Author: Saadi Muslu

As we switch off for the holidays and head into the end of year, we’re all looking forward to some well deserved time off! 

Whether you’re spending time with family and friends, staycationing by the fireplace, or hiking in the sunshine, we’ve got you covered.

Taking inspiration from our Singular team, and incredible industry leaders, we’ve compiled a list of suggested holiday reads (and for those who prefer to listen, we’ve thrown in some podcasts for good measure) to help you pass the time.

Is your reading pleasure for professional development? Industry insights? Personal growth? or a good old fashioned casual read? We’ve made sure to include recommendations for all of the above, so dive into your next favorite read and let us know some of your must-have titles!

Author’s note: This list is a compilation of recommendations we’ve received from industry experts and fellow colleagues. We’ve added links for your convenience, however, it is by no means an endorsement of the websites, authors, or publishing companies. 

Professional Development

Want to hone in on those management skills? Learn how to diversify your team in the most inclusive way? Understand the best way to be more efficient? Try out some of these! 

• The Culture Map by Erin Meyer
• Invisible Women – Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez
• The Phoenix Project: A novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford 
• Just Work by Kim Scott
• The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
• Measure What Matters by John Doerr 
• Zero to One by Peter Thiel 

Singular Spotlight

Recommendation by our CCO, Noa Shaul:

The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart

 

Life Lessons 

Interested in learning from history makers? Diving into inspiring stories from around the world? These recs are for you! 

• The Ride of a Lifetime by Robert Iger 
• The Rescue 
• The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
• The Science and Technology of Growing Young by Sergey Young 
• Radiolab
• The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish
• Hardcore History with Dan Carlin 

Singular Spotlight

Recommendation by our CEO, Gadi Eliashiv:

The Daily by New York Times 

 

Personal Growth

What better time to work on yourself than the new year? Develop, learn new habits, and invest in yourself with some of these wisdom-filled titles

• The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle 
• The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz 
• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman 
• The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
• You are a Badass by Jen Sincero 
• Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
• The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek

Singular Spotlight

Recommendation by our CGO, Ron Konigsberg:

No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings and Eric Meyer 

 

Casual Reading

Ok ok, sometimes you just want to cuddle by the fireplace (or lounge at the beach) and immerse yourself in the fictional life of someone else. We’ve got you covered!

• Mythos by Stephen Fry
• American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins 
• Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky 
• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir 
• The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam 
• Educated by Tara Westover
• The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification by Christopher Hitchens
• Today in Focus by The Guardian

Singular Spotlight

Recommendation by our journalist, John Koetsier:

The Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov 

 

Industry Must-Reads

Last but not least, we couldn’t call ourselves marketers if we didn’t share a list of industry must-reads from 2021. Books, podcasts, guides, we have it all! 

• 21 Lessons from Mobile Heroes in 2021 by Liftoff 
• Level Up Academy by ironSource
• Growth Masterminds Podcast by Singular 
• The Prof G Podcast with Scott Galloway
• The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen 
• The State of Mobile Growth with Thomas Petit by Storemaven  
• The App Marketer’s Handbook for iOS 15 User Acquisition by MobileAction 

Singular Spotlight

Recommendation by our CTO, Eran Friedman:

Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda 

 

We hope that this list helps you through the holiday season (and maybe even those down-time moments in the year ahead).

As always, Singular is here to offer the insights you need on ad performance, creative optimizations, and growing your business with better marketing performance insights! Chat with one of our experts! 

As you may have heard, on Friday, December 10th, the world became aware of a critical vulnerability in Log4j, a widely used logging Java library.

Dubbed “Log4Shell” when exploited successfully, this software flaw allows attackers to take control of vulnerable systems remotely and among others, steal sensitive data.

