Unlocking mobile programmatic’s potential

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Ocean Fine is senior director of agency and strategic partnerships at Factual           

Programmatic display ad spending in the United States is expected to top $22 billion this year, according to eMarketer, with mobile expected to represent 69 percent of the total spend.

Behind this shift are the advanced consumer targeting capabilities that are increasingly available on mobile. Marketers who are not taking advantage of these progressive capabilities will be left in the dust by competitors.

How the cookie crumbles
There are brands that have made advancements to leveraging programmatic solutions to test and optimize their campaigns, and those brands are seeing large success in their mobile campaigns.

For some others, the shift to programmatic buying and mobile has raised some frustrations.

The fact that cookie-based tracking in the mobile space is greatly limited compared to the desktop environment can be a big challenge.

Advertisers’ reliance on cookies has caused them to overlook the fact that, even if cookies were present in the mobile space, the strongest indicator of a person’s intent and behavior on mobile is actually his or her location.

Consumers carry their phones with them everywhere. As such, when mobile location signals are properly paired with rich places data, mobile advertising can be delivered to highly precise and accurate audiences.

While impressive tools and automated solutions exist to help brands succeed in programmatic, simply having a good algorithm or flashy user interface does not make for an effective programmatic campaign.

Brands that are truly succeeding in this space are those that blend smart technology with smart people at the brand, agency and vendor levels.

While the promise of programmatic is automation, in a realm that evolves as quickly as mobile programmatic, it still takes a lot of human testing, evaluation and understanding to make campaigns work. That is especially true when it comes to leveraging location data in mobile programmatic buys.

Promise of location data
Location data now is one of the trends in mobile programmatic advertising.

Location data is a leap forward for mobile, where the traditional targeting model tried to infer audience based on the applications that a user installed and used.

After all, location data provides advertisers with a glimpse into the actual real-world behavior of consumers.

Furthermore, tailored advertising through location data benefits both sides of the equation by enabling buyers to create better advertising experiences for their consumers and enabling sellers to increase revenue by offering more tailored audiences to their advertising partners.

For example, location data’s ability to tie into timing can be tremendously valuable in distinguishing between specific audience segments.

There are vast differences between the do-it-yourself weekend warriors and professional contractors. Are both parties likely to be making frequent stops at The Home Depot? Sure.

But those weekend warriors are far likelier to be visiting on the weekends or off-work hours, while contractors will often be putting in their Home Depot time on the weekdays during regular business hours.

This is just one example of how location data can help marketers reach extremely precise and accurate audiences.

As marketers continue to improve their grasp of location data and how to layer it properly into their programmatic initiatives, we are going to see the usefulness of location data expand.

Most brands now focus on location data as a means of finding and targeting new customers.

In the near future, we are going to see the savviest brands begin to leverage this data to better understand existing customers and better target them in the future.

What to look for when tapping into location-data sources
These days, everyone in mobile has a location story.

The key for marketers is to understand which providers will provide them with high-quality location data as that is the only way for marketers to see the ROI from location. And this comes down to understanding at a detailed level where the provider gets its data.

Marketers must have a firm grasp on two important elements of their location data sources:

Latitude and longitude. The lat/long data that comes in from an ad call is table-stakes when it comes to location data. It is simply a pair of numbers that indicates where a user was on the planet when an ad call was made.

Unfortunately, a significant percentage of the lat/long data that flows through the programmatic ecosystem is of insufficient quality for the most advanced targeting tactics, so marketers need to have a firm grasp on how their vendors clean and filter the lat/long data.

Places data. If lat/long numbers are table-stakes, then places data is where marketers need to double-down.

Places data maps out the real-world locations that correlate to lat/long numbers and provides true meaning to the otherwise incomprehensible lat/long coordinate pairs.

There is a lot of outdated places data being used, and accurate sets can be hard to come by.

Marketers need to dig deep with their vendors in this regard and ask the right questions: Where does your places data come from? Did you build it yourself, or is it third party? How is it integrated into your solution, and how am I being charged for it? How often is it updated? Is it global?

For further guidance, check out the IAB's Mobile Location Data Buyers Guide.

