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.
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.
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.
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.
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 needs. 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?
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.
How do you grow ROI while maintaining CPA and scale?
This is a question marketers face every day. And answering this question has become more complex as they advertise on more platforms across more devices than ever before. When conversions happen, it’s a struggle to connect the dots and understand what caused them.
Back when Singular was founded in 2014, we focused on solving this challenge first for the complex, highly fragmented, mobile ecosystem: providing a single solution that automatically collects and combines spend data and conversion data to expose mobile marketing performance, including ROI, at unrivaled levels of granularity.
That is powerful. And we quickly became the de facto solution for unifying campaign analytics and mobile attribution to expose ROI.
But in 2019, the game is different
Top brands advertise over a wide range of platforms to users on multiple devices. A customer may see an advertisement for a product on her desktop, and later buy that product on her mobile app. With today’s analytics, it’s hard to connect the two experiences and measure the customer journey accurately.
For mobile-first brands, this often leads to two separate teams, one web, one mobile app, using different tools, and even different metrics, to measure the customer journey. For web-first brands, it results in limited investment in mobile apps, preventing them from diversifying their marketing efforts to bring in incremental users, leaving untapped growth potential on the line.
Moreover, inaccurate measurement leads to misguided decision-making. Matter of fact, poor data quality costs brands an average of $15 million annually, according to Gartner. Making an investment and creative decisions with inaccurate and incomplete datasets is just plain costly.
In true Singular spirit, we sought to solve this new challenge for our customers so they can drive growth more effectively and efficiently in this multichannel world. And I’m happy to say that we have leveraged our vast experience in attribution and marketing analytics to do just that.
Cross-device, cross-platform attribution
Today, Singular is announcing the first-ever cross-platform and cross-device ROI analytics solution for growth marketers.
With the release of Cross-Device Attribution, Singular’s Marketing Intelligence Platform connects marketing spend data to conversion results across devices and platforms. First, we ingest granular spend and marketing data from thousands of sources. Then we connect it with attribution data from our easy-to-implement in-app and web SDKs as well as direct integrations with customer data platforms, analytics solutions, and internal BI systems, bringing the full customer journey into a single view. Finally, we match the two datasets.
The result is the most accurate cohort ROI and CPA metrics available to marketers, at the deepest levels of granularity including campaign, publisher and even creative.
That’s ground-breaking. It’s revolutionary.
But bringing cross-device and cross-platform ROI into Singular and measuring it accurately, at granular levels, is only the beginning to driving impactful growth.
Granular data for growth
Marketers can now access granular ROI cohort reporting that is more accurate than ever, as you can get clear, combined revenue for users across all devices. This is critical to achieving profitable growth and only possible with Singular – a complete platform that innovates beyond a single attribution solution.
Moreover, marketers can also utilize the wide set of capabilities that Singular’s Marketing Intelligence Platform offers to make smarter decisions and optimize their growth efforts with additional cross-device visibility; plus, they have more visibility into essential context such as the exact creative customers engaged with and the audience segments they belong to.
For example, you may find that a web channel’s impact is much higher than expected for specific types of customers. And now you can analyze the impact of the same creative across mobile and web.
In fact, we won’t be surprised if marketers start shifting investments with this new level of clarity. We are excited to see how growth strategists are going to rise above the crowd using this new solution to become part of the future wave of sophisticated marketers. Gone are the days of attribution feature wars – Marketing Intelligence has arrived.
Launching Cross-Device Attribution is just another step towards achieving our goal: to be every marketer’s indispensable tool in driving growth. We keep working not only to ensure that you can innovate your growth processes and have access to the highest data accuracy but also to ensure that we bring you the right insights at the right time to help you make timely strategic and operational decisions.
Are you ready to take part in the future of growth?
Of course, that’s where the challenge lies. And doing it is not nearly as easy as saying it. But, as we’ve seen in our Scaling Mobile Growth report, top marketers get more and spend less, helping their companies achieve breakthrough growth.
