Marketing analytics Archives

Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv on chief growth officers and the rise of marketing intelligence [video]

Over the past decade we’ve seen the rise of the marketing technologist, who has one foot in the marketing department and another in engineering. And we’ve seen the data scientist role jump from almost nonexistent to being one of the fastest-growing jobs in just a decade.

Increasingly, as marketing is changing, technology is central to how marketers perform. Growth is now a key unifying function in brands and enterprise, and we’re also seeing the rise of the Chief Growth Officer.

We’re releasing a report on that in about a month.

But … our CEO Gadi Eliashiv gave a sneak peak at some of the results recently at Mobile Apps Unlocked in Las Vegas.

The rise of chief growth officers

Ultimately, the way chief growth officers lead their organizations is by using data-driven insights. Some of the most successful leaders drive those insights via marketing intelligence platforms like Singular.

The primary function of a marketing intelligence platform?

To provide insights for growth by connecting effort with outcome at granular and aggregate levels.

Ultimately, that’s how CGOs and other growth leaders get the score. Understand if they’re winning or losing. And know at both as high level and as granular as they want: how successful are our marketing, our campaigns, our ads, our creative.

Knowing that — and getting smart insights for optimization — powers breakthrough improvement in conversions and ROI. And that’s exactly what most brands, enterprises, and companies need.

Finished the video?

Click here to get a demo. See how Singular enables unprecedented growth for the most sophisticated marketers on the planet.

5 things to do when your mobile retail sales crash

This is a guest post by Ryan Gould, VP of strategy and marketing at Elevation Marketing

Mobile commerce sales are expected to reach approximately $420 Billion by 2021.

That’s massive, and it’s only going to grow. More importantly, people who use their mobile devices to make purchases usually spend twice as much as other customers.

It’s no surprise that mobile e-commerce is a very important channel for retailers to sell their products and services through. However, in the volatile economic environment, we live in, mobile retail sales can crash, for myriad reasons.

That’s why it’s smart to know what to do if your mobile retail sales collapse. In this article, we’ll give you five concrete things to take action when things go south with your mobile sales.

Let the action begin!

#1: Read the data to figure out why mobile retail sales are crashing

Before you start taking any action on improving your mobile retail sales, it’s best to investigate why your sales are falling in the first place. Never assume what the reason could be, until you’ve explored it.

Here’s a great list of questions you can use to get to the root of the problem:

When did mobile retail sales start crashing?
Was there any event that occurred before mobile retail sales started crashing?
What is the size of the sales drop, in dollar terms?
Which products have caused mobile sales to drop?
Is there any trend that’s being revealed by the sales numbers?
Are my site visits and app sessions down, flat, or growing?
Is the buyer’s journey ending on one particular screen?
Did my pricing change, or did currency fluctuations in foreign markets recently happen?
Is the number of abandoned shopping carts vastly growing?
Did a competitor release something attractive to my users and customers?
Is my store suddenly rejecting more credit cards?

Make sure you confirm that you know the reason, so your plan of action is relevant to the problem you’re wanting to address!

#2: Revamp your mobile site/app design

There are a bunch of things you can do to restyle your mobile e-commerce app and optimize it for conversions. Your e-commerce website or app should be easy to access on any mobile device, so people find it easy to transact with you.

Start by enlarging your mobile retail product images and text so people can see your products clearly. You should also enlarge your buttons so people with ‘fat fingers’ can click on your calls to action with ease.

Another way to make your mobile site or app user-friendly is by only including one call-to-action button per page. It makes the buying decision simpler for customers, by giving them lesser choice and making it super simple for them to transact.

Make the navigation experience super simple.

Your mobile website or app experience should be significantly different compared to your desktop version. Using ‘responsive design’ so that your website fits any mobile device, whether smartphones or tablets, is a great way to provide a universally consistent user experience.

But almost nothing beats a native mobile app for usability.

#3: Send great mobile emails (and maybe a push notification)

If you notice your mobile retail sales plummeting, it’s best to reconnect with your subscribers.

And the best way to reconnect with subscribers is to send them beautiful mobile emails. More than 67% of retail consumers check their email on their mobile device.

Sending mobile emails is an art. You can use them creatively, for various reasons such as finding out why your customers have stopped buying, what would interest them, and what you can do as a retailer for them. Nearly 20% of all mobile sales are initiated by email marketing, so it’s worth the time investment to utilize the channel as best as you can!

