Tag: roi

Today marketers have access to a huge amount of data about their users and customers. App remarketing is a good example.

On the mobile app side of business, attribution and analytics can provide an amazing view into both the health and vitality of your business and the in-app behaviors of your users. We can leverage mobile app remarketing to capitalize on these signals and meet critical business needs.

Google says app remarketing is …

a way to connect with people who previously interacted with your website or mobile app. It allows you to strategically position your ads in front of these audiences as they browse Google or its partner websites, thus helping you increase your brand awareness or remind those audiences to make a purchase.

One of the reasons why we created the Singular marketing analytics platform was because we wanted to empower marketers to take what they have learned and put it into immediate use building their businesses through data-driven marketing programs that really move the needle on revenue and ROI. One of the best ways to do that is to focus on delivering a one-to-one user experience that reflects the wants and needs of that person. Such data-driven marketing initiatives leverage the signals gathered through the attribution and analytics processes to define and refine what, when and how we speak to app users.

Our audience segmentation offering enables clients to define high-performing audience segments for tailored media and messaging programs. By combining people who have completed a common set of actions, for example, we make it possible to deliver custom messages to those users.

Probably the easiest way to understand the power of this approach is to think in terms of specific use cases …

App remarketing for new user activation

More and more market research is showing that the first hours and days after an install are a critical time for determining whether someone will become a regular user or customer. By defining high-performing custom audiences of new installs, we can develop and deliver ad messages designed to make regular mobile app usage a habit.

And the more times they return to the app during that early period, the more likely they are to become regular users and customers.

Win back uninstallers

People uninstall mobile apps for a variety of reasons. Uninstalls that occur early in the app user’s life cycle are the most interesting to marketers because they can provide signals on how to improve user relationships. Many mobile app marketers are now defining audiences of recent uninstallers in order to create messaging and media programs for ads designed to get people to reinstall the apps.

App remarketing efforts targeted to these individuals can bring some of them back.

Turning intent into purchases

When an individual searches for products and services in your app, you have a great indication of purchase intent. But one of the realities of our business is that many more people will search than will actually make a purchase in your app.

If you can deliver marketing messages that can drive even modest increases in the number of people who transact in your app, you can have a profound effect on your revenue and profitability. By featuring recently searched items in custom messaging ads — or in an area in your app — you can remind app users that your app is a great way to get the things they want and need. This is a great example of how using app remarketing can help close sales.

App remarketing: engaging cart abandoners

An even better signal of purchase intent is if someone places an item in a shopping cart. For most mobile apps, 90%, 95%, 99% or more people will abandon their carts before making a purchase.

By using custom audiences and dynamic deferred deep-linking app remarketing ads featuring the items in an individual’s cart, we can drive more users to return to the app to buy. For a profound impact on app revenue and profitability.

Upsell or cross sell

The people most likely to make a purchase in your mobile app are those who have already made a purchase in the past. You can get more of those people to transact again through focused messaging that reflects their past purchases and current needs. Further, many app marketers are now cross-marketing one app to the users of another, related app as a means of driving highly efficient user acquisition.

Again, a great example of app remarketing to help close sales.

Better lookalike modeling

Many brands use lookalike modeling – targeting prospects who behave similarly to their users. But what if you could do your modeling based on the characteristics of your best customers and payers? If you could attract more people like them, you can drive your KPIs. By analyzing your best customers and creating audience segments of those individuals, you can work with partners to reach and drive installs from people who hold incredible revenue potential.

I am sure you see how action – closing the loop on data-driven marketing – offers profound advantages versus knowledge alone. Getting that knowledge is essential, but it really only the opening gambit for the highly effective marketer.

If you’ve worked in mobile advertising, you know that user acquisition (UA) is no easy feat. UA managers face a lot of challenges in their day-to-day, and we consider it our job to make their lives easier. Read on to learn about the top 5 struggles of today’s UA managers, and how they overcome those challenges.

1: Connecting fragmented data

On average, advertisers are running campaigns on 20 or more networks. But each network uses a unique taxonomy and hierarchy in their reporting. This normally means the UA manager is spending hours in spreadsheets trying to standardize and aggregate a slew of reports just to get a side by side analysis. It’s enough to drive you mad.

