#i hope this doesn’t come across wrong but this IS the bad reading comprehension website
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I would say that the United States, as of right now, has three main food groups (aside from junk food) and those are, Italian, Mexican, and Chinese. All of which have been Americanized here to some extent but differently in different parts of the country. I find this very funny because I have heard people from Italy be indignant about what we’ve done with the stuff (and about good restaurants too!) like, sorry if you guys weren’t creative, mixing things up a bit is great. “What about (regionally popular food)?!” I know we all have those, I haven’t heard of bitches in the south eating lefse, but that’s not my point! What was my point actually? I think I was going to say that, even if we bastardize stuff a lot, I’m super glad we have, as a country, agreed that more seasoning is good. Because if this place had been like “fuck immigrant food forever, we are eating British style” I think I would die.
This country has historically treated immigrants like shit, but we do tend to cave eventually and go like “actually,
your food is really good” a kind of shallow prize I guess, but I’m glad we actually start doing it eventually because I WILL mock British food and I WILL be sad that the only good family recipes my family has from before immigrating are all desserts. Don’t get me wrong, I love sweets, but I’m pretty sure there is a reason we stopped making other stuff
Wait, I re-read this today and realized I sound like my family is British. We are not. What even are British desserts? I bet they don’t have enough cardamom. Although lefse doesn’t have cardamom and i like a lot of things without it, my point is that their holiday and special event foods probably don’t have enough! Which wouldn’t surprise me tbh because apparently the only place that went crazy for the stuff outside of where it originated seems to have been Scandinavia for some reason. At least some maps I looked at seemed to suggest it. Which rocked me to my core
#emma posts#and I know that there are Native American foods that were really here first#but the three most popular quisenes (idk how to spell that) on a country wide scale#are those three#and also. I’ve seen a few Italian recipes from Italy and you guys don’t always use enough seasoning#I don’t care if that’s insulting#foods should have depth if they are going to be good#and I think people (at least around here) rely too heavily on cheese#even aside from the vegan thing. since i have diversified my diet more I am like#cheese is not a substitute for other flavors#this is my hot food take#my take on hot foods though is that I thought I couldn’t handle hot spiciness but then#I heard about British people reacting and also ate with older people here and was like ‘oh my god. that’s so sad’#my mom thinks udon is too spicy :(#i hope this doesn’t come across wrong but this IS the bad reading comprehension website#going to a local Scandinavia festival and admiring the arts and the sweets and then they start talking about other cultural foods and I’m#just like ‘why would you do that to fish?’ and judging my ancestors#in THEORY I understand why. food preservation and all that. but in practice…#like I said. there is a reason dessert and bread recipes are what my family still has from before America and I’m not really mad about that#being the only food#we’ve all heard the old people talk about lutefisk and we are like ‘nope’
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I live in adams wisconsin just got my licence and just got a car wondering what insurance i should get?
"I live in adams wisconsin just got my licence and just got a car wondering what insurance i should get?
I would like to know the cheapest insurance........otherwise i will just go on my dad's insurance
BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare quotes: : http://insureinfo.xyz/index.html?src=tumblr
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How much is insurance on a motorcycle for a 16 year old caucasion male in Texas??
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I live in adams wisconsin just got my licence and just got a car wondering what insurance i should get?
I would like to know the cheapest insurance........otherwise i will just go on my dad's insurance
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This might be long but PLEASE READ EVERYTHING. When I was 15 my grandfather (Legally my father, always lived with him) had always promised me he would get me driver's ed but he never did. A few months before I was 18 I moved out and in an apartment with my fiance. My fiance went to college 5 hours away the day after my 18th. After I turned 18 (July 25) I wanted to get my license, and I know how to do it. My fiance came back from college last weekend and took me to buy a used car for 400. Its a beater, but it drives. It has no insurance and no license plates. Im caught in a super circle. I cant get to SOS or DMV to even apply for my permit without 1) a ride and 2) insurance. I cant get plates to even drive it illegally without a license. I cant get insurance because, from what Im figuring out, just about no body will insure someone without a license. My grandfather will -not- put me on his insurance to save our lives and I need a car to get back and forth to work. (Walking 5 miles? Nah...) What am I supposed to do???? I cant pay a whole lot for insurance as Im now living alone in an apartment on a crappy salary. I had a decent salary until my work decided to super hire and how we are severely over staffed... What to do!?""
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Free Insurance Quotes Online?
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I'm interested in getting a life insurance policy on my mother because unfortunately she will not be around forever and I want to make sure my sister and I are able to take care of financial obligations that would have to be resolved including funeral expenses. Obviously this is a very difficult situation, no one wants to have to plan for a loved one's passing. Anyone know if this is possible? thanks.""
Is it illegal to drive in florida without insurance? ?
Is it illegal to drive in florida without insurance? ?
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""I was hit by an uninsured motorist, and I have an uninsured clause in my car insurance.?""
My car was totaled out, and since my car insurance had a non insured motorist clause then I just have to pay the deductible, and they will cut me a check. I was hurt in the accident, and I wanted to know if my car insurance (Progressive) will also pay out pain and suffering. I am considering taking this guy to small claims court, but if I do then I have no idea what the outcome would be. IF my insurance offers me a pain and suffering settlement then should I take it? can I negoiate for a higher settlement? Everyone is telling me to take whatever is offered to me because the guy that hit my car didn't have insurance, and could possibly claim indigentcy in which case I would most likely never see the money. I can get a pain and suffering settlement from my own insurance, but I believe that the person that hit me should have to pay it, and I am also assuming that I would get more money out of him directly than letting my insurance cover the pain and suffering. This is my first wreck that I have gotten into, in which, I was the party that was damaged (almost died), and the other guy only received a ticket. I know that life is not fair, but like I said before, this is my first car wreck where I was owed money and the other person did not have insurance. Any information will be much appreciated. Thank You Very Much.""
Are Honda's usually expensive on insurance?
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Does anyone know an insurance plan for health and dental?
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How much car insurance for 16 year old?
The state of Louisiana. The car is a Lexus GS 2003. My family has a total of 3 drivers already. (4 Plus me) What does car insurance depend on?
""Car Accident, Insurance won't pay up .. Any advice ?""
I was in an car accident two weeks ago, the other driver hit the side of my car because she did not make her stop. I tried to stop however, she was still able to hit the left side of my car. Police arrived but he recommended for us both to file a claim on each others insurance and that they would settle the problem themselves. My insurance company came to take photos of the damages and asked us what had happen. I received letters a couple of days ago, one from my insurance and the others person insurance. My insurance denied her claim because the damages demonstrated that it was her fault. However, i also received a letter from her insurance, that they also denied my claim. I called her insurance and they told me that it they weren't going to pay for any of the damages made to my car, because the the collision shows that it was my fault. I told them i was going to get my lawyer . and they told me i could do what ever i wanted. So, anyone has any advice ? **there was also a witness (a neighbor) who saw what happen**""
Co-operative car insurance - third party liability?
i am 17 years old. I have a fully comprehensive car insurance policy with the Co-operative insurance. i am a named driver on this policy but would like to be able to drive my parents cars. What i am wondering is, is it possible to change something on my policy so as to get third party liability on their cars, as i would not use them enough to warrent adding myself to their policys.""
Classic car ownership in the UK; apparantly there's an advantage over other cars such as cheaper insurance or
tax, or MOT, but I can't remember what...anyone know?""
How much for car insurance?
My mom drives a Mercedes B 150 (about 5 year old car), she's Middle Aged and had a good driving record so her insurance is around 200-300pa. I'm nearly 18, and a new driver (passed yesterday), was wondering how much insurance would be for me if I was added onto her insurance. (just an estimation would be great!) Thanks in advance!""
How much does learning to drive cost roughly?
how much do driving lessons + car (800 - 1000) + insurance etc cost??? thanks :)
Question about Car insurance (UK)?
Does anyone know if / how mileage for year is calculated for insurance purposes. What do the insurers check for these details? I have a private policy for my second car (my non work runaround) and it is limited to 3000miles per year. Perfect for trips to the dump, bulky or messy trips to the shops etc. I lend the car to my partners foreign parents who use their own insurance policy (cheaper for them) to drive it during their vacations to the UK 2-3 times a year adding quite a bit of mileage to the vehicle. If we both have insurance to be driving my car, am I at fault for claiming low mileage allowance for cheaper insurance for the car?""
How do I get health insurance?
My job doesnt provide health insurance and I do need to get some. Thanks for the help :)
I live in adams wisconsin just got my licence and just got a car wondering what insurance i should get?
I would like to know the cheapest insurance........otherwise i will just go on my dad's insurance
Will my insurance agent report to my car bank that car is not covered no more.?
I'm with state farm. I been playing 190 monthly. Now they want me to pay 450 dollars. I just paid yesterday and my agent said my next due payment is due on 7th this month for 450 dollars. He said it was to be paid when I first got with state farm but I switched agents and now I am expected to pay next week. This is unfair and without fair notice. My insurance is going a cancle if not paid in weeks from now. What do I do. Is my car bank gonna find out car insurance got canceled. I was told it was 190 per month. I thought deposit was high but why 400 ?
2 accidents and an oui how much will my insurance be now?
i hit a parked car while backing up 2 yrs no one was harmed my cars rear bumper needed to be replaced and the other cars front fender ago and then 2 weeks ago i hit my car on a tree and totaled it and i got an oui my insurance was $100 a month before how much will it be now like a guess?
I hit my neighbors parked car and it's going to cost $2400. How much will my insurance go up?
I have Geico Insurance. 22/m and out of school. 1 at fault accident already on my record from 2005 and a ticket that should be off my record but shows up on motor vehicle report. Just got Geico Insurance about 2 months ago. Paying about $1150 every 6 months. Would it be better just to pay the guy off?
Car insurance Fiat Coupe 1998?
My partner is willing to by me my dream car, a Fiat Coupe 20v turbo, 1998 model, where should i go for insurance, i am getting really daft quotes! i have been driving 21 yrs, unfortunately not had my own insurance! except for the last 3yrs, had a windscreen claim, stone on the motorway, thats it! somebody please help me , i really want this car!!!! (, i am a very young 52)!!!""
""Would something like an older, heavier car get me a better insurance rate? Any insurance lowering tips also?""
I'm a 16 year old teen guy (I know, I know) and I'm getting a car. Would an older, heavier model of car, like a large van or something, reduce my incredibly high rates? Looking an an out here. I don't have enough money to pay for it all. Any insurance lowering tips, besides drivers ed and good (already qualify) would be great.""
Staying in California for 2 months. Is it worth it to get a motorcycle?
I'm from Indiana, am over 21, and have a valid Indiana drivers license. I'm going to be staying in California for 6-8 weeks and would like some sort of transportation. I'm considering buying a motorcycle or scooter but am not sure if it will be worth it considering the hassle of registration, insurance, etc. Then I would sell it again before I go back to Indiana. My brother has offered to give me motorcycle lessons before I leave and I could get my Motorcycle learner's permit from the local BMV. Does anyone have experience with titles, registrations, insurance etc and could tell me if it would be worth the hassle?""
Question on using to insurance to pay for something?
if i went to the doctors and used insurance to pay for it would my parents get a statement that says i used it and what it was for ?
WHATS THE CHEAPEST CAR INSURANCE?
I AM TRYING TO GET A QUOTE FOR MY CAR INSURANCE AND THERE ALL LIKE 1000-2000. ITS A SKODA OCTAVIA 1.9 ELEGANCE PD 2006 ESTATE IVE TRIED WEBSITES LIKE GO COMPARE, COMPARE THE MARKET, CONFUSED.COM, DIRECTLINE.COM, LLOYDS TSB ECT ECT. ANY IDEAS WOULD BE MUCH APPRECIATED?""
