Resource Label: Marketing analytics

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 this problem. 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. 

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: 

1. 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).
2. 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.
3. 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:

1. Start my computer and auto-login to each partner dashboards (2 minutes)
2. Find my Excel spreadsheet and open it (1 minute)
3. Download reports from my reporting tool and paste them into Excel (5 minutes)
4. Copy and paste ad spend data (source-level only) from each partner dashboard (2 minutes)
5. 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

1. Start my computer and auto-login to each partner dashboard (2 minutes)
2. Download reports from each ad network (5 minutes)
3. Format each report as required (5 minutes)
4. Upload individual reports from each network (5 minutes)
5. 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.

Ad monetization is growing fast. But traditionally, user acquisition teams don’t see ad revenue and can’t account for it when calculating return on ad spend. That means they make sub-optimal user acquisitions decisions with inadequate information.

How do you fix the problem?

Align your user acquisition and admon teams.

Of course, that’s easy to say, but it leaves plenty of open questions. How do you calculate ad monetization revenue, for instance? How do you know which users are more valuable than others? And how do you merge in-app purchase revenue with ad revenue to obtain a blended real number for total revenue? What is your true ROAS?

The short answer?

Attend our ad monetization webinar with IronSource.

We’ve have Singular’s Director of Customer Success, Liz Lauer-Lopez, and Ironsource’s VP of Growth, Yevgeny Peres on the call to work through three steps that will help you align ad monetization and user acquisition. The result: you’ll acquire more users that generate higher ROI and revenue.

Liz and Yevgeny will talk about:

1. Measuring user revenue behavior for IAPs and ads together
2. Attributing user revenue across all channels and combining it with cost data
3. Taking action based on data

Add it all up, and you’ll be able to predict true LTV with all revenue accounted for. And that will help you analyze and optimize your user acquisition marketing much more effectively.

Sign up for the webinar here.

Even if you can’t make it tomorrow, that will ensure that we’ll send you a full version of the webinar later, which you can watch at your leisure. And, if you’re seeing this days or weeks after the webinar occurred, you’ll still get a copy to consume.

How do you do data-driven creative optimization for digital advertising campaigns? Should you do data-driven creative optimization? Should you localize creative? And, should you always follow the data?

It’s not always obvious.

And, just to make it more confusing, top experts at leading mobile brands don’t always agree.

While there are commonalities between how leading mobile experts approach these questions, there’s also considerable diversity. That diversity is often tied to companies’ different strategy and tactics. It’s also a function of short versus long-term goals. It depends on how digital marketers do data-driven marketing in general.

And, this diversity suggests that there is not one true answer for your company and your brand either … but that you’re going to have to make an informed decision for yourself on how to proceed with data-driven creative optimization.

So while top mobile experts don’t always agree, what they say and how they disagree can help you formulate a customized data-driven creative strategy that works for your brand.

Here are the top 10 secrets we learned from marketing strategy experts at Supercell, Earnin, and Vungle at Singular’s big UNIFY mobile marketing conference.

(You can also watch the full presentation here … and get all of the UNIFY sessions in our free UNIFY @ Home mobile marketing masterclass.)

1. Testing matters (a lot) for data-driven creative

It’s probably not a shock to most people that testing matters when you’re trying to do creative optimization.

“Test everything,” says Earnin’s Director of User Acquisition Vanessa Chang. “Not just your in-house creative but your buttons, your copy, everything that can help impact your creative.”

Why do people test? It’s simple, says Supercell’s Emily Tierney:

“The best creative yields the best performance metrics.”

This is especially important when you scale data-driven marketing. (It’s also harder … which is why Singular’s Creative Analytics tool comes in handy for high-volume digital marketers.)

“When you scale and have a ton of volume, it gets more important to iterate quickly and you need to evaluate your results quickly as well,” Chang says. “What Singular has really allowed us to do is it answered questions we weren’t able to answer without the platform.”

2. Creative exhaustion is over-rated (sometimes)

Creative exhaustion is almost an item of faith for modern digital marketers. But sometimes it’s over-rated, as Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv discovered in a data-driven creative exhaustion study he recently published.

For Supercell, there are higher priorities than optimizing for creative exhaustion or even individual ad performance.

