff Bezos, it’s day one.

For us what matters is having the best North Star. And that is the top customers. In every market, the top companies are a constant source of envy and imitation by the up-and-comers and smaller companies.

Since our launch in 2014, and up until this very moment of me typing this, these top customers are the strongest source of influence on our roadmap. That, combined with our vision, is helping us move forward.

We’ve got a lot in the kitchen. You’re going to start hearing more about it in January. Our vision is huge, and we’re well capitalized to make it happen.

For our amazing Singular customers, our sole mission is to be a great, innovative partner that will always put you two steps ahead of the competition. Accept nothing but relentless drive to serve, topped with the whipping cream of world-class innovation.

That is what the best do.

And we aim to serve the best.

Singular closes $30M funding to accelerate innovation for growth marketers

Since founding Singular in 2014, we’ve focused on solving the data challenge for marketers. And it’s only gotten tougher.

Five years ago when we came up with the idea for Singular, there were 150 marketing technology tools. Today there are almost 7,000, and the average enterprise uses more than 90 martech tools, each with their own datastream. The marketing technology landscape has exploded, and thanks to new devices, new data points, and new marketing KPIs, the amount of data being thrown at marketers is simply overwhelming.

We’re incredibly fortunate to be the first to truly solve this challenge, and are becoming the de facto leader of the marketing intelligence space.

Today I’m excited and humbled to announce we’ve raised $30M in series B funding led by Norwest Venture Partners. We’re really happy to also have the full support and participation of all our previous investors, including General Catalyst, Method Capital, Telstra Ventures, Translink Capital, and Thomvest.

This past year has been one of the most exciting years of my professional life, and I’m so proud of what our team has accomplished. Just in the past year, we’ve:

Hosted an amazing experts-only marketing event: UNIFY
Acquired a company and fully integrated its team and technology
Onboarded some of the best brands and smartest marketers in mobile to our attribution product
Measured over a trillion events for marketers
Optimized over $10B in clients’ marketing spend
Doubled our global team
Opened offices in London, India, Japan, and Korea alongside our existing home bases in Tel Aviv and San Francisco
And lastly, continued on our aggressive growth path and achieved more than 100% revenue growth

But in reality, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what is possible.

We have a really big vision for how Singular can help marketers unify their data, optimize for growth, and get timely, intelligent insights to guide data-driven decision making. It’s really about the entire organization.

CEOs need to align their teams to common goals and build in accountability. CMOs have to drive profitable growth with data. CFOs have to allocate capital effectively. VPs of growth need to define and execute growth strategies. UA managers and performance marketers need to test new channels, maximize efficiency, and attribute growth results to marketing inputs. And BI analysts need clean data in standardized formats to ingest into corporate systems.

The common denominators?

Trustworthy data. Accurate measurement. Actionable intelligence. And there’s so much room for Singular to help.

We start by enabling marketing science. We know that there’s always going to be art to marketing. That’s the heart of what marketers do: the right words, the right images, the right feel.

The brain, however — the marketing science — tells marketers what resonates, what engages, and what ultimately drives action.

To drive the science of marketing, companies build their best-of-breed tech stacks, choosing from thousands of marketing solutions and/or marketing cloud providers. But no matter how you’ve built your tech stack, connecting it is not easy.

This is where Singular comes in.

Singular integrates with your tools of choice. By unifying marketing data from more than 2,000 global marketing and advertising partners, and combining upper-funnel marketing data with bottom-funnel conversion, attribution, and customer data, we provide the much needed standardization and insights marketers need. The result is marketing science.

That includes processing data in any format, and partnering at the deepest levels with Facebook, Google, Apple, and all of the other key marketing partners, as an MMP. We’ve worked hard to ensure our customers can finally achieve marketing’s holy grail: all data, standardized, accessible, and actionable, at their fingertips.

We’ve had a great start.