At Singular, we immediately responded by taking the following measures:

• We mapped all of our services to find out which ones use the vulnerable version of the Log4j library, and within those, mapped any potential paths attackers could exploit.
• We ran scans to detect if anyone has managed to attack our servers. We did not find evidence for any such attacks.
• We patched one internal component that was running a vulnerable version of Log4j to further ensure there’s no way we’ll get attacked in the future. We have also concluded that this component cannot have been accessed from the public web and has not been compromised.
• We continue to monitor our systems as well as public information about the vulnerability and associated attacks. At this point, we are confident in Singular being fully patched against “Log4Shell.”

As a customer, no action is needed on your part.

If you have any questions, please reach out to your Singular Customer Success Manager or email us at support@singular.net.

 

Today Facebook’s Advanced Mobile Measurement program is officially over. That means that the granular device-level data you used to receive on Android app installs is going away in favor of more privacy-safe aggregated reporting. (Yes, AMM covered iOS too, but that data has been gone since iOS 14.5.)

Privacy: win.

Marketing measurement: loss.

But there’s good news for marketers as well as users here: you can still get device-level data for your Android app installs. And, little secret: it’s actually a net positive in a number of different ways. At least if you use an MMP that supports Facebook’s new Google Play​​ Install Referrer solution out of the box right now.

(Yes, Singular does.)

 

Here’s what’s happening

Instead of providing device-level data in the AMM program, Facebook has decided to introduce a Google Play Install Referrer measurement solution.

That works pretty much like an HTTP referrer would on the web:

• A user clicks an ad
• They go to the Play Store and install the app
• Once they open the app, Singular can see the click metadata and assign it to a Facebook campaign
• The result is that you get independent device-level performance data on your campaigns

As Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv mentioned a week ago, there’s significant upside here:

The first obvious win is that advertisers can get back much of the Facebook attribution data that was available to them via the AMM program … this means that a lot of disruption to BI/internal analytics systems can be avoided …

This also opens the door for longer cohorts.

Facebook device-level attributions must be deleted after 180 days …. Google does not provide any clear retention requirements for Install Referrer data, which means we’ll be able to offer longer cohorts (e.g. 365-day) for app users.

What that means for you essentially is more granular data on campaign performance for longer periods, providing improved insight for marketing optimization. Existing user-level postbacks and ETL destinations will automatically contain this data once you configure it in your Singular dashboard, and we’ll maintain the Facebook self-attributing integration so it’s available to compare and contrast.

Plus, don’t forget, you still have access to insights from your on-platform Facebook data.

As an MMP, Singular still has access to device-level parameters for app install campaigns. Per Facebook policy, the device-level data cannot be shared, but Singular can still process and combine it with your other data sets, at which point we can share these aggregate insights. As an example, we could run something like user-level LTV predictions, then share aggregated insights back to you at the campaign level.

 

This is ready now for Singular clients

We know it’s important for mobile marketers to keep on top of campaign performance every single day. That’s why we’ve ensured that we’re ready for Facebook’s change now.

If you’re a Singular customer, check your email for instructions on how to enable the new Google Play Install Referrer measurement solution. Enable it as soon as possible so you don’t lose any data.

If you’re not a Singular customer … maybe it’s a good time to chat with us about why you might want to consider changing that.

 

Using Google Play Install Referrer is a good, privacy-safe path

As a mobile measurement partner, we’re pretty positive about the change. Moving this direction is actually good for both user privacy and marketing measurement.

The measurement part we’ve already talked about. The privacy part is that referrers, like on the web, only exist based on explicit action. That means view-through — as useful as that can be — isn’t supported, and that means no personal or device data gets transmitted just as a result of someone just randomly loading a screen in an app or viewing a page.

(Which, let’s be honest, can be a little bit creepy.)

You can still get aggregated — not device-level — insights on view-through attribution through Singular’s MMP integration with Facebook. That gets you marketing performance insights without violating privacy.

And for actual clicks on campaigns, using the Google Play Install Referrer means that only specific action with a specific ad produces marketing data … and even then it is simply connecting an eventual app install with a particular advertising campaign.

We think it’s a good solution that respects privacy while still giving marketers — who pay for all the free services we get online and in apps — the ability to optimize their marketing.