“Optimizing for brand [is] very important for us,” Tierney says. “It’s more important to elevate our company so that people recognize Supercell as a global brand, so that when we create new IP, people immediately associate that it will be high-quality games with high-quality animations.”

As a result, Supercell invested nine months in building one piece of creative … a 60-second long cinematic that is essentially a fully animated world-class 3D movie.

The result, “No Time To Explain,” brought in the lion’s share of new users for Brawl Stars with very low CPI, Tierney says. It had both long view time on both Facebook and Google and active engagement, and is still being used for user acquisition more than six months after launch.

Consumer behavior, clearly, does not always require new creative assets and new creative strategies.

3. And yet … creative exhaustion exists

On the other hand, marketers know that for many brands and campaigns, creative exhaustion is a very real thing. Digital marketing assets don’t last forever. Advertising ages.

“Ad fatigue is real,” says Vungle’s Global Head of Creative Labs Gavin McNicholl.”Our clients want to do testing … it’s expected in the space now.”

That’s something that Earnin sees as well, particularly when scaling spend. And it forces EarnIn to scale creative production as well.

“The more we were spending money, especially in the same channels, the more we needed to keep up the rotation and keep feeding the channels to find new winners,” Chang says. “We needed more message types, more actors.”

Even Supercell, which Tierney calls “lucky” for having some evergreen creative that she can run for a long time, sees decay.

“They do decay over time,” she said about her creative. “It’s not like we can run it for six years.”

The goal, according to Vungle is to keep looking for new evergreen creative while running iterations. The company’s algorithm, therefore, allocates a certain percentage of impressions for new units to try to find that new evergreen material.

4. Data-driven creative: Localization is not ALWAYS required

Localization is religion to marketers burned by stories of brands releasing culturally inappropriate messaging or products in different cultures. Often that even extends to different ad creatives and marketing campaigns by audience segment.

Supercell pays attention to culture, but it doesn’t focus on building geo-focused campaigns or creative.

Instead, Supercell goes for the universal in its creative process:

“We really believe in one true global creative,” says Tierney. “When we launch any new games, we really try to generate creative that resonates with all our communities and all regions, and it’s quite challenging. As you know, western creative sometimes doesn’t translate well to the east. Our games are games that people will play forever, and our creative is creative that people will remember forever.”

That may not work for every brand or every app. Advertising in general should focus on being relevant to its audience.

But Supercell is clearly doing something right … on a global scale.

5. BUT … localization is OFTEN required

As GM and its creative agencies found out when naming a car “Nova,” or “no go” in Spanish, not every name works in every culture. Similarly, not every image works for every culture.

When Vungle was working to localize Sherlock Holmes, the British actor Benedict Cumberbatch and the American actor Robert Downey Jr made perfect sense, although it’s possible they could have found one star to cover both countries.

But Japan … Japan was another story.

Suffice it to say: the creative process was entirely different.

Now that’s localization with an added dose of gender-switching.

But you can go farther and do hyper-localization based on seasonal events, Vungle’s McNichol added.

“Chinese New Year is a very significant revenue period for us, so we’ve looked to scale out specific kinds of end cards that incorporate cultural elements,” he said. “So for Chinese New Year you have the red envelope — obviously, the connotations around that [are that] good things are coming your way. It was no surprise that clickthrough rates went through the roof there.”

6. Data-driven creative: Shockingly, data is incredibly important

It shouldn’t be surprising: data matters.

That’s not just the case on upper funnel. Lower funnel is probably even more important.

“When you scale and have a ton of volume, it gets more important to iterate quickly and you need to evaluate your results quickly as well,” says Earnin’s Chang. “What Singular has really allowed us to do is it answered questions we weren’t able to answer without the platform.”

By leveraging community as well as in-house creatives, Earnin was able to build 5X more creative concepts. Now, 50% of their ad impressions originate from community-sourced ads. And that’s resulted in a 25% funnel step improvement. Data drives actionable insights which can be fed into future creative thinking and marketing efforts.

Ultimately, Vungle looks at three kinds of data, says McNichol: performance, contextual, and user data:

Performance data includes installs, conversions, and retention. Contextual data includes geographical location, time, and placement. User behavior is engagement, duration, and interaction points, as measured by heat mapping and lab testing.

Also important: target audience and some understanding of the customer journey.