Some tips for sending great mobile emails are:

Keep them simple. It’s best to come to the point, as people have very short attention spans these days. So only send them the message they need to hear!
Use visually appealing images, with less text. Images get the message across in an interesting and engaging way, and consumers will love you for it.
Have a specific, clear and simple call to action. Emails should make it easy for customers to transact with you too.
Use catchy subject lines to grab the attention of your consumers. The better your subject lines are, the higher the chances are of your consumers clicking on them!

If you’ve got highly engaged users, and you have an offer that won’t cause them to uninstall your app, you can also send a smart push notification that’s tailored to who they are, what they want, and what they’ve been doing recently.

#4: Invest in search optimization (SEO and ASO)

Just like you need to invest time in optimizing your website for SEO for desktop searches, you also need to invest time in optimizing your mobile website for mobile searches. And for apps, you need to optimize your App Store and Google Play descriptions for search on those platforms so that you can rank well.

Organic channels (and paid channels) are complementary, so increased success in one often spills over to the other, so it makes sense to enhance these different channels together.

58% of all searches are on mobile. Inevitably, you need to put some effort into this.

Some steps you can take to enhance your mobile SEO are as follows:

Make sure your website is responsive: If your website doesn’t fit on a mobile device, the ones that are will outrank yours.
Optimize your content for mobile devices: This will help in loading content on your website faster and optimize your website for speed. By reducing the image sizes and placing meta tags in the right places you can enhance your search rankings.
You can use the Google Search Console for checking your website’s mobile usability issues so you can fix all the errors that are stopping it from being found by people. It’s a great way to determine how you can spend your time wisely on mobile SEO.

Mobile commerce now represents a third of all retail sales in the U.S. according to one report and is growing almost 15% year-over-year.

Some steps you can take to enhance your app ASO are as follows:

Pick the right category. Remember, Twitter switched from social, where it was always trailing massive competitors, to news, where it instantly became number one. A higher ranking means more installs.
Get more (and better ratings). Look, ratings are table stakes: all the top apps have lots of them. But continually adding new and updated ratings for your app is critical to even having the opportunity to get good placement.
Build your offline footprint. Most people who install an app have heard of it before and went searching for it. Without some brand identity and awareness, it’s hard to get drive-by installs. And, they’re much less likely to result in engaged long-term users/customers.

#5: Make sure you keep the checkout experience as simple as possible

The checkout experience is the make or break moment for mobile retail. That’s why it’s so important you avoid asking for unnecessary information from your users during checkout.

You can run a survey with your customers to understand what they like or dislike about your mobile checkout experience so you can add what’s necessary and eliminate what’s not needed. As a general guide though, implementing the below steps is great for mobile eCommerce:

Allow users to pay through multiple sources: Your checkout page should allow users to pay via credit card, paypal or bank transfer, whatever makes it easy for them to transact.
Simplify the UI elements of your app to entice your users to take action. Some colors are more appealing than others for shoppers to click on the ‘buy’ button. For instance, using shades of orange or green are better for enticing users to take action compared to red which puts the ‘halt’ signal in the human brain.
Remove all the content that’s unnecessary for checking out. You can include complimentary products for upselling them at checkout, but don’t annoy customers with any irrelevant promotional offers.

Wrapping it up

By implementing the above steps, you can minimize the temporary setback.

Mobile retail sales can be cyclical, abrupt, and vary depending on the nature of the industry your business is in. Reading the data and taking appropriate action is the best way to know which is the best cure for the problem.

Ryan Gould is Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Services at Elevation Marketing. From legacy Fortune 100 institutions to inventive start-ups, Ryan brings extensive experience with a wide range of B2B clients. He skillfully architects and manages the delivery of integrated marketing programs, and believes strongly in strategy, not just tactics, that effectively aligns sales and marketing teams within organizations.

3 critical things CGOs (and CMOs) absolutely need to drive growth campaigns

In the simplest possible terms, a chief marketing officer’s role is to implement strategy that ultimately increases sales. A chief growth officer’s role is even simpler and more explicit: grow the company.

But how?

And what tools do they need to achieve those goals?

Singular is privileged to work with growth marketers at companies like Lyft, LinkedIn, Rovio, Wish, AirBnB, DraftKings, StitchFix, plus many more. We’ve seen what the best growth marketers the planet do, and we know what technology they use.

We also know how much data they have.

In a recent survey, 200 CMOs told us that their biggest challenge isn’t marketing data. Quite the opposite, in fact — they have plenty of data. They have avalanches of data.

And that’s the core challenge.