 

Next steps

If you’re a Singular customer, you’ll have an email with easy instructions about how to enable Facebook’s new Google Play Install Referrer solution. If you’re not … now’s a good time to do something about it.

TikTok is forwarding postbacks to Singular, ensuring advertisers easily get complete raw data access. TikTok is a brand-safe environment, as you can see in our 2021 Singular ROI Index. Still, postback forwarding is a nice confirmation for most ad networks and major platforms that indicates transparency and trust.

TikTok and Singular’s SKAdNetwork integration includes campaign data enrichment with campaign IDs, so you have data to optimize campaigns and conversion value decoding to assess the value of installs, and TikTok can optimize based on your advertising goals.

All you need, just like all of Singular’s other SKAdNetwork integrations, is the latest iOS SDK from Singular. That one SDK manages SKAdNetwork conversions based on the model you’ve defined in the Singular dashboard. 

Our TikTok integration is just one of our latest SKAdNetwork developments. We’ve already shared details on our integrations with Twitter, Snap, Facebook, AdColony, Fyber, Liftoff, Tapjoy, Vungle, and many more.

We’ve also released information about working with Google, which has said it does not plan to surface the ATT prompt. Google will be modeling some conversions, and I’m sure more details will be coming shortly.

It’s clear from the first week of iOS 14.5 that not everything is going smoothly. Getting app updates passed is challenging for many right now, and there’s a fair amount of confusion over what “tracking” means and who needs to ask users for permission to track via the App Tracking Transparency prompt. We’ve seen some of the most prominent players in tech run into issues, and it may be the case that some App Store reviewers have differing opinions on what requires ATT and what does not.

As that all gets sorted out, however, it’s good to know that the major partners you count on to drive growth and new users are SKAdNetwork enabled.

It’s also good to know that Singular SKAN has marketers covered with the most advanced SKAdNetwork suite available from a mobile measurement partner. Singular SKAN includes:

• Clear role definitions for all mobile marketing parties
• Unification of all your SKAdNetwork postbacks from each ad network
• Mapping of SKAdNetwork campaign IDs to readable formats
• Support for more real-time configurable conversion models
• Validation of post-install conversions
• Clean technical separation from classical mobile attribution, ensuring full privacy compliance
• Reporting, include ROI and cohorts, that powers easy analysis, optimization, and better decision making

 

Learn more about our SKAdNetwork solution here.

Or, if you’d like to talk to a Singular representative about how to make SKAdNetwork work for you, simply book some time.

 

 

 

 

We’re now only a few days away from the iOS 14.5 release, and the ecosystem is providing its final guidance to marketers around preparing for post-IDFA advertising. Since the IDFA deprecation news dropped last June, Facebook and Singular have worked closely together to solve attribution and conversion management on iOS 14. Along the way, we’ve made enhancements to our partnered SKAdnetwork solution to minimize any disruption for advertisers.

One of the more recent updates to Singular’s Facebook SKAdnetwork integration is support for value optimization campaigns. With that update, Singular’s SKAdNetwork solution is among the first to support all three Facebook campaign types: Mobile App Install (MAI), App Event Optimization (AEO), and value optimization (VO).

What are Facebook’s Value Optimization Campaigns

Value optimization for Facebook App Campaigns uses a prediction of how much return on ad spend (ROAS) you’re driving to optimize campaigns for high-value audiences. While the other two optimization options are tailored for installs or a given event, VO campaigns help maximize your return on investment.

Singular’s Facebook Value Optimization Support

The added support for Facebook’s value optimization campaigns provides three main benefits:

