How To Shrink Your Marketing Analytics Stack

For top mobile brands, marketing analytics has become dramatically more important in recent years as the emergence of a multitude of tools to track advertising spend, attribution, creative performance, and in-app analytics has advanced mobile app marketers’ ability to measure their user acquisition (UA) efforts across channels and optimize their campaigns.

But you can get too much of a good thing. And you can find that more tools doesn’t equal better performance.

Digital marketing analytics are on the rise — but utility is stagnant

Performance marketing is hard. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve seen the rise of growth stacks and marketing analytics stacks. It’s precisely because of the challenges that digital marketing teams face in corralling and crunching performance data that we’ve seen the growing importance of growth stacks and marketing analytics.
And that’s driving an increase in the purchase and use of marketing analytics to support data-driven decision-making. In fact, a recent survey of CMOs commissioned by Deloitte and The American Marketing Association found that companies plan to increase their spending on marketing analytics by 376% in the next three years.

But there’s a problem.

While most companies have increased focus (and budget) on their marketing analytics stack and the sophistication of analysis tools has grown, for many companies, the investments have yet to pay off. More money spent on marketing analytics hasn’t translated into more growth.

One reason: more tools doesn’t mean more usage. According to data derived from the same survey of CMOs, the use of marketing analytics in decision-making has actually remained stagnant for the last five years. In other words, we have the tools, but we’re not using them.

Why?

Personnel is one issue. Time is another. And perhaps training as well. Marketers surveyed in the study cited a lack of qualified people who can utilize marketing analytics tools as well as a lack of tools to actually measure success through analytics as the primary factors preventing their companies from using more marketing analytics.

Fragmentation follies?

But in a way, it’s not marketers’ fault.

A separate survey commissioned by Google found that only 13% of digital marketers were confident in their ability to measure marketing performance data. The number one reason marketers gave for why they have such a hard time exposing marketing performance data is a lack of integration between their marketing analytics tools.

It’s like telling time: if you have one clock, you “know” exactly what time it is. Two or more, and if there’s any differences, you’re not really sure any more which is right.

Plus, there’s inefficiencies in a large growth stack with multiple redundancies.

Fragmentation in the modern-day marketing stack creates workflow inefficiencies as well as holes in performance data. Simple tasks like aggregating performance data across channels often require marketers to toggle between multiple dashboards and manually update metrics in unwieldy Excel files or other tools. The process is particularly painful for marketers who want to analyze performance data not merely by click-through rates or raw install metrics but rather by the actual quality of those users, as measured by ROI. (In other words, by metrics that matter.)

That’s one reason why Singular is named the way it is.

Singular’s name serves as a constant reminder of our mission: to build a single marketing analytics platform that unites all the disparate data feeds, enabling marketers to do their jobs more efficiently and more effectively. In other words, a single source of marketing truth.

In essence, when your marketing analytics are centralized under one single source of truth, your stack’s output becomes smaller and more manageable, making reporting, analyzing and optimizing performance across channels less error-prone and time-consuming.

This isn’t removing data. It’s not ignoring signals.

It’s integrating them all into a unified whole.

Take cross-device attribution, for instance. In the past, we’ve seen marketers make investments in the wrong marketing campaigns because cross-device data was not properly integrated into their marketing analytics. This highlights the fact that just because a campaign drives high performance metrics on one device or platform does not mean it drives high performance metrics on other devices or platforms. When user engagement data across devices and platforms is taken into account, marketers are able to expose the true ROI metrics of their campaigns to drive better spending decisions and optimizations.

Analytics-Driven Experimentation, Without the Data Deluge

At the core of effective mobile user acquisition strategies is experimentation.

As new channels, media formats and targeting strategies emerge, they can lead to outsized returns for marketers, especially in their early days. For example, when they first launched in 2016, Apple’s auction-based Search Ads drove low CPIs and high conversion rates as demand for Search Ads remained relatively low and curious users noticed the new ad slots.

(By the way, check out the Singular ROI Index for the highest performing networks, including new entrants.)

The advantage of testing new channels and media formats is clear, but marketers have to do so in a way that is deeply integrated with existing analytics systems. The common problem? Thanks to the lack of standardization among ad networks, extracting detailed data from partners for analysis often requires custom integrations and constant maintenance. Definitions and standards differ. Normalization and standardization is essential.