7. But being purely data-driven could be the wrong approach

It’s not controversial to be data driven, and to be evaluating results for your data-driven creative. It would be controversial, on the other hand, if a digital marketer said that they’re not data driven.

Supercell has an interesting nuance on this.

“This is a philosophy we use a lot in Supercell: to become a data-informed marketing team instead of data-driven,” says Tierney. “It actually means optimizing for the brand, for the IP, for the company.”

That’s worth unpacking.

Supercell cares about data and performance of their ads and campaigns, but not the overall brand matters more than any given ad. And it matters more than individual campaign performance..

That’s why the first second of  every Supercell video is alway the Supercell logo. Supercell knows that the first five seconds of every video is the most important, and that they’re sacrificing 20% of that attention-grabbing time.

But they’re betting that positive long-term association with the Supercell brand outweighs individual ad performance. That’s data-informed — and you could argue data-driven on the macro level.

8. Your mobile ads CAN work on TV

You have to build creative assets uniquely for each platform or medium, right? Such as social media ads versus search ads, and mobile ads versus traditional TV ads?

Well … not necessarily, according to data-driven marketing experts. At least in the case of repurposing mobile ads to traditional and streaming TV platforms.

“As we scaled in streaming TV and linear TV, a lot of people were telling us that we should use very branded versions of creatives that were more for TV,” Earnin’s Chang says. “And I would challenge that because I think we have seen a lot of success in using our community-generated ads across many different platforms. It’s not necessarily about the format or the placement, I think it’s really about assessing how you want your message to go in all your different channels.”

That means that you actually can use a “low-quality” portrait creative on TV, she added. You just have to be aware of delivering that in a way that makes sense to the audience.

That’s a role reversal, Vungle’s McNichol says.

When Vungle first started building ads for mobile, they’d get a lot of executive asking them to run TV ads on mobile ad networks … something that doesn’t really work. (Especially back then.)

“What’s very interesting is the idea of the visual language of mobile and web finding its way onto TV,” says McNichol.

9. Your customers can make your ads

We’re not in the dawn of user-generated content any more. But there still aren’t many CMOs who are jumping up and down agitating for their customers to make their ads.

It make a ton of sense, however, if you don’t have enough time to produce a wide enough variety of creative. Just maybe, your community can help.

“We focus a lot of our efforts on using creative generated by our community,” says Chang. “This is really at the core of what we believe is one of our biggest differentiators as a financial tech brand … we have a real community supporting us.”

10. UA and creative need to be In Sync

User acquisition and the creative team need to be completely in sync … and co-location helps.

“We’re very aligned with our creative team,” says Chang. “First, we sit next to them so that makes it easy to share insights. And second, we actually have a weekly creative performance review where we share insights.”

Easy access to the same numbers doesn’t hurt either.

All creative producers at Earnin are well versed in the company’s dashboards — and Singular data — so they can check whenever they want on what’s performing well, what has high click-through rate, conversion rate, and so on.

11. Data-driven creative: Make playables MORE interactive

Playables are the highest-performing creative on the Vungle Ad Network, McNichol said. But by analyzing three million views of one particular playable ad, they learned how to make them better.

One hint: add more interactive elements.

“Always give the user something to interact with,” McNichol says. “They’re engaged … they want to get involved.”

Interaction heat maps show that users are tapping and swiping all over playable ads, including in places where there are no interaction points. Providing more interactive elements is important for engagement: when users are starting to engage, they stay in the experience.

And once they’re engaged, there’s a lot less “X’ing out” of the playable.

12. RPG game? Put characters in the ad

Many games, including RPG games, are character-driven. While it might seem important to demonstrate game-play in your video ads, Vungle has found that focusing on characters is critical.

Why?

People connect with characters, and connection drives engagement.

The result for for one Korean client’s mobile RPG game, King’s Raid, was 5X return on ad spend by day seven.

13. Playables aren’t just for gaming brands

Playables are just for games, right?

The short answer is no.

“We actually started introducing playable to some of our brand clients, including TikTok,” McNichol says. “We actually produced this playable unit where you kind of gamify it.”

Essentially, Vungle made a tapping game: as a cool video plays, you tap on it to make social-media-style love hearts pop up. That unlocks an even cuter video, and repetition unlocks an even cuter yet video. All of which represents what people actually do on Tiktok in a pretty authentic way, and yet is fun and playable for a complete Tiktok newbie.