A great product is a necessity, a great team helps, and a great offer is important, but great marketers know that to maximize their results, they also have have to successfully manipulate four key levers: creative, media sources, bids, and budgets.
Get them right consistently, and you win.
Screw up any one of them, and you risk blowing budget, wasting time, and killing credibility.
Brendan Lyall
Brendan Lyall knows more than most about being a top 10% marketer. He was a growth marketer at RockYou! and Storm8, then built businesses in mobile marketing: Grow Mobile, which was acquired Perion Networks, and Downstream.ai.
He’s currently helping Snap build out its ad solutions for marketers.
I spent some time with him recently to talk about marketing, growth, and moving beyond what is safe and known in order to achieve outsized results.
Essentially: how to become a top 10% marketer.
Koetsier: There’s a comfort level for digital marketers in using ad partners they’ve always worked with before. But what’s the risk in that?
Lyall: I’ve been a marketer and I’ve been on the ad network side too.
It is always risky for marketers to get too complacent or comfortable with their current ad vendors. The ad ecosystem is a constantly changing landscape of ad partners and that also includes ever-changing performance of ad partner inventory quality and install value.
There are also inward changing variables that app marketers need to keep in mind to keep they their UA campaigns running efficiently. As many mobile apps evolve, so do their user bases, features, monetization strategies and a countless number of other variables, and this can directly impact the app’s ad campaign performance.
One common scenario is, your ad partner breakdown at one stage in your mobile app lifecycle might be a great fit and provide excellent yield, making the ad partner choice and reliability appropriate, but as the app transitions to another lifecycle phase this can result in certain ad partners being no longer effective or the best choice for a marketer’s ad partner stack. Active and savvy marketers should always consider and test new partners and track the performance fluctuations in correlation to the changes to the app.
It’s important to never allow ad partners to run unsupervised with no or minimal optimization. A marketer’s comfort can lead to complacency and while we all know building a efficient and ROAS-rich strategy is not accomplished overnight. Always stay on top of your marketing campaigns and constantly validate and iterate your ad partner prioritization.
All of the quality ad partners in the mobile ecosystem have evolving products, ad units, optimization algorithms and publishers, so continue to stay up to date on your ad partner’s product offerings and how they benefit your marketing strategy. Marketers should test new channels continually and optimize their campaigns to ensure that their ad partners remain relevant throughout their app’s lifecycle.
Koetsier: The same applies to old versus new ad formats. What have you seen happen when marketers try new ad formats?
Lyall: This is something that has been a constant struggle for a lot of marketers. New formats are really exciting, but can be challenging if you don’t have the resources. Creative and ad formats are often the one of the most crucial part of a performance marketing campaign and can often get overlooked.
Quantitative optimization often takes the front seat for obvious campaign changes since they can be most closely A/B tested and correlated to certain results. Creative and ad formats are the hardest to optimize effectively and to quantify accurately.
One thing that Snap has been very conscious of is user experience and how different brands mesh with that quality standard. As mobile users we are constantly finding ways to subliminally block out ads, this brings up the importance for both marketers and ad partners to constantly iterate on ad units and formats. Testing new creatives is something we encourage our marketers to do frequently. Snap ads are a full-screen experience and this is a unique and immersive way to interact with an app or a brand, and when people spend time with them, they demonstrate high levels of intent.
It’s no surprise that ad solutions that allow for strong customization for natural and native experiences perform the best. For marketers who do not have the luxury to do high production ad formats, it’s important to iterate and test the formats that are within reasonable scale to your budget and resources.
We often see marketers test Snapchat Ads for the first time get impressive results. With thoughtful optimization and iteration within our Snap Publisher Tool, they have been really pleased with the new segment of users coming from Snapchat through the immersive ad units. User experience is very important to Snapchat which is why the ads team has continually iterated on new ad formats that resonate best with Snapchat’s audience of users while also presenting relevant ads for them to interact with.