We’re honored to work with some of the smartest brands in the world. I truly cannot say how much I appreciate our customers. They’ve taught us so much about what marketers need, and about how marketing is evolving as a discipline.

I thank you for being part of our journey, and I’m giving you fair warning: expect significantly more innovation and excellence in the coming months and quarters. We’re going to use this funding round to give you tools that enable your greatness, and we have some amazing plans to make that happen. Please continue to be in touch with us. Your insights and your feedback guide our roadmaps.

I also have to express appreciation for our investors. They fuel our fires, and they are not just sources of capital. They truly get it. We’re so impressed with our investors. They’ve learned everything there is to know about our business, and they’ve surprised us with how smart their insights are. Thank you for partnering with us.

Last but not least: the Singular team has earned this.

You’ve worked late, worked weekends, worked holidays, (and worst of all, worked for me!) … all in pursuit of a dream and a goal. We’ve accomplished many things, and now we’re getting major reinforcements. Thank you for being part of the journey. We really are a Singular family, and I am so thankful for each and every one of you.

I couldn’t be more proud of the team, and we couldn’t be more excited for what the future holds. Thank you for your support throughout the years.

Now, we’re turning our eyes to the future. We have some amazing new projects we’re working on that we can’t wait to unveil, and I’ll make sure to be in touch when we’re ready to talk about it.

If you’re not currently a Singular customer, click here to find out what you’re missing. If you are, thank you!

And… expect great things.

7 critical criteria to include in your mobile attribution RFP

According to eMarketer, mobile advertising in the United States is expected to reach over $70 billion this year and account for a whopping 75% of all digital ad spend.

As mobile advertising budgets continue to climb, so does the demand for tools and services to measure and optimize these investments. This surge in demand has led to a proliferation of mobile attribution companies and the commoditization of attribution technologies.

As a result, many mobile attribution providers rely heavily on inflated claims and marketing jargon as a means to differentiate themselves in an increasingly crowded market. Even if you’re an attribution expert, researching mobile measurement providers can be a confusing and frustrating experience for marketers.

To help you feel more confident re-evaluating your current provider or choosing a new one, we’ve written an attribution RFP guide to help you wade through the jargon and find the right provider.

Download our Guide to Mobile Attribution now.

Here’s a snapshot of the seven key criteria we cover in the guide to help you build the best mobile attribution RFP.

1. Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP)

A mobile attribution provider will only be effective if it’s integrated with the media sources you buy from, period. This is particularly crucial if you spend (and you most likely are) on any of the self-attributing networks (such as Facebook, Google, Snapchat, Twitter, and Apple).

2. Data combining

There are two main types of integrations marketers need to be aware of in order to understand the complexity of mapping their data. The first is an attribution integration (which delivers user-behavior data) and the second is an ad network integration (which delivers marketing data). To truly understand ROI across your mobile campaigns, creatives and publishers, you need to collect and combine both sets of data. However, the ability to do this is entirely dependent on the provider’s technological capabilities, and almost all providers (except Singular) cannot do both today. We’ll dig deeper into each data integration and demonstrate why it’s necessary for both to be connected.

3. Granularity

Ensuring accuracy and completeness when combining and connecting your data is the greatest challenge to granularity. No two sources are the same and even when it is accurate, complete, and attributed, you still need to ensure your marketing campaign data matches your user-level data to unlock ROI at the campaign, publisher, keyword, and creative-levels.

4. Reporting

Another area where attribution providers are heavily differentiated is reporting. While many providers will provide some way of accessing raw data, for the system to be truly impactful, the reporting interface must be designed in a way for insights to be derived quickly and efficiently. We’ll review a few report types that have proven to be indispensable to mobile marketers.

5. Fraud prevention

No matter where you advertise or how much you spend, your mobile campaigns will likely be impacted by fraud. Even if a provider says they offer “fraud protection,” make sure you read the fine print. Actual prevention, custom rules, reporting and insights, cost savings and alignment of incentives are a few specifics to pay attention to.