ULTIMATELY, THE MARKETERS who are succeeding in the mobile programmatic space are those leveraging self-serve automated platforms that provide the needed transparency and flexibility to customize, test and refine their location-based targeting strategies.

After all, not all data is created equal.

Especially in these early days of mobile programmatic, it is the human touch – how we use, understand, apply and learn from the data – that ultimately translates location data into true audience insights.

Today, I Accept Your Nomination

mediapost.com
In 1999, I met a banner.  At first I just admired it from behind a screen. I stared for what seemed like an hour, wondering what would happen if I clicked on it.  Finally, I got the nerve to move my cursor toward it and clicked. 

The banner has gone downhill ever since, according to most working in this digital display ad business:
“Banners are ignored.”
“Banners get blocked.”
“Banners don’t work.”
For years we have blamed the banner (display) ad for all of our problems.  The thing is, the ad banner didn’t fail us.  We failed it.
We were handed a new medium with millions of consumers on day one.  We were handed an exciting new ad to sell to advertisers that could instantly transfer a consumer to an advertiser’s online store.  We were selling time travel. Advertisers, while initially skeptical, quickly started writing big checks to buy these display ad banners.
Then we screwed it all up.
So what’s the problem today?  Just about everything. 
In my fantasy of being nominated to restore order to the business of digital media so it is sustainable for generations to come and not just the next big deal, here is my first 100-day plan to fix the system we broke:
1.  Data. Fundamentally, I believe we are taking something from consumers without their consent and full understanding, and this fuels an undercurrent of resentment that is not sustainable. I will make it a law that sites have to visually display a counter tracking how many data points have been taken from a consumer during each visit session. 
In addition, there must be a red easy button on every browser that allows users to immediately stop all data collection of any kind.
2.  Ad-Edit Ratios. Ad-edit ratios in print used to be a simple sales pitch.  The higher your edit percentage, the more likely the ads you sold received attention from your audience.  The ad-edit ratios of iconic content brands on the Web look like this:

I will pass a law so that the ad-edit ratio must be calculated for every site and displayed for media buyers to evaluate, other publishers to notice, and for consumers to see as they arrive at a Web site, so they can decide if that site is worth their attention.
Now watch as Web publishers race to clean up their sites so they can claim to have the best ad-edit ratio in their space.
3. Video Advertising. Nothing makes a consumer scroll down a Web page faster than an auto-play pre-roll ad.  Consumers also hit mute, go to another browser, pick up their phone or stare at the ceiling -- all just to avoid watching that effing ad.
I will pass a law that all pre-roll video ads must be six seconds long, and the video content experience will only begin when a user clicks play and then fills in a CAPTCHA.
Total video plays of course will plummet, but that number is full of shit now, anyway.  With my new law, human engagement with video content and the ads that run prior will increase significantly.  Publishers will then have real human engaged inventory to sell at a premium rate, and/or give away as added value in return for a larger commitment to purchase display ads.
4.  Mobile. Looking at 20somethings who have had phones since they were teenagers, it’s almost impossible to ignore their physical and emotional device addiction on full display.  We are profiting from this addiction, as mobile ads fund this whole operation.  This mobile device addiction is literally killing people on our roads and figuratively killing family communication.
You wouldn’t give a 13-year-old kid crack cocaine, but we hand out iPhones to this group like candy.  In my very first day in office, I will pass a law that you must be 21-years-old to have a phone.
5.  The Banner. We owe the display ad unit an apology and a chance to succeed.
To do that, I will pass a law that all sites must limit their page views to two display ad units: a 728x90 that appears along the top of the page, and a 300x250 placed in the left-hand rail that is “fixed” so that when a user scrolls down, the 300x250 remains in view.  The same advertiser must always occupy both ad units each time a consumer views a page.
All other ads, including “native,” will be removed from the premises.
Web pages will look great, sites will be trusted, ads will be noticed -- and the responsibility to get someone to click and visit an advertiser’s site will be on the shoulders of the creative, where it has always belonged.

Programmatic’s Evolution Is Just Beginning

minonline.com

How do publishers successfully meet advertiser demand? Julie Clark, VP of programmatic sales at Hearst Core Audience, believes it starts with great inventory.