Enter Singular: Our marketing analytics platform helps you connect fragmented data and perform side by side analyses by automating the collection and standardization of your data across all media sources. Singular even auto-detects data discrepancies before they throw off your analytical groove. We’ll do the heavy lifting (aka turning data into actionable insights) so that you can get to the good stuff, like improving your audience or creative strategies.

2: Uncovering ROI at granular levels

Imagine that you’re running a successful ad campaign, but you’re not sure which element of the campaign is really bringing you wins. Are you scoring well in a particular country? Is one variation of your ad creative outperforming a different version? Is one of your publishers raking in the cash or is it another? You need to dig deep down into the data and get the most granular view possible to understand where you’re doing well – and where you aren’t.

We know that ROI is your bottom line. It’s our’s, too. A huge focus of our efforts are dedicated to efficiently combining attribution and marketing data to uncover ROI down to the Creative and Keyword levels so that marketers can leave the manual work behind and focus on hitting their goals. When our customers have a clear view of all of their marketing data, it makes it easy for them to drill down to the most granular levels possible, and take home the valuable insights they need to win.

3: Combating fraud and feeling confident in your data

Fraudsters diverted over $6.5B away from the advertising ecosystem last year. That number is only going to increase as their tactics continue to evolve and bypass traditional prevention methods. But somehow, 63% of mobile advertisers are not actively using fraud prevention in their attribution systems. How can you be sure that you aren’t being taken advantage of by fraudsters?

It takes a lot of smart proactive and reactive work to protect your assets against the efforts of fraudsters.

Fortunately, Singular’s Fraud Prevention Suite is the most sophisticated product on the market today. We’ll show you where and when fraud is taking place, proactively reject fraudulent clicks, installs, and events, and give you complete control over the way you want to take action on fraudulent activity. Plus, our methods for combating fraud are constantly adapting to new forms so you can feel confident in your data.

4: Help Finance reconcile marketing spend

UA managers need a healthy marketing budget to work with. But how do you ensure you get this? By proving to Finance that you know how to spend your budget wisely and that you can produce profit for the company. But how can you do this if you aren’t 100% confident in the accuracy and reliability of your data?

At Singular, we pride ourselves on the authenticity and verifiability of the data we present. This is in part due to the use of our proprietary API that acts as a solid line of defense against data loss. Other providers get marketing data from tracking links, which are imperfect and subject to breaking – resulting in the UA team on the other end never receiving the spend data they’re looking for. When you use Singular, our API takes a second pass at retrieving data even when your links fail.

5: Directing your design team on what assets are performing

Killer creatives are absolutely essential to a successful marketing strategy, but a great creative that works for some audiences won’t necessarily work for others. How do you ensure you’re serving the most engaging creatives imaginable to your targeted audience? And how do you set up your designers with the information they need to create those breakthrough ads? It can be a dizzying problem.

With Singular’s Creative Reporting, UA teams can learn a lot about what they’re doing right with their ads. Through our advanced reporting tool, marketers can measure ad fatigue, the effectiveness of creative variations per demographic, the difference in performance of minute changes to creative such as font color, and much more.

All these struggles are a huge pain for UA teams, but they don’t have to be. With the right partners and tools in place, marketers can reduce the headaches caused by these problems and get down to the work they really care about. If you’re interested in the solutions we have, request a demo!

This is the first post in a series of articles about Return on Investment (ROI) in mobile marketing. Each post in Singular’s Mobile ROI Series will dive into a different level of mobile ROI data — from User-Level to Country-Level to Publisher-Level ROI — and show how mobile marketers are using different facets of their ROI data to increase performance.

These days, many mobile marketers are investing in app remarketing — the practice of creating high-performing user segments and customizing marketing campaigns to these users in order to drive incremental app engagement and revenue. Remarketing is increasingly viewed as a critical source of mobile ROI. For our clients who use the attribution toolset, remarketing’s share of paid events has increased more than 18X in the past two years.

When segmenting users for the purpose of remarketing, tracking how much you pay for each user and the touchpoints that drive them into your app is as important as tracking how much users spend in your app. Yet all too often, marketers rely solely on user revenue and post-install events when deciding on user groups to remarket to and how much to spend on driving their future actions.

Here we’ll show why targeting existing users based solely on the revenue or events they complete in your app may actually be hurting your remarketing efforts, and how you can leverage User-Level ROI data to drive more profitable remarketing campaigns.

