Resource Label: ROI

Introducing global-first Cross-Device, Cross-Platform ROI analytics

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?

Find out what Singular can do for you

Ad Monetization Reporting & True ROI Made Easy

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.

Why Marketing ROI Is The Most Important Yet Least Understood Metric in UA

It is perhaps the most dysfunctional metric in digital marketing.

Marketing return on investment, or marketing ROI, is frequently talked about, but frequently misstated, misunderstood, or just plain inaccurate.

Simply put, marketing ROI is a way of measuring the return on investment from the amount a company spends on marketing. It can be used to assess the return of a company’s overall marketing mix, or a specific marketing program.

The calculation for marketing ROI might seem relatively straightforward: Revenue divided by Marketing Cost. Yet arriving at fast, granular and reliable ROI data is by no means a straightforward process.

ROI calculation is particularly challenging for marketers who seek detailed levels of reporting to inform their optimizations. For instance, marketers may want to see the ROI of a specific campaign, publisher, keyword, geography or user — and the more granular a marketer wants to get, the more difficult it is to calculate ROI.

But before we delve the into the challenges of calculating ROI, let’s dive into why marketers consider ROI to be such an important metric.

Critical to Securing Marketing Budget

Marketing is a significant expense and leaders want to know exactly what they’re getting for it. In a recent study commissioned by Google, marketers identified ROI as the most valuable metric for securing additional budget for their marketing programs and media campaigns.

The study, which surveyed 150 marketing decision-makers at U.S. companies, found that consistently achieving ROI goals allowed marketers to prove the value of their initiatives to the greater organization and ultimately gain resources from executives to expand their efforts.

Deciding Where to Spend

Marketers often calculate ROI at the channel or campaign level to determine which efforts have a higher return and therefore deserve additional investment. When experimenting with a new ad network or marketing channel, a crucial first step for marketers is setting up analytics such that marketing teams can measure ROI and determine if the network or channel is driving performance.

Smarter Optimizations

In the process of determining the effectiveness of an ad network or channel, marketers optimize ongoing campaigns on the fly to maximize performance. Effective optimizations require digging deeper into spend and performance data to achieve more granular levels of reporting.

For instance, ad networks consist of numerous websites and apps, known individually as “publishers”, where marketers’ ads run. By monitoring the ROI of specific publishers within an ad network, marketers can determine which publishers drive the best performance. In turn, marketers are able to increase spending on high-performing publishers and shut off or “blacklist” under-performing publishers in order to increase the overall ROI of an ad network.

Marketers might also seek to inform their optimizations with ROI analysis at the Campaign, Creative, Keyword, Geographic or User level — or any combination of these dimensions. For instance, a marketer may want to see how one creative performs in a specific geography in a campaign which targets a specific demographic of users.

ROI Drives Integrated Marketing Analytics

This kind of precision analysis requires a particularly advanced set of analytics tools to collect, clean and combine data streamed from multiple sources, not to mention powerful database technologies to process flexible queries on large volumes of data.

The ROI metric in particular requires combining data from multiple sources — namely cost, revenue and event data. The most accurate and granular cost data comes from direct marketing channel integrations, which often require constant maintenance. Meanwhile, revenue and event data is typically extracted from tracking links, before it is combined with cost data to produce ROI and other “full-funnel” metrics like Cost per Event.

By focusing on ROI, marketing teams can galvanize their teams around building marketing analytics systems that leverage a host of well-integrated tools to deliver intuitive and flexible reporting. Google’s study showed that marketers with measurement stacks that rely on five or more marketing analytics tools are 39% more likely to see improvements in the overall performance of their marketing programs. They are also able to realize reduced marketing expenses and improved marketing efficiency than their less sophisticated counterparts in other organizations.

The Challenges of Calculating ROI

Google’s study showed that marketers are not confident in their ability to reliably measure ROI. While a majority felt capable of accurately measuring the performance of efforts like email campaigns as well as traffic to their site or app, only 13 percent of marketers were confident in their ability to measure marketing ROI and only 14 percent were very confident that they understood the contribution of marketing programs to business revenue.

The number one reason marketers gave for why they have such a hard time exposing ROI is a lack of integration between their marketing analytics tools.