Insurance when buying 1st car?
How do i go about buying a car (private or dealer) without insurance to test drive it 1st, as i'll only get insurance once i know what car i will have (i live in the UK).""
Does insurance go up for out of state speeding ticket?
I hae a New York drivers license, i was pulled over going 45 in a 30.....$150 ticket....................i looked it up and i know i do not get points on my record, but does my insurance go up? does anyone knoow and have a good source they can provide? Thanks""
What would be the cheapest way to get a car insurance?
What would be the cheapest way to get a car insurance?
Is there a way to get around expensive car insurance for a 19 year old boy in the UK?
I will eventually have my car when I'm 19 but i want to drive a 1.6 instead of a smaller engine. Is there a way to get around expensive car insurance because i know of people who got it cheap In england
Is minimum coverage car insurance the same as an SR22?
In Tennessee, is minimum coverage car insurance the same as an SR22? I already have minimum coverage but am now required to get an SR22. Is this something that needs to be added on or will minimum coverage suffice? Thanks.""
What car insurance coverage do you really need?
I have an 2002 honda civic that is worth about $7,000 with 112,000 miles on it. I have collision, death and dismemberment, uninsured motorist. I have a 1,000 deductable, but I am paying $110.00/ mo and want to reduce my payment. Is it a bad idea to drop uninsured motorist or death and dismemberment? Can someone explain what all the car insurance options are? I don't have dependents, but a already have free life, health insurance, and disablility insurance through my employer if that makes a difference. I would call my agent, but I think he must be have busy or smoking a joint out back for the last couple of weeks because he doesn't call me back.""
Health insurance for baby only?
I'm under my moms insurance , and I just recently applied for Medicaid and got accepted . Once I got my card my name was on it . I don't need the insurance but my unborn baby does . How does this process work if unborn baby needs insurance but I don't ?""
""What do i do first, title or insurance?""
so i figured out what insurance company i'm going to use, and my cousin is giving me her car. do i need to get the title of the car before i get insurance or do i have to get insurance first. i'm 17 by the way.""
Universal life insurance as a savings plan?? Is that a good idea?
Ameriprise Financial is sellign me 400k life insurance policy that costs 200 per month. They say its like a savings plan because I can access 90% of the 200 per month at any time. Is this a good idea or a scam??
I have full coverage on my car insurance..i accidently dented my car and broke the window my self what i do?
i have full coverage on my car insurance ,,i accidently broke the driver side window and dented the door my self,,what should i do? tell the insurance that somebody else did it and have them fix it?..they supposed to right?""
Can I purchase life insurance?
Can I or may I purchase a life insurance policy for my step father in law. I've been asking around and some family member say no we can't and some other say yes we can. I'm so lost
Would my father's insurance go up if...?
If I were to buy a car under my name and insure it under my name, would my dad's insurance rates rise because I live at the same address?""
Car insurance question ONTARIO?
I am 18, live in Toronto, Ontario and dreaming of having a car, but I can't afford to pay $400 a month or more, so, could I get my dad to buy the car with my money, register it as if it his, get cheap insurance for it as if it was his, and then just drive it all the time having the proper car documents on me. How much of a legal issue would that be if a cop pulled me over and I showed him that the car is family owned and insured and I just happen to be driving it today. My family already has a truck and a Toyota, I don't know if that is relevant or not, but Im just throwing it out there. And just to make sure, what would happen if (god forbid) I was to get in an accident and wasn't at fault? how about if it was my fault(talk about sticky situations).""
Can I buy a car without car insurance?
Hi, I am trying to purchase myself a Mazda, but after I checked the car insurance quote offered by RBC and other companies, things get ridiculous-the quote calculated my insurance to be more than 5000 per year-that's much more than my car! I am 19 years old and this is my first car. I just got my 5N license in Halifax. I didnt take the drivers course, so can I get my car without insurance? Or can you guys recommend a low-price insurance company? Thanks for helping!""
Parents of Teens Drivers insurance question?
I wanted to ask parents who have teen drivers. how much extra did it cost when you added your teen to your insurance??
Car insurance?
I was given a car from Texas would I be able to insure the car with Texas plates ? If not how would I go about getting it smogged & insured if I can't drive it ?
Car wreck....Why is his insurance calling me? Can someone please clear this up?
So Friday morning, my fiance' and I were headed to New Jersey to visit his family for Christmas. On the way there, I was driving his truck so he could sleep a little before we switched places. Early morning when we were in Virginia, I pulled off the highway to go to a McDonalds to get some coffee. When I pulled off, it was a weird exit and I had no clue where I was going. I stopped at a red light, which had another light very close behind it which turned green, my idiot self was looking at that light for some reason while our light was still red...I hit the gas and then slammed on my breaks realizing what I was doing but it was too late and I hit a guy on the side of the door. It wasn't a big wreck. The guy didn't fly across the intersection. He didn't even move, his door was just dented and it will definitely need to be replaced but the man said he was not hurt at all. The truck we were driving in barely had damage, just a little dent in the hood that was very small to the eye and a bent license plate. We were in much better shape; but again, he was not in pain and his door was the only thing that seemed to be damaged. ANYWAYS, I received a traffic ticket for failing to obey a traffic light which I totally accept because this was extremely stupid of me and I am planning on mailing the fine to the court. So since I was driving my fiance's car, which is under his parents insurance, I assume my insurance is not affected. The trooper just told us that the other guy's insurance will contact my fiance's insurance. So I am thinking all I have to do is just pay this awful fine. Well my fiance' called me this morning and said that Statefarm (the other guy's insurance) called him asking for my number. Why would the other guy's insurance need to contact me if my fiance's parent's insurance are the ones who insure the truck? I just want to know what's to come when they call me. I don't know much of anything about insurance. I just want to know why the other guy's insurance would contact me when, yes, I caused the accident but my fiance's father is the insurance holder of the car that was wrecked. Thanks!""
I live in adams wisconsin just got my licence and just got a car wondering what insurance i should get?
I would like to know the cheapest insurance........otherwise i will just go on my dad's insurance
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/looking-really-cheap-car-insurance-ohio-cleofa-escobedo"
0 notes
Text
4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
For the past nearly 3 years, I’ve been in charge of Audience Development for one of the largest media companies in the US.
I learned a LOT during that time. Even more important, I learned a lot about what NOT to do.
Not all of these things were personal ‘mistakes’ per se. Some were top down decisions that were influenced by lack of foresight, knowledge or budget. Others were due to an industry that is undergoing rapid change.
As John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
To that end, here are the top 4 mistakes I learned during my tenure. I hope sharing these and their learnings will spark some good discussion – either internally or in the comments below.
1. Not Investing in Building User Data
This one definitely took me by surprise.
When I arrived, I had big plans to leverage CRM data to build remarketing pools, lookalike audiences, email campaigns, etc.
But there was no CRM database.
One thing not often considered about media companies is the fact the consumer data is controlled by the cable provider. The cable company collects the payment and therefore have all the associated consumer data:
Name
Address
Phone
Email
Credit Card Info
Purchase history
Login Username/Password
Etc.
In it’s simplest form, the media company simply provides the content the cable provider sells to the consumer. For the longest period of time, the value of collecting this data had been overlooked.
Plan of Action:
To access ‘free’ content within an app from the likes of NBC, CBS, Fox and others, you must go through an authentication process. This is done using the same credentials you would login to pay your cable bill.
In one of these apps, you’ve likely come across a login page that looks like this:
This poses two challenges:
Many consumers don’t know or remember this login. As a result, a lot of potential video consumption is lost.
As mentioned above, this is an interstitial page that drives to the cable provider as they own the username and password information.
In collaboration with the product team, a strategy was developed to implement a ‘free trial’ in exchange for the user’s email address. This would allow the user to forego the authentication requirement.
This was the minimal piece of information required for us to begin building a CRM and the beginning of a customer match marketing program across Google, Facebook and Twitter.
It also provided us with the initial piece of consumer data that we could subsequently build on with supplemental offers in exchange for profile completion.
The overarching lesson here is – invest in CRM. Even if you have to start with just a database of email addresses. Start somewhere.
2. Not Understanding the Nuances of Mobile Tracking
As you might imagine, much of our marketing strategy and budget focused on the mobile space. Interestingly enough, this is also a space where ad-blockers are not working.
That said, with mobile advertising comes tracking nuances that I was initially unaware of.
When I joined the team, we were full-steam into launching the first ever marketing campaign. In our haste to launch, we did not take the time to fully understand the impact of not solidifying our mobile tracking solution.
Our primary mobile advertising consisted of:
Desktop & Mobile Banner and Social Ads:
The standard process for attribution is based on the use of cookies.
When a user visits a website via their desktop or mobile device, your banner displays and a cookie is dropped on the visitor’s computers – regardless of whether or not they click through to your website.
Depending on the ad-server being used, this cookie can remain active for up to 2 years.
Eventually, if the user performs the desired action, that same cookie fires sending the proper attribution for your campaign. All is well in the world.
Apple’s Safari browser blocks 3rd party cookies by default which makes this ‘standard’ tracking more complicated. Among other things, this means your app cannot read the cookie data stored by Mobile Safari.
This presents a challenge to advertisers as Safari’s market share is around 33% globally.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our brand websites):
I’m sure you’ve noticed when you open a link in an app, it doesn’t open a new browser window. Rather, it opens an “in-app browser”.
This makes perfect sense for UX as it allows you to quickly return to the app.
The issue lies in the cookie drop on your phone. This naturally occurs with the click, however, it only drops a cookie for the in-app browser session. Unless the conversion happens immediately within that session, the attribution is lost.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our apps):
Quite simply, cookies are not used ‘in-app’. This left us with zero attribution or cross-device tracking.
The lack of attention to these details was quickly evident. At the end of the campaign, we were left pointing to engagement metrics like impressions, CTR and social shares as a measure of success.
Not at all what a consumer acquisition campaign should be reporting.
Plan of Action:
The quickest change to a leaky attribution bucket that we could make was to tackle the Safari issue. We simply updated our social and display targeting to remove Safari browsers.
While Google struggles with mobile and socially-driven demographic/interest targeting, Facebook provides the ability to target (or exclude) users by Web browser.
While not foolproof, for the likes of Twitter and Google, we targeted only older operating systems in an effort to capture users who were still using legacy browsers.
Considering our audience was US based, we estimated that we would only be missing out on approximately 15-18% of the overall market.
The other two challenges were a bit more complicated and required a mobile attribution solution that established the match between the user’s advertising ID and the publisher.
While there are many companies available for this, after evaluation, we landed on Kochava as our solution provider.
Pro tip: if you’re on a budget, Branch.io is a completely free solution that provides many of the same features.
3. Focusing on Sexy vs. Efficient
The programmatic display and mobile space is filled with shiny new tools, ad placements, and even ad units.
Combine that with the traditional types of advertising done by media companies (think big billboards, bus sides, etc) and these quickly become distractions from tactics that are proven to work.
I think it’s fair to say we spread our tactics far too wide in the early years in hopes of capitalizing on that sexy new ad-unit or the hot new ad targeting. This was, unfortunately, at the expense of tried and true tactics like traditional paid search.
A smarter approach would have been to test into these tactics rather than build a comprehensive media plan that included them.
Plan of Action:
I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. And Apple in general. One of my favorite quotes from him is:
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
With more data and proper attribution in place, we were more empowered to direct the media plans across the brands.
