But their availability on the web has been on the decline for several years because of ad blockers, the GDPR, and privacy settings in popular web browsers like Safari and Firefox.

And when Google Chrome stops supporting third-party cookies some time around 2022, AdTech companies will need to look for alternatives.

Third party cookies are losing their tread. To drive on the superhighway of the future, AdTech Companies will need to use a new set of wheels.

Check out our blog posts to learn more about the importance and role of third-party cookies in online advertising and what their demise means for the future of advertising in web browsers:

Blog posts about third-party cookies:

• What’s the Difference Between First-Party and Third-Party Cookies?
• How Different Browsers Handle First-Party and Third-Party Cookies
• Google Chrome To Kill Off Third-Party Cookies: What It Means for AdTech
• Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP): The Impact on Cookies, AdTech, and MarTech

Blog posts about privacy in AdTech:

• Privacy in AdTech: Speed Limits vs Speed Limiters
• Privacy in AdTech FAQ: Google Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox, Safari ITP, Firefox, GDPR
• Taming the Wild West of Consumer Data Sharing in AdTech

Data & Privacy

Clearcode Cartoon #1: The Safari Club

Mike Sweeney

Sep 30, 2019

Data & Privacy

Clearcode Cartoon #2: The Party’s Over for AdTech

Mike Sweeney

Dec 04, 2019

Data & Privacy

Clearcode Cartoon #3: What’s in the Box?

Mike Sweeney

Jan 31, 2020

The post Clearcode Cartoon #4: AdTech’s New Set of Wheels appeared first on Clearcode.

The allure of video is undeniable, and thus video ads are well on their way to becoming the dominant driving force of online advertising in the coming years.

The Rise of Video Advertising

According to the IAB Video Advertising Spend Report, digital ad video spend grew from $12.1 billion in 2017 to $14.2 billion in 2018.

This number is expected to increase to $17.8 billion in 2019, an increase of 25% year over year. 

The report also reveals that nearly two-thirds of video ad revenue comes from mobile devices and nearly 75% of surveyed advertisers are planning to increase their digital video ad spend over the next 12 months.

While most advertisers run video advertising campaigns via walled gardens like Google and Facebook, many businesses are including independent AdTech companies in their video ad strategies. 

What Is Video Advertising?

Video advertising is the process of displaying ads either inside online video content – usually before, during or after a video stream, known as pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll – or as standalone ads. A majority of video ads are bought, sold and displayed programmatically using various targeting methods and may also include interactive elements.

What Are the Different Video Ad Formats?

The IAB envisions three main video ad formats:

Linear video ads are displayed before, during or after the video content, much like commercials on TV.

Non-linear video ads run concurrently with video content so users see the ad while viewing the content.

Companion ads include text, images or rich media that don’t interrupt video experience.

Where Are Video Ads Shown?

Video ads can be displayed across a number of advertising channels and mediums, including:

• In web browsers on laptops and mobile devices
• In mobile apps (in-app video ads)
• On over-the-top (OTT) devices

What AdTech Platforms Are Involved in Serving Video Ads?

For any given video ad, there could be half a dozen or so AdTech platforms involved in the delivery from an advertisers to a publisher. 

Below are the main platforms used to serve video ads.

Video demand-side platforms (DSP): A piece of software used by media buyers (brands, advertisers and agencies) to purchase video inventory from publishers via real-time bidding (RTB) auctions.

These video DSPs work in a very similar way to those used to serve display ads. 

The main functions of a video DSP usually include bidding- and campaign-optimization algorithms, behavioral targeting based on third- and first-party data, measurement and attribution, and campaign reporting and analytics. 

Video supply-side platforms (SSP): A piece of software used by publishers to aggregate, manage and sell video inventory to media buyers via RTB auctions.

Many video SSPs include analytics and reporting, yield management and optimization, and inventory management.

Video ad servers: An AdTech platform that provides advertisers with centralized storage, tracking and delivery of video ads. 

Ad servers also help publishers manage campaign tags from advertisers and make decisions about which video ads to show.


Video ad networks: A piece of software that aggregates advertising space from various publishers and sells it to advertisers. Most ad networks don’t own the media, they just facilitate the buying and selling process between publishers and advertisers. The exceptions here are walled gardens like Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Google (which owns YouTube, Blogger, etc).

The Video Ad Serving Process

At the core, and from the perspective of advertising technologies involved in the process, video advertising is not much different from display advertising, except for what is displayed on the screen. 

Video ad serving can be a complex process depending on the number of AdTech platforms involved, as each will need to send and receive ad and bid requests.

Below is a basic overview of how video ads can be served. 

We use the term “video player,” but it is meant as any device capable of displaying video media with ads.

The steps:

• The user visits a site with a video player, which sends a request to the publisher’s web server to retrieve the video content.
  
  The server responds with code that tells the browser where to get the main video content from and how to format it in the player window.
  
  The video player should support HTML5 video and VAST tags for communication with ad servers.
• After the video content is fetched, the video player sends a request to the publisher’s ad server to retrieve a video ad (or at least the advertiser’s ad markup). This process requires sending a VAST request. The publisher’s ad server would also count an impression. 
  
  The publisher’s ad server programmatically decides which ad to display in the ad space and sends back the chosen ad markup.
• The ad markup loads in the video player and sends a request to the advertiser’s ad server to retrieve the video ad. 
  
  The advertiser’s ad server counts an impression and sends back a link that directs to the video ad’s location so it can be displayed to the user in the video player. Most of the time, the video ad would be hosted on a content delivery network (CDN).
• The video player sends a request to the CDN. The CDN returns the video ad file and the video ad is shown to the user.

There will often be other AdTech platforms involved in the ad serving process, depending on how the video ad space is sold (e.g. via RTB or direct deals).

The Player

As seen in the ad serving process above, the central element of video advertising is the player, which serves as an interface between the video and the user. 

