ITV

Tag: return on ad spend

  • GUEST ARTICLE: Everything marketers need to know about optimising mobile OEM user acquisition campaigns

    GUEST ARTICLE: Everything marketers need to know about optimising mobile OEM user acquisition campaigns

    Mumbai: Mobile original equipment manufacturer (OEM) inventory is rapidly increasing, with a year-over-year growth of 3.8 per cent, and with shipments expected to reach 1.43 billion by the end of 2022. Within this space, brands such as Vivo, Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, and Oppo (which includes Realme and OnePlus) occupied 52 per cent of the global smartphone market share as of Q1 2022.

    The user inventory generated by these mobile OEMs provides a tremendous competitive advantage for budget holders, as it continues to scale for as long as smartphones dominate the telecommunications industry. In parallel, these giant companies have been developing new and better proprietary platforms and systems that support specific targeting and ongoing optimisation of their intrinsic user traffic.

    As a result, mobile OEMs are becoming one (if not the most) successful channels for mobile marketers to add to their marketing mix plans to achieve scalable and targeted user acquisition.

    Marketers should not miss the diversity and effectiveness of ad campaign optimisation capabilities provided by mobile OEMs.

    When mobile advertisers don’t see the right results for their campaigns, their first instinct is to pause the ad channels that are not meeting their expectations. However, as new inventory sources (such as mobile OEMs) provide a very granular range of optimisation options towards specific targets, learning and taking advantage of such features is crucial for the campaign’s success.

    From this perspective, to get better outcomes and higher engagements, mobile marketers should consider three layers of optimisation for their user acquisition (UA) advertising (ad) campaigns:

    1. Advertisement placement optimisation: Not all placements will drive the same level of quality. Advertisers need to look at which ad placements are driving quality users compared to others, and increase the bid for those placements so they can leverage more traffic. In addition, there are advertising placements that drive volumes but not quality, and those can be optimised by calculating the return on ad spend (ROAS) for a particular ad placement so they can decrease the bid and still get a positive ROAS result and retain volumes.

    2. Creative optimisation: When mobile advertisers are buying media, they need to prevent “advertising fatigue” and ensure that their users aren’t seeing the same ad multiple times, as it leads to them eventually not interacting with it. Therefore, an advertiser should always have three creatives running for A/B testing and constantly come up with new concepts. Hence, the engagement of the ad remains constant as users get to see something new each time the ad is displayed. The higher the engagement of the ad, the better the conversion rate and effective cost per install (ECPI) for the advertiser.

    3. Targeting optimisation: Some app stores also offer appographic targeting that helps app advertisers promote their apps to new users based on their unique app interests. It allows the advertiser to target over 200 appographic segments based on app interests and leverages audience insights beyond category and ownership, and all of this is user privacy compliant.

    Understanding how advertisers can optimise their advertising spend based on upcoming special promotions

    Timing, timing, timing!

    Advertisers looking to place their ads on mobile OEMs during the special promotions season need to start by planning way ahead. For example, if there is a shopping app that wants to run a campaign for promotional offers in a specific time period, they need to work closely and plan with their partner agency in order to leverage the right mobile OEM inventory mix.

    When the shopping app is featured within alternative app stores on any of these promotional days, then not only does the conversion rate go up, but overall conversion volumes also become higher, and this is when an optimisation strategy is key to achieving maximum success.

    Furthermore, if the shopping app has also been promoted through offline media and other networks such as TV and third-party ad networks, the effective cost per acquisition per user becomes much lower.

    Key takeaways for mobile marketers to consider for UA campaign optimisation

    Optimising efforts for app marketing can be challenging, but mobile marketers can certainly tackle such situations by focusing on a few things:

    First of all, they need to look at pricing based on quality. They should never remove an entire mobile OEM ecosystem because of quality. They need to be careful that app discoverability decreases if they pause the campaigns on a specific smartphone OEM. Therefore, they can always choose to negotiate price deals based on quality.

    Secondly, they should measure mobile OEM performance. Every mobile OEM has different levels of offering placements and inventories to get apps launched in their respective app stores since each is at a different maturity level in its offerings. Analysing which mobile OEM works best is the key to placing and winning bids for advertising user acquisition campaigns.

    Last but certainly not least, mobile marketers often tend to cannibalise when bidding for multiple inventories from their agency partners. They should choose one agency partner that acts as a single source of truth, specialises in mobile OEM inventory, and has close partnerships with those mobile OEMs. They need the know-how to deal with the individual platforms from launch to running user acquisition campaigns and optimisation.