1. Enable SKAdNetwork optimization and reporting for all Facebook campaigns
   With the addition of value optimization, Singular gives advertisers support for all Facebook campaign types so they can hit the ground running post-IDFA. This support enables Facebook to optimize your campaigns for the highest return possible while providing you reporting transparency in the Singular dashboard or via our API and ETL alongside reporting from all your other ad partners.
2. Import Singular’s SKAdNetwork conversion models into Facebook Event Manager to launch any campaign type
   Facebook has recognized early on the importance of supporting iOS 14 measurement and analytics via an MMP SDK, and interoperability with MMP SKAdNetwork solutions. Defining your conversion model once with an MMP and leveraging that same model for campaigns across partners is both more streamlined and critical to having normalized reporting and cross-channel insights.
3. Ensure reporting standardization across ad partners
   Standardization is a big deal for SKAdNetwork Analytics. Being able to use the same Singular-based conversion model across all ad networks ensures compatibility for measurement and reporting. This is a critical role that MMPs take as it ensures that all your media partners are aligned on the same conversion values, and allows you to get apples-to-apples reporting across your entire media mix. MMPs don’t just collect and standardize SKAdNetwork data; we also provide a translation layer for conversion values to ad partners like Facebook. This is critical for being able to optimize campaigns, as well as for extracting back meaningful insights. Without the MMP, advertisers are at risk of incompatible data, disrupted cross-platform measurement, and conversion methodology collisions between media partners.

What’s Next

This is just the beginning of our work with ad partners like Facebook to provide advertisers the solutions they need to continue growth on iOS 14.5 and beyond. There are incredible opportunities to innovate on this foundation, including some exciting new tools Singular is working on for predictive analytics. We’re confident that with iteration and close collaboration, we can continue to evolve for a more privacy-conscious yet still effective form of advertising.

If you’re not already a Singular client, get in touch with us now to get a SKAdNetwork walk-through, demo, and access to testing code and our SDK.

Do you need to control the uncontrollable? Jam City does. Would you like to save 15 hours a week? CrazyLabs does. Do you need to share cost data to 8 teams? N3TWORK does. Do you want to collect data from 40+ ad networks? Postmates does.

The secret?

None of them actually have to. At least not themselves.

Because Singular’s Cost Aggregation product does it for them.

THIS IS PART 4 OF A 4-PART COST AGGREGATION SERIES:

– Part 1: Why it’s not as easy as you think
– Part 2: It’s not just about cost
– Part 3: What is combining and why should I care? 
– Part 4: This article!

This is the fourth and final post (for now) in our four-part cost aggregation series. We started by saying that what seems easy … just isn’t. Then we shared a truth bomb or two: cost aggregation isn’t just about cost. And (almost) finally we talked about combining cost data with attribution data, and why that matters.

But it’s really all about a marketer’s ability to drive growth for their business, isn’t it?

Unlocking growth via cost aggregation

Modern marketing organizations for top mobile-first or mobile-centric brands are complex organisms. When every team functions well — and the product, experience, and service is good — growth results.

That’s how cost aggregation accelerates growth.

Part of it is streamlining workflows and automating manual processes. CrazyLabs saves 15 hours every week thanks to Singular’s cost aggregation: automating the collection and standardization of campaign data across all their media sources. That’s 15 hours that can then be invested in value-added marketing activities like building new creative or testing new networks. Part of it is making internal workflow more efficient. N3TWORK, which not only makes its own smash hit Legendary: Game of Heroes but also provides a scaling platform for other top games, uses Singular to coordinate no fewer than eight teams including finance, UA, media buying, data analytics, creative, and 3 marketing sub-teams.

Not to mention, of course, scaling to truly huge campaigns.

“If you’re trying to scale your spending from $100,000 a month to $10 million a month, you really need very granular, accurate data that comes in on time,” says Nebojsa Radovic, Director of Performance Marketing at N3TWORK.

Sometimes it’s just about collecting every detail, without having to invest in manually ensuring every “i” is dotted and “t” is crossed.

“With Singular, we can collect every data point from every partner and measure results in a multitude of ways — by platform, by partner, by creative,” says Patrick Witham, Director of User Acquisition at Postmates. “There are always useful things to be learned about your business that can help you grow.”

Getting the right data to the right place

Ultimately, it’s about getting the right data to the right teams at the right time, from Finance/Accounting (those bills do need to be paid) to User Acquisition. The right place might be your BI systems that run forecasting or predictive LTV analysis, or it might be Singular’s dashboards where you can slice and dice performance data by a slew of dimensions.