This can add layers of complexity to your analytics stack. And that’s why outsourcing partner integrations to a third-party analytics and attribution provider (Singular!) will allow for smarter testing and analysis without the data deluge.

And that has rewards.

Using this approach, one Singular customer says their team can now dedicate roughly 20% of their time to experimentation with new partners that they think could be promising, including BD, relationship management, media buying and testing. The remaining 80% of their time is spent investing in larger platforms they know well. In both cases, Singular serves as the analytics backbone, providing the most detailed and flexible performance data across nearly 2000 networks, thereby allowing the team’s stack to stay small, nimble and powerful.

Small. But nimble. And powerful.

That’s the power of activated insights driven by consolidated data.

9 App Best Practices for a Successful iPhone or Android App

We talk to dozens of mobile app brand leaders every week. Everyone — literally everyone — has questions about what sorts of best practices they should follow to ensure the success of an app. Or, they’re wondering what’s new and exciting: a good opportunity to differentiate themselves.

There are two pieces of good news here:

  1. Even the experts are always still learning
  2. Successful mobile apps do share a number of app best practices

So the goal here? Discuss some of the most important ones.

But let’s be realistic. The bad news is that the competitive environment for Android and iPhone apps is intensely challenging. Recent data show that there are about two million paid and free apps available in the iOS App Store. And there are now over three million apps on Google Play. So the whole world doesn’t jump up and down in excitement just because another new app is launched.

(Yep, even if it’s yours.)

Look, I’m not pointing that out to discourage you from launching your app – far from it. Rather, I’m bringing it up because any company that wants to be successful in the app arena needs to recognize that it takes real, sustained commitment. That commitment needs to extend from initial concepting to ongoing support and feature development. Launching your app might feel like the end of a long process of ideation and development and testing, but it’s really just the start of another integrated long journey of marketing and testing and re-development.

Here, then, are a few best practices that help you launch and monetize a successful iPhone or Android app.

1. Decide what success looks like and identify KPIs

Before you begin app development, before you get app developers involved, before you appoint a product manager, you need to determine what constitutes success for you. Don’t get caught up with what the app developer and app publisher Joneses are doing. For applications outside of the game genres, being number one in the app stores is not only unlikely, it’s also probably meaningless from the point of view of driving your business.

Retail apps, for example, are about driving sales, not being at the top of the heap in downloads. Additionally, companion or utility apps have experiential benefits that are not measurable in install counts. You need to define what success means for YOU, and then use that as your app development compass and barometer.

This will significantly impact what KPIs you choose. It will also have a huge influence on how you bring your app to market, who you market it to, and how you measure success in those efforts.

2. Analyze and understand people’s behavior in your app

Unless you know what people are doing in your app, you can’t adapt it to their needs or be agile in the face of shifting trends. Even more foundationally, you won’t know when you’ve succeeded: achieved product/market fit and delivered something that works.

Successful apps are much more likely than average to have mobile app attribution and analytics platforms in place before they launch. They recognize the need to understand consumer behavior, both to see what is working in their apps and well as to identify and improve what isn’t. This information is absolutely critical business intelligence.

Without the ability to see and understand in-app user behavior for your Android and iPhone app, you’ll have to rely on hunches to assess customer satisfaction and define your optimization plan.

And that’s a recipe for disaster.

At Singular, we take measurement to an entirely different level by actually enabling marketers to understand their marketing ROI all the way down to the user level. (For more information on our unified platform and unique approach to marketing analytics, request a demo.)

3. Shine: maximize your unique utility

Millions of apps means that every niche is taken. Or, that your niche needs to be invented, which can be challenging. Either way, you’ve got to demonstrate that you’re better at what you do than existing solutions.

That’s why the best apps do things that people can’t get done in other places. It is not enough to simply offer up another way to make purchases or find a store. While basic tasks may be elements of your overall app experience, you need to look at your app as a way of creating unique value. That value can come in utility, entertainment, convenience, or a host of other areas. But it needs to be there.

Utility and uniqueness matter in large part because even if people have hundreds of apps on their phones, they focus on 10 to 20 that they use regularly. Others just fade away.

With that kind of dynamic, “good enough” just … isn’t. A big part of delivering on this must-have is ensuring you have outstanding app UI and UE. User interface and user experience are simply table stakes: apps that are difficult to use don’t get used. Games with confusing economies don’t make money. Utilities that don’t function well get deleted.

