Marketing ROI 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.

The next generation of user-level ad monetization: Introducing support for impression-level revenue data from MoPub

Without complete and accurate ad monetization data, app marketers can’t optimize growth decisions. Today, that means they need to include ad monetization data as well as in-app purchase data in their ROI calculations.

App marketers need to measure ad revenue on two distinct levels: aggregate and granular.

Granular ad revenue

Mobile app marketers need the ability to see user-level ad revenue so that they can accurately understand their return on ad spend for user acquisition. Without granularity you won’t know which users are ad whales … and which are ad duds.

Plus, you’re not sure where they came from. Or where to get more of them.

“Granularity is critical in mobile ad monetization,” says Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv. “Understanding the relative value of their ad impressions helps mobile publishers optimize their apps for maximum revenue. It also helps them improve user experience by making decisions that can minimize irrelevant and wasted ads.”

Aggregate ad revenue analytics

You also need aggregated data so that you know exactly where you stand with ad-based revenue across all partners, plus of course IAP and product/service purchase data. Only then can you get a full picture of your growth efforts.

You also need to understand ad requests and fill rates.

“Smart companies check the fill rate all the time to optimize their waterfall,” says Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv.

MoPub’s new impression-level revenue data

Singular has been providing ad monetization services for almost a year with a variety of partners, including IronSource. Now, MoPub is providing revenue information to mobile app publishers for every single ad impression. Not only that, MoPub is also surfacing what supported demand source was able to fill the ad slot and what country the user is in.

This is extremely powerful.

With this data, you can understand ad-based life-time value of your users. That’s increasingly important, because just 2% of mobile app users are converting to paying customers via in-app purchases.

Ads are one of the key drivers of monetizing the other 98% of your users, so it’s no shock that ad monetization is increasingly critical for app marketers. In fact, 60% more apps are monetizing through ads in 2019 compared to last year, and ad revenue now represents more than half of many app publishers’ total revenue.

Available today

Starting today, Singular supports MoPub’s impression-level revenue data product, enabling marketers to measure granular ad revenue.

The result is better data precision, more accurate and complete LTV models, superior user acquisition and monetization strategies, and ultimately, the potential to earn more revenue.

And all of it, of course, right inside your Singular dashboard, providing a single pane of glass to understand your cost and revenue.

Learn more about Singular’s Ad Monetization solution here, and set up a demo to go deeper with one of our specialists.

Mobile user acquisition in India: How the most efficient advertisers grow faster

The following is an in-depth overview of the growth strategies of a very well respected and profitable online business in India. This is a Singular customer who runs a transaction-oriented business, and the data is used with permission.

In the last 15 months this advertiser has accrued approximately 13 million installs on both Android and iOS devices. What is impressive is that they have focused on checking fraud right from the get-go and only paying the partners on Cost Per Transaction (CPT).

Here are some key areas this advertiser focuses for user growth.

Focusing on Android for mobile user acquisition

It’s no brainer – Android is the winner in India market and therefore is this advertisers’ key focus area.

iOS marketing efforts were light until this publisher accrued a respectable user base on Android.

Paid beats organic

Organic ranking is good; but paid marketing gets you there faster The advertiser has been very comfortable with a lower rate of organic installs.

When they started on this journey, they had approximately 35% organic installs on Android and 99% organic installs on iOS. Over the last 15 months, they have experimented with various sources and found the best ones for their vertical. After 15 months the advertiser finds they now have approximately 10% organic installs on Android and 60% organic installs on iOS.

Reducing the organic installs percentage can sometimes be perceived as cannibalization but given that the advertiser is focused on a cost per transaction, they ensure that these paid installs are coming with linked transactions which translates directly to revenue per user.

For mobile user acquisition, in experimentation you must trust

The advertiser started with 20 sources on Android and two sources on iOS. (For the purpose of this case study, a source is considered valid only if it delivered more than 100 installs in the calendar month.)

As the paid user acquisition program saw success the advertiser has scaled to 40 sources for Android and 15 sources on iOS.

On an average the advertiser tests configurations with over 180 sources. Once the tests have been successful, the advertiser goes live with the chosen few sources every month. This eye to detail and diligence in evaluating sources gives the advertiser an edge in optimizing spends and driving growth.

Scaling media sources is critical to growth. See how smart marketers pay 30% less and get 60% more.

Singular helps the customer test new sources with the following:

Custom postbacks
The ability to add additional information in postbacks enables advertisers to know what works and enables them to further segment acquired traffic.
1,600+ network integrations
Singular is integrated with 1,600 plus networks. Chances are that a network the advertiser wants to evaluate is already integrated without any custom work, which boosts speed of execution.
Dedicated support
Singular has a dedicated customer success and support team that helps with configuration. This team is governed by an SLA, meaning that the customer is not alone in this never-ending effort. Having Singular’s team available to action changes makes the UA manager a winner.

