Elizabeth Lauer-Lopez, Author at Singular

Amazon AppFlow: your data pipeline to any destination

Singular is very excited to partner in Amazon AWS’s AppFlow launch which will help marketers by streamlining the availability of marketing performance data into their internal data warehouse including support for Redshift, S3 & Snowflake.

Using this new integration enables AWS clients to access spend and ROI data across Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Bing, and 2,000+ additional integrations.

What is Singular?

Singular provides a single source of truth for marketing performance data by managing the 3rd party data connections for marketers fetching advertising spend, conversions, and attribution decisions for all marketing channels from over 2000+ integrations. Data is aggregated into business-ready schemas from partnֳers such as Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Bing, and many more publishers, influencers, and offline channels to create one data table. Singular’s cost aggregation solution enables marketers to see the impact of every marketing dollar they spend.

What is AppFlow?

AppFlow is a new AWS product that enables seamless data transfer between SaaS applications to AWS services like Amazon S3 and Redshift. Using AppFlow flows, you can easily manage and automate data transfers securely in just a few clicks. Example use cases include:

Power Internal Marketing Dashboards

Use AppFlow to load performance marketing data including clicks, spend, and conversions into a unified table. Access all Singular supported integrations to copy data in the most granular way possible including campaign, ad group, keyword, and creatives.

Connect Paid Marketing with Salesforce opportunities

Use AppFlow as a data pipeline to copy:

Sales opportunity records from Salesforce.
Linkedin Ads campaign performance including spend, leads, and web conversions.

Load both data sets into Redshift and use it to measure the ROI for your social campaigns.

What is Singular’s Marketing ETL solution?

Singular’s Marketing ETL takes all marketing data collected by Singular’s Marketing Analytics platform and packages it into a single data table that can be ported to any data warehouse.

Singular and AppFlow make managing data pipelines and data flows into internal data warehouses, such as S3, Redshift, and Snowflake, and visualization tools easier than ever for marketers and engineering teams. Teams can easily map inbound data points from exclusive launch partners, such as Singular, into a newly created data table built on-demand through AppFlow’s interface without any additional coding required. Never before has it been easier to get marketing data into your data warehouse to enable marketing and business intelligence teams to do deeper analysis and project where future marketing dollars should be spent.

How can Singular’s Marketing ETL help my company?

Engineering teams:

Unifies all your marketing channels into one table with a business-ready schema.
Reduces requests from marketing teams like new channel integration requests and data discrepancies
Ensures your data will always be accurate – Singular ETL is a fully managed solution with monitoring 24/7.

Marketing teams:

100% coverage of all advertising spend guaranteed–even those partners where there is no API available
Create powerful marketing dashboards by joining Singular data with your proprietary data
Save valuable hours every week calculating return on investment for each marketing source and gain more time you can put towards optimizing campaigns
Add new channels without breaking existing dashboards and save engineering resources
Align internal teams and work towards common goals with a single source of truth

What is required to send my marketing data to my internal data warehouse?

The Singular and AppFlow integration streamlines data infrastructure to empower marketers to build more effective growth strategies based on accurate, relevant datasets.

Marketing automation in the early stages can be extremely beneficial if your focus is to scale and have a quick insight into marketing analytics. Try Singular free with AppFlow and begin bringing data into your internal data warehouse or visualization tool without having to write a single line of code. If you’re an existing customer that would like to know more about how to use Singular as a data pipeline data to your internal database, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager to start that conversation about the Marketing ETL and AppFlow integration.

Snowflake: make paid marketing data accessible without coding

Singular is now integrated with the cloud data warehouse Snowflake to enable simple and scalable data access. This integration will save companies engineering resources and speed up business decisions by integrating paid marketing data from multiple platforms, such as Facebook, Google Ads, Bing, and 2000+ more partners. Advertising spends and performance ROI data from all marketing sources are normalized in a single table. Marketers are able to streamline the availability of marketing performance data into their internal data warehouse and make it more accessible to run custom queries.

What is Singular?

What is Snowflake?