In order to display video ads, the player must be able to communicate with ad servers, as well with the page or device. 

But most devices like OTT or Advanced TVs don’t necessarily speak the same language. 

This is why a common schema is needed to standardize how ads can be served from video ad servers, and then played in video players across a number of websites (publishers) and on numerous devices (e.g. desktop, mobile, connected TV, tablet, etc.). 

Enter VAST.

Video Ad Serving Template (VAST)

VAST is a common video ad serving template proposed by the IAB. 

After numerous iterations and changes (we’ve written about them in another post on our blog), the IAB recently introduced VAST 4.2. 

The new version brings about many important and much overdue solutions for video advertising’s nagging problems and processes, such as measurement, verification and interactivity. 

Unfortunately for the whole industry, many video players are lagging behind. 

According to the IAB, some manufacturers of devices and developers of advertising technology still use VAST versions 3 and 2.

Why Is the Adoption of VAST 4.2 Important for the Ad Industry?

Just like software updates keep your phone safe from hacking, VAST updates are much needed across the industry to streamline ad delivery processes and curtail ad fraud – the perennial bane of online advertising. 

If you’re interested in the various types of ad fraud, head over to another article on the blog where we describe the issue in more detail.

The key benefits of industry-wide adoption of VAST include:

• Faster implementation due to standardized macro-based ad requests, enabling all video players to more efficiently display video ads
• Improved support for mobile and OTT platforms
• Combined audio and video standards, with the inclusion of Digital Audio Ad Serving Template (DAAST)

The introduction of VAST 4.2 also means the final killing-off of VPAID, a format that wasn’t originally met with a good reception and may have been the reason for the slow adoption of a common schema. 

VPAID offered limited transparency and created various issues in the industry associated with trust, vulnerabilities, negative user experiences and poor fill rates.

What Does VAST 4.2 Do?

The various video ad protocols known as VAST, VPAID, VMAP and MRAID were once a real dumpster fire, and the fragmentation did not help vendors in getting on board with the standard. 

After numerous updates and tweaks introduced by the IAB, VAST has finally matured and now also incorporates OMID and SIMID. 

This means it covers both ad delivery and essential video interactivity. 

• VAST controls the delivery of video ads. It is used to describe the ad, beacons, and determines the location of various assets of the ad – media files, verification scripts and interactive scripts.
• OMID is used for measurement and viewability, and is supported by Open Measurement SDK for actual implementation.
• SIMID controls interactivity.

How Does a VAST Request Work?

In order to play a video ad, the video player must send a VAST request to an ad server for information about:

• The ad that should be played
• How the ad should be played
• What should be tracked as the ad is played

The VAST request is an HTTP address with a query string like: 

http://www.example.com/?LR_PUBLISHER_ID=1331&LR_CAMPAIGN_ID=229&LR_SCHEMA=vast2-vpaid

The VAST inline response contains information like 

• Creative type
• Creative ID
• Creative dimensions
• Location of assets
• Tracking URLs
• What happens, for example, when the creative is clicked

Read this post to learn about the difference between VAST wrappers and VAST inline requests/responses.

Once the specified events have occurred, the video player will fire the tracking pixels to track impressions and other metrics.

The sample VAST 4.0 response containing the above parameters would look like this (courtesy of IAB Tech Lab):

<VAST version="4.0" xmlns="http://www.iab.com/VAST">
<Ad id="20011" sequence="1" conditionalAd="false">
<Wrapper followAdditionalWrappers="0" allowMultipleAds="1" fallbackOnNoAd="0">
<AdSystem version="4.0">iabtechlab</AdSystem>
<Error>http://example.com/error</Error>
<Impression id="Impression-ID">http://example.com/track/impression</Impression>
<Creatives>
<Creative id="5480" sequence="1" adId="2447226">
<CompanionAds>
<Companion id="1232" width="100" height="150" assetWidth="250" assetHeight="200" expandedWidth="350" expandedHeight="250" apiFramework="VPAID" adSlotID="3214" pxratio="1400">
<StaticResource creativeType="image/png">
<![CDATA[https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/iab-tech-lab-6-644x290.png]]>
</StaticResource>
<CompanionClickThrough>
<![CDATA[https://iabtechlab.com]]>
</CompanionClickThrough>
</Companion>
</CompanionAds>
</Creative>
</Creatives>
<VASTAdTagURI>
<![CDATA[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/InteractiveAdvertisingBureau/VAST_Samples/master/VAST%204.0%20Samples/Inline_Companion_Tag-test.xml]]>
</VASTAdTagURI>
</Wrapper>
</Ad>
</VAST>

AdTech

OTT Advertising: What it is and How Does It Work?

Maciej Zawadziński, +1

Apr 20, 2018

AdTech

Challenges AdTech Companies and Advertisers Face With Advanced TV

Michal Wlosik

Oct 16, 2018

AdTech

What Is Connected TV (CTV) & OTT Advertising and How Does It Work? [infographic]

Mike Sweeney, +1

Mar 16, 2021

The post Video Advertising: What Is It and How Are Video Ads Served? appeared first on Clearcode.

Our Monopoly: Walled Gardens Edition infographic is a game where four major AdTech players fight for dominance in an increasingly competitive industry by properly leveraging the concept of a walled garden. The winner takes it all…

Amazon

E-commerce Platform

Amazon’s ecommerce platform accounted for 56.7% of all US online retail sales in 2021 — just think about all that purchase data Amazon has in its systems. Google and Facebook know what online users search for and click on (with some purchasing data thrown in), but Amazon owns the game when it comes to knowing what people buy, who they buy it from, and how often. This alone makes the company a very attractive option for retailers.

Devices

Amazon devices like Kindle, Fire TV Stick, and Echo help boost Amazon’s overall revenue. Amazon’s hardware strategy has been to sell at break-even prices and then upsell other Amazon purchases. St atistically, Amazon hardware owners spend twice as much on Amazon as other shoppers ($1,450 per year compared to $725), according to a Consumer Intelligence Research Partners study published earlier this year.