The following is a cumulative growth graph of the app installs that the advertiser has driven in the last 15 months.

Detailed logs and their usage

Singular’s platform enables the customer to extract detailed Click, Install, Postback, and Fraud logs via the interface, API, and firehose methods.

These logs are used for log for log validation in case of discrepancies. The API and firehose methods are used to have a complete repository of the data. This repository is processed in the customer’s internal BI system to manage the payouts and make goods with the advertising partners.

Singular has world-class fraud protection, but if they wish, customers can also work with a third party install fraud detection service by using the attribution logs. This gives them complete control of how advertising spend decisions are made.

Take these tools for a test drive?

Interesting in experimenting with Singular’s marketing intelligence platform to see you you can drive similar results?

Talk to a Singular representative in your market for more details on how you can build a solid user base and drive transaction volumes and not just installs. Or get a demo now.

Jam City optimizes campaign performance and creative strategy with Singular

We got to sit down with Jam City’s VP of User Acquisition Marketing, Brian Sapp, to discuss how his team is using Singular to optimize campaign performance and improve their creative strategy. Watch our discussion on Jam City’s use of campaign analytics below!

Video

Transcription

Introduction

My name is Brian Sapp. I’m the VP of UA (User Acquisition) Marketing at Jam City. Jam City is one of the leading mobile casual gaming developers in the West. We have a fairly large portfolio of games. Some of our tentpole games are Cookie Jam and Panda Pop. But recently we launched Harry Potter Hogwarts Mystery, [and] that game has been a big success.

Connecting fragmented marketing data

Singular right now we use to ingest data from all of our ad networks and as you can imagine, when we spend with over 40 networks, that’s a lot of data. The manpower it would take to go into each network and pull in that API, do the work, or pull it in manually, would be extremely time-consuming.

Singular solves that for us, solves it in a much faster time, and more efficiently than we could do it ourselves. And then, having that data in the dashboard, especially for someone like me who’s spending across 8-10 titles, we have a massive portfolio, the dashboard really gives us the ability to easily pivot that data whether it be by spend, by channel, by paid installs, by tracker installs, impressions, it’s very, very useful, as well as creative. Having all of the data, especially creative data, plus images, plus the data behind the creative, in one dashboard is extremely valuable for us.

Aligning with Creative Product Marketing

So we actually have a team called Creative Product Marketing that focused on our creative roadmap/creative strategy and they’re using Singular to look at our performance by game, by channel, and right now it’s the fastest, easiest way we have to do that across all the different data sources.

Next-level Performance Analytics

Singular collects a lot of the ad network data for us and we’re using that to look at CPI by campaign, CPI by geo, paid performance, scale, spend, organics versus paid installs. And so we’re also ingesting data from our attribution partner which allows us to kind of marry the two, and so we get very granular on Singular’s reporting for whatever questions we have.

I use it for executive reports, building massive pivot charts, visuals that I want to see across the portfolio. The combination of our internal tools plus Singular really gives me everything I need.

Ready to take your growth marketing to the next level? Let’s connect!

Nexon transforms marketing data into granular performance insights with Singular

We got the chance to catch up with Nexon‘s Director of Acquisition, Warren Woodward, and discuss how his team uses Singular to analyze and optimize the performance of their sophisticated user acquisition program. One topic we covered was how challenging it can be to analyze the performance of ad creatives, especially when advertising multiple titles across many ad partners. Thankfully, Nexon overcame this challenge. 😊Check out our discussion below!

Video

Transcription

Introduction

My name is Warren Woodward, and I’m with Nexon. I’m the Director of User Acquisition. Nexon is an international gaming company. We have games for PC and mobile across the world. We have a couple of major IPs, such as Maple Story, and the biggest video game series in China, Dungeon and Fighter.

How Singular fits in Nexon’s growth stack

At Nexon, we leverage Singular in a few different ways. We use it as our source of truth. We also use it as a way to join data from multiple sources for day-to-day campaign optimization. Singular for us is a great way to look at all that data in one place. And for me as Director to look in on everything that everyone is doing and see it all in an apples-to-apples comparison to understand how to best move budget around.

Reaching growth goals

Singular helps us reach our growth goals ultimately because it saves us time in any number of ways. With the number of titles that we’re buying for, we don’t have the time to go into every separate source, every separate title, and look at it all à la carte. So the ways that we can slice and dice, and stack rank what’s important to us to see what’s giving us the highest ROI… everything across the game, where are we spending the most, what’s bleeding, let’s us judge how we can use a finite number of hours in the day to get the most impact to our campaigns.

Singular let me see it all in one place, slice and dice it. If I just want to see all of the performance for any given country or OS, or maybe just dive really deep to a particular ad network. It’s nice to have one dashboard that can quickly make all these ad-hoc reports. And also to do a creative analysis and collaborate with the creative team.

