Need a retention boost? Singular now supports Google App campaigns for engagement

Today, Google officially announced its latest solution for mobile app performance marketers with the release of App campaigns for engagement. Combined with Singular’s support of this new campaign type, marketers have all the insights they need to maximize revenue and the lifetime value of every single user.

In November of 2017 Google introduced its AI-powered solution for optimizing mobile app campaigns which provides huge improvements to conversion rates. However, the question remained: “now what to do with all those new users?”

ENGAGE!

Google App campaigns for re-engagement runs on the same powerful AI to help marketers re-engage with their customers and encourage them to take specific, in-app actions. The goal of App campaigns for engagement is to improve customer retention and long term revenue by increasing active users, generating sales, and reducing churn.

Have a group of high-value customers that you want to keep happy? Engage them with a customer loyalty offers. What happened to all those users who added something to their cart but never purchased? Target them with a discount to complete their order. What about all the users who you know downloaded your app but never opened? Message them with an incentive to check out “what’s inside”.

Getting started with Google App campaigns for engagement is simple.

Singular makes it easy to set up conversion tracking, create deep-links into the relevant points in your app, and measure the performance of every event from the first time a user engages with your campaign, to the last time they engaged with your app. Get more details from your Singular Help Center.

If you are as excited about Google App campaigns for engagement as we are, reach out to your Google account manager to apply to for the whitelist.

Still, have questions? Reach out to your Singular Customer Success Manager or email us at contact@singular.net for more information.

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.

Singular <3 Quora: The latest partnership to maximize your ROI

Today, Singular is excited to announce a new partnership to improve the ROI of your user acquisition strategy.

Quora, a platform for people to ask questions and read insightful answers, offers advertisers an opportunity to influence people during the consideration phase of their purchase process. Now, through Singular’s integration with the new Quora API, advertisers can accurately attribute user behavior and measure the true performance of their Quora campaigns all within the same Singular dashboard.

Luno, a power user of Singular and active advertiser on Quora, can attest to the power of bringing the two platforms together.

“Luno provides a safe and easy way to buy, store and learn about digital currencies. Advertising on Quora allows us to target people actively looking for more information on Bitcoin and Ethereum, and now with our data available in Singular we are able to uncover new insights and more effectively ensure the performance of our campaigns,” says Charlie Jobson, Growth Manager at Luno.

Quora has a worldwide audience of 200 million monthly unique visitors. The Quora advertising platform offers marketers the ability to target high intent audiences who are reading relevant questions and answers. Quora allows advertisers to target based on particular topics and then records metrics in the Singular dashboard at the campaign and sub-campaign level so you can measure ROI with granularity.

Adding Quora as a data source for campaign analytics in Singular is easy.

  1. Once you log in to your dashboard, simply navigate to the “Settings” tab and click “Data Sources.”
  2. From there, search for Quora and enter your Quora credentials.
  3. Within 24 hours you will see your data populated in your reporting.  

For more information on how to get started on Quora and how to include this data in your Singular dashboard, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.

About Quora

Quora is a place to gain and share knowledge. It’s a platform to ask questions and connect with people who contribute unique insights and quality answers. This empowers people to learn from each other and to better understand the world. Since its founding in 2010, Quora has grown to more than 200 million monthly unique visitors. The product is currently available in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Hindi, Portuguese and Indonesian. Quora launched its advertising platform in May 2017 and has more than 1,000 active advertisers across a spectrum of categories. Marketers can run text or image ads and access a range of strategic targeting options.

About Singular

Singular is a marketing intelligence platform that unifies marketing analytics, giving marketers actionable insights from previously siloed data. By connecting upper funnel marketing data with lower-funnel attribution data, marketers can measure ROI from every touchpoint across multiple channels and optimize spend down to the most granular levels. Singular currently tracks over $10 billion in digital marketing spend to revenue and lifetime value across industries including commerce, travel, gaming, entertainment, media, and on-demand services. Singular customers include companies like Lyft, Yelp, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Symantec, Zynga, Match, and Twitter. Singular is backed by Norwest Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Thomvest Ventures, Method Capital, Translink Capital, DCM and Telstra Ventures. Visit www.singular.net to learn more.