We focused on tried and true channels that significantly outperformed the “shiny objects” that had resulted in wasted spend and higher costs for creative development.
This paid off in a big way:
Total impressions declined significantly, however, clicks increased just as dramatically
Average click costs also declined
Cost per app install decreased nearly 200%
Cost per video start decreased 230%
Sometimes the ‘simple’ things just work better.
Ultimately, after seeing the data, I took away a few lessons that can be applied to almost any campaign:
Programmatic display isn’t the end all, be all. It’s an industry buzzword. I could even say ‘buzztactic’. It’s rife with click fraud and vendors with non-transparent ‘private networks’. It’s susceptible to ad blockers and comes with many privacy issues.
Don’t get me wrong. It can work.
But, test into programmatic options ONLY after you’ve exhausted the below tactics.
Focus on channels where a consumer is actively searching for you. They’re already self-qualified based on their actions. The most applicable here is paid search across Bing or Google.
Remarket your way to lower cost per acquisitions. You’ve already paid the premium CPC or CPM to get that user to your website. Typically, remarketing campaigns come with much lower costs. Why not re-engage a warm lead for less?
Image Source
#Hashtags are inherently social, but leave them out of social ad copy. Through our trimming of tactics, we also trimmed areas where consumers might be tempted to leave the topic at hand.
In this case, we removed any hashtag mentions in our ad copy so consumers would focus instead on the ‘install’. Our conversion rates improved as a result.
When pushing mobile installs, leverage a device in your creative. When you think about it, of course. It makes sense. But we proved it out via testing. Showing consumers an image of their device in the creative they’re being served improved conversion rates.
4. Not Leveraging an Always on Strategy
Consumers, myself included, are always on. Always plugged in. It’s a bad, addicting habit.
But, that also means running a campaign for a TV show only when that show is in-season leaves opportunity on the table.
There are a few challenges with being able to do this:
First, media companies are selling off the rights to their shows to the likes of Netflix and Hulu. In some cases, the ability to create a show is solely dependent on the revenue coming from these transactions.
This means an always on strategy will never be an option once the rights are sold.
Second, when we first launched our campaigns, we were spending large portions of our budget on fancy creative and higher cost CPMs trying to capture the next big thing.
This left us without budget pacing that would allow for an always on strategy.
Plan of Action:
We tackled the second issue as part of our streamlining of tactics. This enabled our budgets to stretch farther and for longer periods of time both pre-premier and post-finale.
The matter of rights was more complicated and is probably worth a completely separate post. That said, as a test, we decided to focus on a core set of shows where the rights had been retained for several years.
The hope was, if we could show a series with multiple seasons resulted in larger average views per user, we could start to build a case for investing in the rights for the more popular shows.
It worked.
We found not only were the average views per user up, but these campaigns were far outperforming pilot shows and series with limited rights.
This resulted in overall efficiencies for the campaign.
Wrapping Up
There’s no question the digital space can provide lots of opportunity for growth and learning. I have certainly learned a ton.
Hopefully sharing some of these insights will help you better streamline your digital marketing efforts, focus on what works, get your tracking in order and ultimately drive increased performance.
About the Author: Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly on SEO tactics, analytics and social media best practices. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on Instagram.
from Search Results for “analytics” – The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2wYmkQq
#Digital #Analytics #Website
0 notes
Text
4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
For the past nearly 3 years, I’ve been in charge of Audience Development for one of the largest media companies in the US.
I learned a LOT during that time. Even more important, I learned a lot about what NOT to do.
Not all of these things were personal ‘mistakes’ per se. Some were top down decisions that were influenced by lack of foresight, knowledge or budget. Others were due to an industry that is undergoing rapid change.
As John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
To that end, here are the top 4 mistakes I learned during my tenure. I hope sharing these and their learnings will spark some good discussion – either internally or in the comments below.
1. Not Investing in Building User Data
This one definitely took me by surprise.
When I arrived, I had big plans to leverage CRM data to build remarketing pools, lookalike audiences, email campaigns, etc.
But there was no CRM database.
One thing not often considered about media companies is the fact the consumer data is controlled by the cable provider. The cable company collects the payment and therefore have all the associated consumer data:
Name
Address
Phone
Email
Credit Card Info
Purchase history
Login Username/Password
Etc.
In it’s simplest form, the media company simply provides the content the cable provider sells to the consumer. For the longest period of time, the value of collecting this data had been overlooked.
Plan of Action:
To access ‘free’ content within an app from the likes of NBC, CBS, Fox and others, you must go through an authentication process. This is done using the same credentials you would login to pay your cable bill.
In one of these apps, you’ve likely come across a login page that looks like this:
This poses two challenges:
Many consumers don’t know or remember this login. As a result, a lot of potential video consumption is lost.
As mentioned above, this is an interstitial page that drives to the cable provider as they own the username and password information.
In collaboration with the product team, a strategy was developed to implement a ‘free trial’ in exchange for the user’s email address. This would allow the user to forego the authentication requirement.
This was the minimal piece of information required for us to begin building a CRM and the beginning of a customer match marketing program across Google, Facebook and Twitter.
It also provided us with the initial piece of consumer data that we could subsequently build on with supplemental offers in exchange for profile completion.
The overarching lesson here is – invest in CRM. Even if you have to start with just a database of email addresses. Start somewhere.
2. Not Understanding the Nuances of Mobile Tracking
As you might imagine, much of our marketing strategy and budget focused on the mobile space. Interestingly enough, this is also a space where ad-blockers are not working.
That said, with mobile advertising comes tracking nuances that I was initially unaware of.
When I joined the team, we were full-steam into launching the first ever marketing campaign. In our haste to launch, we did not take the time to fully understand the impact of not solidifying our mobile tracking solution.
Our primary mobile advertising consisted of:
Desktop & Mobile Banner and Social Ads:
The standard process for attribution is based on the use of cookies.
When a user visits a website via their desktop or mobile device, your banner displays and a cookie is dropped on the visitor’s computers – regardless of whether or not they click through to your website.
Depending on the ad-server being used, this cookie can remain active for up to 2 years.
Eventually, if the user performs the desired action, that same cookie fires sending the proper attribution for your campaign. All is well in the world.
Apple’s Safari browser blocks 3rd party cookies by default which makes this ‘standard’ tracking more complicated. Among other things, this means your app cannot read the cookie data stored by Mobile Safari.
This presents a challenge to advertisers as Safari’s market share is around 33% globally.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our brand websites):
I’m sure you’ve noticed when you open a link in an app, it doesn’t open a new browser window. Rather, it opens an “in-app browser”.
This makes perfect sense for UX as it allows you to quickly return to the app.
The issue lies in the cookie drop on your phone. This naturally occurs with the click, however, it only drops a cookie for the in-app browser session. Unless the conversion happens immediately within that session, the attribution is lost.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our apps):
Quite simply, cookies are not used ‘in-app’. This left us with zero attribution or cross-device tracking.
The lack of attention to these details was quickly evident. At the end of the campaign, we were left pointing to engagement metrics like impressions, CTR and social shares as a measure of success.
Not at all what a consumer acquisition campaign should be reporting.
Plan of Action:
The quickest change to a leaky attribution bucket that we could make was to tackle the Safari issue. We simply updated our social and display targeting to remove Safari browsers.
While Google struggles with mobile and socially-driven demographic/interest targeting, Facebook provides the ability to target (or exclude) users by Web browser.
While not foolproof, for the likes of Twitter and Google, we targeted only older operating systems in an effort to capture users who were still using legacy browsers.
Considering our audience was US based, we estimated that we would only be missing out on approximately 15-18% of the overall market.
The other two challenges were a bit more complicated and required a mobile attribution solution that established the match between the user’s advertising ID and the publisher.
While there are many companies available for this, after evaluation, we landed on Kochava as our solution provider.
Pro tip: if you’re on a budget, Branch.io is a completely free solution that provides many of the same features.
3. Focusing on Sexy vs. Efficient
The programmatic display and mobile space is filled with shiny new tools, ad placements, and even ad units.
Combine that with the traditional types of advertising done by media companies (think big billboards, bus sides, etc) and these quickly become distractions from tactics that are proven to work.
I think it’s fair to say we spread our tactics far too wide in the early years in hopes of capitalizing on that sexy new ad-unit or the hot new ad targeting. This was, unfortunately, at the expense of tried and true tactics like traditional paid search.
A smarter approach would have been to test into these tactics rather than build a comprehensive media plan that included them.
Plan of Action:
I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. And Apple in general. One of my favorite quotes from him is:
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
With more data and proper attribution in place, we were more empowered to direct the media plans across the brands.
We focused on tried and true channels that significantly outperformed the “shiny objects” that had resulted in wasted spend and higher costs for creative development.
This paid off in a big way:
Total impressions declined significantly, however, clicks increased just as dramatically
Average click costs also declined
Cost per app install decreased nearly 200%
Cost per video start decreased 230%
Sometimes the ‘simple’ things just work better.
Ultimately, after seeing the data, I took away a few lessons that can be applied to almost any campaign:
Programmatic display isn’t the end all, be all. It’s an industry buzzword. I could even say ‘buzztactic’. It’s rife with click fraud and vendors with non-transparent ‘private networks’. It’s susceptible to ad blockers and comes with many privacy issues.
Don’t get me wrong. It can work.
But, test into programmatic options ONLY after you’ve exhausted the below tactics.
Focus on channels where a consumer is actively searching for you. They’re already self-qualified based on their actions. The most applicable here is paid search across Bing or Google.
Remarket your way to lower cost per acquisitions. You’ve already paid the premium CPC or CPM to get that user to your website. Typically, remarketing campaigns come with much lower costs. Why not re-engage a warm lead for less?
Image Source
#Hashtags are inherently social, but leave them out of social ad copy. Through our trimming of tactics, we also trimmed areas where consumers might be tempted to leave the topic at hand.
In this case, we removed any hashtag mentions in our ad copy so consumers would focus instead on the ‘install’. Our conversion rates improved as a result.
When pushing mobile installs, leverage a device in your creative. When you think about it, of course. It makes sense. But we proved it out via testing. Showing consumers an image of their device in the creative they’re being served improved conversion rates.
4. Not Leveraging an Always on Strategy
Consumers, myself included, are always on. Always plugged in. It’s a bad, addicting habit.
But, that also means running a campaign for a TV show only when that show is in-season leaves opportunity on the table.
There are a few challenges with being able to do this:
First, media companies are selling off the rights to their shows to the likes of Netflix and Hulu. In some cases, the ability to create a show is solely dependent on the revenue coming from these transactions.
This means an always on strategy will never be an option once the rights are sold.
Second, when we first launched our campaigns, we were spending large portions of our budget on fancy creative and higher cost CPMs trying to capture the next big thing.
This left us without budget pacing that would allow for an always on strategy.
Plan of Action:
We tackled the second issue as part of our streamlining of tactics. This enabled our budgets to stretch farther and for longer periods of time both pre-premier and post-finale.
The matter of rights was more complicated and is probably worth a completely separate post. That said, as a test, we decided to focus on a core set of shows where the rights had been retained for several years.
The hope was, if we could show a series with multiple seasons resulted in larger average views per user, we could start to build a case for investing in the rights for the more popular shows.
It worked.
We found not only were the average views per user up, but these campaigns were far outperforming pilot shows and series with limited rights.
This resulted in overall efficiencies for the campaign.
Wrapping Up
There’s no question the digital space can provide lots of opportunity for growth and learning. I have certainly learned a ton.