6. Data retention & accessibility

This is an area where this is a huge difference between providers, where some offer decent APIs, and some offer rather useless means to export your data, that will make the entire exercise extremely painful. We’ll dive into the four different options available for downloading and sharing more robust data with your internal teams and systems in this guide.

7. Pricing

While pricing may be one of the most obvious points of consideration when evaluating attribution providers, it’s far more useful to weigh value over price. Hidden costs and feature charges can add up quickly. So, before you are lured by a low-cost solution, make sure you know what you’re paying for.

We’ll help you understand the different pricing models in the attribution market today.

So what are you waiting for? Cut the bullsh!t and get the complete facts on mobile attribution providers now.

MAU Game Plan: How marketers can make the most of Grow.co Mobile Apps Unlocked 2018

We’re one week away from what we at Singular like to call the Super Bowl for mobile marketers: Grow.co’s Mobile Apps Unlocked (MAU). This year, the event is stacked up to be massive, complete with multiple content tracks, a huge expo floor, crazy parties and of course the best and brightest marketers in the country. No doubt this event is the largest opportunity of the year to learn new strategies and understand how to fuel your marketing stack for bigger and better things.

We’ve seen conference attendees fail to make the most of their days in Vegas time and time again by not preparing a game plan in advance of the big event. So, we’ve put together a complete list of places to be and people to talk to so you can leave Vegas more knowledgeable on how to build a next generation marketing tech stack, and of course… a bit hungover.

If you’re looking to improve your measurement…

4-25 @ 9:20 AM: The Modern Mobile Marketing Stack featuring PicsArt, Women in Wireless, Kongregate, Scopely, N3TWORK
4-25 @ 3:50 PM: How to Win in Marketing with Data Granularity featuring Singular

Who to meet with: Singular! Singular combines marketing analytics and attribution in one platform providing a single source of truth for marketing campaign performance

If you’re looking to acquire new users on high performing, low fraud channels…

4-25 @ 2:00 PM: Driving Performance on Snapchat featuring Snapchat
4-26 @ 10:00 AM, Growth Track: Inside Mobile Ad Fraud: A DSP’s View into the Programmatic Ecosystem featuring Liftoff
4-26 @ 10:20 AM Growth Track: Awed by Fraud? Get Clarity With Transparency featuring AdColony, Camelot, Intuit
4-26 @ 2:20 PM, Growth Track: Scaling Facebook & Instagram in 2018 featuring Priceline, Freshly, Smartly.io, Unique Influence, Quidd, Seriously

Who to meet with: Check out the Singular ROI Index for a complete list of media sources you should meet up with at MAU

If you’re looking to retain existing users & re-engage past users…

4-25 @ 10:10AM: Notifications @ Scale featuring Pinterest
4-25 @ 3:50 PM: Avoiding “Garbage In, Garbage Out”: The Power and Promise of Human-First AI featuring Braze and Smule
4-26 @ 10:40 AM, CRM/Retention Track: App Retargeting in the Mobile Age featuring Remerge and DraftKings
4-26 @ 1:30 PM, CRM/Retention Track: A live ops approach to CRM featuring NBC Universal, Playstudios, Headspace, FabFitFun

Who to meet with:
Sumee Oh, Sr. Director, Marketing at NBC Universal
Siberia Su, Sr. Manager, Acquisition Marketing at DraftKings
Jeet Niyogi, Marketing Director at Playtika

And if you’re just looking for a good time…

4-25 @ 7:00 PM: Keep in on the Download. The most exclusive party at MAU hosted by Singular & Applovin. Get access to the largest penthouse suite at the MGM Grand. Invite-only, but you can request to get added to the list by emailing mau@singular.net
4-26 @ 12:00 PM: Mobile Fempire Lunch – Join the leading women in the advertising industry for networking, drinks, and lunch. Invite-only, so request an invite at mau@singular.net
4-26 @ 9:00 PM: MAU’s Official After Party

With so many incredible sessions, dozens of technology vendors, a hot lineup of parties every night, how do you plan to make the most of your 48 hours in Vegas?