Perfecting storytelling

So one of the ways that we use this on a daily basis is to get our creative team talking about performance, the same way that we do; to be looking at a creative level across the dozens of creatives who might have any given time for a game. Understand the trends that are working. It helps us identify what we want to make next, what’s really working, and we start seeing a better return on investment for the creatives themselves when we can see how they’ve been performing in the ecosystem.

Ready to take your growth marketing to the next level? Let’s connect!

N3TWORK optimizes marketing spend and aligns internal teams with Singular [Video]

We recently had the privilege of sitting down with Nebojsa Radovic, Director of Performance Marketing at N3TWORK, to talk about how his team is leveraging Singular’s Marketing Intelligence Platform to optimize marketing spend and align their internal teams with a single source of truth for marketing performance. Check out our discussion below!

Transcription

Introduction

Hi, my name is Nebojsa Radovic, but most people in the industry know me as Nebo. I’m a Director of Performance Marketing at a company called N3TWORK, which is the developer behind Legendary Game of Heroes.

How Singular fits in N3TWORK’s growth stack

We’re currently using Singular pretty much as our marketing stack. We’re using [Singular] as both an attribution and cost aggregation partner. We’re getting spend data from our ad partners and at the same time, we’re getting user-level data that tells us where the installs are coming from.

The importance of granular performance insights

Singular was very important for us simply because it unlocked certain opportunities that we were not having before. Think about optimizing at the publisher and creative level, combining those two, and trying to spend more dollars in the places where it makes sense. Without that data, it’s pretty much impossible to extrapolate manually and figure out what’s working and what’s not.

Let’s say 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… When you’re spending a few thousand dollars a day, maybe you don’t need granular data. But if you’re trying to scale the spend across different channels and different geos you really need accurate and granular data to be able to do that. So thank you Singular!

Aligning internal teams with a single source of truth

Singular helped us a lot with aligning the Finance team with the User Acquisition team. And within the User Acquisition team, we have a media buying team, data analytics team and marketing creative [team]. All four teams, Finance and the three sub-teams of the marketing team are looking closely into the Singular data and trying to understand how to do their jobs better.

In particular, Finance is estimating what the spend is at the end of the month or week, whatever is that time period we’re looking at, and they’re estimating what the payback windows are going to be and the financial health of the company at a very high level. At the same time on the User Acquisition side, we’re just trying to make better buy decisions by using Singular data. This is crucial to do this job successfully.

Ready to take your growth marketing to the next level? Let’s connect!

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. (Sign up here.)

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, and you can sign up right here.

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.

To build or not to build: making build vs buy decisions for mobile attribution and aggregated campaign analytics (part 1)

Some of the larger marketing organizations we talk to in EMEA think about building aggregated campaign analytics and ROI insights themselves. They generally don’t see the full difficulty and continuous maintenance this project involves. In this article, I explore the challenges of building and why a solution like Singular meets and exceeds these need. This is part one; part two will arrive in a month.

EMEA is a hub of marketers big and small representing every type of app developer and web-centric marketer you can think of. The data explosion has affected each one. It has made actionable insights, which make all the difference in this competitive landscape, the holy grail of every growth marketing team.

Build vs buy

One question that is a serious challenge for them all: should we build an in-house mobile attribution solution or buy it from a third party?

Our customers are smart and between them own over 50% of the top 100 grossing apps. So it’s no surprise that they employ intelligent engineers and data-savvy growth teams who already have the knowledge of how to achieve aggregated campaign analytics and could have a good shot at the greater challenge of getting ROI in an accurate, timely manner … although getting ROI at the most granular levels would be a massive challenge.

Therefore, it’s not a question of whether they can do it, but rather should they do it. We found that when addressing this question, the same considerations led even the largest enterprises out there to outsource this crucial work to a marketing intelligence platform like Singular.

The first thing to take into account is the cost of undertaking such a huge project and the time to completion.

Engineering time is not cheap and a company can rack up several hundred thousand dollars to build the required infrastructure even before considering the ongoing cost of maintenance. Not to mention that a project of this size and complexity will take months to complete and in such a fast-paced industry, this is long enough to start falling behind the competition.

Cost is not just measured in currency

However, the cost of this is not just monetary.

Valuable technical resources likely need to be diverted from core product projects, which impedes innovation and custom developments that address the specific needs of the business, allowing even more breathing room for competitors.

Getting the foundations right is no easy feat: you have to get a framework for your BI system, make sure that your MMP matches that framework, and then map your cost APIs into it correctly to get full aggregated campaign analytics. Furthermore, if your marketing efforts extend beyond Google and Facebook, you will have to set up multiple APIs with all the different networks you run with and for any new networks you want to test in the future.

If engineering time is limited, as it often is, and new networks are not integrated – what is the impact of the inability to test on the business? The cost of passing on new inventory and networks with new targeting and ad format capabilities cannot be underestimated.