Ultimately, you want it connected to attribution and conversion data to generate insights on ROI, LTV, and ROAS against multiple dimensions. That can’t be done without unifying access to the data, normalizing and standardizing it across all your media sources, and building a single source of truth for marketing performance (thus why we’re called Singular 😊).

Now your monetization team knows the cost of acquiring revenue and your acquisition team can craft smart budget allocation strategies. Knowing your cost per partner, tactic, or event by combining cost with attribution data shows efficacy.

And that unlocks growth.

From data to decisions to growth

For N3TWORK, that growth is millions of players in multiple games, thanks to better buy data and increased insight into payback windows. For Postmates, that’s an 80% reduction in cost per new buyer, and a 60% reduction in cost per registration … while simultaneously increasing conversion rates 100%. One of the drivers: seeing evidence in the data for which campaigns and creatives drove the best results, enabling the marketing team to quickly double down on success and cut losses on lower performers.

At CrazyLabs, saving time and increasing marketing effectiveness translated to literally billions of app installs and a position as a top mobile app publisher in casual games.

Growth is good, of course.

But efficient growth is better.

Because any company can grow, provided sufficient capital and the willingness to deploy it. The key to sustainable growth is understanding the profitability of the growth you create — and optimizing it in as close to real time as possible. You can only do that at scale by automating your marketing processes, and that includes marketing cost data aggregation, combined with attribution data, that reveal true performance.

More to learn?

There’s probably a lot more we could say about cost aggregation for mobile marketers, and how it drives growth. I’m guessing, however, that it would be better if we could show you rather than tell you. And if we could tailor the message to exactly those areas you care most about.

We can do that!

Simply book a slot, and our team will be happy to walk you through the Singular Cost Aggregation solution, along with any of the other product components we offer, and show you personally how we can drive faster growth for your business, while saving you time and money.

Get a demo here.

Cost aggregation is only half the battle to unlocking insights needed to optimize performance efficiently. That statement is probably not what mobile marketers who desperately need a cost aggregation solution want to hear. But, like George Washington, his hatchet, and the cherry tree … I cannot tell a lie.

In fact, combining is the essential other half, without which you will achieve only partial benefit from mobile advertising cost aggregation.

This is part 3 of a 4-part cost aggregation series:

– Part 1: Why it’s not as easy as you think
– Part 2: It’s not just about cost
– Part 3: this article!
– Part 4: How cost unlocks growth

This blog is part 3 of a 4-part series on tackling cost aggregation. In the first part, I explained why cost aggregation is even a thing, why it’s hard, what it involves, and why you can’t just do it all in a simple Excel spreadsheet. In the second part, I talked about why cost aggregation is not just about cost, despite the name. A proper cost aggregation solution also considers your creatives, targeting, bids, publishers, and much, much more. And in the fourth part, I’ll talk about how cost aggregation unlocks growth, and why Singular’s solution is the best and most mature on the market.

(Yeah, sorry, I’m a little biased here. But that doesn’t make it untrue!)

Now let’s get back to combining and why cost aggregation is only half of what you need.

I’m not saying cost aggregation doesn’t matter

Look: cost aggregation is hugely important. I don’t want to downplay that in any way.

Modern mobile marketers run ads and campaigns at scale. It’s not unusual for a Singular client to simultaneously run hundreds of campaigns with dozens of media sources and ad networks. That means getting accurate data across partners, geos, currencies, and timeframes, which is not easy. Especially when you’re also looking to compare creatives, get keyword-level data, and normalize dimensions and metrics across ad networks that each have different naming conventions, KPI standards, and reporting formats.

Getting cost aggregation — even just at this level — is critical for growth teams. You need a single source of truth to understand where and how you spent your advertising budgets, and so does your CFO. With a powerful cost aggregation solution, you save hundreds of hours a year in data futzing that results in insights that are not reliable, timely, or even accurate. And avoiding those hundreds of hours of messing around with data helps you focus on what moves the needle: making smart, faster marketing decisions that ultimately drive growth.