P.S. Be sure to swing by Booth 311 to say hi to the Singular team!

Marketers are thinking about mobile attribution completely wrong

Why Singular is creating the new marketing data standard for mobile attribution

Since launching Singular 4 years ago, we’ve worked with some of the largest mobile apps, along with an expansive set of mobile marketing solutions to become the de-facto Marketing Data Platform. Singular provides a single source of truth for marketing campaign performance by merging three core datasets that historically existed in silos:

Media sources:
Ad spend, campaign information, creative performance, targeting options
Attribution:
Clicks, attributed app installs, tracking links, postbacks
BI:
Customer profiles, post-install events, predictive LTV, cross-platform revenue

We developed a technology unlike any in existence — instead of building another stand alone marketing solution (advertising channel, email service, re-engagement tool, etc.) — Singular built a platform that could connect data across all the different siloed solutions in the marketing stack, standardize it, and make it actionable for mobile marketers. Using Singular, the leading marketers easily get the analytics and insights they need to maximize ROI across their mobile campaigns.

While we initially set out to collect and connect every piece of marketing and attribution data in a single platform, customers were still challenged with combining these datasets together. We recognized that there are two very different types of data that marketers needed: certain data is only available in aggregate (i.e. ad spend), while other datasets are aggregated from user level data (i.e. app install attribution). Combining these is like trying to assemble a puzzle with pieces from different sets. It simply doesn’t work… the pieces are not built to fit together.

Today we want to talk about a mistreated piece of the marketing stack: Mobile Attribution.

We’ve witnessed an odd approach to Mobile Attribution throughout the years. Legacy mobile attribution providers defined this market in a silo with no understanding of how media sources actually deliver campaigns. While attribution providers built their products to gather the bare minimum data needed to attribute an app install, media sources have infinitely outpaced them in complexity and depth with campaigns using enhanced targeting and multiple variations of creatives. Instead of matching the sophistication of the sources to provide marketers with more insights to optimize on, legacy attribution providers focused on one-upping the other with marketing jargon-filled features lists and a race to be the cheapest solution out there.

The irony here, is this siloed approach to mobile attribution is the #1 reason massive gaps exist in datasets today, making it nearly impossible for marketers to trace the customer journey. We’ve often been asked to solve these gaps within Singular, but there was nothing we could do since the problem originates with the way legacy attribution platforms were built. So in 2017, we decided to kill the status quo.

Mid last year, we came across an opportunity to acquire Apsalar, an established mobile attribution provider and an exclusive Mobile Measurement Partner of Facebook, Google, Snapchat, Twitter and Pinterest. This was a big and bold decision, but we had a solid conviction that we needed to own the Mobile Attribution piece of the puzzle to fill the drastic data holes that had become standard for app marketers.

So how does our approach actually solve the data challenge?

1: We did not pursue “sufficient” attribution functionality or just reach industry parity – we built the best attribution product in existence, by any objective measure.

Recognizing Attribution as critical infrastructure, we utilized learnings from the entire mobile attribution ecosystem to build the industry’s best of breed attribution stack from the ground up. Just imagine if the legacy attribution providers could rebuild their platforms with today’s knowledge of partner integrations, fraud, data privacy regulations, real-time data processing, and data warehousing.

2: We’ve given marketers a dataset that is entirely complete, accurate and extremely granular spanning all of the tools and sources in their marketing stack.

We built attribution natively into Singular’s larger data platform, rather than patching in another siloed attribution stack. Using the knowledge acquired over 4 years of mapping the ecosystem to understand every datapoint reported by every source (and how to standardize it), we built Singular’s attribution to fit all of our proven workflows and data connectors.

3: We redefined how businesses consume marketing data.

Where previously BI teams struggled to assemble different datasets sourced from various APIs, exports and postbacks, we invented new streamlined APIs for easy access to all marketing data. Once-challenging BI projects are now completely trivial.