Hopefully sharing some of these insights will help you better streamline your digital marketing efforts, focus on what works, get your tracking in order and ultimately drive increased performance.
About the Author: Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly on SEO tactics, analytics and social media best practices. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on Instagram.
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4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
For the past nearly 3 years, I’ve been in charge of Audience Development for one of the largest media companies in the US.
I learned a LOT during that time. Even more important, I learned a lot about what NOT to do.
Not all of these things were personal ‘mistakes’ per se. Some were top down decisions that were influenced by lack of foresight, knowledge or budget. Others were due to an industry that is undergoing rapid change.
As John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
To that end, here are the top 4 mistakes I learned during my tenure. I hope sharing these and their learnings will spark some good discussion – either internally or in the comments below.
1. Not Investing in Building User Data
This one definitely took me by surprise.
When I arrived, I had big plans to leverage CRM data to build remarketing pools, lookalike audiences, email campaigns, etc.
But there was no CRM database.
One thing not often considered about media companies is the fact the consumer data is controlled by the cable provider. The cable company collects the payment and therefore have all the associated consumer data:
Name
Address
Phone
Email
Credit Card Info
Purchase history
Login Username/Password
Etc.
In it’s simplest form, the media company simply provides the content the cable provider sells to the consumer. For the longest period of time, the value of collecting this data had been overlooked.
Plan of Action:
To access ‘free’ content within an app from the likes of NBC, CBS, Fox and others, you must go through an authentication process. This is done using the same credentials you would login to pay your cable bill.
In one of these apps, you’ve likely come across a login page that looks like this:
This poses two challenges:
Many consumers don’t know or remember this login. As a result, a lot of potential video consumption is lost.
As mentioned above, this is an interstitial page that drives to the cable provider as they own the username and password information.
In collaboration with the product team, a strategy was developed to implement a ‘free trial’ in exchange for the user’s email address. This would allow the user to forego the authentication requirement.
This was the minimal piece of information required for us to begin building a CRM and the beginning of a customer match marketing program across Google, Facebook and Twitter.
It also provided us with the initial piece of consumer data that we could subsequently build on with supplemental offers in exchange for profile completion.
The overarching lesson here is – invest in CRM. Even if you have to start with just a database of email addresses. Start somewhere.
2. Not Understanding the Nuances of Mobile Tracking
As you might imagine, much of our marketing strategy and budget focused on the mobile space. Interestingly enough, this is also a space where ad-blockers are not working.
That said, with mobile advertising comes tracking nuances that I was initially unaware of.
When I joined the team, we were full-steam into launching the first ever marketing campaign. In our haste to launch, we did not take the time to fully understand the impact of not solidifying our mobile tracking solution.
Our primary mobile advertising consisted of:
Desktop & Mobile Banner and Social Ads:
The standard process for attribution is based on the use of cookies.
When a user visits a website via their desktop or mobile device, your banner displays and a cookie is dropped on the visitor’s computers – regardless of whether or not they click through to your website.
Depending on the ad-server being used, this cookie can remain active for up to 2 years.
Eventually, if the user performs the desired action, that same cookie fires sending the proper attribution for your campaign. All is well in the world.
Apple’s Safari browser blocks 3rd party cookies by default which makes this ‘standard’ tracking more complicated. Among other things, this means your app cannot read the cookie data stored by Mobile Safari.
This presents a challenge to advertisers as Safari’s market share is around 33% globally.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our brand websites):
I’m sure you’ve noticed when you open a link in an app, it doesn’t open a new browser window. Rather, it opens an “in-app browser”.
This makes perfect sense for UX as it allows you to quickly return to the app.
The issue lies in the cookie drop on your phone. This naturally occurs with the click, however, it only drops a cookie for the in-app browser session. Unless the conversion happens immediately within that session, the attribution is lost.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our apps):
Quite simply, cookies are not used ‘in-app’. This left us with zero attribution or cross-device tracking.
The lack of attention to these details was quickly evident. At the end of the campaign, we were left pointing to engagement metrics like impressions, CTR and social shares as a measure of success.
Not at all what a consumer acquisition campaign should be reporting.
Plan of Action:
The quickest change to a leaky attribution bucket that we could make was to tackle the Safari issue. We simply updated our social and display targeting to remove Safari browsers.
While Google struggles with mobile and socially-driven demographic/interest targeting, Facebook provides the ability to target (or exclude) users by Web browser.
While not foolproof, for the likes of Twitter and Google, we targeted only older operating systems in an effort to capture users who were still using legacy browsers.
Considering our audience was US based, we estimated that we would only be missing out on approximately 15-18% of the overall market.
The other two challenges were a bit more complicated and required a mobile attribution solution that established the match between the user’s advertising ID and the publisher.
While there are many companies available for this, after evaluation, we landed on Kochava as our solution provider.
Pro tip: if you’re on a budget, Branch.io is a completely free solution that provides many of the same features.
3. Focusing on Sexy vs. Efficient
The programmatic display and mobile space is filled with shiny new tools, ad placements, and even ad units.
Combine that with the traditional types of advertising done by media companies (think big billboards, bus sides, etc) and these quickly become distractions from tactics that are proven to work.
I think it’s fair to say we spread our tactics far too wide in the early years in hopes of capitalizing on that sexy new ad-unit or the hot new ad targeting. This was, unfortunately, at the expense of tried and true tactics like traditional paid search.
A smarter approach would have been to test into these tactics rather than build a comprehensive media plan that included them.
Plan of Action:
I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. And Apple in general. One of my favorite quotes from him is:
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
With more data and proper attribution in place, we were more empowered to direct the media plans across the brands.
We focused on tried and true channels that significantly outperformed the “shiny objects” that had resulted in wasted spend and higher costs for creative development.
This paid off in a big way:
Total impressions declined significantly, however, clicks increased just as dramatically
Average click costs also declined
Cost per app install decreased nearly 200%
Cost per video start decreased 230%
Sometimes the ‘simple’ things just work better.
Ultimately, after seeing the data, I took away a few lessons that can be applied to almost any campaign:
Programmatic display isn’t the end all, be all. It’s an industry buzzword. I could even say ‘buzztactic’. It’s rife with click fraud and vendors with non-transparent ‘private networks’. It’s susceptible to ad blockers and comes with many privacy issues.
Don’t get me wrong. It can work.
But, test into programmatic options ONLY after you’ve exhausted the below tactics.
Focus on channels where a consumer is actively searching for you. They’re already self-qualified based on their actions. The most applicable here is paid search across Bing or Google.
Remarket your way to lower cost per acquisitions. You’ve already paid the premium CPC or CPM to get that user to your website. Typically, remarketing campaigns come with much lower costs. Why not re-engage a warm lead for less?
Image Source
#Hashtags are inherently social, but leave them out of social ad copy. Through our trimming of tactics, we also trimmed areas where consumers might be tempted to leave the topic at hand.
In this case, we removed any hashtag mentions in our ad copy so consumers would focus instead on the ‘install’. Our conversion rates improved as a result.
When pushing mobile installs, leverage a device in your creative. When you think about it, of course. It makes sense. But we proved it out via testing. Showing consumers an image of their device in the creative they’re being served improved conversion rates.
4. Not Leveraging an Always on Strategy
Consumers, myself included, are always on. Always plugged in. It’s a bad, addicting habit.
But, that also means running a campaign for a TV show only when that show is in-season leaves opportunity on the table.
There are a few challenges with being able to do this:
First, media companies are selling off the rights to their shows to the likes of Netflix and Hulu. In some cases, the ability to create a show is solely dependent on the revenue coming from these transactions.
This means an always on strategy will never be an option once the rights are sold.
Second, when we first launched our campaigns, we were spending large portions of our budget on fancy creative and higher cost CPMs trying to capture the next big thing.
This left us without budget pacing that would allow for an always on strategy.
Plan of Action:
We tackled the second issue as part of our streamlining of tactics. This enabled our budgets to stretch farther and for longer periods of time both pre-premier and post-finale.
The matter of rights was more complicated and is probably worth a completely separate post. That said, as a test, we decided to focus on a core set of shows where the rights had been retained for several years.
The hope was, if we could show a series with multiple seasons resulted in larger average views per user, we could start to build a case for investing in the rights for the more popular shows.
It worked.
We found not only were the average views per user up, but these campaigns were far outperforming pilot shows and series with limited rights.
This resulted in overall efficiencies for the campaign.
Wrapping Up
There’s no question the digital space can provide lots of opportunity for growth and learning. I have certainly learned a ton.
Hopefully sharing some of these insights will help you better streamline your digital marketing efforts, focus on what works, get your tracking in order and ultimately drive increased performance.
About the Author: Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly on SEO tactics, analytics and social media best practices. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on Instagram.
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Text
4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
For the past nearly 3 years, I’ve been in charge of Audience Development for one of the largest media companies in the US.
I learned a LOT during that time. Even more important, I learned a lot about what NOT to do.
Not all of these things were personal ‘mistakes’ per se. Some were top down decisions that were influenced by lack of foresight, knowledge or budget. Others were due to an industry that is undergoing rapid change.
As John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
To that end, here are the top 4 mistakes I learned during my tenure. I hope sharing these and their learnings will spark some good discussion – either internally or in the comments below.
1. Not Investing in Building User Data
This one definitely took me by surprise.
When I arrived, I had big plans to leverage CRM data to build remarketing pools, lookalike audiences, email campaigns, etc.
But there was no CRM database.
One thing not often considered about media companies is the fact the consumer data is controlled by the cable provider. The cable company collects the payment and therefore have all the associated consumer data:
Name
Address
Phone
Email
Credit Card Info
Purchase history
Login Username/Password
Etc.
In it’s simplest form, the media company simply provides the content the cable provider sells to the consumer. For the longest period of time, the value of collecting this data had been overlooked.
Plan of Action:
To access ‘free’ content within an app from the likes of NBC, CBS, Fox and others, you must go through an authentication process. This is done using the same credentials you would login to pay your cable bill.
In one of these apps, you’ve likely come across a login page that looks like this:
This poses two challenges:
Many consumers don’t know or remember this login. As a result, a lot of potential video consumption is lost.
As mentioned above, this is an interstitial page that drives to the cable provider as they own the username and password information.
In collaboration with the product team, a strategy was developed to implement a ‘free trial’ in exchange for the user’s email address. This would allow the user to forego the authentication requirement.
This was the minimal piece of information required for us to begin building a CRM and the beginning of a customer match marketing program across Google, Facebook and Twitter.
It also provided us with the initial piece of consumer data that we could subsequently build on with supplemental offers in exchange for profile completion.
The overarching lesson here is – invest in CRM. Even if you have to start with just a database of email addresses. Start somewhere.
2. Not Understanding the Nuances of Mobile Tracking
As you might imagine, much of our marketing strategy and budget focused on the mobile space. Interestingly enough, this is also a space where ad-blockers are not working.
That said, with mobile advertising comes tracking nuances that I was initially unaware of.
When I joined the team, we were full-steam into launching the first ever marketing campaign. In our haste to launch, we did not take the time to fully understand the impact of not solidifying our mobile tracking solution.
Our primary mobile advertising consisted of:
Desktop & Mobile Banner and Social Ads:
The standard process for attribution is based on the use of cookies.
When a user visits a website via their desktop or mobile device, your banner displays and a cookie is dropped on the visitor’s computers – regardless of whether or not they click through to your website.
Depending on the ad-server being used, this cookie can remain active for up to 2 years.