“It became our highest-performing creative for Tiktok,” McNichol says. “So you can definitely gamify: take elements of the brand and have fun with it.”

Next steps: see all the sessions

Check out all the rest of the UNIFY @ Home sessions here.

And, if you’d like to see how to do data-driven creative on Singular’s platform, schedule a demo. We’d love to show you how top mobile marketers are beating the competition with a little help from our data and insights.

There’s a set of campaign properties that are incredibly important for growth decisions that you don’t have easy access to. We’re not talking about clicks, impressions, or installs. It’s not CTR, ROAS, or ROI either, although all of these are important metrics.

Instead, we’re talking about bids and bid strategies.

Performance marketers have a few key levers to pull in campaign management. There’s creative, which Singular has a solution for. You have call to action, which you can test and optimize. There’s channel mix, where Singular makes experimentation and analysis painless. In addition, there’s targeting — who you want to deliver your messages to — and finally there’s bids and budgets.

Bids and budgets are critical. How much you’re willing to spend has huge implications for how often your ads get seen, how much scale you can drive, and how much ROI you can generate. But to date there have been almost no tools to help marketers optimize their bid strategies. Or, even see how bid parameters impact campaign performance.

Now that’s changing.

Campaign properties: metadata

Think of campaign properties as metadata: data about your campaigns. What made a campaign successful? What made it fail? More to the point, what specifically changed about your campaign at the moment in which it went from failing to succeeding, or vice versa?

You might have upped your bid. Decreased it.

Maybe you changed your bid type from CPM to CPI, or perhaps CPE.

Whatever you did had a material impact on your Google Ads campaign, or your Facebook ads, just like changing creative or switching offers. The problem is, a week or a month from now, how will you remember what you did? And how will you know what impact you made? Will you be able to check back, see changes you made, look at their impact, and be able to design informed future strategies from those learnings?

Probably not.

It’s probably just not a standard part of your workflow.

Mostly because you don’t have anywhere to save, record, or see that data. And yet, it’s some of the most vital data you have on what is making you successful (along with creative optimization and not wasting money on fraud). Unless, of course, you kept a record yourself, perhaps in Excel or some other document, every time you made a change.

Which is — let’s be honest — not the most reliable method.

You forget, you miss a change, you lose the document, you enter the wrong date or wrong bids. Or you get the junior member of the team to do it, and he takes off for Cancun. There’s dozens of challenges to manually storing the data.

Not least of them: now it’s not associated and queryable in relation to all of your other data.

Problem solved: Singular now surfaces this data

The good news is that Singular now records campaign property changes. And, like everything else in Singular, campaign properties are queryable, analyzable in reference to other marketing data and campaign data, and always available.

I spent some time with Singular product manager Evyatar Ram to learn more, and to see how mobile marketers can build bid data and bid strategies into their user acquisition workflow.

Here’s a lightly edited version of our conversation:

Why bid data is critically important for marketers

John Koetsier: Let’s take it from the top. What exactly are campaign properties?

Ram: Campaign properties are a new set of dimensions that we have started pulling into Singular. They include bids, bid types, bid strategies, campaign statuses, and others.

John Koetsier: Is this just an addition of new dimensions?

Ram: Yes and no.

While this feature does include adding new dimensions to the Singular dataset, this is actually a new category of data. This data represents a snapshot of your campaign analytics in a given point in time as opposed to pulling data which is stored historically.

To illustrate the difference between this data and regular data, with campaign properties there is no concept of historical data out there that Singular can access. We have to check the current state on a regular basis and then store it. In order to implement this our development team had to build new tools to pull in campaign properties data, a new pipeline to process the new data, and a new process to enrich the regular campaign statistics with campaign properties data.

John Koetsier: Why do marketers and user acquisition managers need this?

Ram: Campaign properties data is essential for user acquisition teams to be able to evaluate campaigns, see key parameters of their bid strategies, and make smart decisions for future changes.

One of the main levers UA teams have is to set and optimize bids. We know that many customers don’t have a good method today to log all the bid changes they make. They mostly rely on Excel sheets to manually document changes. Now, having this data in Singular makes it easier for them to have visibility into their activities. It also helps them have a single source of truth for all their user acquisition data.