4: We provide a team of business strategists to help scale marketing in the best way possible.

In accordance with the Singular philosophy, we’ve focused on the customer experience. We provide 24/7 global support, in-region customer success teams and continued improvements on the product based on feedback.

And what can we provide that a siloed mobile attribution provider can’t?

Our customers now have unparalleled control over their data, standardized marketing and attribution datasets, the analytics on their marketing campaign performance at the most granular levels, the tools to further analyze this data in their own BI and most importantly, the ability to construct the full customer journey.

I’m proud to say our decision to create a new standard, the “Singular Standard,” for complete marketing data was one of the most important and successful decisions we’ve made in Singular’s history. Companies like Rovio, LinkedIn, Sam’s Club, N3TWORK, are among the pioneers of the future marketing stack, and they are being joined by the masses every quarter.

In fact, I’ll let the number speak for themselves:

If you’re ready to remove the data deficit in your stack caused by legacy attribution providers and bring on an innovative approach, we would be happy to talk to you.

LoseIt Taps Singular’s Unified Product To Expose A Complete View of Users – From Acquisition Through Engagement

We’re excited to announce that Lose It!, one of the world’s most popular health and wellness apps, has partnered with Singular to strengthen its marketing attribution and analytics.

The Lose It! team will leverage all aspects of the unified analytics solution resulting from the recent merger of Singular and Apsalar. With this fully integrated offering, Lose It! will be able to connect, measure, and optimize its acquisition and lifecycle marketing data across paid and organic sources from a single platform.

“We didn’t want to work with multiple vendors to get the data we need,” says Eliza Jonathan, Growth Manager at Lose It!. “Singular’s unified product lets us retrieve and measure as much information as possible to discover the KPIs that are most valuable for our app. Now we can optimize towards these KPIs across every part of our app’s growth funnel – from acquisition to engagement through premium upgrade.”

Their Story
Lose It! was founded in 2008 to help real people achieve real weight loss by delivering an easy, personalized, app-based program. Since then, Lose It! has attracted more than 30 million downloads, and has consistently been ranked among the top apps in the Apple app store’s fitness and wellness category, and for good reason: Lose It! has helped its members lose over 50 million pounds.

Their Goals
In choosing a marketing analytics platform, the Lose It! team had several goals in mind:

Integrate analytics across all marketing channels
“It’s essential for us to see beyond front-end acquisition data and expose what our users do further down funnel, so marketing can be optimized for downstream activity.”
Reduce reporting bottlenecks & operational overhead
“Manual collection and analysis of marketing data in Excel wasn’t sustainable as it took hours to collate. In searching for a way to automate the process, we didn’t want to work with multiple vendors to get the attribution and analytics data we needed.”
Reduce reliance on Engineering
“When onboarding a new channel, mapping events to our data warehouse required the help of engineers, which prevented us from easily testing and setting up analytics for new channels.”
Access deeper analytics
“Network dashboards and internal reports weren’t meeting our analytics needs. In some cases, segmentation by date, ad group and cohort was limited. Or, we could only see conversions by campaign, not the sum of conversions by Geo or across the entire channel.”

Their Solution
After integrating Singular, the Lose It! team is already seeing the value of centralizing its acquisition and attribution data, with Singular’s powerful analytics tools layered on top.

Lose It! connected its ad channels and lifecycle management tools to Singular, giving Lose It! the ability to see if users coming from a specific channel or campaign are highly engaged with the app and are taking high-value actions. “The value of Singular is not just the users we obtain, but also what we learn about those users through other marketing channels like in-app messaging and email marketing,” says Jonathan.

Insights are derived from highly accurate and flexible ROI and CPA data, which the team can analyze on a channel, campaign, creative and publisher-level.

While platform integrations with new ad channels previously required assistance from engineering, now integrations are streamlined. “When I set up a new advertising channel, I can go into Singular and select which events I want to map to that channel on my own, without engineering help.”