There is no substitute for great mobile app design. It’s that simple.

4. If appropriate, maximize education or entertainment value

Look, maybe you’re designing a new banking app. In that case, just get the work done quickly, accurately, and maybe even enjoyably.

For most other apps, people are using your app because they’re killing time, needing a break, or looking for a few seconds of fun. Phones play a big role in how most of us spend our personal time.

So give people what they’re looking for: fun if that’s where your app and its promise are. Education if that’s what you’re doing. Value is that’s the goal. Publishers who succeed here win longer and deeper engagement and better monetization, providing big opportunities to drive app adoption and usage.

5. It’s a smartphone — a mobile PC — so leverage the tech

Yes, there are millions of apps. Most of them are cookie-cutter me-too apps built by developers who are lazier than you and lack features that people expect today.

Leverage what you can about this mobile PC in a pocket that is a smartphone. Use biometrics like TouchID or FaceID. Work with Google Pay or Apple Pay. Provide AR capabilities and barcode scanners and other technology that is there waiting to be implemented — even via low-code development environments — by developers who are willing to go the extra mile to make their apps simpler, better, more powerful, and easier to use.

It’s hyper-portable: use location features where it makes sense.

It’s got a great camera attached: use photography where it makes sense.

6. Leverage personalization and personalized experiences

Presenting the same message, the same interface, and the same options to different people who want different things and need different data is not just annoying, it’s costly for you in terms of conversion and retention rates.

Consumers expect to be able to customize information and experiences on mobile, especially in purpose-built applications. This raises the bar for you and your development team when it comes to creating a successful app, but it also provides the opportunity to create uniquely personal iPhone and Android app experiences that drive brand engagement and conversion.

This app marketing principle is important in both the experience you provide in your app and in the messages you use to drive people back to your app over time. Leverage insights about in-app user behavior to segment your users and develop targeted marketing programs personalized to these segments.

For example, our Singular Audiences for Facebook offering enables you to define segments of users and export the device advertising IDs (such as Android Advertising ID) of those segments directly into Facebook Ads Manager as Custom Audiences.

After all, driving an install from an app store is only the beginning of the marketing challenge for most mobile applications.

7. Keep it fresh with frequent content and experience updates

Mobile users forget about you easily if you’re not updating and changing and adapting.

Succeeding with an application is definitely NOT a set-it-and-forget-it proposition. You need to constantly freshen-up your content, experience, or interface to give people reasons to keep using your app. In addition, you need to ensure that you incorporate new features and capabilities to keep the utility fresh as well. Apps that adopt a strategy of continuous improvement of their user experience are apps that get better and better for both new and existing users.

8. Get social, but use owned channels too

Social media and social media networks are important ways to spread the word about your app and drive re-engagements/relaunches. Because so much mobile time is spent in social media apps like those for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, integrating your app into social conversations can yield both immediate and prolonged benefits for your business.

But don’t forget about owned channels too. In-app messaging and push notifications can be huge. Email — yes, old-fashioned 30-something email — can be a big piece of user acquisition and engagement/retention programs. Use all the tools at your disposal.

9. Keep supporting your app with marketing

Establishing and sustaining an app costs money. Growing an app costs money.

Unless you’re the new Pokemon Go and hundreds of millions of app installs fall into your lap for free because you managed to hit the mobile trend jackpot, you need significant marketing support to drive installs and re-engagements. Take those sentences seriously. Most mobile app businesses really cannot propel themselves without advertising.

You need to create a real marketing plan that focuses on strategies and tactics to deliver on your KPIs over the long haul.

Remember, your app is competing with millions of apps in each app store, and hundreds that people already have on their Android or iOS phone. Staying top-of-mind and becoming a regular/ubiquitous part of their lives is essential. That doesn’t mean you should pursue those standard tricks and questionable games that some companies rely on to boost their success and show up on the top of the App Store or Google Play. Being on the App Store top 10 is highly unlikely for your app. You need a strategy that doesn’t rely on hitting a top installs list.

Fortunately, top 10 status is unnecessary and in all probability doesn’t help you deliver on your true goals.

So what does matter?

Since many non-game apps are designed to drive sales through in-app purchases, here are a few examples of how targeted mobile app marketing and precision messaging give you amazing tools with which to build your business. The key is effectively managing your data and creating rich and informative user profiles.