Ultimately, new kinds of ad types have created new opportunities for stronger adoption and better performance.
Koetsier: What’s working best on Snap right now? What kinds of campaigns for what kinds of brands?
Lyall: From a performance perspective, we see a lot of scale when it comes to gaming and commerce. We’ve also had very significant scale in dating and travel.
Many of these are very performance-driven campaigns, and we see a lot of advertisers who have very specific downstream metrics and post-install events being able to scale very well with Snap. In commerce, deeplinking has been very successful for specific sales, either to another app or an external website.
Koetsier: What are the common characteristics of the best marketers — top 10% marketers — that you’ve seen?
Lyall: The Snapchat Ads self serve ads manager tool is used by a wide range of marketers and advertisers based on budget size, business category and needs.
To speak more towards the relevancy of this blog post, app advertisers have shown really significant adoption and success in the ads manager’s short history. Our most successful UA managers who generate app installs from Snapchat exemplify a heavy quantitative and non-biased approach towards their ad partners and constantly iterate and test on a wide range of campaign variables.
They also are able to understand that while the quantitative optimization is one piece of the puzzle, the creatives and ad formats are much more difficult to quantify and take a scientific approach to how they evaluate creatives and ad units. Overall, a tireless effort from UA advertisers who are willing to get their hands dirty and optimize campaigns and constantly iterate and test.
Koetsier: Thank you for your time!
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To learn more about becoming a top 10% marketer, get a copy of our Scaling Mobile Growth report. We analyzed over $10B in ad spend and a trillion ad impressions to learn what the best marketers are doing, and are sharing the insights with you.
In some fantasy world, growth marketers have all the cash, corporate support, creative assets, and analytics they need, and can do their jobs in splendid isolation. In the real world? No marketer is an island, every team is an integrated component of the overall organization, and marketing alignment is a tough challenge.
Which means that kindergarten lessons still apply.
And marketers need to play nice with others … for their own good.
Marketing alignment in fast-growing companies
That’s exactly what we recently discussed with key executives at fast-growing Lyft, LinkedIn, Poshmark, and Calm during our recent UNIFY conference.
Specifically, we asked them how marketers should align internal teams to achieve ROI.
On the panel: Esther Hwang, Director of Growth at Poshmark, Ben Shanken, Director of Product and Growth at Lyft, Jake Bailey, Senior Manager, Digital Marketing and Strategy at LinkedIn, and Dun Wang, VP of Product and Growth at Calm. Fabien-Pierre Nicolas, Head of Marketing at SmartNews, moderated.
Here’s a summary of their insights.
Aligning with executive teams
Aligning with the executive can be challenging. Most CxOs don’t know growth marketing, and they may also have a different time-frame for decision-making than campaign-driven marketers. Achieving marketing alignment requires tight coordination.
“At Calm we have three KPIs,” says Calm VP Dun Wang. “It’s purchase conversion, subscriber engagement, and subscriber renewals, so all of the conversations come back to those three metrics.”
That simplifies conversations, because those three key performance indicators are identical all the way up and all the way down the organization. Every decision can be weighed by how it contributes to at least one, and hopefully multiple of the top KPIs.
At Lyft, with 1,600 employees, alignment requires structural thinking.
“We actually invest a lot in building a structure for how we think, and disseminating that structure across the whole company, so that people can be in line with how we think,” says Ben Shanken, Director of Product and Growth.
But it’s also about investment, and investment carries risk.
And that’s something else to consider at the executive level.
“We think about things in terms of how much risk we want to take in terms of learning,” says Shanken.
Aligning with finance teams
Marketing alignment with finance and the CFO matters too. And it’s often not without some history.
“Historically the relationship between finance and marketing has been kind of contentious, because one is the money-spender and one is the money-protector,” says Poshmark Director of Growth Esther Hwang.
That means marketers need to educate finance.