Clark understands programmatic advertising from both the supply and demand sides of the business. Before she joined Hearst, she was VP, agency & enterprise sales at Rocket Fuel, a demand-side platform provider, where she built the sales team in Central, East and Canadian regions.
On September 14, Clark will be among the prestigious panel of speakers at min’s Programmatic Selling Conference on the “Strategies to Manage and Sell Your Inventory.”  We caught up with her beforehand to learn more about her philosophy on programmatic selling and what publishers still don’t “get” about this relatively new way of doing business.
min: How do you describe your job to people outside of the business?
Julie Clark: Specific to programmatic, I talk about how technology works in advertising, making marketing a seamless part of the user experience.
min: When was the first time you actually heard the word “programmatic?”
Clark: I can’t specifically remember, but I do recall first hearing about “exchanges” in 2008 and it was almost a dirty word and put on IO’s that we’d insure to “exclude all exchange inventory.” Times have changed!  I was working at a DSP at the time and “programmatic” just became the way to describe tech enabled RTB [real time bidding].
min: What sparked your interest about programmatic selling?
Clark: I was attracted to the technology powering marketing and the idea of smart buying tied to real KPI’s—programmatic was a natural path.

min: What was your first job that involved programmatic sales?
Clark: Rocket Fuel was my first official programmatic sales gig in 2010, but people were not even calling it “programmatic” at that time; they were just trying to figure out what DSP’s were and RTB.
min: What do you think most people don’t “get” about programmatic?
Clark: Last year I would have said that people don’t get that programmatic is more than RTB. That has diminished greatly. There is still a lingering perspective of “remnant” and “efficient” being connected to programmatic. Of course, efficiencies can be one part of a marketers programmatic strategy—but in the past 12 months the space has evolved in a way that has opened up true premium programmatic opportunities.
min: What have been the biggest advances in the last year?
Clark: Technological advances in automated guaranteed buying and header bidding have proven to be substantial. What’s most exciting about such advancements is the ability to strategically leverage programmatic buying tech for more sophisticated marketing goals and targeting. It is possible for a marketer to “own” their audience and leverage premium inventory for lower funnel KPI’s.
min: What still needs work?
Clark: Programmatic is an evolution, I think that there will always be work and advancements needed. The lowest hanging fruit is continuing towards automation of simple functionality and easier connections between programmatic technologies.

Top 4 Tips For Combining Native and Programmatic

mediapost.com

Native advertising has rapidly emerged as an exciting way for advertisers to engage with consumers, and offers an interesting new revenue stream for publishers. Native emerged out of a desire for publishers and platforms to deliver advertisements that fit with the feel of their site, and are consistent with viewers expectations over how a platform should behave.

cc

1) Choose your feed carefully.  It’s important to ensure that any native programmatic ad fit well with the overall look and feel of the host page design.

There are many different types of feeds, each of which will give your ad different context. The Interactive Advertising Bureau defines content feeds as publisher sites and news aggregators such as CNN, Forbes and Yahoo. Product feeds are retail sites and app listings such as Amazon, Etsy and eBay, while social feeds are social networking and messaging apps such as Facebook, Instagram and Tango.

The feed that you choose will largely depend on the type of content you have. Story and video ads can be expected to perform better within content and social feeds, product ads would likely perform better surrounded by other product content, and native app install ads are a good fit for social. A native ad on a social feed could also be enriched with social data, such as friends that like a particular profile.

2) Choose your placement. Advertisers can choose to purchase ads that are “in-feed” as a single atomic unit (e.g., hosted on an article page or single image page), outside the core content (e.g., on a right rail), or as a recommendation widget.

Different types of ad placement will involve tradeoffs in terms of performance and inventory. For instance, right-rail ads are likely to have higher inventory but lower click-through rates, and in-feed ads will have the lowest available inventory but above-average click through.

The placement type will dictate the metadata you provide, too. Heavily visual ads are likely to underperform on the right rail for instance, as the thumbnail will be displayed as a smaller size than in an in-feed ad.

As with feeds, you should experiment with which placement types work well for you and continue to optimize as you receive results.