Mobile ROI for High-Revenue User Audiences

For remarketing, mobile marketers often create user segments based on the revenue, events and device-level information recorded in their app. One segment might include users who completed a sign-up; another might include users who browsed a certain type of product page. These segments are used to customize remarketing messaging and media programs, including push notifications, email and retargeting on ad networks.

One of the most common pieces of information used for remarketing is revenue — the total amount of money a user has spent, or is expected to spend, in your app. Marketers will often segment users who have spent above a certain amount and shift budget to remarket to their most “valuable” users.

However, doing so without factoring in the cost of acquiring and re-engaging users can actually yield negative ROI. Marketers must factor in the cost of each user touchpoint — otherwise they risk remarketing to users who cost more than they generate in revenue.

As the table below shows, just because a mobile app user generates comparatively high revenue doesn’t mean they deliver positive mobile marketing ROI.

In this example, User 1 spends more in the app, but costs 6 times as much to attract. Based on these figures, User 2 is actually more profitable — a fact that would go unnoticed by marketers who aren’t tracking user-level cost.

We work with a client in Asia who witnessed such results. When they optimized their mobile app marketing programs to users that drove the most revenue, they actually overlooked many of their best customers from a profitability perspective.

Instead of user revenue, mobile marketers should focus on user-level mobile ROI (user revenue divided by user cost) when segmenting users for remarketing. Where ROI is greater than 100%, spending on the user yields incremental profit.

With this approach, you might observe that users who cost a lot to acquire will often also cost a lot to re-engage. Remove these users from remarketing campaigns in favor of remarketing to users who may spend less initially but who will be cheaper to re-engage and, as a result, more profitable in the long run.

The Problem with Optimizing on Cost

Remember that the reverse can also be true, that users who cost more to acquire can actually turn out to be your most profitable mobile app users. Consider two different mobile app users whose costs and revenue are outlined below:

This is a fairly common mobile marketing circumstance. For example, users of mobile apps that are attracted by low-cost incentivized media are often less lucrative from an ROI perspective. Remarketing to such individuals can spike your app installs but produce less profit.

If you focus your remarketing efforts solely on users that cost little to acquire, you may optimize to programs that actually hurt your rate of return. Again, considering both cost and revenue will yield better results for your business.

By accounting for the cost to acquire and re-engage users through mobile advertising and other tactics, marketers can segment users who drive the most revenue at the lowest cost. In turn, mobile marketers won’t get stuck blindly remarketing to app users who actually cost a boatload and are less profitable to re-engage. Marketers would do well to remember this important insight for their campaigns.

Find out how the world’s best marketers, including Lyft, Yelp, Zynga, Walmart and Postmates, use Singular to expose deep ROI insights to increase marketing performance at Singular.net.

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

Ad fraud is a problem, but just how big of a problem?

Ad verification company Adloox found that in 2016 ad fraud cost marketers nearly 20 percent of their total digital ad spend — meaning one out of every 5 dollars marketers spent on advertising was wasted due to bots, spiders and other non-human actors viewing or clicking their ads.

And despite an increased focus on ad fraud prevention in the marketing industry, researchers project that the ad fraud problem will only grow in 2017. Agency group The&Partnership estimates that the cost of ad fraud will swell to nearly $16.4 billion globally this year, up from $12.5 billion last year.

Costs of Fraud

By 2025, global ad fraud costs could reach $50 billion annually, the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) said earlier this year — which is second only to the drug trade as a source of income for organized crime.

Gaming is the Most Targeted

On mobile, gaming is by far the most susceptible to ad fraud, with 39% of all attempted fraudulent traffic aimed at gaming apps, following by Lifestyle apps (18%), Shopping apps (15%), Travel apps (15%) and Sports apps (14%). That’s according to a recent study by mobile ad network ClicksMob, which also found that fraud was more prevalent on iOS apps than Android apps. iOS apps account for 61% of attempted fraud, compared with 39% for Android apps.

A Constantly Moving Target

As with most data-driven industries, organizations and fraudsters are in a race with each other. The organizations iterate on detection and prevention tactics, while fraudsters create more and more sophisticated and devious forms of fraud. As of now, the numbers seem to suggest that fraudsters in the digital advertising world are winning by a long shot.

New forms of fraud are constantly being uncovered, with the latest and most prevalent being Ad Stacking, Click Injection, Click Spamming, and Mobile Location Data Spoofing. Frequently, by the time advertisers uncover new forms of fraud and implement prevention methodologies — which inevitably take time to catch on across advertisers and ad networks — the damage has already been done.