Analytics

Amazon’s Brand Analytics tool displays the conversion and keyword data for its own wildly popular Amazon Basics product line. There’s nothing like opening the kimono a little, especially when some merchants accuse Amazon of manipulating product reviews to gain traction for their own private label brands.

Advertising Products

Amazon’s DSP allows advertisers to efficiently reach Amazon shoppers on Amazon sites, across the web, and in mobile apps. Amazon was originally known for keeping its proprietary shopper data secret. However, by making this data readily available to a large volume of merchants, Amazon is partly looking to soften its anti-competitive image. But the more compelling reason to share this important data with brands is to compel them to ramp up advertising spend on Amazon.

Sizmek

Amazon’s acquisition of Sizmek’s ad server and dynamic creative optimization (DCO) tool further strengthens its position as a possible third contender to the duopoly of Facebook and Google in terms of advertising. With Sizmek technology, Amazon will enable brands and advertisers to display personalized messages to consumers across the web based on their search and purchase history on Amazon.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon’s cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has emerged as a popular option for AdTech companies. AWS is used by startups, big companies, and government agencies. It works in the shadows as the backbone of most leading online services today: Netflix, Instagram, Spotify, Vine, Instagram, Airbnb and many, many more.

Facebook

Social Media Platform

Facebook possesses and stores information about users’ actions and can reuse it later for his own audience segments, recommendation engine, and lookalike models. Facebook owns the platform where its ads are displayed, which means it doesn’t have to share profit with other publishers. Facebook has full control of the price of their ad slots. It’s like having all the cards in hand when playing poker.

Facebook Ad Manager

Facebook’s Ad Manager programmatically sells only Facebook inventory – based on advertising formats that only appear on Facebook. Facebook does not provide any DMP or DSP integration capabilities (and no cookie matching), meaning advertisers can only purchase Facebook inventory via Facebook. This seems to be a deliberate choice to keep their inventory and audiences inside their walled garden.

Facebook Audience Network

People don’t always realise it, but Facebook runs a very precise and effective marketing network. Audience Network allows advertisers to show their ads on mobile apps and websites outside of Facebook, enabling them to reach the same audience on a larger scale. It is very effective as it uses the same people-based marketing across the Internet as it does in the Facebook News Feed. It matches ads with its audiences’ interests using very accurate first-party data.

Instagram

As one of its acquisition success stories and with 1.28 monthly active users (data for 2022), Instagram is a huge ad revenue generator for Facebook. Brands and advertisers can run ads on Instagram via Facebook’s Ad Manager.

Devices

Facebook does not manufacture any devices of its own, but they don’t really have to. Most people use the Facebook app on almost every device they own. This helps boost Facebook’s ad revenue by displaying more ads and collecting data about users across different devices.

Apple

Safari

Apple’s web browser, Safari, is the second-most popular web browser, holding a global market share of around 15%. Unlike Google which has Chrome and Search, Apple does not own a search engine. Google is the default search engine on iPhones, and Apple charges Alphabet a percentage of the revenue to keep it that way. In 2014, that percentage reportedly amounted to $1 billion.

Operating Systems

Apple is known to produce very polished, powerful, and reliable operating systems (macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS) for their many devices, but it comes at a price — they are designed to tie you to the ecosystem. Because Apple’s devices come packed with their own applications and services, using an
Android tablet or a Windows PC alongside your Apple devices will be unnecessarily hard in terms of user experience.

App Store

Unlike its walled-garden counterparts, Apple does not drive its revenue through displaying ads, but it’s trying to do so to at least monetize the huge traffic on its App Store. When available, Apple Search Ads appear at the top of the search results listings, which is useful if they are well-targeted – there is little point offering a game to App Store customers seeking productivity apps. Search Ads have a light blue background and an icon that lets viewers know they are looking at an ad.

Devices

Apple’s family of devices has close-ended architecture, allowing the company to control who can write apps for their OS’s, and who can produce devices that actually run the systems (er, that would be Apple). The Apple ecosystem is designed in such a way that each new Apple product seamlessly integrates with the other products you already own and improves the overall user experience.

App Analytics

App Analytics is Apple’s own analytics platform. It lives right inside of App Store Connect. Announced at the WWDC in summer 2014, it launched finally in spring 2015 and just recently added new metrics about the discovery of developers’ apps.

Google

Chrome

Google Chrome is the most popular web browser worldwide, with a market share of 65,43% (January 2023). It’s no surprise that the default search engine on Chrome is Google Search. This allows Google to show more search ads to users, and improve search results by collecting and storing search data from Chrome users.

Android

Google’s operating system for mobile devices, Android, boosts Google’s revenue via advertising and mobile app purchases. Although it’s free to use for device manufacturers (e.g. Samsung and HTC), Android requires users to log in using a Google account to download apps from Google Play and use the many Google apps, like YouTube, Maps, and Gmail.

Google Account and Applications

Advertising accounts for around 84% of Alphabet’s total revenue. Just like any good advertising business, Google needs user data to power its ad products. It does this via its Google Account and consumer-facing applications. Because many people regularly log into various Google services, Alphabet collects data associated with their behavior across websites and its own applications, like Google Search, YouTube, and Maps.

Advertising and Marketing Products

Google’s dominance and presence within the online advertising and marketing industry is what really gives Google its walled garden status. Data collected from various Google products and services fuels their advertising and marketing products. It’s estimated that Google holds a 36% market share of total US digital ad spend, which represents a large stake in what is a highly competitive and fragmented industry.

Devices

Google is increasingly spreading its tentacles into other areas, such as hardware. By offering hardware products in categories like phones (Google Pixel) and speakers (Google Home) and incorporating them with Google services, Google makes it more likely that an Android mobile phone user will choose to remain in the Google ecosystem instead of purchase a competing device (e.g. Apple iPhone or Amazon Echo).