Snowflake is an enterprise-ready cloud data warehouse that automatically scales (up and down) to get the right balance of performance versus cost by separating data storage from data computing. For example, if you need near-real-time data loads for complex transformations, but have relatively few complex queries in your reporting, you can script a massive Snowflake warehouse for the data load, and scale it back down after it’s completed–all in real-time. This saves costs without sacrificing your solution goals.

The integration enables seamless data transfer between Singular and Snowflake in just a few clicks. Customers use cases are:

Power Internal Marketing Dashboards

Use Singular to load performance marketing data including clicks, spend, and conversions into a unified table. Companies have access to copy data in the most granular way possible including campaign, ad group, keyword, and creatives to get more customized insights.

Analyze Customer Behavior Patterns for Better Segmentation

Copy marketing performance data from Singular, such as ad spend, clicks, country, campaign, and creative into your data warehouse and join this with proprietary data, such as transaction data. Companies will have much deeper segmentation information based on where they spend advertising dollars and the ROI results each customer segment produced.

What is Singular’s Marketing ETL solution?

Singular’s Marketing ETL takes all marketing data collected by Singular’s Marketing Analytics platform and packages it into a single data table that can be ported to any data warehouse.

Singular and Snowflake make managing data pipelines and data flows into internal data warehouses and visualization tools easier than ever for marketers and engineering teams. There’s no code required to start pushing data to Snowflake. Teams simply enter credentials and start using their marketing data in Snowflake. Never before has it been easier to get marketing data into your data warehouse to enable marketing and business intelligence teams to do deeper analysis and project where future marketing dollars should be spent.

How can Singular’s Marketing ETL help my company?

Engineering teams:

Unifies all your marketing channels into one table with a business-ready schema.
Reduces requests from marketing teams like new channel integration requests and data discrepancies
Ensures your data will always be accurate – Singular ETL is a fully managed solution with monitoring 24/7.

Marketing teams:

100% coverage of all advertising spend guaranteed–even those partners where there is no API available
Create powerful marketing dashboards by joining Singular data with your proprietary data
Save valuable hours every week calculating return on investment for each marketing source and gain more time you can put towards optimizing campaigns and access clear insights via Singular’s cost aggregation solution
Add new channels without breaking existing dashboards and save engineering resources
Align internal teams and work towards common goals with a single source of truth

What is required to send my marketing data to my internal data warehouse?

The Singular and Snowflake integration streamlines data infrastructure to empower marketers to build more effective growth strategies based on accurate, relevant datasets.

Marketing automation in the early stages is extremely beneficial if your focus is to scale and have a quick insight into marketing analytics. Try Singular free with Snowflake and bring data into your internal data warehouse or visualization tool without having to write a single line of code. If you’re an existing customer that would like to know more about how to send data to your internal database, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager to start that conversation about the Marketing ETL and Snowflake integration.

Playing the ROI Game: How Gaming Advertisers Are Winning a $150 Billion+ Market

According to TechCrunch, by the end of 2019, the global gaming market was estimated to be worth $152 billion—with 45% of that, $65.5 billion, coming directly from mobile games. Investors continue to buy in, too, with over $9 billion in investments. EY.com notes that “total funding in gaming firms over the last 18 months has exceeded the amount invested over the previous five years.” Talk about great ROI!

If the industry’s so hot right now, how are global gaming companies tracking their success? In the gaming realm, you hear a lot about LTV vs. ROAS, but is one more important to track than the other? Which one should gaming advertisers be focused on for optimizing their campaigns?

How can you ensure your calculations are accurate?

The challenge of measuring success

Taking a step back, how can marketers actually calculate what their target ROAS should be? Can you calculate ROAS at the publisher level? Should you be looking at ROAS on a cohort basis?

Although many veteran gaming marketers in the mobile industry have had great success with existing ROAS tracking methods, the technology and methods themselves have evolved over the last couple of years. Marketers have had to find new and better ways to get reliable calculations.

What’s in a game? The three main gaming genres

In devising the best method possible for measuring gaming ROI, it helps to analyze the business model and goal of the different types of games. Let’s take a look at the main gaming genres.

