Mobile advertising cost aggregation: It’s not just about cost

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!