Lapsed customers

We all have mobile customers that for whatever reason stop using an app. Often, it’s not driven by dissatisfaction but rather that the Android or iOS app has left their top of mind. By identifying your lapsed customers and being able to send ads, emails and push notifications to them, you can make your app top of mind again.

Cart abandons

Lots of people start the buying process but exit the app before they finish it. Identify these individuals and communicate with them. Use your marketing automation platform so you can encourage them to return and buy.

Brand buyers and loyalists

If you know through past purchases that someone buys a lot of merchandise for a particular brand or in a particular category within your mobile application, you can use push notifications and other marketing tactics to sell them additional brand items, or related items, or capture more share of their category wallet.

In conclusion …

A final thought: it may not be necessary to deliver on all these areas for your app. Certainly, there may be unique circumstances or characteristics that make one or more of these points irrelevant.

But this list of app success factors offers a strong starting point on which to build your success. The most important thing to remember is that like any other worthwhile thing, app marketing success requires strategy, insight, and ongoing dedication to make happen.

 

Custom Dimensions: How to easily customize marketing analytics to your unique business

Recently, Singular updated the flexibility of our Custom Dimensions functionality, enabling marketers to personalize their analytical views and group data by any metric that matters to their unique business. But what does that mean exactly?

Well, maybe you want specific ways of looking at your business, your KPIs, and your marketing campaign analytics.

Something beyond apps, sources, and operating systems.

Something way, way, way beyond.

Custom Dimensions: how clients use them

Custom Dimensions allow you to set up and save unique ways of slicing and dicing your data … without requiring a data scientist, a BI team, or a developer. And without requiring that you spend hours in Excel grinding through data (as fun as that sounds).

Saving time is saving money, DoorDash says:

As an on-demand food platform with unique geographic markets, it’s critical for us to be able to break out our views by different cities and custom market definitions. Previously, we’d spend many hours each week manually breaking out reporting. With Singular’s Custom Dimensions, we’ve automated this process fully and are able to create completely custom reports that meet our specific analytical needs.

Just as importantly, Custom Dimensions enable targeted granularity: deep insight into very specific parts of your unique business, as 3Q Digital has found,

“Each one of our clients has distinct reporting needs, and out-the-box reporting just doesn’t cut it,” says Paul Bloom, Senior Account Manager at 3Q Digital. “With Custom Dimensions, we’re able to report by parameters that matter to our clients’ particular business, such as custom geographic regions, languages and business units. We’re even able to see creative performance broken down by different stages in the funnel, enabling precise optimizations to maximize results.”

How do Custom Dimensions work, exactly?

To answer the question, I caught up with Singular’s product marketing manager, Saadi Muslu.

Digging deeper: creating and using Custom Dimensions

Koetsier: What are Custom Dimensions?

Muslu: Custom Dimensions are a way for you to translate, segment, and organize data coming from marketing analytics datastreams. Customers create Custom Dimensions so that they can break out data views that are customized to their businesses.

For example, most analytics solutions allow you to break down your data by country, but you may have regionalized the way you’re looking at your campaigns. Maybe you need city-to-city data versus state-to-state or country-to-country.

Custom Dimensions enable you to do that out of the box every time, after you’ve set them up.

Koetsier: Sounds good, but why do people need them? How do they use them?

Muslu: It’s probably easier to understand with some examples.

One client in a sports vertical breaks out campaigns by type of sport. Another buckets campaigns by custom channels that fit their marketing, such as offline, agency, direct digital, search, and social.

A client in an on-demand vertical uses Custom Dimensions for both city-level targeting and characterizing the type of campaign, such as branding, retargeting, or offline. A different client sells unique products within multiple apps, and they use Custom Dimensions to separate each one out for additional levels of granularity in cost reporting.

 

 

One real estate client breaks out data by date when they entered a certain market, like Philadelphia or San Diego. And some of our clients use Custom Dimensions to break out reporting by user acquisition manager … comparing Anna’s campaigns to Dan’s campaigns, for instance.

A client that’s a bit more in the B2B space breaks out data by funnel stage: TOFU, MOFU, BOFU. (That’s top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel.)

There are basically as many ways to use Custom Dimensions as there are companies.

You can even build strategy dimensions or objective dimensions. One example is bundling up all your re-engagement campaigns in order to compare their ROI, clickthrough rate, or conversion rate to prospecting or branding campaigns.