So cost aggregation is critically important … even if you only take it that far.

But … combining doubles your benefits from cost aggregation

Stopping at cost aggregation is, unfortunately, the reality for some. But for mobile marketers who want to double down on growth insights, combining upper-funnel campaign data, like cost, with bottom-funnel conversion data, like revenue, is the essential next step.

Cost is one side of the coin. It’s two-dimensional, an input in the marketing ROI equation.

Impact, or conversions, or results, is the other side of the coin. It’s output … what happens as a result of your marketing efforts.

Combining the two colorizes the monotone cost aggregation picture and transforms your two-dimensional image into 3D. When you use Singular both for cost aggregation and attribution, Singular automagically combines all your campaign data with all attribution data. That exposes accurate, timely, and actionable insights that help you drive growth at scale. And it ensures that your data is perfectly aligned at every dimension, fills in missing data, and identifies discrepancies between what ad networks report and attribution conversions.

But don’t take my word for it. N3TWORK, which built Legendary: Game of Heroes, and scales other publishers’ apps into huge hits, says this:

“We were not able to get ROI at a very granular level before we started working with Singular. Now, thanks to Singular, our front-end data gets automatically joined with our backend data, exposing ROI on a publisher, creative, campaign, and partner level.”

— Nebojsa Radovic, Former Director of User Acquisition @ N3TWORK

The reality is that combining unlocks outsized value via data unification, connecting inputs and outputs. On the campaign side, you get cost, impression, click data, creative data, and more for each campaign. On the attribution side, you get installs, purchases, in-app events, re-engagement metrics, and more. Unifying upper and lower funnel data makes metrics like

ROI, CPA, ROAS, eCPI, and LTV deeply meaningful and easily segmented by dimensions like geo, campaign, target audience, ad network, creative, and more.

Singular combines marketing inputs with outputs automatically, out of the box

Because Singular connects to thousands of media partners and gets your cost aggregation data directly from your campaigns, it’s 100% accurate and reliable. And because Singular manages your attribution, connecting every dollar of spend with marketing output is possible.

It’s worth noting that with iOS 14 and IDFA deprecation, Singular can do this at both a granular level, where user and platform privacy permissions allow it, and at an aggregated level. In both cases, you’re getting better, more in-depth views of performance as fast as possible, with accurate, normalized data.

There’s a lot more to tell (and show)

There’s a lot more we could say about cost aggregation and combining it with attribution data. But it’s probably better to show it. We help some of the top mobile marketers on the planet grow faster than their competitors, and we’d love to show you how.

Simply request a demo, and we’ll take the opportunity to show you how Singular can deliver faster growth via better, more complete, and more actionable data.

I’m going to reveal a big secret about cost aggregation and reporting in advertising and marketing.

Ready? Cost aggregation is not just about cost.

I understand that’s confusing, mostly because “cost” would appear to be a big part of “cost aggregation” just given the English language and … the meaning of words. But there’s a lot more to cost aggregation than just cost, and there are a lot of good reasons why.

This is part 2 of a 4-part cost aggregation series:

– Part 1: Why it’s not as easy as you think
– Part 2: It’s not just about cost
– Part 3: What is combining and why should I care? 
– Part 4: How cost unlocks growth

(Quick recap here for those who are just joining this series. I introduced mobile advertising cost aggregation in this post about a month ago. Key point there: while cost aggregation sounds easy, it’s not. Sure, at a high level it’s simply aggregating all your advertising spend across each of your media partners to total up how much you are spending on mobile user acquisition. But it’s not actually easy … read that full blog post to find out why!)

Not only is cost aggregation not easy, however … it’s needs to go beyond cost.

Singular directly integrates with all your media sources and ad networks (we have literally countless integrations, so anyone you want to work with) to pull all available data around your campaigns including:

• Creative
• Targeting
• Bids
• Publishers
• Geos
• And much more …

With additional data points to analyze you can unlock deeper growth insights, make smarter decisions to reach your goals, ensure you have a complete view of marketing performance.