Eventually, if the user performs the desired action, that same cookie fires sending the proper attribution for your campaign. All is well in the world.
Apple’s Safari browser blocks 3rd party cookies by default which makes this ‘standard’ tracking more complicated. Among other things, this means your app cannot read the cookie data stored by Mobile Safari.
This presents a challenge to advertisers as Safari’s market share is around 33% globally.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our brand websites):
I’m sure you’ve noticed when you open a link in an app, it doesn’t open a new browser window. Rather, it opens an “in-app browser”.
This makes perfect sense for UX as it allows you to quickly return to the app.
The issue lies in the cookie drop on your phone. This naturally occurs with the click, however, it only drops a cookie for the in-app browser session. Unless the conversion happens immediately within that session, the attribution is lost.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our apps):
Quite simply, cookies are not used ‘in-app’. This left us with zero attribution or cross-device tracking.
The lack of attention to these details was quickly evident. At the end of the campaign, we were left pointing to engagement metrics like impressions, CTR and social shares as a measure of success.
Not at all what a consumer acquisition campaign should be reporting.
Plan of Action:
The quickest change to a leaky attribution bucket that we could make was to tackle the Safari issue. We simply updated our social and display targeting to remove Safari browsers.
While Google struggles with mobile and socially-driven demographic/interest targeting, Facebook provides the ability to target (or exclude) users by Web browser.
While not foolproof, for the likes of Twitter and Google, we targeted only older operating systems in an effort to capture users who were still using legacy browsers.
Considering our audience was US based, we estimated that we would only be missing out on approximately 15-18% of the overall market.
The other two challenges were a bit more complicated and required a mobile attribution solution that established the match between the user’s advertising ID and the publisher.
While there are many companies available for this, after evaluation, we landed on Kochava as our solution provider.
Pro tip: if you’re on a budget, Branch.io is a completely free solution that provides many of the same features.
3. Focusing on Sexy vs. Efficient
The programmatic display and mobile space is filled with shiny new tools, ad placements, and even ad units.
Combine that with the traditional types of advertising done by media companies (think big billboards, bus sides, etc) and these quickly become distractions from tactics that are proven to work.
I think it’s fair to say we spread our tactics far too wide in the early years in hopes of capitalizing on that sexy new ad-unit or the hot new ad targeting. This was, unfortunately, at the expense of tried and true tactics like traditional paid search.
A smarter approach would have been to test into these tactics rather than build a comprehensive media plan that included them.
Plan of Action:
I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. And Apple in general. One of my favorite quotes from him is:
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
With more data and proper attribution in place, we were more empowered to direct the media plans across the brands.
We focused on tried and true channels that significantly outperformed the “shiny objects” that had resulted in wasted spend and higher costs for creative development.
This paid off in a big way:
Total impressions declined significantly, however, clicks increased just as dramatically
Average click costs also declined
Cost per app install decreased nearly 200%
Cost per video start decreased 230%
Sometimes the ‘simple’ things just work better.
Ultimately, after seeing the data, I took away a few lessons that can be applied to almost any campaign:
Programmatic display isn’t the end all, be all. It’s an industry buzzword. I could even say ‘buzztactic’. It’s rife with click fraud and vendors with non-transparent ‘private networks’. It’s susceptible to ad blockers and comes with many privacy issues.
Don’t get me wrong. It can work.
But, test into programmatic options ONLY after you’ve exhausted the below tactics.
Focus on channels where a consumer is actively searching for you. They’re already self-qualified based on their actions. The most applicable here is paid search across Bing or Google.
Remarket your way to lower cost per acquisitions. You’ve already paid the premium CPC or CPM to get that user to your website. Typically, remarketing campaigns come with much lower costs. Why not re-engage a warm lead for less?
Image Source
#Hashtags are inherently social, but leave them out of social ad copy. Through our trimming of tactics, we also trimmed areas where consumers might be tempted to leave the topic at hand.
In this case, we removed any hashtag mentions in our ad copy so consumers would focus instead on the ‘install’. Our conversion rates improved as a result.
When pushing mobile installs, leverage a device in your creative. When you think about it, of course. It makes sense. But we proved it out via testing. Showing consumers an image of their device in the creative they’re being served improved conversion rates.
4. Not Leveraging an Always on Strategy
Consumers, myself included, are always on. Always plugged in. It’s a bad, addicting habit.
But, that also means running a campaign for a TV show only when that show is in-season leaves opportunity on the table.
There are a few challenges with being able to do this:
First, media companies are selling off the rights to their shows to the likes of Netflix and Hulu. In some cases, the ability to create a show is solely dependent on the revenue coming from these transactions.
This means an always on strategy will never be an option once the rights are sold.
Second, when we first launched our campaigns, we were spending large portions of our budget on fancy creative and higher cost CPMs trying to capture the next big thing.
This left us without budget pacing that would allow for an always on strategy.
Plan of Action:
We tackled the second issue as part of our streamlining of tactics. This enabled our budgets to stretch farther and for longer periods of time both pre-premier and post-finale.
The matter of rights was more complicated and is probably worth a completely separate post. That said, as a test, we decided to focus on a core set of shows where the rights had been retained for several years.
The hope was, if we could show a series with multiple seasons resulted in larger average views per user, we could start to build a case for investing in the rights for the more popular shows.
It worked.
We found not only were the average views per user up, but these campaigns were far outperforming pilot shows and series with limited rights.
This resulted in overall efficiencies for the campaign.
Wrapping Up
There’s no question the digital space can provide lots of opportunity for growth and learning. I have certainly learned a ton.
Hopefully sharing some of these insights will help you better streamline your digital marketing efforts, focus on what works, get your tracking in order and ultimately drive increased performance.
About the Author: Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly on SEO tactics, analytics and social media best practices. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on Instagram.
from WordPress https://reviewandbonuss.wordpress.com/2017/08/18/4-mistakes-i-learned-about-marketing-and-data-while-working-at-a-fortune-50-company/
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4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
For the past nearly 3 years, I’ve been in charge of Audience Development for one of the largest media companies in the US.
I learned a LOT during that time. Even more important, I learned a lot about what NOT to do.
Not all of these things were personal ‘mistakes’ per se. Some were top down decisions that were influenced by lack of foresight, knowledge or budget. Others were due to an industry that is undergoing rapid change.
As John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
To that end, here are the top 4 mistakes I learned during my tenure. I hope sharing these and their learnings will spark some good discussion – either internally or in the comments below.
1. Not Investing in Building User Data
This one definitely took me by surprise.
When I arrived, I had big plans to leverage CRM data to build remarketing pools, lookalike audiences, email campaigns, etc.
But there was no CRM database.
One thing not often considered about media companies is the fact the consumer data is controlled by the cable provider. The cable company collects the payment and therefore have all the associated consumer data:
Name
Address
Phone
Email
Credit Card Info
Purchase history
Login Username/Password
Etc.
In it’s simplest form, the media company simply provides the content the cable provider sells to the consumer. For the longest period of time, the value of collecting this data had been overlooked.
Plan of Action:
To access ‘free’ content within an app from the likes of NBC, CBS, Fox and others, you must go through an authentication process. This is done using the same credentials you would login to pay your cable bill.
In one of these apps, you’ve likely come across a login page that looks like this:
This poses two challenges:
Many consumers don’t know or remember this login. As a result, a lot of potential video consumption is lost.
As mentioned above, this is an interstitial page that drives to the cable provider as they own the username and password information.
In collaboration with the product team, a strategy was developed to implement a ‘free trial’ in exchange for the user’s email address. This would allow the user to forego the authentication requirement.
This was the minimal piece of information required for us to begin building a CRM and the beginning of a customer match marketing program across Google, Facebook and Twitter.
It also provided us with the initial piece of consumer data that we could subsequently build on with supplemental offers in exchange for profile completion.
The overarching lesson here is – invest in CRM. Even if you have to start with just a database of email addresses. Start somewhere.
2. Not Understanding the Nuances of Mobile Tracking
As you might imagine, much of our marketing strategy and budget focused on the mobile space. Interestingly enough, this is also a space where ad-blockers are not working.
That said, with mobile advertising comes tracking nuances that I was initially unaware of.
When I joined the team, we were full-steam into launching the first ever marketing campaign. In our haste to launch, we did not take the time to fully understand the impact of not solidifying our mobile tracking solution.
Our primary mobile advertising consisted of:
Desktop & Mobile Banner and Social Ads:
The standard process for attribution is based on the use of cookies.
When a user visits a website via their desktop or mobile device, your banner displays and a cookie is dropped on the visitor’s computers – regardless of whether or not they click through to your website.
Depending on the ad-server being used, this cookie can remain active for up to 2 years.
Eventually, if the user performs the desired action, that same cookie fires sending the proper attribution for your campaign. All is well in the world.
Apple’s Safari browser blocks 3rd party cookies by default which makes this ‘standard’ tracking more complicated. Among other things, this means your app cannot read the cookie data stored by Mobile Safari.
This presents a challenge to advertisers as Safari’s market share is around 33% globally.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our brand websites):
I’m sure you’ve noticed when you open a link in an app, it doesn’t open a new browser window. Rather, it opens an “in-app browser”.
This makes perfect sense for UX as it allows you to quickly return to the app.
The issue lies in the cookie drop on your phone. This naturally occurs with the click, however, it only drops a cookie for the in-app browser session. Unless the conversion happens immediately within that session, the attribution is lost.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our apps):
Quite simply, cookies are not used ‘in-app’. This left us with zero attribution or cross-device tracking.
The lack of attention to these details was quickly evident. At the end of the campaign, we were left pointing to engagement metrics like impressions, CTR and social shares as a measure of success.
Not at all what a consumer acquisition campaign should be reporting.
Plan of Action:
The quickest change to a leaky attribution bucket that we could make was to tackle the Safari issue. We simply updated our social and display targeting to remove Safari browsers.
While Google struggles with mobile and socially-driven demographic/interest targeting, Facebook provides the ability to target (or exclude) users by Web browser.
While not foolproof, for the likes of Twitter and Google, we targeted only older operating systems in an effort to capture users who were still using legacy browsers.
Considering our audience was US based, we estimated that we would only be missing out on approximately 15-18% of the overall market.
The other two challenges were a bit more complicated and required a mobile attribution solution that established the match between the user’s advertising ID and the publisher.
While there are many companies available for this, after evaluation, we landed on Kochava as our solution provider.
Pro tip: if you’re on a budget, Branch.io is a completely free solution that provides many of the same features.
3. Focusing on Sexy vs. Efficient
The programmatic display and mobile space is filled with shiny new tools, ad placements, and even ad units.
Combine that with the traditional types of advertising done by media companies (think big billboards, bus sides, etc) and these quickly become distractions from tactics that are proven to work.
I think it’s fair to say we spread our tactics far too wide in the early years in hopes of capitalizing on that sexy new ad-unit or the hot new ad targeting. This was, unfortunately, at the expense of tried and true tactics like traditional paid search.
A smarter approach would have been to test into these tactics rather than build a comprehensive media plan that included them.
Plan of Action:
I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. And Apple in general. One of my favorite quotes from him is:
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
With more data and proper attribution in place, we were more empowered to direct the media plans across the brands.
We focused on tried and true channels that significantly outperformed the “shiny objects” that had resulted in wasted spend and higher costs for creative development.
This paid off in a big way:
Total impressions declined significantly, however, clicks increased just as dramatically
Average click costs also declined
Cost per app install decreased nearly 200%
Cost per video start decreased 230%
Sometimes the ‘simple’ things just work better.