Drowning in data

“Marketers are drowning in data,’ says Jo Ann Sanders, a VP at Optimizely.

That’s the problem.

“With the exponential growth of data over the past decade … it’s becoming harder daily to turn information into action,” says SurveyMonkey CMO Leela Srinivasan.

Marketers are drowning in data thanks to the unprecedented data exhaust of our digital lives.

We browse the web, we install apps, we watch four million videos on YouTube every minute, we search on Google 40,000 times a second. The world will soon have almost six billion mobile subscribers, and American adults now spend more than 3.5 hours a day on their phones in branded apps, sponsored media, and ad-supported sites.

At the same time, marketers are dealing with an exponential rise in tech tools, more digital channels than ever before, and more billion-user platforms every year.

Add in global competition, and 76% of CMOs say they can’t measure marketing performance accurately enough to make truly informed decisions.

Marketing intelligence platform

What marketers need most is actionable insights for growth. So CMOs’ (and CGOs’) biggest challenge is simply mining nuggets of gold from all that data. That requires real-time measurement and analysis at scale across potentially hundreds of platforms, partners, and channels.

That’s why Singular built what we call a Marketing Intelligence Platform.

The new marketers are different. They speak data and write code. They form hypotheses and run experiments; then measure results and optimize. These new marketers are marketing scientists, and they need tools of their trade.

With a Marketing Intelligence Platform, marketers achieve three critical things:

Unprecedented visibility at scale
On-demand flexible reporting
Full customer journey insights

That’s seeing not just your data, but your ROI on every activity. It’s slicing and dicing not just by campaign, but getting CAC per creative asset. And it’s measuring not just conversions, but cross-device and cross-platform journeys that led to customer action.

This requires at least nine components, combined into a single platform, grouped in three sections. We’ll take a very brief look at each. For a full in-depth overview, however, check out our complete Marketing Intelligence Platform report.

The three things that CGOs and CMOs need to drive and accelerate growth are …

One: Unified marketing data

You can’t get the golden nuggets of actionable insights without mining your data, and that starts by unifying it.

Unifying marketing data includes:

Data governance
Data ingestion
Data processing
Attribution
Dimensional data combining/synthesis

Data governance ensures clean data from every source, and enables processing, enriching, and combining later on.

Ingestion is getting all your relevant data from every source, and it’s not easy. Processing is essential to standardize and normalize it, at which point you can conversion outputs to marketing inputs. Combining and synthesizing top-funnel and low-funnel data reveals deeper trends and granular results.

Two: Intelligent insights at scale

At a high level, marketers need to know the score: across all their campaigns, are they winning or losing? At more granular levels, they need to know if a specific campaign, partner, publisher, or creative is performing.

Generating intelligence insights includes:

Reporting and visualization
Actionable insights

Reporting and visualization shows marketers what’s happening, and actionable insights provide clues for future profitable growth. Some of those insights are pull, but some need to be push: alerts about out-of-scope campaigns, click-through rate drops, poorly performing ad partners, and so on.

Three: Automation

The volume of data flooding marketers’ dashboards, reports, and spreadsheets cannot be handled manually at scale. Automation is required, and it includes:

Data transport
Alerts, fraud, audiences
And much more

It is not useful to have a system that only ingests data. Marketing data needs to move from systems of deployment to systems of analysis to systems of engagement, and sometimes in multiple directions. So building in the ability to do that via API, exports, or S3 to internal BI systems and hundreds if not thousands of external partner systems is critical.

And while modern scientific marketing is not a set-it-and-forget-it activity, marketers increasingly need to be able to automate actions within set parameters.

That includes automated creation and distribution of audiences for retargeting, look-alike campaigns, or suppression lists. It also includes built-in on-by-default configurable mitigation of fraud, along with both whitelisting and blacklisting of sources and publishers in paid media campaigns.

And at higher levels, it includes automation of bids and buys for ad campaigns at scale.

Results: what a marketing intelligence platform delivers

What does a marketing intelligence platform deliver?

Find out soon in part two of this blog post, coming next week.

Or, click here to access Singular’s entire Marketing Intelligence Platform report right now.

Why Singular Is The Only MMP Integrated To Twitter’s Ads API

Intelligent data that drives insights for growth requires three key ingredients:

Accuracy
Granularity
Actionability

In order to obtain all three ingredients, you need to ensure the reliability of API integrations with each of your marketing platforms. This is where you find the Singular difference. Singular is the only measurement partner to have two separate API integrations with Twitter, along with over 1,000 additional marketing platforms, providing you the most comprehensive solution for ROI down to the creative level.