3) Adapt KPIs accordingly. Native programmatic will involve a sea change in traffic KPIs (key performance indicators) when contrasted to display. This change is twofold: There are areas where we can expect native ads to outperform display, and there are some new metrics that you will need to pay attention to if you want to make sure your native ads are performing well — measurements that matter less for display ads.

First, the areas where you should expect native to outperform traditional display are click-through and conversion rate. Native programmatic ads are closer to a publisher’s site in terms of look and feel than traditional display ads, so should drive higher levels of engagement.

Social shares provide great insight into the value of your native ad content. If a native ad was sufficiently good that a certain number of readers wanted to tell their followers about it, it’s easy to compare that with the average number of shares that a piece of social content on your site receives. You should expect programmatic native on the whole to outperform generic display and come closer to social metrics.

4) Understand your platform capabilities. The standards for native programmatic are still evolving. Some DSPs support all of the different feed types, while some choose to specialize in certain ad types or media formats, such as direct response or video storytelling. Some DSPs have been slow to integrate native formats altogether.

Bidding algorithms will also take time to learn and adapt to the new formats. It’s worth watching the results of your campaigns particularly closely with native programmatic, as some platforms do not distinguish according to media type. This can in turn lead to some campaigns not performing as you would expect. The capabilities of native programmatic tools are standardizing, but we’re not there yet.

Report: 12% of native ads are not labeled

marketingdive.com

Dive Brief:

• A study of ads by MediaRadar found that 54% of native ads are labeled as "sponsored," while 12% have no label at all. 
• The study found other terms are used to identify native ads: “promoted” (12%), “presented by” (6%), “provided by” (5%), and “brought to you by” (4%).
• Separate research conducted by Research Now for Contently found that 48% of U.S. internet users polled reported feeling "deceived" after realizing an article or video is sponsored content.

Dive Insight:

Native ads are an effective and growing format for marketers in a world rife with ad blocking. Native ads currently make up 56% of all display ad revenue, according to data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), PwC and IHS, but BI Intelligence predicts that native advertising will account for 74% of all ad revenue by 2021.

However, concerns over the blurred lines between sponsored content and editorial content are arising at media companies, in regulatory hearings, and on social media. 

Last December, Grady College published research that foundless than 8% of the study’s participants could tell the difference between paid and editorial content — a troubling finding in a media environment where consumers are growing frustrated by a poor user experience. 

The Federal Trade Commission made waves earlier this year by offering guidelines for native ad disclosures. The FTC guidelines specify that native advertising should be disclosed “in plain language that is as straightforward as possible.”

Recommended Reading

eMarketer: The Lines Between Native Advertising and Editorial Content Are Still Blurred
Marketing Dive: Are FTC native ad guidelines the first step toward regulation?

Telltale Signs You Have an Ad Fraud Problem

entrepreneur.com

By now you’re probably sick of hearing about ad fraud.

You know ad fraud costs the industry $18.5 billion annually. You’re well aware that for every $3 spent, $1 goes to fraudsters. You get that ad fraud is a costly problem, and no one is immune. It doesn’t matter if it’s pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-call or display advertising, fraudsters continue to find ways to drain advertisers of hard-earned dollars. Even mobile, which accounts for 30 percent of all digital advertising revenue, is getting hit hard by ad fraud.

You may be thinking what’s the point of constantly rehashing it when there’s no solution in sight. Every time you get rid of one fraudster another one pops up. Might as well learn to live with it, right?

Wrong.

While you can’t simply press a button and make ad fraud go away, there are ways to stop the bleeding. By knowing what to look for and which tactics to employ, advertisers can mitigate ad fraud.

First, let's talk about click fraud.

Click fraud is the bane of many advertisers’ existence. You think your campaign is doing well, only to wonder why conversions are drastically down. Turns out your campaign is being hijacked by pesky bots.

There are three tell-tale signs that you’re a victim of click fraud. Here they are.

1. You get a spike in clicks.

This is when you’ll see an increase in click volume with minimal change in conversions or a spike in clicks from a keyword from one search engine but not others. Often there will be repetitive clicks from the same IP address too.

Your clicks may be coming from areas outside your target area. Don’t be fooled. Bots pretending to be consumers are the culprit.