Ultimately, after seeing the data, I took away a few lessons that can be applied to almost any campaign:
Programmatic display isn’t the end all, be all. It’s an industry buzzword. I could even say ‘buzztactic’. It’s rife with click fraud and vendors with non-transparent ‘private networks’. It’s susceptible to ad blockers and comes with many privacy issues.
Don’t get me wrong. It can work.
But, test into programmatic options ONLY after you’ve exhausted the below tactics.
Focus on channels where a consumer is actively searching for you. They’re already self-qualified based on their actions. The most applicable here is paid search across Bing or Google.
Remarket your way to lower cost per acquisitions. You’ve already paid the premium CPC or CPM to get that user to your website. Typically, remarketing campaigns come with much lower costs. Why not re-engage a warm lead for less?
Image Source
#Hashtags are inherently social, but leave them out of social ad copy. Through our trimming of tactics, we also trimmed areas where consumers might be tempted to leave the topic at hand.
In this case, we removed any hashtag mentions in our ad copy so consumers would focus instead on the ‘install’. Our conversion rates improved as a result.
When pushing mobile installs, leverage a device in your creative. When you think about it, of course. It makes sense. But we proved it out via testing. Showing consumers an image of their device in the creative they’re being served improved conversion rates.
4. Not Leveraging an Always on Strategy
Consumers, myself included, are always on. Always plugged in. It’s a bad, addicting habit.
But, that also means running a campaign for a TV show only when that show is in-season leaves opportunity on the table.
There are a few challenges with being able to do this:
First, media companies are selling off the rights to their shows to the likes of Netflix and Hulu. In some cases, the ability to create a show is solely dependent on the revenue coming from these transactions.
This means an always on strategy will never be an option once the rights are sold.
Second, when we first launched our campaigns, we were spending large portions of our budget on fancy creative and higher cost CPMs trying to capture the next big thing.
This left us without budget pacing that would allow for an always on strategy.
Plan of Action:
We tackled the second issue as part of our streamlining of tactics. This enabled our budgets to stretch farther and for longer periods of time both pre-premier and post-finale.
The matter of rights was more complicated and is probably worth a completely separate post. That said, as a test, we decided to focus on a core set of shows where the rights had been retained for several years.
The hope was, if we could show a series with multiple seasons resulted in larger average views per user, we could start to build a case for investing in the rights for the more popular shows.
It worked.
We found not only were the average views per user up, but these campaigns were far outperforming pilot shows and series with limited rights.
This resulted in overall efficiencies for the campaign.
Wrapping Up
There’s no question the digital space can provide lots of opportunity for growth and learning. I have certainly learned a ton.
Hopefully sharing some of these insights will help you better streamline your digital marketing efforts, focus on what works, get your tracking in order and ultimately drive increased performance.
About the Author: Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly on SEO tactics, analytics and social media best practices. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on Instagram.
Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2017/08/4-mistakes-i-learned-about-marketing.html
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Text
4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
For the past nearly 3 years, I’ve been in charge of Audience Development for one of the largest media companies in the US.
I learned a LOT during that time. Even more important, I learned a lot about what NOT to do.
Not all of these things were personal ‘mistakes’ per se. Some were top down decisions that were influenced by lack of foresight, knowledge or budget. Others were due to an industry that is undergoing rapid change.
As John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
To that end, here are the top 4 mistakes I learned during my tenure. I hope sharing these and their learnings will spark some good discussion – either internally or in the comments below.
1. Not Investing in Building User Data
This one definitely took me by surprise.
When I arrived, I had big plans to leverage CRM data to build remarketing pools, lookalike audiences, , etc.
But there was no CRM database.
One thing not often considered about media companies is the fact the consumer data is controlled by the cable provider. The cable company collects the payment and therefore have all the associated consumer data:
Name
Address
Phone
Email
Credit Card Info
Purchase history
Login Username/Password
Etc.
In it’s simplest form, the media company simply provides the content the cable provider sells to the consumer. For the longest period of time, the value of collecting this data had been overlooked.
Plan of Action:
To access ‘free’ content within an app from the likes of NBC, CBS, Fox and others, you must go through an authentication process. This is done using the same credentials you would login to pay your cable bill.
In one of these apps, you’ve likely come across a login page that looks like this:
This poses two challenges:
Many consumers don’t know or remember this login. As a result, a lot of potential video consumption is lost.
As mentioned above, this is an interstitial page that drives to the cable provider as they own the username and password information.
In collaboration with the product team, a strategy was developed to implement a ‘free trial’ in exchange for the user’s email address. This would allow the user to forego the authentication requirement.
This was the minimal piece of information required for us to begin building a CRM and the beginning of a customer match marketing program across Google, Facebook and Twitter.
It also provided us with the initial piece of consumer data that we could subsequently build on with supplemental offers in exchange for profile completion.
The overarching lesson here is – invest in CRM. Even if you have to start with just a database of email addresses. Start somewhere.
2. Not Understanding the Nuances of Mobile Tracking
As you might imagine, much of our marketing strategy and budget focused on the mobile space. Interestingly enough, this is also a space where ad-blockers are not working.
That said, with mobile advertising comes tracking nuances that I was initially unaware of.
When I joined the team, we were full-steam into launching the first ever marketing campaign. In our haste to launch, we did not take the time to fully understand the impact of not solidifying our mobile tracking solution.
Our primary mobile advertising consisted of:
Desktop & Mobile Banner and Social Ads:
The standard process for attribution is based on the use of cookies.
When a user visits a website via their desktop or mobile device, your banner displays and a cookie is dropped on the visitor’s computers – regardless of whether or not they click through to your website.
Depending on the ad-server being used, this cookie can remain active for up to 2 years.
Eventually, if the user performs the desired action, that same cookie fires sending the proper attribution for your campaign. All is well in the world.
Apple’s Safari browser blocks 3rd party cookies by default which makes this ‘standard’ tracking more complicated. Among other things, this means your app cannot read the cookie data stored by Mobile Safari.
This presents a challenge to advertisers as Safari’s market share is around 33% globally.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our brand websites):
I’m sure you’ve noticed when you open a link in an app, it doesn’t open a new browser window. Rather, it opens an “in-app browser”.
This makes perfect sense for UX as it allows you to quickly return to the app.
The issue lies in the cookie drop on your phone. This naturally occurs with the click, however, it only drops a cookie for the in-app browser session. Unless the conversion happens immediately within that session, the attribution is lost.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our apps):
Quite simply, cookies are not used ‘in-app’. This left us with zero attribution or cross-device tracking.
The lack of attention to these details was quickly evident. At the end of the campaign, we were left pointing to engagement metrics like impressions, CTR and social shares as a measure of success.
Not at all what a consumer acquisition campaign should be reporting.
Plan of Action:
The quickest change to a leaky attribution bucket that we could make was to tackle the Safari issue. We simply updated our social and display targeting to remove Safari browsers.
While Google struggles with mobile and socially-driven demographic/interest targeting, Facebook provides the ability to target (or exclude) users by Web browser.
While not foolproof, for the likes of Twitter and Google, we targeted only older operating systems in an effort to capture users who were still using legacy browsers.
Considering our audience was US based, we estimated that we would only be missing out on approximately 15-18% of the overall market.
The other two challenges were a bit more complicated and required a mobile attribution solution that established the match between the user’s advertising ID and the publisher.
While there are many companies available for this, after evaluation, we landed on Kochava as our solution provider.
Pro tip: if you’re on a budget, Branch.io is a completely free solution that provides many of the same features.
3. Focusing on Sexy vs. Efficient
The programmatic display and mobile space is filled with shiny new tools, ad placements, and even ad units.
Combine that with the traditional types of advertising done by media companies (think big billboards, bus sides, etc) and these quickly become distractions from tactics that are proven to work.
I think it’s fair to say we spread our tactics far too wide in the early years in hopes of capitalizing on that sexy new ad-unit or the hot new ad targeting. This was, unfortunately, at the expense of tried and true tactics like traditional paid search.
A smarter approach would have been to test into these tactics rather than build a comprehensive media plan that included them.
Plan of Action:
I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. And Apple in general. One of my favorite quotes from him is:
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
With more data and proper attribution in place, we were more empowered to direct the media plans across the brands.
We focused on tried and true channels that significantly outperformed the “shiny objects” that had resulted in wasted spend and higher costs for creative development.
This paid off in a big way:
Total impressions declined significantly, however, clicks increased just as dramatically
Average click costs also declined
Cost per app install decreased nearly 200%
Cost per video start decreased 230%
Sometimes the ‘simple’ things just work better.
Ultimately, after seeing the data, I took away a few lessons that can be applied to almost any campaign:
Programmatic display isn’t the end all, be all. It’s an industry buzzword. I could even say ‘buzztactic’. It’s rife with click fraud and vendors with non-transparent ‘private networks’. It’s susceptible to ad blockers and comes with many privacy issues.
Don’t get me wrong. It can work.
But, test into programmatic options ONLY after you’ve exhausted the below tactics.
Focus on channels where a consumer is actively searching for you. They’re already self-qualified based on their actions. The most applicable here is paid search across Bing or Google.
Remarket your way to lower cost per acquisitions. You’ve already paid the premium CPC or CPM to get that user to your website. Typically, remarketing campaigns come with much lower costs. Why not re-engage a warm lead for less?
Image Source
#Hashtags are inherently social, but leave them out of social ad copy. Through our trimming of tactics, we also trimmed areas where consumers might be tempted to leave the topic at hand.
In this case, we removed any hashtag mentions in our ad copy so consumers would focus instead on the ‘install’. Our conversion rates improved as a result.
When pushing mobile installs, leverage a device in your creative. When you think about it, of course. It makes sense. But we proved it out via testing. Showing consumers an image of their device in the creative they’re being served improved conversion rates.
4. Not Leveraging an Always on Strategy
Consumers, myself included, are always on. Always plugged in. It’s a bad, addicting habit.
But, that also means running a campaign for a TV show only when that show is in-season leaves opportunity on the table.
There are a few challenges with being able to do this:
First, media companies are selling off the rights to their shows to the likes of Netflix and Hulu. In some cases, the ability to create a show is solely dependent on the revenue coming from these transactions.
This means an always on strategy will never be an option once the rights are sold.
Second, when we first launched our campaigns, we were spending large portions of our budget on fancy creative and higher cost CPMs trying to capture the next big thing.
This left us without budget pacing that would allow for an always on strategy.
Plan of Action:
We tackled the second issue as part of our streamlining of tactics. This enabled our budgets to stretch farther and for longer periods of time both pre-premier and post-finale.
The matter of rights was more complicated and is probably worth a completely separate post. That said, as a test, we decided to focus on a core set of shows where the rights had been retained for several years.
The hope was, if we could show a series with multiple seasons resulted in larger average views per user, we could start to build a case for investing in the rights for the more popular shows.
It worked.
We found not only were the average views per user up, but these campaigns were far outperforming pilot shows and series with limited rights.
This resulted in overall efficiencies for the campaign.
Wrapping Up
There’s no question the digital space can provide lots of opportunity for growth and learning. I have certainly learned a ton.
Hopefully sharing some of these insights will help you better streamline your digital marketing efforts, focus on what works, get your tracking in order and ultimately drive increased performance.
About the Author: Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly on SEO tactics, analytics and social media best practices. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on Instagram.
from DIYS http://ift.tt/2wYmkQq
0 notes
Text
4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
For the past nearly 3 years, I’ve been in charge of Audience Development for one of the largest media companies in the US.
I learned a LOT during that time. Even more important, I learned a lot about what NOT to do.