First, you have hyper-casual, highly addictive, lightweight games with simple mechanics.

In this type of game, user sessions are short and LTV is low. Therefore, it’s important for marketers to have leading indicators they can track within the first couple hours of a game launching.

Given that cohorts are measured on a daily basis, there are other metrics marketers might need to use as leading indicators immediately versus relying on ROAS—for example, the number of installs and the CPI or eCPI target. Given that publishers of hyper-casual games produce multiple apps each month, retention isn’t the key goal until they can quickly identify a successful game to put their marketing dollars against.

What is the main goal here? Installs.

And they’re getting those in spades. In Q4 2019, hyper-casual games grabbed 10 out of the 15 slots for top downloads. Their business model is to monetize through in-app advertisements and cross-app promotion.

Advertisers for these gaming companies need their marketing dashboard to be able to provide a ROAS calculation based on revenue from served ads versus the traditional in-app purchase. A technical challenge to overcome is for your technology partners to be able to process the extremely low revenue increments that are standard to this business model.

The other extreme is the hardcore games that involve a lot of strategy—these are what most self-proclaimed “non-gamers” would consider “gaming”.

With longer game production time and user sessions, user LTV and retention can be among the highest. But, this gaming experience is generally for a small number of big spenders.

With longer sessions, retention, being able to see multiple cohort periods around spend, and your custom metrics become very relevant leading indicators of success or failure. Having a ROAS-centric benchmark becomes essential to tracking success and projecting your game’s break-even point within your marketing dashboard.

Serving ads within hardcore games has become a more accepted practice. If your ROAS calculation doesn’t combine in-app purchase revenue with revenue generated from serving in-app ads, then you should update it using a provider that offers this as a solution out of the box.

It’s essential to understand how users are generating revenue for your business and which sources are driving early whales into your game.

Similar to eCommerce, the gaming industry goal is to find lookalikes that continue to grow revenue. This also opens an entirely new revenue stream for hardcore games to creatively explore with. For this business strategy, an LTV model is also a must.

Finally, there are casual and midcore games.

These game types strikes the balance between “hyper-casual” and “hardcore.” That said, consider strategies for this group that are closer to “hardcore.” Why? Because more time goes into the app development strategy. And, like all apps, the goal is to blow up and provide a great return. At this point, LTV may be a stretch goal or very simplistic until a game proves its worth and is on target to the break-even point.

Overall, calculating ROAS at the most granular level possible will help you find pockets of optimizations within your campaign for a particular media channel. These will inform how to shift your budget to increase your potential for greater ROAS results/outcomes and gain an edge in a very competitive landscape.

Ad campaign optimization tactics for gaming advertisers

Eric Seifert’s Mobile Dev Memo’s guide to mobile marketing notes that a ROAS-centric campaign optimization strategy is essential to have in order to understand how cohorts deliver ROAS overtime. He notes that identifying what your ROAS target should be is “similar to mapping an LTV curve onto cohort performance, but the difference is that the specific value of cumulative revenue delivered by a cohort isn’t important, but rather the relative value of that revenue to acquisition costs.”

So, how are you tracking acquisition costs and the return on your investment or ad spend? Is this still a manual process for you? Is your current method of collecting spend data and matching it to your attribution data on a cohort-basis efficient? Or, is the lack of a sophisticated cost aggregation solution prohibiting you from launching campaigns with new partners or scaling in new markets effectively?

A long-standing Singular customer, DGN, leverages Singular to aggregate, standardize, and analyze their campaign analytics across all of their apps and 10+ media sources in a single platform. Singular empowers the team to expose insights, such as publisher level ROI, and ultimately enable faster and smarter optimizations. You can read more about DGN’s success story.

The well-known global gaming company, Nexon, is able to reach their growth goals because Singular helps them save time in a number of ways. A big one is that Singular can “slice and dice, and stack rank what’s important to us to see what’s giving us the highest ROI”, says Warren Woodward. Listen to some of the benefits from Nexon’s Executive Director of User Acquisition.