2. You have a high rate of abandoned shopping carts.

If you’re encountering a high rate of shopping cart abandonment, you may have a click fraud problem.

Let’s say you sell golf clubs. Golf clubs are one of those products that sell themselves. If you need a golf club, you will purchase one. It’s not like you’re trying to sell something abstract. If you’re seeing a ton of traffic but no golf club purchases then you may just have a fraud issue.

Remember, while bots have the ability to download and fill-out forms, they aren’t sophisticated enough to complete the purchase yet.

3. You have a drained budget.

When you have a drained budget and nothing to show for it, that’s a huge red flag. Where did all of that money go? Unfortunately, it often goes to fraudsters.

Currently the music industry is feeling the heat from bots. Fraudsters are stealing huge chunks of money from music streaming services. It’s so easy. It’s like taking candy from a baby.

First, a fraudster sets up an artist account on a platform, such as Spotify. Then they upload fake tracks, and create a bot to stream those tracks on repeat. Now the fraudster is making a ton of money and cutting the artist and producer out of the profit.

Click fraud tip: To stay on top of click fraud, keep track of your metrics on a regular basis so you can spot any unusual activity.

Next, let's talk about impression-based ad fraud.

Twenty-two percent of impressions are considered suspect traffic. Imagine paying for an ad, and it’s never actually viewed. That’s the problem impression ad fraud poses for advertisers. Here are a few common types of impression-based fraud.

• Ad retargeting: Bots pretend to be engaged users and are served retargeted ads that they click so they aren’t viewed by an actual engaged user.
• Video fraud: Ads are stacked, layered or invisible, triggering impressions even though nobody is watching the video.
• Paid impression fraud: Paid traffic can often be riddled with bots.
• Hidden ad impressions: Small ads can be hidden within larger ads, causing both to trigger an impression.
• Fake sites: These sites are created for the sole purpose of serving ads, not content.

Impression ad fraud tip: If your reports aren’t lining up, there’s a problem.

Related: How Ad Fraud Ruins the Internet

Third, let's talk about ad injections.

Fraudsters not only utilize bots, they use browser extensions to place ads on websites through a nefarious tactic called ad injection. Once the ads are injected, they’re sold by third parties without the owner’s permission. And of course, any money that’s earned is collected by the fraudster, not the advertiser.

Pinpointing ad injections isn't easy, especially if you’re using programmatic advertising. Oftentimes, you don’t know there’s an issue until it’s too late. But if you know what to look for, you can quickly remedy the situation once they’re discovered. Here are three clues you’re dealing with an ad injection:

• It appears on top of an already existing ad.
• It replaces existing ads entirely.
• It’s running on pages that weren’t supposed to have ads at all.

Ad injection fraud tip: Keep an eye out for companies involved with ad injections, and try to steer clear of them.

Related: Giving Advertisers a Way to Bypass Facebook Click Fraud

Lastly, let's talk about pay-per-call fraud.

Some may think it’s harder to fraud pay-per-call than pay-per-click. But fraudsters have managed to find a way.

To detect fraud, make sure you have set criteria, including a minimum call duration and key presses. Know your audience too so you can detect anything out of the ordinary. For example, a Colorado phone number calling about hurricane insurance.

To separate legit callers from bots or fraudulent serial callers, consider using the following.

• Interactive voice response (IVR): With pay-per-call, it’s imperative to use IVR to filter calls. You can create a series of phone prompts that will qualify calls before they ever reach a live person. While bots can click, they won’t be able to pass the phone screening process and will be quickly filtered out.
• Call recordings: Also utilize call recordings to detect any red flags. By reviewing recordings you’ll be able to listen for any callers that may be just calling to for a specific time to receive payment for a call.

Pay-per-call fraud tip: Use IVR to qualify calls and be sure to review call recordings to detect any red flags.

Related: 5 Ways You Can Be Swindled by Click Fraud

Ad fraud is a nuisance that comes in many forms: pay-per-call fraud, impression-based fraud, ad injections and pay-per-call. No one is immune, and it’s a costly problem that continues to grow.