Not all of these things were personal ‘mistakes’ per se. Some were top down decisions that were influenced by lack of foresight, knowledge or budget. Others were due to an industry that is undergoing rapid change.
As John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
To that end, here are the top 4 mistakes I learned during my tenure. I hope sharing these and their learnings will spark some good discussion – either internally or in the comments below.
1. Not Investing in Building User Data
This one definitely took me by surprise.
When I arrived, I had big plans to leverage CRM data to build remarketing pools, lookalike audiences, email campaigns, etc.
But there was no CRM database.
One thing not often considered about media companies is the fact the consumer data is controlled by the cable provider. The cable company collects the payment and therefore have all the associated consumer data:
Name
Address
Phone
Email
Credit Card Info
Purchase history
Login Username/Password
Etc.
In it’s simplest form, the media company simply provides the content the cable provider sells to the consumer. For the longest period of time, the value of collecting this data had been overlooked.
Plan of Action:
To access ‘free’ content within an app from the likes of NBC, CBS, Fox and others, you must go through an authentication process. This is done using the same credentials you would login to pay your cable bill.
In one of these apps, you’ve likely come across a login page that looks like this:
This poses two challenges:
Many consumers don’t know or remember this login. As a result, a lot of potential video consumption is lost.
As mentioned above, this is an interstitial page that drives to the cable provider as they own the username and password information.
In collaboration with the product team, a strategy was developed to implement a ‘free trial’ in exchange for the user’s email address. This would allow the user to forego the authentication requirement.
This was the minimal piece of information required for us to begin building a CRM and the beginning of a customer match marketing program across Google, Facebook and Twitter.
It also provided us with the initial piece of consumer data that we could subsequently build on with supplemental offers in exchange for profile completion.
The overarching lesson here is – invest in CRM. Even if you have to start with just a database of email addresses. Start somewhere.
2. Not Understanding the Nuances of Mobile Tracking
As you might imagine, much of our marketing strategy and budget focused on the mobile space. Interestingly enough, this is also a space where ad-blockers are not working.
That said, with mobile advertising comes tracking nuances that I was initially unaware of.
When I joined the team, we were full-steam into launching the first ever marketing campaign. In our haste to launch, we did not take the time to fully understand the impact of not solidifying our mobile tracking solution.
Our primary mobile advertising consisted of:
Desktop & Mobile Banner and Social Ads:
The standard process for attribution is based on the use of cookies.
When a user visits a website via their desktop or mobile device, your banner displays and a cookie is dropped on the visitor’s computers – regardless of whether or not they click through to your website.
Depending on the ad-server being used, this cookie can remain active for up to 2 years.
Eventually, if the user performs the desired action, that same cookie fires sending the proper attribution for your campaign. All is well in the world.
Apple’s Safari browser blocks 3rd party cookies by default which makes this ‘standard’ tracking more complicated. Among other things, this means your app cannot read the cookie data stored by Mobile Safari.
This presents a challenge to advertisers as Safari’s market share is around 33% globally.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our brand websites):
I’m sure you’ve noticed when you open a link in an app, it doesn’t open a new browser window. Rather, it opens an “in-app browser”.
This makes perfect sense for UX as it allows you to quickly return to the app.
The issue lies in the cookie drop on your phone. This naturally occurs with the click, however, it only drops a cookie for the in-app browser session. Unless the conversion happens immediately within that session, the attribution is lost.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our apps):
Quite simply, cookies are not used ‘in-app’. This left us with zero attribution or cross-device tracking.
The lack of attention to these details was quickly evident. At the end of the campaign, we were left pointing to engagement metrics like impressions, CTR and social shares as a measure of success.
Not at all what a consumer acquisition campaign should be reporting.
Plan of Action:
The quickest change to a leaky attribution bucket that we could make was to tackle the Safari issue. We simply updated our social and display targeting to remove Safari browsers.
While Google struggles with mobile and socially-driven demographic/interest targeting, Facebook provides the ability to target (or exclude) users by Web browser.
While not foolproof, for the likes of Twitter and Google, we targeted only older operating systems in an effort to capture users who were still using legacy browsers.
Considering our audience was US based, we estimated that we would only be missing out on approximately 15-18% of the overall market.
The other two challenges were a bit more complicated and required a mobile attribution solution that established the match between the user’s advertising ID and the publisher.
While there are many companies available for this, after evaluation, we landed on Kochava as our solution provider.
Pro tip: if you’re on a budget, Branch.io is a completely free solution that provides many of the same features.
3. Focusing on Sexy vs. Efficient
The programmatic display and mobile space is filled with shiny new tools, ad placements, and even ad units.
Combine that with the traditional types of advertising done by media companies (think big billboards, bus sides, etc) and these quickly become distractions from tactics that are proven to work.
I think it’s fair to say we spread our tactics far too wide in the early years in hopes of capitalizing on that sexy new ad-unit or the hot new ad targeting. This was, unfortunately, at the expense of tried and true tactics like traditional paid search.
A smarter approach would have been to test into these tactics rather than build a comprehensive media plan that included them.
Plan of Action:
I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. And Apple in general. One of my favorite quotes from him is:
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
With more data and proper attribution in place, we were more empowered to direct the media plans across the brands.
We focused on tried and true channels that significantly outperformed the “shiny objects” that had resulted in wasted spend and higher costs for creative development.
This paid off in a big way:
Total impressions declined significantly, however, clicks increased just as dramatically
Average click costs also declined
Cost per app install decreased nearly 200%
Cost per video start decreased 230%
Sometimes the ‘simple’ things just work better.
Ultimately, after seeing the data, I took away a few lessons that can be applied to almost any campaign:
Programmatic display isn’t the end all, be all. It’s an industry buzzword. I could even say ‘buzztactic’. It’s rife with click fraud and vendors with non-transparent ‘private networks’. It’s susceptible to ad blockers and comes with many privacy issues.
Don’t get me wrong. It can work.
But, test into programmatic options ONLY after you’ve exhausted the below tactics.
Focus on channels where a consumer is actively searching for you. They’re already self-qualified based on their actions. The most applicable here is paid search across Bing or Google.
Remarket your way to lower cost per acquisitions. You’ve already paid the premium CPC or CPM to get that user to your website. Typically, remarketing campaigns come with much lower costs. Why not re-engage a warm lead for less?
Image Source
#Hashtags are inherently social, but leave them out of social ad copy. Through our trimming of tactics, we also trimmed areas where consumers might be tempted to leave the topic at hand.
In this case, we removed any hashtag mentions in our ad copy so consumers would focus instead on the ‘install’. Our conversion rates improved as a result.
When pushing mobile installs, leverage a device in your creative. When you think about it, of course. It makes sense. But we proved it out via testing. Showing consumers an image of their device in the creative they’re being served improved conversion rates.
4. Not Leveraging an Always on Strategy
Consumers, myself included, are always on. Always plugged in. It’s a bad, addicting habit.
But, that also means running a campaign for a TV show only when that show is in-season leaves opportunity on the table.
There are a few challenges with being able to do this:
First, media companies are selling off the rights to their shows to the likes of Netflix and Hulu. In some cases, the ability to create a show is solely dependent on the revenue coming from these transactions.
This means an always on strategy will never be an option once the rights are sold.
Second, when we first launched our campaigns, we were spending large portions of our budget on fancy creative and higher cost CPMs trying to capture the next big thing.
This left us without budget pacing that would allow for an always on strategy.
Plan of Action:
We tackled the second issue as part of our streamlining of tactics. This enabled our budgets to stretch farther and for longer periods of time both pre-premier and post-finale.
The matter of rights was more complicated and is probably worth a completely separate post. That said, as a test, we decided to focus on a core set of shows where the rights had been retained for several years.
The hope was, if we could show a series with multiple seasons resulted in larger average views per user, we could start to build a case for investing in the rights for the more popular shows.
It worked.
We found not only were the average views per user up, but these campaigns were far outperforming pilot shows and series with limited rights.
This resulted in overall efficiencies for the campaign.
Wrapping Up
There’s no question the digital space can provide lots of opportunity for growth and learning. I have certainly learned a ton.
Hopefully sharing some of these insights will help you better streamline your digital marketing efforts, focus on what works, get your tracking in order and ultimately drive increased performance.
About the Author: Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly on SEO tactics, analytics and social media best practices. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on Instagram.
4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
0 notes
Text
4 Mistakes I Learned About Marketing and Data While Working at a Fortune 50 Company
For the past nearly 3 years, I’ve been in charge of Audience Development for one of the largest media companies in the US.
I learned a LOT during that time. Even more important, I learned a lot about what NOT to do.
Not all of these things were personal ‘mistakes’ per se. Some were top down decisions that were influenced by lack of foresight, knowledge or budget. Others were due to an industry that is undergoing rapid change.
As John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
To that end, here are the top 4 mistakes I learned during my tenure. I hope sharing these and their learnings will spark some good discussion – either internally or in the comments below.
1. Not Investing in Building User Data
This one definitely took me by surprise.
When I arrived, I had big plans to leverage CRM data to build remarketing pools, lookalike audiences, , etc.
But there was no CRM database.
One thing not often considered about media companies is the fact the consumer data is controlled by the cable provider. The cable company collects the payment and therefore have all the associated consumer data:
Name
Address
Phone
Email
Credit Card Info
Purchase history
Login Username/Password
Etc.
In it’s simplest form, the media company simply provides the content the cable provider sells to the consumer. For the longest period of time, the value of collecting this data had been overlooked.
Plan of Action:
To access ‘free’ content within an app from the likes of NBC, CBS, Fox and others, you must go through an authentication process. This is done using the same credentials you would login to pay your cable bill.
In one of these apps, you’ve likely come across a login page that looks like this:
This poses two challenges:
Many consumers don’t know or remember this login. As a result, a lot of potential video consumption is lost.
As mentioned above, this is an interstitial page that drives to the cable provider as they own the username and password information.
In collaboration with the product team, a strategy was developed to implement a ‘free trial’ in exchange for the user’s email address. This would allow the user to forego the authentication requirement.
This was the minimal piece of information required for us to begin building a CRM and the beginning of a customer match marketing program across Google, Facebook and Twitter.
It also provided us with the initial piece of consumer data that we could subsequently build on with supplemental offers in exchange for profile completion.
The overarching lesson here is – invest in CRM. Even if you have to start with just a database of email addresses. Start somewhere.
2. Not Understanding the Nuances of Mobile Tracking
As you might imagine, much of our marketing strategy and budget focused on the mobile space. Interestingly enough, this is also a space where ad-blockers are not working.
That said, with mobile advertising comes tracking nuances that I was initially unaware of.
When I joined the team, we were full-steam into launching the first ever marketing campaign. In our haste to launch, we did not take the time to fully understand the impact of not solidifying our mobile tracking solution.
Our primary mobile advertising consisted of:
Desktop & Mobile Banner and Social Ads:
The standard process for attribution is based on the use of cookies.
When a user visits a website via their desktop or mobile device, your banner displays and a cookie is dropped on the visitor’s computers – regardless of whether or not they click through to your website.
Depending on the ad-server being used, this cookie can remain active for up to 2 years.
Eventually, if the user performs the desired action, that same cookie fires sending the proper attribution for your campaign. All is well in the world.
Apple’s Safari browser blocks 3rd party cookies by default which makes this ‘standard’ tracking more complicated. Among other things, this means your app cannot read the cookie data stored by Mobile Safari.
This presents a challenge to advertisers as Safari’s market share is around 33% globally.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our brand websites):
I’m sure you’ve noticed when you open a link in an app, it doesn’t open a new browser window. Rather, it opens an “in-app browser”.