Search Ads

Ads from Google Search are a big contributor to Google’s ad revenue. Every query done on Google search is another ad they can potentially show you. Users can change the default (Google) search engine in Chrome, but few actually do.

Data & Privacy

What Facebook’s First-Party Cookie Means for AdTech

Maciej Zawadziński, +1

Dec 20, 2018

AdTech

Walled Gardens vs Independent AdTech: The Fight for Ad Dollars and Survival

Mike Sweeney

May 08, 2019

Data & Privacy

Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP): The Impact on Cookies, AdTech, and MarTech

Mike Sweeney

Oct 03, 2019

The post The Walled Gardens of AdTech [infographic] appeared first on Clearcode.

The situation has prompted advertisers to steadily shift towards new, more direct ways of reaching their audiences – methods that don’t involve the use of third-party cookies and minimize the need for consent collection. This explains an increasing interest in social media marketing – Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat and, by extension, influencer marketing.

Why Influencer Marketing Matters

Influencers are currently one of the fastest-growing marketing channels. According to MarketingHub, as many as 86% of marketers are dedicating part of their budget to influencer marketing in 2019. At the same time, 80% consider influencer marketing effective.

Advertising products through celebrities is on the decline – we’ve written about the evolution of influencer marketing in another post on our blog. Working with long-tail, niche influencers is becoming increasingly popular and carries undeniable benefits. It offers extremely precise targeting and drives high-quality traffic to your website. According to a Mediakix study, 71% of the surveyed marketers considered traffic from social media influencers superior to other traffic sources. At the same time, influencer marketing was found to offer better ROI than other channels. Influencer campaigns are modern-day word-of-mouth marketing, and it is proven that 92% of people trust recommendations from individuals – even if they don’t know them – over brands.

While influencer marketing is in its heyday, it is also becoming more fragmented and complex. The success of a campaign is contingent on finding the person most relevant to your niche. This necessitates the use of proper tools to support brands in discovering and managing influencers, and evaluating the results of campaigns.

What Is an Influencer Marketing Platform?

An influencer marketing platform (aka influencer marketing marketplace) is a platform to discover influencers for a specific campaign and connect with, hire and pay them from a single place. This is an invaluable tool for brands wanting to manage multiple influencers within a single campaign. The platform automates some processes associated with managing influencers working on a campaign.

There are dozens of influencer marketing platforms and the most popular include TapInfluence, AspireIQ, FameBit, Heartbeat and Grapevine. However, many of them share the same growing pains and universal problems. This only shows that there is still space for improvement.

The Challenges of Influencer Marketing Platforms

There is no “one size fits all” platform. Many platforms focus on specific social media channels and offer unique features, but it’s difficult to find one that manages all channels equally well. Similarly, some platforms require an opt-in from influencers, while others proactively reach out to them. Also, while each platform offers a database of influencers, only a combination of a few platforms can give a full view of the influencer marketing market, which can ramp up the total fees.

Difficulty reaching big-name influencers. Some of the most successful industry experts, YouTubers, or bloggers (i.e. so-called macro- and mega-influencers like Gary Vee, Oleg Vishnepolsky or Tim Ferriss) may not even be found through the search engine of a platform. Instead, they are often accessed through talent managers.

No human touch. While platforms offer the benefit of automation for marketers, they often (but not always!) lack proper mechanisms for ensuring the content produced by influencers meets certain standards and is safe for the brand. No matter how advanced a platform, human labor is still indispensable in many ways.

Problems finding good fits. Even with these platforms making it much easier, it is still hard for some marketers to identify the best influencers for specific campaigns. The challenge is confirmed by 61% of marketers.

Many of the growing pains of influencer marketing platforms stem from the fact that this technology is relatively new and still evolving.

What Are the Key Features of an Influencer Marketing Platform?

Most influencer marketing platforms share a number of key, essential features, but many leading platforms are trying to differentiate by offering something unique. Let’s do a quick rundown of the most important features an influencer platform should offer.

1. Search and Discovery Engine

Popular vloggers and bloggers come in all shapes and sizes, from game streamers, mobile phone reviewers, makeup vloggers, fitness gurus, expert foodies, etc. The leading platforms offer big databases of influencers – Upfluence alone boasts a whopping 2.7 million profiles. There really is a niche for almost every conceivable product out there, but the challenge is to know which influencer to pick for a campaign. 

Platforms like Grapevine or TAKUMI offer access to their network of human-vetted influencers, which gives marketers additional quality assurance beyond numbers in the analytics panel. The payoff, naturally, is the size of the database.

A search and discovery engine is one of the core functionalities of an influencer marketing platform and helps marketers find the most relevant influencers for their product. This typically involves a searchable database of potential influencers and automated suggestions for the most relevant people in a specific campaign. 

Searches are based on criteria that characterize both the influencer and their audience. There may be filters for various pieces of information from the influencers’ profiles like performance metrics, rating, historical engagement, post frequency, recommended price, audience overview and demographics.

The results page should provide contact information for each influencer, allowing brands to communicate with them directly, negotiate the deal and hire them for a specific campaign. Some platforms offer draft contracts and handling of various regulatory compliance matters. More on that later.

2. Contact and Relationship Management

An influencer marketing platform should automate all the tedious tasks like messaging influencers, signing contracts, price negotiations, and payments – and support the marketer in keeping track of the relationship.

Automated invitation emails (with email templates to choose from) streamline the process of establishing collaboration with an influencer. Some platforms come with customized email drip campaigns, improving their response rate.

When a relationship with an influencer has been established, a marketing platform works much like a CRM. It groups every relationship automatically by stage, and guides the marketer through the subsequent stages. 

Brands that run campaigns with many influencers will benefit from features like custom groups, tracking contract signatures, mass-messaging and sending automated reminders and messages based on rules.