It’s up to advertisers to remain vigilant against fraudsters. The best way to do that is knowing the common signs of ad fraud so advertisers can effectively mitigate it.

Retargeting Revulsion? Join the Data-Driven Revolution...

exchangewire.com

Retargeting is often viewed as a dirty word in the digital advertising industry. From annoyance with receiving ads for already purchased products on the consumer side, to opinions that it devalues display advertising on the industry side, retargeting has popularity issues. As Martin Pavey (pictured below), UK country director, Flashtalking writes, there are more sophisticated ways to target consumers today. Here, Pavey tells ExchangeWire that retargeting needs to evolve, using data and creative intelligently to truly understand and engage with the consumer.

Retargeting is about acting on clear signals. If a consumer shows interest in a product, the goal of retargeting is to convert that interest into a sale, to turn window shoppers into buyers. It takes a consumer’s direct sign of intent and encourages them to take that next step. 

Today’s data-rich targeting methodologies offer more sophisticated ways to detect that sign of intent. In many ways, we are finding that the intent itself was more nuanced than retargeters once imagined. Most smart marketers today understand that behavioural signals are not to be taken entirely at face value. When a consumer shows interest in sports cars, it’s not necessarily a sign they have the intention, let alone the financial means, to buy one. Rather, that signal is one input in a sophisticated profile that may take into account age, household income, location, and so on. It probably makes more sense to show them ads for tyres, car repair shops, certain brands of sunglasses, or apparel. 

The problem is that most retargeting today will still turn right around and show that consumer pre-made ads for the same sports cars they were originally searching for. All the sophisticated tech we have to understand consumer’s intentions hasn’t yet translated into a new sophistication in how we act on those intentions, and in how we design and deliver the message. It’s finally time for retargeting to evolve in that direction – to look beyond a simple response to the last product viewed. 

Evolve beyond the last product

Let’s take another example. A consumer is browsing online for wall paint and carpeting. It looks, on the surface, that they are planning to do some work on their home. But what if the week prior, that same consumer was looking at family cars and cribs? These behaviours suggest the consumer is expecting a child, and, likely, in the market for larger purchases than paint. A remarketing ad featuring nothing but home improvement products misses that big picture and those bigger buys. Given the richness of today’s data sets, it’s outdated and simplistic.  

Combine additional data to enhance retargeting

Martin Pavey, UK Country Director, Flashtalking

The key to this evolution of retargeting is the layering-in of additional data and better quality creative, both of which are easy and actionable today. Ad servers can now tap multiple data sets simultaneously, combining first-party DMP data segments, in-page contextual data, geo information, weather, time, sequences, A/B testing, third-party data feeds, you name it. These can, and should, all be available in your ad server and, when used in combination with site-visit behaviour, will deliver on the big picture and identify the big opportunity. Executing on that opportunity requires that you go one step further and have the data inform the personalisation of the creative itself. 

And just adding more data isn’t enough – you have to demand more detail from your data as well. The only way to truly validate conversions from retargeting is with impression-level reporting. Anything short of a full fractional attribution model and the only thing your retargeting data will prove is the rate at which you harvest cookies.

Such a model will also yield the type of nuanced understanding that enables creatives to take an entirely new approach to crafting the message. Clarity on the consumer’s place in the purchase cycle allows for precise personalisation. In the previous example of the expecting parent, this creative personalisation is the difference between advertising, say, a life insurance policy instead of a can of baby-blue paint they already Googled. It opens the opportunity to stay one step ahead.

The real KPI: understanding the consumer

One of the reasons that last-product retargeting persists today is because our methods for measuring success are good at hiding these shortcomings. Catch-all cookie harvesting (AKA post-view conversion tracking) only serves to demonstrate that people who visit your website buy more stuff than people who don’t. People who window shop buy more than people who don’t shop at all – you don’t need data to figure that out.

But you risk letting the consumer’s real interests disappear behind a wall of safe KPIs. A bad retargeting job will show the consumer something they no longer want, already have, or never wanted in the first place. For long-term success, it’s time for retargeting to evolve beyond its comfort zone, take a bolder approach beyond last-product focus and focus on the relationship with consumers – by delivering engaging and high-quality creative experiences powered by intelligent data activation.