This makes perfect sense for UX as it allows you to quickly return to the app.
The issue lies in the cookie drop on your phone. This naturally occurs with the click, however, it only drops a cookie for the in-app browser session. Unless the conversion happens immediately within that session, the attribution is lost.
In-App Advertising (sending users to our apps):
Quite simply, cookies are not used ‘in-app’. This left us with zero attribution or cross-device tracking.
The lack of attention to these details was quickly evident. At the end of the campaign, we were left pointing to engagement metrics like impressions, CTR and social shares as a measure of success.
Not at all what a consumer acquisition campaign should be reporting.
Plan of Action:
The quickest change to a leaky attribution bucket that we could make was to tackle the Safari issue. We simply updated our social and display targeting to remove Safari browsers.
While Google struggles with mobile and socially-driven demographic/interest targeting, Facebook provides the ability to target (or exclude) users by Web browser.
While not foolproof, for the likes of Twitter and Google, we targeted only older operating systems in an effort to capture users who were still using legacy browsers.
Considering our audience was US based, we estimated that we would only be missing out on approximately 15-18% of the overall market.
The other two challenges were a bit more complicated and required a mobile attribution solution that established the match between the user’s advertising ID and the publisher.
While there are many companies available for this, after evaluation, we landed on Kochava as our solution provider.
Pro tip: if you’re on a budget, Branch.io is a completely free solution that provides many of the same features.
3. Focusing on Sexy vs. Efficient
The programmatic display and mobile space is filled with shiny new tools, ad placements, and even ad units.
Combine that with the traditional types of advertising done by media companies (think big billboards, bus sides, etc) and these quickly become distractions from tactics that are proven to work.
I think it’s fair to say we spread our tactics far too wide in the early years in hopes of capitalizing on that sexy new ad-unit or the hot new ad targeting. This was, unfortunately, at the expense of tried and true tactics like traditional paid search.
A smarter approach would have been to test into these tactics rather than build a comprehensive media plan that included them.
Plan of Action:
I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. And Apple in general. One of my favorite quotes from him is:
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
With more data and proper attribution in place, we were more empowered to direct the media plans across the brands.
We focused on tried and true channels that significantly outperformed the “shiny objects” that had resulted in wasted spend and higher costs for creative development.
This paid off in a big way:
Total impressions declined significantly, however, clicks increased just as dramatically
Average click costs also declined
Cost per app install decreased nearly 200%
Cost per video start decreased 230%
Sometimes the ‘simple’ things just work better.
Ultimately, after seeing the data, I took away a few lessons that can be applied to almost any campaign:
Programmatic display isn’t the end all, be all. It’s an industry buzzword. I could even say ‘buzztactic’. It’s rife with click fraud and vendors with non-transparent ‘private networks’. It’s susceptible to ad blockers and comes with many privacy issues.
Don’t get me wrong. It can work.
But, test into programmatic options ONLY after you’ve exhausted the below tactics.
Focus on channels where a consumer is actively searching for you. They’re already self-qualified based on their actions. The most applicable here is paid search across Bing or Google.
Remarket your way to lower cost per acquisitions. You’ve already paid the premium CPC or CPM to get that user to your website. Typically, remarketing campaigns come with much lower costs. Why not re-engage a warm lead for less?
Image Source
#Hashtags are inherently social, but leave them out of social ad copy. Through our trimming of tactics, we also trimmed areas where consumers might be tempted to leave the topic at hand.
In this case, we removed any hashtag mentions in our ad copy so consumers would focus instead on the ‘install’. Our conversion rates improved as a result.
When pushing mobile installs, leverage a device in your creative. When you think about it, of course. It makes sense. But we proved it out via testing. Showing consumers an image of their device in the creative they’re being served improved conversion rates.
4. Not Leveraging an Always on Strategy
Consumers, myself included, are always on. Always plugged in. It’s a bad, addicting habit.
But, that also means running a campaign for a TV show only when that show is in-season leaves opportunity on the table.
There are a few challenges with being able to do this:
First, media companies are selling off the rights to their shows to the likes of Netflix and Hulu. In some cases, the ability to create a show is solely dependent on the revenue coming from these transactions.
This means an always on strategy will never be an option once the rights are sold.
Second, when we first launched our campaigns, we were spending large portions of our budget on fancy creative and higher cost CPMs trying to capture the next big thing.
This left us without budget pacing that would allow for an always on strategy.
Plan of Action:
We tackled the second issue as part of our streamlining of tactics. This enabled our budgets to stretch farther and for longer periods of time both pre-premier and post-finale.
The matter of rights was more complicated and is probably worth a completely separate post. That said, as a test, we decided to focus on a core set of shows where the rights had been retained for several years.
The hope was, if we could show a series with multiple seasons resulted in larger average views per user, we could start to build a case for investing in the rights for the more popular shows.
It worked.
We found not only were the average views per user up, but these campaigns were far outperforming pilot shows and series with limited rights.
This resulted in overall efficiencies for the campaign.
Wrapping Up
There’s no question the digital space can provide lots of opportunity for growth and learning. I have certainly learned a ton.
Hopefully sharing some of these insights will help you better streamline your digital marketing efforts, focus on what works, get your tracking in order and ultimately drive increased performance.
About the Author: Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly on SEO tactics, analytics and social media best practices. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on Instagram.
from DIYS http://ift.tt/2wYmkQq
0 notes
Text
Interview with Isaac Wyatt, Sr. Director, GTM Strategy & Ops. at HashiCorp
This Q&A is part of an interview series for the upcoming MarTech Conference, May 9-11 in San Francisco, covering the agenda topics to be discussed at the event. Read on for an exclusive sneak peek from the presenters
1. How have you seen marketers evolve in their understanding of martech in these last five years? What are the gaps (maybe in exploiting technology, attitudes, approaches, strategies etc) that events like these address for newbies as well as veteran marketers?
In my experience, major changes in the last five years include three major areas:
holistic customer journeys and supporting workflows,
integrated digital touchpoints, and
data-informed decision making
On the customer journey, Tomasz Tunguz at Redpoint Ventures blogged about how a holistic customer journey yields a Global Maxima of customer throughput.
The idea is that optimizing individual touchpoints of a customer journey isn’t as effective as optimizing end-to-end effectiveness
The siloed and disjointed motions that are the norm for many organizations create friction between the marketing, sales, and customer success functions. Organizations looking for better alignment and higher yield are stepping back to look at a holistic customer journey and then mapping their internal processes and workflows to create the most effective journey. This is why we have deployed Usermind at Hashicorp — it is a customer journey orchestration platform to tie together the digital customer journey in a way that spans across an entire company — not just marketing or sales or customer success and support.
The integrated digital touchpoints, or customer engagements, should be in support of the specified customer journey, and if not, the organization should ask why. This also helps drive efficient and effective usage of various technologies throughout the customer journey — from MarTech to SalesTech to NPS and customer success technology.
The data generated from systems of engagement and stored in systems of record can then be integrated to tell a comprehensive customer journey, and help identify friction in the supply chain. This integrated data set not only helps measure the business and highlight areas of opportunity, but also is useful for leveraging the data for customer segmentation and market insight.
2. At what stage would you say is the ‘ad tech meets martech’ state of affairs at present? Would you say businesses today need to have a consolidated advertising strategy that includes all formats be it Search, Social, Display, Native and of course, Video being a key entrant or does the character of the business decide the approach?
I consider ad tech to be a subset of martech, which is a subset of all the tech of the customer journey. I differentiate instead on what I refer to as systems of record vs systems of engagement, and the phase(s) of the customer journey that the tech supports. For example, Google Analytics might be the system of record for visitors to your website, but AdSense is the system of engagement which should be tracked inside of Google Analytics — all of which is “top of funnel.” Similarly, Yesware is a piece of sales technology that is a system of engagement, but Salesforce is the system of record, and both are used at the “bottom of the funnel.”
As far as a consolidated strategy, I would start with the customer journey map discussed above. There are certainly “Brand Marketing” activities that serve as awareness building activities surrounding the customer journey, but they still have to be unified with a customer engagement strategy.
3. 2016 was the year of data-driven marketing. This year, AI was added to the data mix. Where do you see the changes in technology taking data next – be it for data capture, analytics and insights? Considering the above data cycle, where do organizations lack in proficiency the most?
You see some neat things coming out of Shift Communications that involve a holistic data strategy and AI could be applied to that in their SCALE reports. In many ways though, “AI” is exactly what marketers have been doing for years. Algorithmic lead scoring is a weak form of AI. More sophisticated AI is the predictive lead scoring that vendors like Infer are doing. This has traditionally been limited to systems of record to serve internal business stakeholders where the cost of the “AI” being wrong is relatively low. The cool stuff on the horizon is automated A/B testing of marketing tactics throughout the customer journey, chat bots, etc - moving AI from operating on the systems of record to the outwardly facing systems of engagement.
I think where organizations are struggling though is in the data collection, mapping the links in their systems of record, and asking the right questions of their data. Pre-maturely leveraging customer facing AI in systems of engagement without a holistic dataset is likely to increase the cost of the AI being wrong from a bad customer experience.
4. What are areas you commonly see where businesses are getting stuck from transforming themselves to optimal customer-centricity – excess of to-dos to achieve this, lack of aligning all stakeholders on a common platform, lack of initiative to know a customer as a person rather than a statistic? How much can data help this transformation?
A lot of the challenge I see is that organizations know that certain activities are highly correlated with positive outcomes, but without a unifying backbone that aligns and coordinates the activities of the organization across functions, the unit of measurement becomes the activity of the org, rather than the result of quality customer experiences. Once an org is measuring the resulting customer experience as opposed to the activity around the customer, it has a clarifying and magnifying effect on customer centricity
Data is useful to highlight and prioritize areas of opportunity, but the voice of the customer always indicates true north
5. How can marketers get a buy-in from their organizations to invest in digital transformation of their businesses? What are the timeframes that a small business should expect for complete digital transformation and how important is it to record each of the marketing and sales process’ digitization?
Being a part of a fast growing company in San Francisco, you could consider us “Digital Natives” — no transformation necessary. However, that doesn’t mean we don’t face many of the challenges faced by many of our more tenured industry peers — selecting the right technology strategy and building the right vendor partnerships is still very much a strategic initiative. Putting together a holistic tech strategy and building relationships within the organization is still very important. I see a lot of people with diverse backgrounds and breadth of experiences join our fast-growing company with strong opinions on what technology we should be using. Figuring out what’s right for the customer, company, team, and individual is much easier when the customer journey is your true north.
6. How can digital transformation become a strategic thought process for a business rather than just being a mere means to an end to enhance customer experience? Please suggest some processes that organizations can put in place so that internal stakeholders move in sync with this makeover?
I’m a fan of a holistic program management commonly called “Integrated Campaign Framework” that identifies a set of activities, owner’s, intended results, timelines, etc. SiriusDecisions has lots of good content around this. Once your customer journey is defined, the integrated campaign framework will drive a regular cadence and also help serve as a checklist of what digital activities need to be completed for each cycle.
7. Could you share for our readers a sneak peek on the topic of your presentation?
Michel at Usermind and I will be sharing the methodology I’m using at HashiCorp to develop the customer journey and the resulting GoToMarket Strategy that is the result. We hope the audience will take home a framework for aligning their org to customer centricity, and how that can inform a technology strategy aligned to quality customer experiences.
MarTech | May 9-11, 2017 | San Francisco, CA
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This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor
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