This is what we call “dual integration.”

WTH is the Dual Integration approach?

Before you can understand the importance of API integrations (and dual integrations) you first should understand the type of data you need to collect in order to have anything meaningful for your campaign optimization efforts. Simply put, there are two key data sets you need to collect from your marketing platform, whether that is from Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Facebook, Google, Vungle, Unity, Amazon: you name it.

First, you need your campaign analytics data (aka pre-install data) to answer questions like:

“How much did I spend on this campaign?”
“How many impressions did that creative get?”
“How many clicks came from each publisher?”

Second, you need your attribution data (aka post-install data) to answer questions like:

“How many installs did that campaign generate?”
“What was the revenue on this creative asset?”
“How many people went to level two as a result of this keyword?”

Only by combining these two datasets with a robust cost aggregation solution can you really know your ROI by campaign, by creative, by keyword, and by individual ad. This gives you the power to optimize at the most granular as well as aggregate levels, providing your best opportunity to maximize profitability.

To do this manually, you would need to standardize the hierarchies (some sources offer only campaign and ad level, while others go right down to the keyword) and the taxonomies (names and terms differ) across every source, and then calculate your ROI by each dimension … every single time you need it.

Sounds like a pain in the @$$?

Good thing Singular has already done it for you!

This is the dual integration approach

Singular has spent years building API integrations for both sides of the puzzle across over 1,000 additional marketing platforms, and automatically combines this data to show you ROI at the most granular levels.

Unlike other analytics platforms who are only accountable for your “pre-install data” or other attribution providers who are only accountable for your “post-install data,” Singular is accountable for both. Which is why we are the only Twitter measurement partner to have integrations that collect BOTH datasets, just as we do for hundreds of other marketing platforms: so we can do dual integration for you, out of the box.

Inherent flaws with tracking links

You might be asking: So why can’t I just use tracking links to collect this data? My attribution provider uses tracking links and says they can do campaign ROI.

Great question! While the tracking link is the easiest way to collect the necessary macros for a given network, this method has some inherent flaws.

It is not retroactive
You are only receiving data at the time of the click, therefore if the numbers reconcile after the time of the click, this will not be reflected in your reporting.
Not all networks support passing all macros
For example, you might be able to receive campaign cost and clicks, but you may not get site ID or publisher ID.
No creative assets!
Singular is the only solution on the market to provide you the most complete reporting of your creative asset ROI across the most visual networks. However, creative assets and their performance can only be reported by an API integration.
Data loss and discrepancy is HIGH
In a recent study, we compared a number of customers who were using Singular along with a third-party attribution provider. In observing their “campaign data” collected via our API integration against the same data set collected via the tracking link by the third-party attribution provider, we saw a 31% discrepancy … with the numbers reported from our API integration matching identically to the number on the final bill.

Of course, we too sometimes rely on the tracking link for those marketing platforms that do not offer an API to collect campaign analytics. However, in the rare case that we cannot collect data via an API, we will also rely on alternate integration methods to ensure accuracy of the data.

For example, a daily email report, or a CSV file upload to an S3 bucket.

We understand every marketer is different, and how you look at your data may be completely different from your competitors. We are flexible and here to ensure the data you see in Singular matches your internal systems.

Heck, we even have a bi-directional API to push and pull data to your source of truth.

To learn more about Singular’s “Dual Integration Approach” and the Singular difference, contact us to request a demo today.

Already a Singular customer and looking to take advantage of our dual integration with Twitter? Check out the help center for details on how to configure your Twitter integration.

Singular’s updated user permissions functionality: granular control for enterprise users

If you’re spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars advertising your app, brand, or services annually, you’re not doing it alone. You’re doing it with a team of people.

More than that, you have a team of people looking over your shoulder.

And why not? You might be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. It’s kind of a big deal.

That’s why Singular has extremely granular user permissions that you can tune exactly how you need to give stakeholders precisely the access to your data that they need — and no more. Without this kind of capability, you simply lack the ability to properly manage your team.

User permissions: three kinds of users

You can define three kinds of users for your Singular account:

Admin users:
User has stunning godlike powers (possible slight overstatement)
Standard users:
User can do everything but add and manage users
Restricted users:
User can only do what you allow them to do

You’ll probably have a couple of admins, a bunch of standard users for the user acquisition managers and marketing managers on your team, and a number of restricted users.