 

Apple Aims to Protect Data Privacy with SKAdNetwork

Wondering what Apple’s new privacy enhancements mean for you?
Watch our on-demand webinar iOS 14 & IDFA Changes: What you need to know

Quietly rolled out by Apple on March 29th, 2018 with their iOS 11.3 release, SKAdNetwork is an API that validates advertiser-driven mobile app installs. In Apple’s documentation, it’s stated that SKAdNetwork’s objective is to help marketers to measure the success of an ad campaign while maintaining user privacy.

What’s different about the SKAdNetwork API?

SKAdNetwork is a class that belongs to the StoreKit framework; Apple’s In-App Purchase Payment System that manages transactions for In-App Purchases. After installing the app, Apple shares only 5 items with the advertiser: ad network ID, transaction identification, ad campaign ID, app ID installed, and attribution code to link all.

Source: Apple Developer Documentation

There are two key postbacks associated with SKAdNetwork:

  • Initiating Install Validation: This Informs an ad network when users install and launch an app after viewing an ad. Ad networks initiate validation by providing signed information, including a campaign ID, when displaying the ad. Later, if the ad results in a conversion, Apple notifies the ad network with a postback that includes the same campaign ID.
  • Verifying an Ad Conversion: When a user installs and launches an app as a result of your ad, you receive a postback request that validates the installation. The request is sent to the ad network URL provided in registration.

What does this mean for advertisers?

It’s still too early to predict how SKAdNetwork will play out. Adding to the mystery, Apple has been very hush-hush about their motives and the rollout of SKAdNetwork. However, we think there are a few possible ways this could play out:

1. Apple doesn’t actively push SKAdNetwork, it doesn’t garner significant adoption, and nothing changes in the mobile marketing space.

One possible scenario could be that Apple doesn’t actively push SKAdNetwork to advertisers, resulting in minimal adoption. In this scenario, there wouldn’t be any significant change in the way that app marketers manage their attribution.

2. Apple pushes SKAdNetwork and Google follows suit with their own version.

Another scenario is that Google follows suit with its own version of the ad network API. This scenario could play out a few different ways:

  • Apple and Google don’t build out a robust attribution solution, which results in a lack of adoption by app marketers. Apple has made its mark in the world thanks to being an extraordinary and innovative hardware company, but they have never been accountable for providing analytics and insights to app marketers. If Apple and Google do not develop all the features that are necessary for an end-to-end attribution solution, (e.g. data extraction, all postback types, flexible attribution windows, easy BI integrations) then the industry will not adopt their solutions.
  • Apple and Google develop all the functionality needed for a robust attribution solution, leaving third-party mobile app attribution providers to potentially die-off in their current form. Who can compete with the operators of the mobile app stores we attribute from anyway? However, advertisers may still lose out in this scenario because they might encounter more complexities coming from running attribution on two separate platforms. The winners in this scenario would be third-party mobile app attribution providers that offer value-added services such as connecting multiple networks into a single view and aggregating all necessary features into a single API.

3. Apple pushes SKAdNetwork but Google does nothing.

In a third possible scenario, Apple could actively push SKAdnetwork to advertisers, while Google doesn’t follow suit with their own version. This would still result in complexities for advertisers who would need to manage attribution programs in silos across different OSs.

In this scenario, marketers would turn to attribution providers who could help them gather data from multiple sources, standardize it, and aggregate it into a single ROI dashboard.

So what’s going to happen?

It’s unfortunately too early to say, but one thing is clear: Apple wants to enhance users’ privacy. Apple has clearly positioned itself as a top privacy-conscious company and will continue to hold this stance as data privacy becomes more top-of-mind in the industry.