    Adopting these success mantras can change the course of mobile marketers’ user acquisition goals ahead of this year’s festive season.

    The author of the article is AVOW co-founder Ashwin Shekhar.

  • GUEST COLUMN: Five ways digital attribution can improve CTV & OTT advertising return on ad-spend

    GUEST COLUMN: Five ways digital attribution can improve CTV & OTT advertising return on ad-spend

    Mumbai: CTV/OTT viewership has exploded in India since the start of the pandemic, opening a new market of opportunities for advertisers. Combining the best of digital and traditional linear TV advertising, CTV/OTT advertising has become marketers’ favourites because of its ability to reach the right audience at the right time. These platforms provide advertisers with easy access to a vast pool of active buyers with high purchasing power.

    It is estimated that more than 500 million Indians are already consuming OTT content. The number of CTV (connected TV) users is expected to reach 80 million households or nearly 320 million users by 2025. As linear TVs continue to lose viewers’ attention, advertisers are scrambling to make the most of the rising CTV/OTT viewership. This has also led to an increase in the amount of money spent on advertising on CTV/OTT, especially by B2B marketers.

    In the OTT and CTV spaces, marketers have the advantage of clear targets, ideal buyer profiles, and clear-cut targeting strategies. While some other factors may affect the overall impact of CTV and OTT campaigns, these platforms also help in improving the return on ad spend (ROAS) through the right digital attribution.

    Here are five ways in which digital attribution can help improve the ROAS:

    Identifies customer touchpoints better

    Marketers have to engage with customers at multiple touchpoints for successful conversions. In video campaigns, it is not easy to identify the exact touchpoint at which the viewer decides to convert.

    Advertisers must have a comprehensive understanding of the customers’ journey for better ROAS. This issue can be mitigated by adopting multi-touch digital attribution for CTV/OTT, as it will enable the advertiser to locate the touchpoint that triggered the conversion. Such knowledge will empower them to reduce ad spend wastage.

    Filters out non-performing tactics

    Through conventional attribution, specific campaigns walk away with sales and conversion credit without giving an insight into what parameters actually worked. This technique fails to take into account that some of the sales may be due to repeat customers or old customers who may have restarted their services. For CTV/OTT, conventional attribution will fail to give the real picture as advertisers use multiple tactics to drive conversions. Digital attribution can help identify the exact ways that resulted in sales on CTV/OTT. It will enable advertisers to focus more on winning tactics and avoid unnecessary ad spending on non-performing strategies.

    Real-time optimisation

    CTV/OTT metrics provide real-time data on customer responses to ad campaigns, allowing marketers to make in-the-moment adjustments. If something is not working, advertisers can withdraw the campaign and launch its alternative or improved version in real time. Digital attribution plays an important role here by enabling advertisers to identify the highest-performing tactics and make adjustments in real time. For example, during live streaming of a new movie on CTV/OTT, if a 30-second video ad is outperforming a 60-second creative, the advertiser can use this data to allocate more budget towards the better-performing 30-second campaign rather than giving in to the length of a video campaign.

    Targets the right audience

    The CTV and OTT streaming markets have exploded since the pandemic. As a large part of the population was confined indoors due to lockdowns, the demand for new entertainment platforms and content also increased. The availability of cheaper data across the country further amplified viewership on OTT and CTV. The surge in OTT/CTV content demand gave advertisers access to a massive new audience.

    However, it has also become important to segment audience attributes for better targeting. With the right attribution, advertisers can easily segment customer databases to identify at which stage of the purchase the customer is actually converted.

    Identifies “buy signals” more accurately

    One of the most common differentiators between a successful and unsuccessful marketer is their ability to identify the “buy signal” from a prospective customer. The “buy signal” on CTV/OTT is an action or behaviour indicating a viewer is ready to become a customer. The actual sale often takes place much after the campaign is over. The right attribution can help in identifying the buy signal correctly. It will further enable marketers to match their strategy with sales insights to optimise the campaign for better results.

    To sum up

    Converting sales from a digital campaign requires slick digital attribution. This beats conventional ad-based tracking. It not only provides precise data points where the customer is most likely to convert, but it also provides insights into consumer purchasing behaviours. A modern world needs more contemporary digital attribution techniques, and we are already ready with one.

    The author is VDO.AI founder and CEO Amitt Sharma.