Honestly, I know it’s a cliché but really, the sky is the limit.

Koetsier: What kind of “queries” can you build?

Muslu: It’s pretty simple, actually. You build queries with AND and OR operators.

Here are a couple of examples:

((Campaign Name Includes US OR Campaign Name Includes UK)
AND (Source = Facebook))
OR
((Campaign Name Includes IL OR Campaign Name Includes DE)
AND (Source = Adwords))

You can also do much simpler custom dimensions, of course, with just a few conditions:

(A AND B) OR C
(A OR B) AND C
(A AND B AND C)

Koetsier: How many rules can you have per Custom Dimension?

Muslu: You can set up 70 different rules per custom dimension, so quite a few!

As always, since we serve very sophisticated enterprise-level clients, we’re giving them the flexibility to get as deep and granular as they need to.

Koetsier: Any other examples of how customers use them?

Muslu: DGN Games does something really interesting. They created Custom Dimensions for campaigns that were run on desktop web to compare them to campaigns that are purely on mobile … and now they can see the difference in conversion rates. Another client is using Custom Dimensions to compare organic versus non-organic attribution.

Ultimately, you can do Custom Dimensions on marketing analytics, on attribution data, on conversion data, or on ROI/CPI.

Koetsier: What’s the big benefit of custom dimensions?

Muslu: Ultimately, it’s understanding that modern marketers don’t fit into one-size-fits-all tools. They need to be able to report on their efforts and performance the same way they benchmark internally.

Now without having to tap into a BI or take up data analyst time, they can see the data exactly the way they need it.

Next steps

Learn more about Singular analytics here. Get a demo of the Singular platform to see how Custom Dimensions could work for you. 

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.

5 things to do when your mobile retail sales crash

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

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

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

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

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

Let the action begin!

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

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

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

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

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

#2: Revamp your mobile site/app design

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

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

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

Make the navigation experience super simple.

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

But almost nothing beats a native mobile app for usability.

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

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

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

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

Some tips for sending great mobile emails are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wrapping it up

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

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

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

Personalizing your fraud prevention strategy with Singular’s custom fraud rules

Mobile ad fraud is an ever-growing threat to marketers, with fraudsters continuously evolving attack techniques. The exact figures for how much ad fraud costs marketers is highly debated, but eMarketer’s Digital Ad Fraud 2019 states that the estimated impact ranges from $6.5 – $19 billion annually.

To navigate this complex problem and effectively prevent ad fraud, marketers need to have an understanding of the techniques used by fraudsters and employ an always-on fraud prevention strategy that proactively rejects fraud. Otherwise, ad fraud can be detrimental to marketers in two key ways: one is the wasted ad dollars on installs that are either fake or hijacked, and the other is dirty data that is inaccurately skewed towards fraudulent networks instead of high-value networks or organic traffic.

Fraud prevention that adapts and reacts

Singular’s industry-leading Mobile ad Fraud Prevention Suite is built and maintained by a highly skilled set of scientists that are dedicated to staying one step ahead of ad fraudsters and their attack methods. The Fraud Prevention Suite provides a proactive approach to detecting and combating ad fraud at scale.

Singular’s fraud prevention dashboard

With Singular’s rules-based fraud prevention, marketers can automatically apply deterministic rules in real-time to block installs before they are attributed to a fraudulent ad partner, or flag activity that is suspicious for further investigation. Automatic fraud rejection gives marketers peace of mind from knowing their ad dollars are always protected and eliminates the need to spend time reconciling ad network invoices.

Singular’s Fraud Prevention Suite not only comes pre-packaged with industry-leading Fraud Prevention Rules but also offers marketers the flexibility to define their own rules, what we call Custom Fraud Rules.

Personalizing with Custom Fraud Rules

With Singular’s Custom Fraud Rules, marketers can personalize their fraud prevention strategy to meet their brand or apps unique needs. For example, they may want to have a more aggressive approach to combating fraud if they’re advertising in markets that are more susceptible to ad fraud, or even if they’re testing new networks, each with varying levels of fraud.

Marketers can create Custom Fraud Rules by defining the conditions and rules that trigger automatic rejection of attributions or flagging of suspicious activity. The flexible rule builder allows the marketer to define multiple conditions that need to be set for the rule to trigger on a touchpoint, enabling them to implement a variety of personalized fraud-fighting rules.