In the study, only 26 percent of marketers believed that their marketing analytics tools were well integrated, while one-third of marketers believed their tools don’t work together efficiently at all.

Download The Singular ROI Index to see the world’s first ranking of ad networks by app ROI.

Introducing Publisher ROI Analytics

Imagine a world in which you had perfect visibility into your media sources.

You could easily expose a breakdown of every ad network’s inventory and determine the individual publishers driving the best performance. You could actually see where your money is being spent and how well each app or site performs for you. You could analyze “performance” not merely by raw install count or revenue, but rather by the actual quality of those users, as measured by ROI.

Optimization decisions would be obvious and, in some cases, automated. You could increase spend for high-performing publishers and decrease spend for under-performing publishers, or shut them off entirely. You could set rules so your publisher-level spending reacts in real-time when performance metrics rise above or dip below a certain level.

With the right tools in place, marketers would be able to easily measure and optimize ROI data at the publisher level to improve the overall performance of each marketing channel.

Publisher-Level ROI Analytics: A Giant Leap Forward

Today, Singular is taking a giant step closer to unlocking this level of transparency with our latest beta release, Publisher ROI Analytics. Singular customers will now have the ability to drill deeper into spend and performance data from their media sources and expose user-level business value by publisher — including ROI, CPA, ARPU, and CVR data — in order to quickly identify and optimize their most valuable pockets of traffic.

Historically, exposing publisher-level ROI data has been an arduous and error-prone process. In some cases, marketers have sought to rely on publisher cost and campaign data collected from tracking links — which is frequently unavailable or inaccurate. In other cases, marketers have been forced to manually collect and combine publisher data from their ad networks in unwieldy Excel files that require constant updating due to ever-changing bids and dynamic cost structures.

Singular now makes the process painless and precise. Our robust integrations with ad networks as well as our advanced data enrichment and combining technologies give marketers a single source of truth for fast and flexible performance data on a publisher level.

Currently, more than 70 of Singular’s integrated ad networks report publisher-level cost and campaign data. Singular collects, cleans and combines this data with revenue and events retrieved from tracking links in order to expose ROI and other full-funnel metrics on a publisher level. Ad partners supporting Singular’s Publisher ROI Analytics include Google AdWords, AdColony, Chartboost, Vungle and 70+ other partners.

In addition, Singular will soon launch a fallback mechanism to handle when a Publisher ID streamed from a tracking link cannot be matched to ad network cost data. In these instances, when a matching Publisher ID is not found, Singular will automatically interpolate data based on the total channel cost (as reported by the ad network) and the paid engagements per publisher (as reported by your tracking links) to provide an estimate of your Publisher-Level ROI. This maximizes the amount of traffic for which marketers receive Publisher-Level ROI data, increasing the accuracy of such data.

Already, in a closed beta test of this feature, multiple Singular customers have leveraged publisher-level analytics to better analyze and optimize the sources within their sources, leading to large efficiency gains and increases in the ROI of their channels.

Enabled By Huge Advances in Processing Power

As most marketing data engineers know, the sheer amount of memory required to process publisher-level data is enormous. On average, we found that collecting publisher-level granularity multiplies the amount of rows by 50–100X compared to collecting campaign-level granularity.

This means that queries are required to process vastly more data, which can dramatically slow database query times, creating bottlenecks for marketers and preventing them from optimizing as quickly and as often as they’d like to.

This is precisely why Singular invested heavily in building a new data pipeline and data store that enables ad-hoc queries on a billion rows with sub-second performance. In doing so, we increased the speed of our customers’ queries — in some cases by a factor of 150X — with a horizontally scalable architecture optimized for advanced analytics.

Now, publisher-level queries that once took 60 seconds in Singular take 1–2 seconds, while queries that once took 30 seconds are now less than a second. With these performance upgrades in place, we’re now able to give customers the ability to process the most granular marketing data — including Publisher, Keyword and Creative-level analytics — at lightning fast speeds.

As ad networks share more and more data with advertisers about where their marketing dollars are being spent, we’re thrilled to help marketers adapt to the data explosion and arm them with the analytics they need to make Publisher Optimization easier than ever.