Finance teams typically don’t understand growth activity or marketing, and nuance escapes them. For example, when one channel is killing it, finance might think: invest all your dollars there. Growth marketers, on the other hand, might know that channel, understand its capacity, and understand that there is not enough scale there to withstand doubling or tripling the budget.
But finance often sees things that marketers don’t.
“At the same time the finance team is a really great ally,” says Hwang. “From their vantage point they have a really great way of looking at certain blind spots that the marketing team might have. For example, at Poshmark it was the finance team that pointed out to us the difference in very long LTV for our male users versus our female users … which the growth team, operating much more short-term, weren’t keeping as close an eye on.”
That’s relevant at LinkedIn too:
“From a finance perspective we have to understand the full evolution of a user,” says Jake Bailey, Senior Manager, Digital Marketing and Strategy at LinkedIn. “We have finance partners that are very baked into our everyday engagement.”
Lyft does the same thing: add a finance executive to the marketing and user acquisition group, says Ben Shanken. It’s easier to run the numbers on LTV and budget allocations — and ensure tight feedback loops — when finance has a seat at the table.
Aligning with engineering teams
Science and art. Data and creativity. Marketing and engineering.
Sometimes it seems like marketing and engineering are oil and water. One promises, and the other has to deliver; one builds, and the other has to market. And they don’t always speak the same language.
That’s not the case in the world’s best companies, however.
“We’re fortunate to have very commercially minded engineers,” says Calm’s VP Dun Wang. “They want to know … if they’re going to spend a week working on a feature, how does that affect the user experience and how does that tie back to more revenue for Calm? So we’re super-transparent with that.”
For Poshmark, it’s all about the relationships.
“Our VP of Growth is an ex-engineer … who has a lot of personal relationships [with engineers],” Director Esther Hwang says. “He still makes it a habit to set up unstructured time with engineers … and that’s proven to be very helpful.”
Just one example: Poshmark has set up car pool routes that intentionally mix staff members across departments. In one case, a growth marketer complained to an engineer about the cost of marketing on Facebook. The engineer brainstormed a solution that involved using Facebook social logins as part of the registration flow. It was super-easy to implement, and had a significant benefit.
“That low-hanging fruit improved our registration conversion rate by about five points,” Hwang says.
Lyft engineers collaboration right into standard workflow and employee organization, says Director of Product and Growth Ben Shanken.
“We have a social pod which is an engineer, a data scientist, a program manager, and a marketer,” he says. “We want the engineer to be a channel manager [and] we want the manager to be a marketer.”
The result?
First of all, Lyft has changed the career path of engineers from building technology to making an impact. And secondly, they’ve empowered engineers with ownership of metrics.
Marketing alignment … with other marketing teams
It may sound silly, but marketing does need to align with marketing. Growth marketers have different imperatives, techniques, technologies, and budgets than brand marketers. Performance marketers and user acquisition marketers look at the world differently. Creative teams are not always aligned with marketing managers.
It’s about size.
“As you scale you’re going to run into these more siloed teams in the marketing space,” says LinkedIn’s Jake Bailey. “You have to find a way to bring those together.”
One way LinkedIn has done it is by creating an internal digital agency.
The agency is horizontal, and flows across silos. It leverages what is working in one team with the others, and derives a whole-company number for ROAS (return on ad spend).
“[This] allows us to work together to grow the business as a whole,” Bailey says.
Lyft has a different way of solving a similar problem, and it involves sometimes intentionally building inefficiencies into the system. It sounds paradoxical — or nonsensical — but it’s actually necessary.
“We have huge brand dollars that we do not control,” says Ben Shanken, Lyft’s Director of Product and Growth. “We can try to align our roadmaps … but every time we do that it sort of fails. It all comes down to agreeing on goals … if you do that, then it becomes easier to sequence how we do things.”
One example: brand marketers tend to like the most efficient ways of buying brand: national advertising. But, if you want to be great at measurement, local spend is the way to go.