Once you have your APIs connected, additional work is required to configure the internal dashboards to display the new data. It’s a manual process that is prone to human error which can easily render datasets inaccurate and therefore unsuitable for optimization purposes. If you’re going down the build route, you’ll need to put in place time and resources for checking accuracy before you even start thinking about which data visualization platform you’ll use to make sense of it all.

From aggregated campaign analytics to marketing intelligence platform

That’s another reason why our customers choose Singular, a marketing intelligence platform built with the modern growth marketer in mind, addressing their requirements of instant access to reliable data for granular optimization.

Even if all the above is accomplished so that data is flowing in and is accurate which we’ve seen can be done, the issue of combining it with internal data sets poses a true challenge.

Filling in the gaps and delivering the insights requires a complex infrastructure with strong identifiers for combining purposes to enrich campaign and publisher granularity, which almost certainly still leaves creative level combining — and therefore creative ROI — beyond reach.

All this means a lot of data and heavy queries that slow down the internal systems.

Our research and customer feedback reveals that the above challenges, opportunity cost, and continuous and expensive maintenance of self-built infrastructure are what drives small and big enterprises alike to a conclusion that a third party is a better solution for this essential need.

What you actually buy from Singular

Here at Singular, we understand these challenges well — after all, we went through the pain of building it ourselves.

Our product is our bread and butter and we’ve gone far beyond the basics to build a true marketing intelligence platform that frees up engineering time of our clients to build marvelous things that uniquely aid their goals while giving growth marketers the tools that they need.

What you buy from Singular is beyond the aggregation and standardization you’d expect to build yourself: you buy a world-class solution that is focused on continued innovation and automation, to give you unrivaled insights and optimization capabilities.

You buy teams that build and support integrations, improve infrastructure and system performance, and constantly work to add new features. You buy a data science team that make it their business to spot discrepancies, a support team that handles data flow errors and API issues, and a stellar (if I may so so myself) customer success team that makes sure the platform is serving your business.

If you had engineering and BI time to spare — what would you build?

See how DGN Games grew 85% and saved 15 hours each week with Singular.

Next month we’ll hear from an EMEA customer about how Singular has enabled their business and aided their growth strategy. If you have ambitious goals and are thinking of buying or building, reach out to us about a demo to see what Singular could do for you.

Singular ROI Index 2019: The unmissable advertising ROI webinar

Singular’s ROI Index is the largest study that ranks top ad networks globally based on their ability to deliver ROI for advertisers. We’ve already published the Index and made it available to the world, giving you the ability to find the best advertising ROI available.

But now it’s time to dig deeper.

This webinar goes beyond the Index to talk about not only where individual media sources rank, but also what some of the key differentiators are.

Meet the experts

To do that, we’re going to bring in the experts: Susan Kuo, Brian Sapp, and Christen Luciano. (Yours truly, John Koetsier, VP of Insights at Singular, will moderate.)

Susan and Christen have deep insight into how various ad partners performed in the Index. Brian has an even deeper insight into what mobile marketers look for, and what they need in terms of advertising ROI from ad networks.

Susan Kuo
COO, Head of Business Development
Susan has an extensive background in mobile ad tech, analytics, and gaming. Prior to Singular, Susan held senior leadership roles at Onavo and InMobi. Susan is an active member of the mobile community and serves on the advisory board for several mobile-focused start-ups.

Brian Sapp
VP, User Acquisition Marketing, Jam City
A mobile veteran with previous roles at Tapjoy and Web Games, Brian manages user acquisition for Jam City, which currently has six of the top 100 highest-grossing games across the App Store and Google Play.

Christen Luciano
Director of Partner Development
Christen oversees Singular’s relationships with key partners. Prior to Singular, she was a product marketing manager with Kenshoo and held multiple additional marketing roles. Her focus is collaborating with top marketing platforms to help advertisers grow reach and maximize performance.

We’ll review the 2019 Singular ROI Index, but also talk about fraud, things marketers need to know about their ad campaigns, some of the biggest surprises, and the role SANs (self-attributing networks like Facebook and Google) should play in marketers’ ad campaigns alongside some of the mid-tier players.

Advertising ROI is critical, of course, but it doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

So we’ll also talk about how to find niches of profitable growth, new innovative players, and what to look out for.

One of the things that the 2019 Singular ROI Index makes very clear is that Snap and Twitter have made significant moves recently in terms of the value they offer to advertisers. We’ve seen that in their recent quarterly reports: Snap grew quarterly revenue almost $100 million year over year, and Twitter had record quarterly earnings.

We’ll talk about what we’re seeing in the platforms that is driving increased advertiser adoption, and we’ll talk about everything else the Index reveals about advertising ROI.

Sign up now for the ROI Index webinar.