Maybe BI needs a window into spend and ROI. Maybe the CFO wants to see what’s going on. Maybe the creative team wants to be able to track clickthrough and ROI per image, or per ad or group of ads. Or maybe an engineer needs to set up a new integration, or data routing to Amazon or an on-prem database.

All of that is possible.

Restricted users: three kinds of restrictions

For restricted users, you’ll be able to limit capabilities and access in any of three ways:

Metrics permissions
User can only view the metrics you allow, even in saved reports or the dashboard
Data permissions
Users can only see the data you want them to, such as for a particular app or data source
Feature permissions
Users can only see the screens you want them to see

Now you can create users who can only see data from one or several apps, but not all your apps. Or you can create users who can only see data from search media sources, or data from only one ad partner.

Of course, it’s not always about restriction.

Sometimes it’s just about simplicity.

If there’s someone who needs access to just a small slice of data, offering the entire world of possibilities might be overwhelming. It might be counterproductive. In other words, simplifying what they see might be the best way to streamlining their workflow.

You’re enterprise. Your software should be too

If you’re growing fast and spending tens of millions on paid and organic growth, you’re enterprise. And your tools should be too. That’s why we have fine-grained, granular control over user permissions built into Singular.

Any questions?

Feel free to contact us or request a demo.

5 massive factors changing the future of games: social, platforms, technology, monetization, and app stores

What is the future of games?

One thing we know: it’s going to be lucrative. The top 25 public game companies generated over $100 billion in revenue last year, according to a recent story on VentureBeat featuring data from Newzoo.

The largest, Tencent, had almost $20 billion in estimated game revenue. Sony, Microsoft, Apple, and Google are on the list. Activision hauled in almost $7 billion, and names like France’s Ubisoft, Korea’s Netmarble, and Japan’s Square Enix all generated more than a billion in 2018 revenue.

To state the obvious, games are a big deal.

But what’s changing in gaming?

At Singular we recently had a chance to review our business with a major gaming client. To prepare for that, a number of us internally including Elizabeth Lauer-Lopez, Victor Savath, and Ligita Kneitaite spent some time consulting our crystal balls (and data) on the future of gaming in general, and mobile gaming.

Here are the results:

Future of games: Social at scale

We’re seeing more and more games with social experiences at scale. HQ Triviashowed us that a year ago in a non-traditional category. Fortnite, which has hit an astonishing total player count of over 250 million people, has hit almost 11 million concurrent players.

That’s social, and that’s scale.

A few weeks ago I chatted with Unity’s chief marketing officer Clive Downie. Unity powers half of the games on the planet, and it’s building tech to scale to 50 million concurrent users. In a few years, that’s likely to be hundreds of millions, and eventually, it will be planet scale.

The massive benefit of social at scale?

When a game succeeds, it becomes a social phenomenon. That has huge new user acquisition benefits, thanks to incessant coverage in the media and in social media conversations, but it also has huge player retention benefits: friends who game together, stay together, you might say.

And they often stick to the same game, too.

Future of games: Connected platforms

In Ready Player One, Wade Watts (AKA Parzival) didn’t need to enter different apps to join other gunters in a racing game, or dance in a club, or chat with his huge robotic friend Aech in a first-person shooter. He just entered different experiences in the Oasis, a global VR universe.

We’re not going to see the Oasis anytime soon.

But we might see some components of it.

Think: why do you have different identities in every game, even games by the same publisher? Why can’t you have a shared wallet, maybe transferable XP between games, and shared friend groups? To go a little crazier and cross game publisher boundaries, why can’t you take your friends from Fortnite to PUBG?

For players, there’s huge potential rewards: faster on boarding, richer experiences, more fun in more environments, and a more social gaming session.

For publishers, there’s easier cross-promotion, faster player onboarding, and potentially longer engagement via more owned platforms, leading to increased brand connection and better monetization opportunities.

Of course, there are caveats.

Game publishers still need to enable super-fast on-demand experiences for the minute-to-kill, I’m just waiting-in-a-line-at-the-coffee-store moment. Anything that increases login and set-up time is a risk.

But if publishers can find a find a way to mitigate that, they have the opportunity to build connected universes inside mobile apps, and with coming smartglasses and 5G, the possibilities are incredible to imagine.

Future of games: Technology driving everything, everywhere, in real-time

We’re seeing that hit games are increasingly multi-platform: mobile, console, desktop, even web.

That might be native versions like Minecraft or Fortnite, or it might be via emulated technology like Bluestacks, which showed up in Singular’s recent ROI Index. And they might even migrate from console to mobile, like Call of Duty.