While this campaign-level and upper-funnel data is gold just on its own, it’s platinum when you can ethically connect it in a privacy-safe way with attribution and events data: the results of your marketing campaigns. We’ll talk about that connection — we call it combining at Singular — in a follow-up blog post.

But even just collecting all this data along with cost delivers massive benefit.

You can’t get this data by simply attaching attribution tracking link parameters to all your mobile ads. That methodology has some benefits, but in terms of aggregating cost and all the other data that you want, it comes with an average 30% discrepancy rate (in addition to lacking support for CPM & CPA campaigns and not working in all media sources).

Getting all the data right at the source in an automated way is the ideal solution. And when you’re collecting all the necessary data, you can answer more questions:

• What creative performs best across all my media partners?
• Which publishers are driving the most ROI?
• Which ad networks perform well for different audiences or geos?
• What bid strategies are performing well for which partners?
• And more …

The upshot is that seriously data-driven marketers need 100% complete and accurate cost data. And they also need 100% complete and accurate creative, targeting, bid, and publisher data.

(You also need it, by the way, for non-traditional mobile advertising channels, such as referrals, podcasts, influencers, and out-of-home.)

Getting all the data helps you understand global performance on a granular level. For instance, if you want to know how effective Creative A is versus Creative B across different campaigns and networks, you can do that. If you want to understand how creative is performing across different countries, you can, even when it’s spread through 10 or 15 different partners.

The result: comprehensive reporting enables marketing optimization.

Interesting sidebar: while by far most of Singular’s clients use both our cost aggregation and our marketing attribution capabilities, there are customers who work with other mobile measurement partners for one reason or another. Those customers still rely on Singular to aggregate, normalize, and connect their marketing data. Singular is compatible with just about any growth stack and channel mix.

However, the majority of our customers are on our Unified plan, which achieves a super-tight integration between cost and conversion data and delivers ROI analysis on the keyword and creative-level. But if you really need to, we can plug and play with anyone.

Ultimately, while “cost aggregation” is about cost, it’s also about a lot more. Done right, cost aggregation delivers comprehensive insights on media partners, creative, bids and … yes … cost and ROI and ROAS and all those other good things.

Interested in learning more?

It’s easy. Talk to us!

How hard is cost aggregation?

Because ultimately, it sounds pretty simple: aggregating your ad spend and costs across all your partners to understand how much you’re spending on mobile user acquisition. In fact, it sounds ridiculously simple. Most things do, from 50,000 feet.

This is part 1 of a 4-part cost aggregation series:

– Part 1: Why it’s not as easy as you think
– Part 2: It’s not just about cost
– Part 3: What is combining and why should I care? 
– Part 4: How cost unlocks growth

But in the world of mobile marketing at scale, cost aggregation is actually a hard problem. One reason is that it’s not just aggregating your costs: it’s marshaling all available upper-funnel campaign data for growth insights. Another reason is that it’s not just about simple addition.

Let’s start with an example: a publisher with 20 or 30 apps available across 15 countries that are significant in terms of revenue and another 75 that are relatively minor, with a user acquisition budget of several million U.S. dollars each month.

What sounds simple actually isn’t. To get accurate cost data, you need to:

• Access multiple accounts across an average of 5-15 growth partners (but it could be significantly more)
• Separate out reporting by individual apps
• Align geos
• Run currency conversions (as values fluctuate)
• Extract creative data
• Extract campaign data
• Get keyword-level data
• Normalize dimensions and metrics cross all those partners

Suddenly, something that sounded so simple just became complicated, with thousands of steps, huge amounts of data, and countless opportunities to get it wrong. And we didn’t even touch on any of the combining you need to do between cost and attribution data to understand your returns.

Many cost aggregation solutions rely partially (or completely) on getting this data via mobile attribution tracking link parameters, in which you append cost data on every ad click. This sounds reasonable until you find out that discrepancies proliferate and your ad spend differs from the actual invoices you receive, making reconciliations and retroactive data updates at best challenging, and at worst impossible. Plus, there are more serious limitations: lack of support for CPM & CPA campaigns, not all sources support these macros, and it won’t work for any non-mobile marketing channel.