For instance, an investigation in 2015 found that thousands of mobile apps were secretly running ads that users never see. Ad fraud tracking firm Forensiq identified over 5,000 mobile apps that display unseen ads on both Apple and Android devices, costing mobile app advertisers roughly $850 million each year and churning through user data usage with malware, the report found.

Ad Fraud and Ad Blocking

Beyond the obvious damaging effects of ad fraud — namely, that it dramatically lowers app marketing ROI — one corollary effect of the growth in malware and ad fraud is that it encourages ad blocking adoption among users.

Over 40 percent of users said they use ad blockers to protect against malware and viruses, a recent survey by ad blocker software Optimal and Wells Fargo found. At the same time, ad blocking usage is on the rise, surging 30 percent in 2016. Over 60 percent of devices with ad-blocking software installed are mobile devices, according to PageFair, which helps publishers recover revenue lost to digital ad-blocking.

This trend alone should serve as a rallying cry for the industry and align the interests of both ad networks and advertisers to stamp out mobile ad fraud. After all, if the rate of ad fraud continues to rise, increasing users’ data costs and prompting more users to install ad-blocking software that safeguards against such costs, the entire digital advertising ecosystem will suffer.

So what can marketers do to protect against mobile ad fraud? Below are 6 tips to identify and prevent ad fraud.

1. Anti-Fraud Tools

Some attribution and analytics suites offer tools to help marketers identify and prevent fraud. Such tools may use signals like IP addresses, click and install pattern detection, and activity monitoring to pinpoint campaigns, partners and buying models that are driving suspicious app installs.

2. Common Sense

Gone are the days when savvy app marketers were taken in by promises from ad networks of massive install counts quickly or at extremely low cost. Today, marketers know that a deal that sounds too good to be true is likely to result in low-quality app installs.

3. Focusing Resources on Larger, Trusted Partners

Large or niche vertical media companies are more likely to have the scale and resources to detect and prevent fraud. Further, properties like social networks can leverage user account information to help ensure that installs come from legitimate people. At Singular, we saw a 393% increase in the number of installs driven by the top ten media partners, and a 105% increase for the second ten, in 2016. The “losers” during that same period? Smaller players without a quality user story to tell. While the size of the media company is no guarantee of strong or weak app installs, this is an instance where big brands are gravitating toward big media to protect their investments.

4. Leveraging Retention and Uninstall Data

By comparing the set of user traffic attracted by different media companies, brands can learn a lot about user quality. Low user retention or high uninstall rates increasingly are seen as signals of possible fraudulent activity.

5. Diversify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Smart incentivized install campaigns drive users to install the app plus complete a post-install event, such as a registration process or tutorial completion. Develop KPIs & benchmarks that are harder to predict or unrealistic to incentivize — such as post-install events that are unique to your traffic, or long-term usage metrics that occur days or weeks after the install. Arguably, the best KPI to monitor and prevent fraud is ROI, or revenue divided by cost, as it is particularly difficult for fraudsters to simulate a sale, especially because most marketing analytics platforms — including Singular — verify in-app purchases with App Stores.

6. Identify Publisher-Level Anomalies

Sometimes ad networks may not be aware that their publishers are perpetrating fraud. By breaking out source- & campaign-level reporting to examine key metrics at the publisher level, it can be easy to spot publishers that drive abnormally high app install counts or abnormally low-quality users.

A big part of my role here at Singular is helping to articulate how our unique approach to data management creates tremendous incremental value for app analytics and marketing — value that marketers cannot get from any other company.

For those who are unfamiliar with our methodology for collecting and processing iOS and Android data for app analytics, let me outline the four components of our approach:

• Extraction: How we capture all of the relevant marketing data from each client’s many partners and platforms, and bring it to their respective instances of our unified app analytics platform.
• Enrichment: How we collaborate with clients to ensure that, even if their partners haven’t in the past been able to deliver data at the level of granularity they need for ROI and other analysis, we can use unique tagging rules and business processes to make it possible going forward.
• Combining: How Singular standardizes taxonomy and matches Android and iOS marketing effectiveness with user experience app data across partners and platforms to deliver ROI and other business insights at any level of granularity.,
• Loading: Our proprietary process for importing the data to our analytics database and making it available through advanced, flexible reporting and customizable dashboards. Thus allowing for quick and easy analysis of actionable insights.