Some examples of Custom Fraud Rules marketers have implemented include:

  • Publisher Blacklisting
    Select specific sites to blacklist from your campaigns. While you will also want to confirm your site blacklists directly with your partner, this rule gives you the power to reject traffic that comes from unreliable or underperforming sites.
  • Fingerprinted Traffic Whitelist
    Define and whitelist traffic sources that are trusted enough to send fingerprinted installs. Automatically reject or flag fingerprinted installs from install sources that are less reliable.
  • Block Unauthorized Store Installs
    Most Android apps are only published on the official Google Play Store. Automatically reject Android installs that came from an unauthorized store.

The flexibility of the Fraud Prevention Suite also allows you to add additional fraud checkpoints. These rules take known characteristics of your apps and campaigns, and allow you to quickly filter out traffic that doesn’t meet your standards.

  • Country Mismatch
    Use this rule to automatically reject or flag installs that take place in a country that your campaigns are not targeting.
  • App Version
    As you update your app version, it becomes impossible for new users to click and install deprecated versions. Fraudsters can struggle to update their attack to include the newest app version from the traffic they send, so blocking deprecated app versions can eliminate a source of fraud.
  • Time-to-install
    When the amount of time between an ad click and the resulting install is unusually small, it can be a sign that the install was hijacked by fraudsters. Similarly, when the time between a click and an install is too long, click spamming might be taking place. Set a custom time-to-install threshold based on the size and usage of your app to automatically reject or flag installs with unrealistically short or long install times.

Savvy marketers from top brands are already taking advantage of this personalized approach to fraud protection, which is paying off in significant cost savings.

Recently, a leading e-commerce app in the APAC region implemented a rule to prevent non-approved publishers and sites from sending fingerprinted traffic. After implementing the rule, 16% of the traffic sent from these sources was automatically flagged and rejected.

Another client, a global giant of gaming, set their iOS receipt validation rule on. When testing a new source, they found that 100% of the 11,000 installs were flagged and rejected for fraud. An additional benefit: no make-good negotiation was required … since the fraud prevention did not allow these installs to be attributed!

When fraud strikes, the marketers that leverage Singular’s Fraud Prevention strike back with high-tech fraud detection and prevention. But this is just the beginning. We’re dedicated to further innovating our Fraud Prevention to keep up with the changing face of ad fraud.

Want to see how much you could be saving with next-level fraud prevention?Reach out to your Customer Success Manager for a complimentary fraud audit.

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

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

But how?

And what tools do they need to achieve those goals?

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

We also know how much data they have.

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

And that’s the core challenge.

 

Drowning in data

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

That’s the problem.

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

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

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

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

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

 

Marketing intelligence platform

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

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

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

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

  1. Unprecedented visibility at scale
  2. On-demand flexible reporting
  3. Full customer journey insights

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

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

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

One: Unified marketing data

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

Unifying marketing data includes:

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

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

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

 

Two: Intelligent insights at scale

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

Generating intelligence insights includes:

  • Reporting and visualization
  • Actionable insights

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

 

Three: Automation

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

  • Data transport
  • Alerts, fraud, audiences
  • And much more

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

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

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

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

 

Results: what a marketing intelligence platform delivers

What does a marketing intelligence platform deliver?

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

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

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

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

  1. Accuracy
  2. Granularity
  3. Actionability

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

This is what we call “dual integration.”

WTH is the Dual Integration approach?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds like a pain in the @$$?

Good thing Singular has already done it for you!

This is the dual integration approach

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

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

Inherent flaws with tracking links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the future of games?

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

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

To state the obvious, games are a big deal.

But what’s changing in gaming?

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

Here are the results:

Future of games: Social at scale

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

That’s social, and that’s scale.

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

The massive benefit of social at scale?


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

And they often stick to the same game, too.

Future of games: Connected platforms

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

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

But we might see some components of it.

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

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


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

Of course, there are caveats.

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

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

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

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

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

Increasingly, we’re seeing noise around streaming too.

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

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


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

And someone has to keep those lights on.

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

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

Future of games: Monetization evolution

Game monetization is changing quickly.

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

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

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

eSports is also also offering new monetization opportunities.

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

Future of games: Decreasing power of app stores

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

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

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

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

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

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

It also means marketing a game just changed significantly.

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

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

Summing up

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

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

Talk to us today about a demo.