3. Integration With Channels

While some influencer marketing platforms focus only on a single social media platform, a majority of them integrate with a number of different channels for broader influencer outreach. 

An influencer marketing platform should offer seamless integration with various social media platforms through their APIs and SDKs. This allows the platform programmatic access, custom audiences, and reports. With automation of activities connected with the promotion of the content, brands can reinforce the impact generated with influencer content.

On top of social media, the influencer marketing platform can offer non-social or offline channels. Upfluence, for example, has a discovery engine that also includes blogs. Some marketplaces specialize in particular areas of the market (beauty, sports, entertainment, tech, etc.), whereas others have a wider positioning.

4. Campaign Content Management

Features like campaign content management allow users to manage ad text and graphic creatives, hashtags, mentions, campaign duration, deadlines, giveaways and sweepstakes, and other ad campaign features for multiple brands and influencers.

Through the platform, brands can receive creative content from influencers and preview, accept, negotiate or reject it accordingly. Conversely, influencers can receive various assets: images, videos or copy they can use in the campaign.

5. Influencer Compensation

Campaigns typically utilize the cost-per mille (CPM) pricing model, whereby a certain amount is paid for every 1,000 views of an ad. Alternatively, campaigns like affiliate marketing campaigns operate on a cost-per acquisition (CPA) model. Other pricing models include cost-per click (CPC) and a set cost for the campaign. 

How much money influencers actually make depends on multiple factors, such as a particular social media platform, follower size, engagement rate, and their audience’s demographic. An influencer marketing platform should also have features in place that allow brands to manage payments to multiple influencers form one place. 

Additional features could include escrow payments (a money deposit taken from the brand to pay influencers, but only once the job is done), tax compliance (e.g. varying VAT and other tax rates for international collaborations), and integration of payment systems like PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, or credit card payment gateways.

6. Analytics and Reporting

A good influencer marketing platform should allow brands to analyze the actual impact that an influencer’s ad campaign has created for the product or service and calculate the return on investment (ROI) for the whole campaign.

Such reporting capabilities are not much different from onsite analytics offered by platforms like Google Analytics. They track information like publication confirmation (whether the sponsored content was published), views, reach, engagement, ROI, real-time analytics, and URL tracking through affiliate links.

To more precisely measure the above statistics, some platforms utilize their own custom tracking pixels or shortened affiliate links that influencers can put on their blog when promoting a product.

Should You Build or Rent an Influencer Marketing Platform?

The dilemma of whether to rent or build an influencer marketing platform involves the same considerations as in the case of other MarTech and AdTech platforms. Careful weighing of advantages and disadvantages would allow you to make the decision. 

By building your own influencer marketing platform, you gain a number of competitive advantages. We’ll list some of them to give you a fuller picture:

• Save money on fees and commissions. Having your own platform allows you to stop paying regular commissions and fees to third-party platform operators. By operating a platform, you can run an unlimited number of campaigns with zero fees on top of the development cost.
• Control the feature roadmap. You make decisions regarding the feature roadmap and choose functionalities that better fit your business goals. By building a custom platform, you can avoid third-party platforms that only partially meet your needs and offer a number of features that your business will not benefit from.
• Generate more revenue. By developing an influencer marketing platform, you can create a new revenue stream, and can also integrate it with your existing products to offer multi-channel campaigns, drive more revenue to your company and increase your company’s overall market value.

By renting the platform, on the other hand, you can:

• Avoid the development cost. Influencer marketing platforms charge fees, but the cost is still much lower than the development of your own platform or agency fees. 
• Test influencer marketing cheaply. Using a platform allows a brand to experiment with influencer marketing and see how effective it is for their campaign management before spending big bucks on development of a full platform.

Last Words

Influencer marketing is an interesting proposition for brands, especially with regard to programmatic advertising being increasingly challenged by privacy regulations, ad-blocking software and other phenomena like banner blindness. This evolving form of marketing is on its way to become a bona-fide channel, and has already proven to work for all companies regardless of their size. 

The benefits behind influencer marketing for brands – granular targeting with very high conversion rates and decent ROI – motivate marketers to allocate increasingly big budgets for campaigns, but the growing confidence in influencers also creates vast opportunities for companies looking to build their own influencer marketing platforms.

MarTech

What Is Influencer Marketing and How Did it Evolve?

Michal Wlosik

Sep 05, 2019

MarTech

The Challenges and Opportunities Facing Influencer Marketing Platforms

Mike Sweeney

Jun 23, 2020

MarTech

The State of Influencer Marketing in 2023 [infographic]

Paulina Zawiślak, +1

Aug 31, 2020

The post How to Select Features and Build an Influencer Marketing Platform appeared first on Clearcode.

The success of influencer marketing lies in the nature of the relationship influencers have with their followers. 

When combined with strictly technical advantages like limited reliance on third- and first-party data, resistance to ad-blocking and a possibility of minimizing banner blindness, influencer marketing is a very attractive way for brands to promote their products and is on its way to becoming a fully fledged form of social media marketing. 

Relevant tools and platforms are cropping up to make the process easier for brands and agencies, as well as for influencers. 

In this post, we will trace the channel back to its origins.

The Fall of Celebrities

Originally, influencer marketing was reserved for big-name celebrities, but recent data and news confirm that the trend is on the decline. Consumers are more aware and discerning, and rarely fall for marketing tricks employed by big brands. They are more reluctant to buy a product only because the brand employed a popular movie star. While celebrities promoting products may be recognizable, they don’t enjoy the level of trust to justify the cost of endorsement. 

We’ve seen examples like Beyoncé joining Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity – only to appear in a soda ad shortly after. 

Another debacle involved Gal Gadot, a rising movie star (Wonderwoman, anyone?), who was picked by Huawei to be an ambassador for the brand. 

The idea was simple at its core – to have her tweet regularly about how much she loved the camera in her new Huawei phone. 