Let’s not even talk about manual reconciliation in Excel, which is only slightly less painful than getting a root canal… without anesthetic.

You export all of your reports from each individual ad network, normalize it, and then try to map it to attribution and internal BI data to understand what each campaign drove. Ultimately, you spend hours manipulating the data trying to standardize it and QA it, and end up feeling about 60% confident in its accuracy. Not to mention the wasted hours you could’ve spent actually analyzing reports and optimizing campaigns.

The only option that makes sense for accurate and timely cost aggregation is direct data connectors to every single media source.

That’s where Singular data connectors do the heavy lifting for you by directly syncing to your media sources and saving your cost data to one place: accuracy guaranteed. From direct API integrations to web dashboards, you’ll get flexible integration methods to ingest your marketing data from any source across mobile, desktop, and offline. Direct data connectors give you the ability to accurately match the network’s numbers — including retroactive data changes — with complete accuracy. And beyond cost, you gain access to a wealth of information critical to driving efficient optimizations like creative, bids, campaign, geo, and publisher.

A few other cost aggregation companies offer direct API connectors to popular ad networks, but Singular’s cost aggregation provides the most coverage and the best data combining to unlock ROI at the deepest levels possible.

If you want to test a new ad partner, you want it to be pain-free. You want the data to just flow, no excuses, no workarounds, no manual nonsense. You can’t just hope that this new potential growth opportunity is supported among the 20, 60, or 100 partners that some cost aggregation solutions have. That’s why Singular’s open integration framework enables thousands of integrations to get data in the most flexible ways from any source across mobile, desktop, and yes, even offline. Basically, any partner you’d ever think of is already fully supported.

And, supported in multiple ways. Not every partner has set up the same technology for you to extract your cost data, so Singular supports pretty much everything for both getting the data and for making it available where you need it. API? Perfect. Dashboards? We got this. S3, Google Cloud, FTP, Email, Google Drive, Dropbox? No problem. Planning to use the data in Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, GCS, MySQL, or PostGres?

Also no problem.

What you quickly learn can be a problem in cost aggregation is the availability of the data.

Sometimes media partners go down. Sometimes the data isn’t immediately accessible. That’s why we have pipeline monitoring, data deletion resolution, broken or delayed data triage, and re-pulls … all out of the box. Built-in. Always ready to spring into action if there’s ever an issue getting your data.

The goal: you always get your data, one way or another.

But the work doesn’t stop once you have the data, however.

That’s (almost) the easy part.

It’d be nice if everything was standardized across the mobile marketing industry. It would also be nice if your apps would just grow 50% every week on their own. Both, however, aren’t reality. Every platform and partner has a slightly different view of how to handle data and what to name things. Getting cost is great, but generating insight to power growth requires understanding that “Ad group” in Google is “Ad set” in Facebook — plus dozens of different ways of understanding views and clicks and campaigns and creative — and standardizing it all into common data forms that work with your backend BI systems.

Every media partner has a different reporting schema. Singular indexes each partners’ reporting schema, aligns the hierarchies, and standardizes the nomenclature so that every marketing effort is comparable on an apples-to-apples basis.

Complete and accurate data enables a complete picture of marketing costs and performance across channels, and Singular offers native reporting to visualize, pivot, or slice-and-dice data in a few clicks for fast optimizations. But you can also load standardized and enriched marketing data directly into your favorite data warehouses like Redshift or BigQuery or storage services to power your favorite reporting tools like Looker and Tableau with Singular’s Marketing ETL.

And it’s worth chatting with Singular about how we do it, why we do it, and how we can help you do it.

The reality is that not only do the vast majority of our customers use both Singular attribution and Singular cost aggregation (more on why they’re better together in a few weeks!), but many customers who are not yet using our attribution are already using our cost aggregation.

We’d love to share why.

Request a demo today.