To give a more specific example, pulling campaign properties data into Singular’s analytics can help user acquisition managers determine what impact changing the bid in a campaign had on the number of impressions or installs they got. Or, what their ROI was.

John Koetsier: So what’s the impact of having this new campaign properties data?

Ram: At a really high level, user acquisition is an operation where you make a lot of decisions every day and every week. Essentially, they go into a black box, and then you measure the impact of those decisions. Today you measure the impact of those changes in aggregate: you made 300 decisions, and you see the overall result in number of installs, ROI, CTR, engagement, and so on.

But you’re not looking at it decision by decision. And you’re not even looking at groups of decisions, like all your bid changes.

Now, with campaign properties in Singular, you can compare all the bidding decisions you made over a year in a specific geo, and see the results.

You sometimes hear from mobile marketers that user acquisition is more art than science, but really it shouldn’t be. This is yet another step to help UA teams be more scientific.

This also helps people not over-optimize, which can be an occupational hazard for high-scale, high-speed marketers. You’re dealing with literally dozens of campaigns on multiple platforms, and you don’t remember that you just changed your bid two days ago — or yesterday — so you change it again. There’s a definite danger in making too frequent updates to campaigns.

And, if you’re doing anything around automation, building an auto-bidding solution … you need this data to enable it.

John Koetsier: So how did user acquisition managers do this in the past?

Ram: We talked to a lot of customers about this and there wasn’t any one particular workflow for this.

There was a real mix: some used Excel spreadsheets, as I mentioned. Others used calendar reminders every time they would create a campaign … just a note in their calendars. One company actually built a small web app to track bid changes. Eventually they stopped using it because it was too manual, and it ran into issues of granularity. For example, the data included bid and country, but skipped publisher. So that tapered off.

Some did not track it at all.

And, bear in mind … even if you do track it somewhere, it’s not connected to all the rest of your marketing analytics data. So if you wanted to look at the impact of your bid changes, you had to remember to go get that data, you had to pull the data, and then you had to actually combine it with your campaign analytics in some way.

So some customers were trying to track bid changes … but the bottom line is that no-one really had a good solution.

John Koetsier: What networks are supported?

Ram: At launch we will support Facebook, Google, Snapchat, Apple Search Ads, and AdColony.

Others are in the works.

John Koetsier: What granularity of bids are you supporting? And what about the parameters … what are the standardized campaign properties you’re using?

Ram: We generally try to pull the bid data at the required granularity. For example, in AdColony we are pulling publisher level bids while for UAC campaigns we pull campaign level bids.

In addition to Bid Type and Bid Strategy dimensions, there are also dimensions called Standardized Bid Type and Standardized Bid Strategy.

These can be thought of as preconfigured custom dimensions that standardize bid types into CPA, CPC, and so on, and bid strategies into Manual bid, Auto bid, etc.

John Koetsier: What about customers who use the Singular API … will campaign properties data be available in the API?

Ram: Yes, and it’s in the API documentation as well.

John Koetsier: What kind of lift or overall benefit do you see this data having for mobile marketers and marketing teams in general?

Ram: I think ultimately the benefit is that you make better decisions. You can be a better user acquisition operator. You can get more scale and better ROI, or you can maximize scale at your target ROI.

It’s hard to see what kind of lift we’ll see at this point. We’ll likely have better data on that in time.

But another way to think about it this: How efficient are user acquisition organizations now?

Are they 95% efficient, as in 95% of their decisions are the best that could be made? I think it’s pretty clear that most teams are pretty far away from that level. Well, our goal is to provide tools that get them as close to optimal as possible, such that 100% of their decisions are better. Every time they create a campaign and every hour they spend in campaign management: we want them to have the data to be smarter.

There’s a lot of room to grow here.

It’s important to note that this is something UA managers and their teams will have to learn how to use. Because there haven’t been good ways to do this in the past, it’s been inefficient. It’s new, and it’ll take some time to become standard practice.

John Koetsier: Thank you for your time.

Next steps: using campaign properties

Interested in learning how you can get access to bid data and start to incorporate that into your user acquisition strategies?

The best way to to request a Singular demo. We’ll have a product expert walk through what Singular does, how it works, and how you can grow faster than your competition with marketing intelligence.