The solution: sometimes being less efficient at one goal (in this case, brand advertising) to enable long-term efficiencies in another goal (in this case, local performance-oriented advertising).
Aligning with creative teams
Mistakes are great teachers, and Lyft saw this first-hand.
“We did a really bad thing … we gave the marketing team and the creative team a goal to replace all creative within four weeks with winning creative,” says Shanken. “They started cranking out huge amounts of creative, but the downside was they were cutting a lot of corners on analyzing this stuff … and rolling out creatives that weren’t that amazing.”
Lyft adjusted team OKRs (objectives and key results) and fixed the problem.
But this isn’t easy, as Calm also learned.
“For us it was really hard to align creative and UA,” says Dun Wang. “[There were] too many opinions on what ads we should launch and why … most of it not founded on data.”
What helped Calm move faster was empowering user acquisition directors to lead creative as well. Each UA team received design resources … and UA managers were given some leeway in marketing.
“We’re not so precious about the brand,” Wang says.
Aligning with BI/Analytics
Growth marketers live and die by the numbers. So it’s no surprise that the best marketers want super-tight relationships with business intelligence and analytics pros.
“Incorporating biz analytics into your process early is the key to success,” says LinkedIn’s Bailey. “Include them early and include them often. For us, they are the core of the team … without them nothing else would exist.”
Lyft’s Ben Shanken agrees:
“Data science is hugely important to each channel for us, especially as we start to automate and build programmatic,” Shanken says. “Because they’re building the models … they are arguably the most important part of the pod. They are the person making the actual model and algorithm working with the engineer and the marketer to translate logic into model.”
The same is true at Poshmark and Calm, where Wang says that data analysts work on every project and with every team.
Summing up
It’s not often that you can get some of the world’s top marketing experts and user acquisition leaders to open up about the core challenges of their jobs. Watch the whole video to get every last detail.
Since launching Singular 4 years ago, we’ve worked tirelessly to become the de-facto Marketing Data Platform for the top mobile brands around the world. Our clients use Singular to unify their core marketing data sets into a single source of truth. And we take pride in helping them sort through the complexities of the ecosystem and uncover insights to help grow their business.
Singular is dedicated to helping marketers uncover ROI across their entire customer journey. A lot of marketers have a single source of revenue, in the form of in-app purchases, but many others have an additional source of revenue called “Ad Revenue” (similar to how a little company named Facebook makes their money 😉). As a result, ROI shouldn’t solely factor “App Revenue”, but must also “Ad Revenue”.
At Singular’s first annual growth marketing summit, UNIFY, our CEO Gadi Elishav announced the launch of our Ad Monetization Reporting. This product addition is in direct alignment with our vision is to help marketers uncover their business’ unique customer journey and understand every touch point within that journey.
Singular’s Ad Monetization Reporting collects, aggregates and standardizes your ad revenue data from all of your monetization partners into a single reporting view. We’ve taken the same approach and technology that Singular is known for with our new Ad Monetization Reporting. For customers who also use Singular attribution – we will soon provide deeper insights into granular ROI, accounting for both Ad Revenue and In-App Purchases, commonly referred to in the industry as True ROI. We’ve already integrated the most popular monetization partners, and are consistently adding new partners.
This is a game-changer for User Acquisition and Monetization teams alike:
User Acquisition teams can finally account for Ad Revenue in their ROI formula.
With the ability to see the true ROI figures – User Acquisition Managers will be able to make better decisions about the actual performance of their campaigns and channels and scale their marketing efforts efficiently and more intelligently. Channels and campaigns that you thought had a specific ROI could look completely different once we factor Ad Revenue into the ROI calculation.
A centralized snapshot of all your Ad Revenue enables better insights and scaling app ad revenue down to the placement level.
Streamline work with finance, and have a true end-to-end view of your marketing profit and loss.
Are you interested in next-level Ad Monetization Reporting and analyzing more accurate ROIs? Let’s connect! Reach out to your Customer Success Manager today or contact us.