Try Singular

Looking to up your gaming? Singular helps mobile marketers across the globe automatically bring together their marketing costs from all sources, and match it daily to the attribution source that drove a user to install and later perform a revenue action within your app.

All this can be done according to the ROAS and ROI cohort length you need to monitor to track towards your business goals. This allows you to spend more time optimizing your campaigns versus logging into platforms to collect the data. What can non-gamers learn from this? Where does your business align with the key goals from our different gaming segments?

Singular has success experts that support customers such as Warby Parker, Twitter, DraftKings, Getaround, and Earnin. We welcome the opportunity to talk to you about how you can measure the success of your mobile marketing campaigns more effectively.

Ditched the spreadsheets, but still stuck manually uploading cost data?

Out of necessity, app marketers have become comfortable with copying and pasting total cost data from partner dashboards or reports into their own master marketing spreadsheet.

That’s a lot of annoying work.

Five years ago, Singular set out to solve the problem of cost aggregation. Since then, we’ve mastered the art and science of data analytics. We provide app marketers with an automated, streamlined process to accurately and reliably collect spend data so they can optimize their marketing campaigns in the moment and boost ROI.

cost data - data analytics - cost aggregation

Now more than ever, having complete, accurate, timely marketing ad spend reporting is just as important, if not more so, than counting installs. Despite this and record programmatic adoption, there are still many out there who haven’t bought into a marketing analytics platform that provides this efficiency, for one or more reasons:

They’re only running on ad networks like Facebook, Google, or Twitter (which use their own attribution and billing despite third-party MMPs ruling on attribution).
They don’t think they run ad campaigns with enough partners in order to justify the cost of a solution to automatically collect their marketing cost data from all their partners.
Their current attribution provider offers a solution that may seem faster than making sense of cost data in a spreadsheet, but “cost ingestion” still requires manually uploading error-prone data.

Complete costs: the full picture

First, the basics. What can you do—or not do—with complete cost data on a daily basis?

For instance, how do you know where you’re pacing? Can you spend more today? What are your effective cost per install rates? What does the ROAS look like?

Now, if uploading an email report is on your to-do list for today, then you’re a few steps behind those managers nailing these questions right after their morning coffee.

That’s where an automated platform like Singular comes in. We automatically collect your marketing costs, saving you time, headaches, and the possibility of errors in your data.

How fast is “fast”?

Let’s walk through each scenario of working with a handful of media partners, to provide a clear view of just how fast and efficient we’re talking.

Scenario #1: the manual spreadsheet report

Here’s the reality of working with even just five media sources and doing manual reporting for each network in a spreadsheet.

Spreadsheet example:

Start my computer and auto-login to each partner dashboards (2 minutes)
Find my Excel spreadsheet and open it (1 minute)
Download reports from my reporting tool and paste them into Excel (5 minutes)
Copy and paste ad spend data (source-level only) from each partner dashboard (2 minutes)
Allow my Excel macros to update or copy and paste a formula down many rows of data to calculate ROI (1 minute)

Total time: 11 minutes

Scenario #2: the cost ingestion tool into your attribution provider

Start my computer and auto-login to each partner dashboard (2 minutes)
Download reports from each ad network (5 minutes)
Format each report as required (5 minutes)
Upload individual reports from each network (5 minutes)
Wait for my uploaded reports to get processed or troubleshoot any errors (15 minutes minimum)

Total time: 32 minutes

So the bottom (ROI) line…

Neither of these scenarios is helping you make fast decisions.

How Singular can help

What’s the easiest way to save time, bring in more revenue, improve ROI, and make better, faster marketing decisions? We recommend finding a provider who:

Has years of experience collecting cost exactly as the media sources display it within their systems
Can work with your existing attribution provider to pull in the results from your marketing campaigns
Can then connect this to your spend data and report your ROI whenever you need it

Singular has a tried-and-true process for automating the collection of ad spend that can save app marketers 15 hours+ a week on average, which is why we’ve become the de facto solution for teams scaling their growth. Go ahead, try us for free today.