Increasingly, we’re seeing noise around streaming too.

Thanks to Google Stadia, streaming console-level games is now possible with sub 25-millisecond lag even for titles like Assassin’s Creed. (Note: here’s the required grain of salt.) Competitors are legion and massive: Microsoft xCloud, Nvidia GeForce Now, Valve Link Anywhere, PlayStation Now, plus a rumored Amazon product.

In other words: there’s a lot of money and big-company corporate cred jumping into streaming, so something very interesting is likely to happen here.

Possible downsides include that the costs of computation for games might now fall much more heavily on the game publisher, since instead of the lion’s share of computational cost falling on a distributed network of millions of devices (gamer’s own phones, consoles, computers), it all falls on a server farm.

And someone has to keep those lights on.

On the upside, gaming experts have told me there’s a higher monetization opportunity because there are now lower risks of trying a game, thanks to there being no large upfront cost. That leads to a larger userbase, potentially. And of course streaming is custom-made for a subscription model, which means a longer payback period.

(Frankly, an ad-supported model makes a ton of sense here too.)

Future of games: Monetization evolution

Game monetization is changing quickly.

A few years ago, it was all in-app purchases. In 2016, for instance, 94% of the revenue generated on the U.S. iOS App Store came from the top 1% of publishers who had paid apps or IAPs … and IAPs generated 20 times more revenue than paid apps.

More recently, in-app advertising has moved into the leadership position in terms of mobile app monetization.

But subscriptions are just starting to grow as well. GameMine is having success with this model, offering access to its entire portfolio for one price. And some streaming games will likely be subscription-based.

eSports is also also offering new monetization opportunities.

It’ll cost you a cool $25 million to buy a franchise in the new Call of Duty professional league, and then you’ll be able to sell tickets, viewing, ads against viewing, sponsorships, broadcast rights, and maybe even new models of joining, helping, or learning from your on-screen heroes.

Future of games: Decreasing power of app stores

App stores like Apple’s and Google’s are tremendously important and will continue to be so. At the same time, however, we’re seeing ways in which their power is being reduced.

The first visible crack in the wall might have been Fortnite moving off Google Play for Android.

Since Fortnite is a global phenomenon on consoles, mobile (including iOS), and desktop, Epic Games could do what most game publishers couldn’t. Clearly, massive games with their own marketing momentum can save the 15-30% store cut of in-app purchases and subscription revenue by moving off-platform. Just as clearly, that’s much harder for new, unknown games.

Also, this works on Android, where you can side-load apps. Not so much on iOS.

In addition, new technology such as streaming, which we’ve already talked about, also reduces our overall dependence on app stores.

If I can just stream a game to my mobile or desktop browser, I don’t need a native app from a platform landlord. That opens up all kinds of possibilities — and dangers — because Google and particularly Apple closely police what games and apps are allowed on their platforms.

It also means marketing a game just changed significantly.

There are also regulatory challenges to the way that app stores operate as bouncers at the app nightclub. Apple, for instance, is facing three separate antitrust actions in Europe from Spotify, Kaspersky, and The Netherlands.

Whether those cases have merit or not is an open question, but we have seen the EU take a leading role in limiting the power that larger U.S.-based multinationals have. And any judgements might impact how Apple polices its App Store and what third-party game publishers can produce, offer, and monetize.

Summing up

Games are an increasingly large part of our lives, thanks largely to mobile. But how we making, distributing, and monetizing them is changing.

Smart publishers will continue to find ways to out-grow the competition. And Singular will be there to help them … on mobile, on web, on IoT, on streaming media, or wherever the industry moves.

Talk to us today about a demo.

How to scale user acquisition from $100 to $250,000/day

Have you ever scaled mobile user acquisition from $100/day to $250,000/day?

I’m guessing very, very, very few people can say yes to that question. Maybe fewer than 1,000 on the entire planet. So if you’re trying to grow — and grow aggressively — it makes a lot of sense to listen to someone who can answer with a yes.

Last week our CEO Gadi Eliashiv shared two articles by UserAcquisition.com’s Dave Riggs in one of Singular’s Slack channels. In them, Riggs talks from personal experience about the tech marketers need when they start scaling user acquisition for hyper-growth.

The most important point?

World-class measurement: something that our very best clients (and the best marketers in the world) whole-heartedly agree with.

The key differentiator between okay UA, good UA, and great UA comes down to data and measurement. Invest in it. The very best UA teams have sophisticated technology setups that allow them to slice and dice any data by any segment imaginable.