Unfortunately for Gadot, the web version of Twitter shows what client and device the tweet was really sent from (e.g. Twitter for iPhone, Twitter for Android, you get the idea), and she was discovered to regularly tweet Huawei-sponsored content from an iPhone. 

Needless to say, the idea of advertising a product using a direct competitor does not sound like a great strategy.

Similar stories crop up every now and then, and while they seem like no big deal, there is an overwhelming vibe that celebrities are not to be trusted with product recommendations, no matter how respected they are otherwise. 

This is one of the reasons why brands are increasingly turning to marketing via micro-influencers – people who are experts in their domain and have earned the respect of loyal followers.

The Rise of Homegrown Influencers

The focus steadily shifted away from celebrities towards regular people who are actually passionate about their specific niches. Many vloggers, podcasters and bloggers have grown to become professional, respected reviewers of products. Some micro-influencers have even become superstars with viewerships surpassing many mainstream media outlets. 

Marques Brownlee, a prodigy YouTuber specializing in mobile phone reviews, has 8.8 million subscribers and well over 1.3 billion total video views today. For people like him, a well maintained channel is instrumental in not only communicating with fans and building audiences, but also in making a decent living.

As brands are looking for new ways to reach their audiences, influencers seem to be a perfect match. They have the domain expertise and big, loyal audiences who heed their opinions on various matters. 

What’s more, influencer marketing simply pays off. 

A study conducted by Tomoson shows that businesses using influencer marketing make $6.50 for every $1 spent, whereas the top 13% of brands earn $20 or more for every dollar. 

Who Are Influencers Today?

Modern-day influencers are typically normal people who most people can relate to and possibly seek advice from. 

However, when becoming massively famous by offering their opinions and expertise online, influencers must still be careful not to cross the so-called “trust threshold” – the point where their credibility falls apart and the audience begins to question their opinions. 

This can happen when there are inconsistencies in product promotion – for example, when an influencer does not actually use the product that they enthusiastically hailed “the best money can buy” only a week ago.

While the long-tail influencers may not offer the reach of celebrities, they have a very coveted quality instead – unflinching trust of their audiences. They usually spend years earning the respect of their followers and very likely cannot allow themselves to ruin their relevance by advertising a bad product.

What Is an Influencer Marketing Platform? 

An influencer marketing platform is a piece of software that assists brands in connecting with relevant influencers and coordinating influencer marketing campaigns from one place.

Some platforms require an opt-in from influencers, where the staff of the platform can vet them and check that they are genuine and willing to work with brands. Other platforms work more like agencies and proactively reach out to influencers. 

Modern platforms offer relationship management, campaign management, influencer marketplaces, third party analytics, and influencer content amplification. The influencer management system provides tools for brands to manage all influencer relationships from one space; for example, they can create lists of suitable influencers for particular campaigns. They can then track the performance of their influencer campaigns and collaborate on content.

The Leading Influencer Marketing Platforms

Influencer marketing platforms come in all shapes and sizes. They usually offer a core set of functionalities, but each platform also tries to differentiate itself by offering something unique that others don’t have.

Choosing a platform should involve consideration of the price, features, and platform integrations.

Below we list some examples of popular influencer marketing platforms.

Final Thoughts

Influencer marketing can be a great channel, but efficient collaboration with bloggers, vloggers or podcasters comes with its own set of challenges. 

A good platform makes the process less of a hassle.

The recent proliferation of influencer marketing platforms clearly shows that there is potential in the market, and developing a platform like that may prove to be a very lucrative opportunity.

MarTech

How to Select Features and Build an Influencer Marketing Platform

Michal Wlosik

Sep 12, 2019

MarTech

The Challenges and Opportunities Facing Influencer Marketing Platforms

Mike Sweeney

Jun 23, 2020

MarTech

The State of Influencer Marketing in 2023 [infographic]

Paulina Zawiślak, +1

Aug 31, 2020

The post What Is Influencer Marketing and How Did it Evolve? appeared first on Clearcode.

The GDPR intended to tame the digital-advertising world, curtail unlimited user tracking, and return control to users over their data, but over a year into its implementation, we still run into blatant displays of disrespect for the law’s noble assumptions.

Who Processes My Data?

When you share your data with an online service, you instinctively expect that the data is processed only by the company whose website you’re visiting, but this is far from the truth. Almost every website integrates many third-party AdTech platforms that process inordinate amounts of data about you. You may not even be aware of their existence (Quantcast, anyone?), but they certainly know a thing or two about you. 

Pretty much every publisher shares your data with a number of such third-party companies, and if you don’t pay proper attention to the consent notices and simply click “agree” just to close it, you’ll likely be handing over your data to companies you’ve never even heard of.

There are good reasons to take better care of your online data. User data and consents (post-GDPR) are the new currency that fuels online marketing. Advertising companies and data brokers – often unbeknownst to internet users – collect, analyze and sell data on the people that browse the internet.

Has the GDPR Improved the Privacy of Users?

Despite the growing awareness of privacy issues after the introduction of the GDPR in May 2018, not much has changed in terms of how people browse the internet. 

Bad habits die hard. 

Back in 2017, Acxiom, an AdTech company providing an identity-resolution platform, admitted to having data on 700 million people and boasted that their “data products contain over 5,000 data elements from hundreds of sources.” What has changed after the GDPR is the extent and granularity at which this is possible today.

With trackers on numerous websites and apps you use, AdTech companies are able to piece together a very detailed image of you as a potential advertising target. 

From a user’s perspective, it is really difficult to keep track of all consents and to control the dissemination of data. The GDPR was introduced with just that in mind – to give individuals solid legal backing and tools to regain control and ownership of their data.