“Singular will make it really easy to test and optimize new channels and see an apples-to-apples comparison between channels all in one place.”

It’s Official — Apsalar Joins Singular!

When we started Singular three years ago, it seemed obvious to us that the fragmented world of digital marketing needed a connective tissue. Hence, our name, Singular, would serve as a constant reminder of our mission: To build a single marketing analytics platform that unites all your disparate data feeds, enabling marketers to do their jobs more efficiently and more effectively.

So we set out to help marketers connect, measure and optimize siloed data from any marketing data source. That included media partners, lifecycle management tools and attribution and analytics solutions, both in-house and third-party. We invented new technologies to enable robust partner integrations, data enrichment algorithms, mapping layers and more. Each component was necessary to provide marketers with better access to their data, no matter its origin or format, and to expose valuable insights that drive ROI. By doing so we created a unique technology that has helped our customers, some of the world’s best marketers, achieve success.

Right from the day we founded Singular, we knew that connecting rich marketing data to user behavior data would be a game-changer for our customers. Without this connection, marketers are being robbed of their right to understand the full customer journey. To make matters worse, this problem could never be solved with today’s technology because of the way mobile attribution systems are built, as well as the walled gardens and data silos in our industry. To overcome this challenge, we needed to once again invent new technology — which first required incorporating a native mobile attribution stack right into Singular.

Enter Apsalar, a leading provider of mobile attribution and user-level audience management. I connected with Michael, Apsalar’s CEO and Co-Founder, about six months ago. We both agreed that today’s marketing systems aren’t well integrated, preventing marketers from getting a complete view of their customers’ journeys. We also agreed that if a single platform could finally link marketing and customer data, it would dramatically improve marketers’ abilities to drive higher ROI.

Fast forward to today and I am thrilled to share that Singular and Apsalar are joining forces!

After months of meetings and a lot of hard work, our teams have completed the successful merger of our technologies. Our unified company and product will operate under the Singular brand and will provide our customers with the first marketing analytics platform that is truly end to end, breaking down data silos that cost marketers time and money.

The combined platform unlocks a host of new capabilities for marketers to expose deeper, more meaningful insights on their performance and act on those insights with far greater efficiency. Those capabilities include:

The Most Advanced Data Collection Engine. Collect and standardize marketing data from social channels, ad networks, marketing clouds, lifecycle management platforms, data warehouses, and other marketing analytics systems — to expose deeper data across every customer touchpoint.
True ROI Analysis. Singular is the only platform capable of connecting marketing data with user behavior data to expose the most granular and accurate ROI data, from channel, country, campaign and publisher-level ROI — down to user-level ROI.
A Best-In-Class Analytics Product Built for Marketers. Slice and dice your data across every dimension so you can analyze marketing performance, manage marketing budgets, optimize creative assets, and create user-level segments with automatic real-time distribution to any third-party system.
Complete Partner Data. Singular is an official Mobile Measurement Partner of Facebook, App Attribution Partner with Google, Pinterest Marketing Partner, Snap Measurement Partner and Twitter Official Mobile App Tracking Partner.

Beyond the value of our game-changing platform, I am also excited to announce that our presence around the globe has doubled. With offices in US, Israel, Germany, United Kingdom, India and Japan, and with over 120 dedicated Singular team members, we are here to serve you faster and better than ever before.

To our customers and partners, I want to take a moment to thank you for your partnership and loyalty over the last several years. You guys are amazing, and we are so lucky to work with such bright and fun people! I am proud of what we have been able to accomplish together and I am also humbled because none of this would have been possible without your commitment and partnership. Our relationships have shaped us into the company we are today, so thank you!

Today’s announcement is just the beginning. I can’t wait to unveil some of the innovations and new products that we are already working on in the new unified platform. Stay tuned!

Gadi Eliashiv
CEO & Co-Founder

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.