– Dave Riggs

That starts with an MMP, Riggs says: a mobile measurement platform. But it extends far beyond just an MMP. To do a world-class job of scaling user acquisition, you need five critical components in your marketing technology stack, he says.

Attribution (an MMP)
A cost data solution (could be same as #1)
A database/data warehouse
A BI platform
A real-time visualization tool

Obviously, Singular plays in both slot #1 and slot #2. And Riggs has some high praise for Singular:

If you want a provider that offers both cost and attribution tracking, I recommend Singular. There’s nothing better.

– Dave Riggs

That’s pretty exciting for us to see here at Singular. But even more exciting are the reasons Riggs provides:

Extreme accuracy
“Far more network integrations than competitors”
All your tracking in one place
No gaps in reporting

Those are great reasons. Even greater, however, is how scaling user acquisition successfully at such extremes feels when you have the right tools: safe.

Let me repeat that: safe.

This is extremely important. After all, you’ve gone from $100/day, or $36,500/year to an almost unimaginable $250,000/day. If you kept your foot on the gas pedal all year at that rate — unlikely unless you’re achieving the most rarified heights of mobile success — that’s an astounding $91.25 million/year.

Some of Singular’s clients spend twice that. And more.

Feeling safe at such extremes of spending is almost more important than words can convey. (And actually being safe is even more critical.) Mistakes at this kind of spend velocity run into the millions of dollars very quickly.

So how do you scale your user acquisition spend 2,500 times? With the right technology … including Singular.

And how does that make you feel?

Picture it.

An expanse of open road appears before you. You accelerate and feel yourself pulled deeper into the plush leather. Your heart beats faster. Meanwhile, you appreciate the sweet complexity and design that holds you in perfect equilibrium, while the world around you flies past at breakneck speed. Thanks to world-class engineering, you know you’re perfectly safe, even as you accelerate. You’re blaring your horn and laughing like Cruella DeVil, as you ride up on the shoulder, leaving all the basic and intermediate fools in your dust.

– Dave Riggs

If you need that feeling today, let’s talk. Contact us, or request a demo. You deserve to feel safe. And if you need more info, here are the links to Dave’s articles again.

Marketers are boosting 2019 ad spend on Amazon, Facebook, and Google (but especially Amazon)

Recently we surveyed 1,500 marketers who actively run ad campaigns. It’s no shock that marketers are looking more and more to Amazon as a media source for advertising — especially those in consumer goods and retail.

But Amazon’s not the only one growing.

Both Facebook and Google will be growing significantly as well. Amazon, however, as the newer competitor in the advertising world with, of course, less historical business, will grow the most. In fact, 63% of marketers who run ad campaigns are planning to increase their spending on Amazon.

Google and Facebook aren’t left out, however. More than half of marketers — 55% — are growing their ad spend with Facebook, and 61% of marketers are also planning to increase their spend with Google.

This should not be a surprise.

Google and Facebook both did exceptionally well in the Singular 2019 ROI Index, where we ranked over 500 ad networks by their return on investment. Both were at the top of virtually all categories and geographies.

Let’s dive deeper into what marketers plan to do with each platform:

Facebook ad spend growth

We’ve already mentioned that more than half of marketers will be increasing their ad spend on Facebook. Only 10% say they’re decreasing it, while 35% say they’re keeping it the same.

Facebook topped the global iOS and Android ROI rankings in our recent Singular ROI Index, so it makes sense that marketers are doubling down on success.

Google ad spend growth

Similarly, 61% of marketer say they’ll spend more on Google. 33% say they’ll keep their spending the same, while only 6% plan to spend less.

Google showed massive strength in the Singular ROI Index in gaming sectors as well as regional dominance in Americas, EMEA, and APAC regions. Again, marketers tend to keep doing what works … and generally do more of it.

Amazon ad spend growth

While Amazon is the newest entrant into the advertising ecosystem among these big three, and has a relatively small share of the overall digital ad market, it doubled in ad revenue over the last year and has been ramping continuously for several years.

In 2019, it will grow the fastest.

One huge advantage: massive amounts of purchase data as well as browsing history, which helps Amazon gain good understanding into what people want and what they’re most likely to click on.

63% of marketers plan to increase their ad spend with Amazon in 2019, with another 34% planning to keep their spend the same. Only 3.5% of marketers who run ad campaigns are planning to decrease their spending.