But even with the GDPR in force, AdTech companies are still boasting surprisingly high concentrates on websites using consent-management frameworks; the numbers reach an eye-watering 90%. This statistic certainly seems inflated due to a number of reasons:

• Misleading consent-box design. Providers of consent-collection platforms (or the companies using such platforms themselves) use very deceptive or intentionally unintuitive design for their consent-collection boxes. Not agreeing is typically made more tedious and time-consuming than simply accepting tracking. On top of that, some consent boxes use “assumed consent” – anything other than an explicit “no” constitutes consent. For example, closing the consent box and continuing straight to the website without adjusting the privacy settings is interpreted as an agreement. As a result, most internet users instinctively press the biggest button to get straight to the website’s content, and ultimately, unintentionally, agreeing to all, or most, data-processing purposes. 

• The privacy paradox. This is a term coined back in 1998 as a name for the phenomenon of online users declaring strong concern about privacy combined with behavior that directly negates it. For example, users of Facebook may not agree to disclose their real home address on the website, but they readily allow for location tracking.Similarly, internet users may express dislike for online behavioral advertising that uses cookies, but then hand over personally identifiable information (PII) to companies like Facebook and Google, which is then used for demographic targeting.  
• Data leaks. Some publishers are known to continue firing third-party tags even when users don’t give consent for the processing of their data. There is, of course, the need to collect and store user consent and pass it along to a publisher’s AdTech partners, but user’s data may still be passed (or “leaked”) to various AdTech platforms.

What Is the GDPR Really For?

Contrary to common belief, GDPR is not about putting an end to advertising per se. Instead, it’s about allowing people to make conscious decisions about sharing their data with AdTech companies – and the ways in which their data is then processed. 

GDPR is intended to stop AdTech companies from using user data for personalization and ad profiling without prior explicit consent. The reasoning behind it is that unrestricted sharing of user data could potentially lead to situations where users are profiled and targeted in very detailed ways that take advantage of their social and economic situation (people who divorces, suffer from cancer, are addicted to gambling etc.). The GDPR basically puts an end to such illicit practices, and gives users practical tools to wield control of the data in the internet space.

Thus, the GDPR boils down to stopping:

• Profiling using personal data without the person’s explicit consent
• Using thus obtained data in automated decision making
• Unsafe storage and transfer of personally identifiable information

The Abuse of Legitimate Interest

Legitimate interest is very likely GDPR’s most controversial and debated clause. It is one of the six lawful grounds for personal data processing that do not require explicit user consent. 

Legitimate interest applies when data collection and profiling is allowed without consent – only in situations where the consent is implied, i.e. expected and required e.g. to fulfill an order placed online. For example, the user must provide their home address, and Amazon must share it with DHL to be able to fulfill the order. 

However, because legitimate interest is very prone to misinterpretation, it often serves as a loophole for AdTech companies, whose reasoning may be something like: “we have legitimate interest. We have to display you targeted ads because this is our business model and the only viable way to provide our free content.”

Fortunately, this interpretation is a little far-fetched with regard to GDPR, which also states that legitimate interest only works if it doesn’t infringe on the rights of the data subject. Also, the Article 29 Working Party stipulates that behavioral advertising and data brokering doesn’t classify as legitimate interest.

Legitimate interest may, however, apply in very specific situations like: direct marketing (where no third parties have access to your data), website personalization for improved experience, web analytics, providing security, fraud detection, and reporting of criminal acts (i.e. Facebook will share your data with the Police as part of criminal investigation).

What Are Data Subjects’ Rights?

According to the provisions of Article 15 of the GDPR – “Right of access by the data subject” – data subjects have the right to obtain from the controller confirmation as to whether personal data concerning him or her is being processed by the company. They have the right to know about the following:

• Purposes of the processing.
• Categories of personal data concerned.
• Recipients or categories of recipients to whom the personal data has been or will be disclosed, in particular recipients in third countries or international organizations.
• Where possible, the envisaged period for which the personal data will be stored, or, if not possible, the criteria used to determine that period.
• Existence of the right to request from the controller rectification or erasure of personal data or restriction of processing of personal data concerning the data subject or to object to such processing.
• Right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.
• Where the personal data are not collected from the data subject, any available information as to their source.
• The existence of automated decision-making, including profiling, referred to in Article 22 (1) and (4) and, at least in those cases, meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of such processing for the data subject. 

Under the GDPR, data subjects – individuals sharing their data with companies on the internet – must have the right to access their personal data, correct it or even request the company to delete the collected data. This means that every company processing the data should have proper tools in place to enable efficient processing of such requests, or face the risk of having to handle such email requests manually. 

Individuals also must be given access to their personal data – not only the data that was willingly provided, but all the data being processed by such an entity. 

The specific user rights regarding data under the GDPR:

Right to Access

You have a right to know what data a company has stored on you. In addition, you can, for example, ask for the purpose of storing the data or which source it was obtained from. If the company employs scoring, they have to tell you your score and explain in detail how it is calculated.

Right to Rectification

If a company is storing incorrect information on you, they have to correct it immediately upon receiving a notice from you.

Right to Be Forgotten

As soon as the data a company has stored about you is no longer necessary for the purpose for which it was collected, you can demand they delete this data. If the data was passed on to third companies, they must even be informed about your deletion request.

Right to Object

Even if you have given your consent to the use of your data at some point, you may revoke it at any time. The company cannot make the revocation of consent more difficult than the original approval.

Right to Data Portability

The information you provide to a company is yours. You have the right to receive this information from them in a common machine-readable format so that you can easily transfer it to another company.

How to Exercise Your Rights Under the GDPR

There are several ways your GDPR rights concerning data can be exercised. Companies have a one-month timeframe (counted from receipt of the request, which can be debatable in itself) to respond to each request they receive from a user.