I’ve told this four-part data management and enrichment story to dozens of enterprise app developer and app publisher marketing teams, and the discussions nearly always go the same. We move quickly through the app data extraction, enrichment and loading components; these are telegraphic concepts that can be understood in the context of app analytics without a lot of explanation. But combining? That takes a few minutes longer.

Why? Fundamentally, it’s about something that gets very little discussion in the industry — the need to get mobile app data organized, united and segmented right in order to get insight out of it.

Combining Mobile App Analytics Data

Brand leaders must work with a variety of partners and platforms to deliver marketing campaigns and grow their Android and iOS app businesses. Because it’s expensive and complicated to work with so many end points to attract and engage users, marketers are clamoring for better tools that streamline management, app analytics, and reporting.

Mobile application marketers must have a way to combine data from all these sources in a single platform to fully understand their businesses and users. Specifically, they must:

• Measure the app marketing ROI for all their media investments, at any level of granularity
• Determine how to optimize their marketing campaigns and other programs so they can attract and engage more iOS and Android app users and deliver optimized data-driven marketing

It’s challenging to construct metaphorical “pipes” to route data from all sources into your analytic tool. But “pipes” aren’t enough. You also need to ensure that the mobile app data flowing through those pipes is combined with data from other sources. In ways that make sense and offer marketers the sort of insights and granularity that they need.

For data to be correctly combined, you need to:

• Collect the same data on both the network “side” (spend) and the tracker “side” (cost/revenue)
• Create consistency in organization between upper funnel and lower funnel data

The challenge is that no two sources organize and categorize data in the same way. Across the hundreds of networks available to marketers, there is no standard set of dimensions or naming conventions. This makes it difficult for marketers to identify true ROI with granularity, and to compare performance side-by-side.

Collecting Complete and Consistent Data

Media networks, push notification platforms, and other toolsets for mobile app marketing organize data so that it can be examined at some level of detail. Whether that be at the app, source, publisher, operating system (OS), campaign, creative execution, or keyword level. However, since not all platforms provide every data dimension, marketers need a partner who will:

• Work with each network to make that data available. Every day, we are working with networks to provide consistent levels of granularity so we can provide ROI at the level marketers need in order to make the most effective campaign optimizations
• Pull data from various text-based fields and customize to create conventions that complete missing data. Without proper naming conventions, it becomes impossible to identify every detail of the campaign for every source
• Use heuristic rules to complete missing data. With proprietary technology, we identify each part of the various text-based fields to auto-complete the missing data not provided by the source as a default. For example, in many cases networks do not provide country level data, but it is important for the customer to see performance by country when determining market expansion. We are able to extract this information in other ways to complete the missing information in the report
• Use custom rules to identify dimensions of data specific to your business. No two businesses are alike. Each has its own app names and nomenclature for distinct aspects of its business. We work with our customers to identify those specific business terms in order to accurately reflect this data in the reporting dashboard

Creating Consistency in Data Organization

Once the data is collected from each network and data provider, it then needs to be standardized. The structures used by media partners and trackers for reporting cost, revenue, and other information vary. Therefore matching to a consistent convention can be a challenge.

By understanding the data provided through each integration, and aligning it to Singular’s standardized data structure and taxonomy, we ensure that we can match all ad performance datasets — like clicks, installs, purchases — to the marketing investments that drove them.

In fact, we work with more than 1,000 partners to codify and adapt to the way that they parse and deliver data to our platform and our clients.

Summary: It’s About a Lot More Than the Pipes

Lots of companies are working on ways of building the mobile data “pipes.” They are feverishly trying to build out the infrastructure to get app performance, marketing results, and media investment information from multiple sources and synthesize it into a single app analytics platform. At Singular, we’ve been doing that for years, and understand all too well why companies often talk about what a struggle this can be.

But even when other analytic solutions eventually reach the stage when they can mimic our mobile app data intake infrastructure, they still won’t be able to match what we do. That’s because we focus just as much attention on what goes through the pipes as in the infrastructure itself. By ensuring that all of the different data sets are organized, combinable, and connectable to other data sets, at the appropriate levels of granularity, we ensure that marketers can squeeze all of the insights from their data.

Find out how the world’s best marketers, including Lyft, Yelp, Zynga, Walmart and Postmates, use Singular to expose deep ROI insights to increase marketing performance at Singular.net.