Most trusted ad networks

We surveyed the same 1,500 marketers on multiple other topics, including which ad networks they trust the most, and what the most important elements that marketers consider when choosing new ad networks.

We can’t reveal all of that publicly, however.

To get that data, contact us and ask for the “most trusted ad networks” data.

21st century marketing intelligence webinar: Data, science, and magic in a world of smart devices

Every marketer knows marketing is changing.

You don’t have to be a CMO to see that lack of data is no longer the reason why marketers can’t grow their brands. Marketers are deluged with data, overwhelmed with data, buried in data. The solution lies within … but finding the growth needle in the data haystack is getting more and more challenging.

That growth needle is 21st-century marketing, or what we call marketing intelligence. And that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about in this webinar.

We’ve got the right people to share their insights.

Scott Beechuk
Scott is a partner at Norwest Venture Partners. He’s spent 20 years in the enterprise software industry, including as a senior VP with Salesforce and head of engineering for Desk.com, and VP product management and marketing for Codebees. He’s also co-founded multiple companies and currently serves on the board of Singular, Leanplum, Bluecore, and Socrates AI.

Morgan Norman
Morgan is CMO at Copper, the #1 CRM for Google’s G Suite. He’s previously led marketing at Dialpad, NetSuite, and Zuora, and was a senior director of marketing at Microsoft. Morgan has also founded companies, contributes to Forbes, and is an abstract painter.

We’ll talk about:

How CMOs manage the constant onslaught of data
How marketers can make smarter decisions to optimize growth
The biggest problems with marketing data
The emergence of the CGO: Chief Growth Officer
Marketing’s emerging leadership role across the entire enterprise
How to connect every input (effort) with an output (conversion)

You will not want to miss this webinar.

I’ve personally heard Scott Beechuk talk and there are few who understand the future of marketing and the future of marketing technology like he does. Morgan Norman is a former engineer as well who deeply understand what technology is doing to marketing, and lives it every day.

Details and link

Date: March 21, 2019

Time: 1:30PM Eastern, 10:30AM Pacific

Link: The webinar will be delivered via Zoom

We look forward to hosting you in a few weeks!

Singular & Segment: New partnership integration allowing for frictionless customer onboarding

I’m extremely happy to announce that Singular is now an official integration partner of Segment.

Segment is a customer data platform that many companies use to collect and action their customers’ data. When new relevant data comes from any source that a publisher has connected to Segment, they can now push real-time data streams from Segment to Singular.

That could include information such as customer purchases and revenue, mobile events like push notifications, or custom events that developers define for themselves.

Integration: easier than easy?

The integration also enables Segment customers to immediately adopt Singular attribution with almost zero migration effort.

Using Singular attribution is the best way to measure ROI from the campaign level all the way down to the creative level. It also allows you to benefit from Singular’s fraud protection and audience management solutions to boost and optimize your marketing.

The new integration capability is server-to-server, which means that mobile app developers do not need to add code or Singular’s SDK to their mobile apps. In other words, it can be instantly available.

That’s critically important to many customers because it means no switching costs and no engineering work. Not having to put an extra SDK in your app can also help slim down your install size, shield you from security and privacy concerns, and make your app more stable.

Capabilities: what can you do?

What can Singular customers do with this integration?

In just one example, advertisers can now receive real-time data about purchases that mobile users make via other platforms. That allows Singular to combine this data with details about customer acquisition cost, marketing campaigns, and ad creatives to provide continually updated ROI and customer acquisition cost data for customers, campaigns, and ads.

In much the same way, brands can track results from push notifications such as opens, actions taken after opening, and determine both cost and return of messaging.

And, of course, brands can attribute mobile app installs using Singular’s industry-leading attribution, fraud detection, and audience management tools.

Singular: first mobile attribution company

Singular is one of the first partners for this new integration program, and we couldn’t be happier to offer it to our customers.

For Singular, this is yet another way for us to unify accurate marketing data from an important partner in the mobile ecosystem, which gives marketers more visibility into what they’re doing, and what impact it is driving.

“Our goal at Segment is to allow our customer to quickly and painlessly connect all their data,” says Segment CTO Calvin French-Owen. “Singular is the first mobile attribution company to custom-build their integration using our Developer Center, and we expect great results for Segment customers and Singular customers.”

We’re very happy to be the first to offer this new integration method and are looking forward to ensuring our customers have a successful and simple integration.

If you have any questions about this, please feel free to contact your customer success manager.

Or, if you’re not a Singular customer yet, talk to us about getting a demo.