Here are a couple of ways to file your data requests:

• Using a relevant form on the data controller’s website. This is the easiest way to request access to your data and exercise your rights. However, not every website has a form like that. McDonald’s has a nice implementation of such a form on their website, allowing users to use any of the data rights under the GDPR:

• Writing an email to the address provided on the website. When no relevant GDPR compliance form is found on the company’s site, emailing them is probably the easiest and most intuitive way to gain access to your data. The company must respond to you within a month’s time of sending such a request (check your “sent” date and count 30 days). Mind that companies may provide a dedicated email for handling electronic-data requests. The content of the email does not have to be different for each company you send the request to. Here’s a template you can use:

• Using a dedicated “wizard” tool. Website like https://www.datarequests.org/ or https://mydatarequest.com/ make it much easier to take back control of your data. They help you send multiple requests from one place.

How Big Brands Respond to User Requests

To put the GDPR’s assumptions to the test, I decided to see how well data requests are handled in real life, and sent my requests to a number of companies processing my data.

Most of the companies were big multinationals that would never be able to manually handle the onslaught of millions of data subjects like myself exercising their data rights. Instead, these companies have put proper self-service mechanisms in place to provide users easy ways to download the data on their own. This implementation was offered by big social media and platforms, including Facebook, Google, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Other companies provided dedicated forms enabling users to submit requests. In such a case, the request may not handled immediately and, require the company to respond first. according to the GDPR, the company has 30 days to respond. What few people know, however, is that in specific cases (with regard to the complexity and number of filed requests) the period may be extended by two further months, which makes a total of 90 days.

In the list, I’ve also included a number of companies whose services I’ve never actually used, just to see to what extent the data is leaked or shared when I don’t specifically express my consent.

Facebook

The more different data a platform has on users, the more automated processes they need to use to enable users submitting GDPR requests. Facebook offers its users an easy way to amend, transfer or delete data using a dedicated automated form and immediate download links. The data is downloaded directly from the website. 

What Facebook Knows About You

Facebooks keeps information about everything you do while logged in. This includes, but is not limited to: what you do on Facebook (interactions, places, likes, etc) and what you say on Facebook Messenger. On top of that, Facebook knows:

• How long you spend online
• Your current location — this is how it knows which restaurants to recommend and which ads to display
• The places you check in
• The pages, accounts and hashtags you connected with on Facebook and your interactions with them
• Your contacts, if you choose to upload your phone book or call history.
• Things you buy directly from or through Facebook, but also things you may not think about, like the metadata from photos you upload.
• Your friends can tag you in posts and photos, which gives Facebook information about how you look (even if your own profile does not use a photo).

The amount of data Facebook has on you is truly staggering, but fortunately users can amend or delete their data any time by accessing and editing their accounts.

Many online and mobile apps include the popular Login with Facebook feature, which, while very convenient for the users, shared a lot of your data with third parties. Developers can also use this feature to get your permission to access Facebook data. In addition to iOS and Android, it also works across the web and on some smart TVs.

Integrations of Facebook login originally served much like a Trojan Horse, allowing third-party apps to tap into your Facebook profile information without you directly providing it. Facebook has allegedly changed this, setting strict data sharing rules and introducing a stringent review process for all apps that want to use anything beyon basic identity information made available via Facebook.

McDonald’s

Most of the information McDonald’s has on its users is voluntarily provided by them first, e.g. by filling in a form to submit a vacancy, sign up for our newsletter or fill in any other question and comment form. 

McDonald’s has created a dedicated GDPR rights center on its website through which it collects all data requests (access, object, portability, rectification, deletion) under GDPR. After submitting a request, the user receives an immediate request receipt confirmation which looks like this: 

I submitted my deletion and access requests together, received a confirmation email, and three weeks later got another email trying to verify that I was really the person sending the requests. Once I confirmed my identity, the deletion request was fulfilled as first. My right to portability was then ignored as there was no longer data to transfer. Disappointing, but understandable.

Uber, Uber Eats, Jump

Uber offers a very simple online wizard for all GDPR-related data requests. The company has also prepared a very comprehensive guide detailing why and how they use user data.

When requested, your data download is ready on the same day. The archive is downloaded directly from the website and contains all data points collected in CSV files. This includes all data Uber has collected on you across Uber, Uber Eats and Jump.

What Uber Knows About You

• Your name and email address, mobile number, rating(s), and the date you signed up for Uber
• Referral code(s) issued by Uber
• Payment method information, such as the date you created and updated a payment method, the issuing bank’s name, billing, and payment method type (Visa, debit, etc.)
• Metadata about support conversations with Uber
• Communications sent between driver and rider or between delivery partner and customer (note: you will only see messages you sent)
• Your rider data includes information used to get you to your destination:
  • Times and locations at which a trip was requested, started, and ended, as well as distance traveled
  • Trip prices and currency
• Your JUMP data includes information for trips you took using JUMP bikes, including:
  • Times and locations at which a trip was started and ended, as well as distance traveled
  • Trip prices
• Your Uber Eats data includes order history details like:
  • Restaurant names, items ordered, prices, and the time you placed your order
  • Customizations or special instructions

Twitter

User data can be deleted and amended at any time directly by accessing your Twitter account settings. A copy of your data can be requested and downloaded directly from the website within a few minutes. The zip archive contains JSON files with all your data.

What Twitter knows about you

Twitter has all the information is has collected through your profile, including your Tweets, your DMs, your Moments, and your media (images, videos and GIFs you’ve attached to Tweets, DMs, or Moments). Twitter also knows your followers, your address book, lists that you’ve created, and checks what you have subscribed to. It has the inferred information about your interest and demographics, and information about the ads that you’ve seen or engaged with on Twitter.

• Profile activity
• Interests
• Inferred interests
• Tailored audiences

YouTube

HTML, JSON, MP4 video (your uploaded videos). Immediate response (automated form). Users can amend or delete their data any time by accessing and editing their accounts. 

Like for many other Google products, data can be easily accessed and amended by accessing the account settings. Through a dedicated page called Google Takeout, you can also download the data (i.e. exercise the right to data portability), and download your data directly from the website.

What YouTube Knows About You

YouTube shares the data it collects from you with other Google products. Apart from the data you can easily access and amend directly from the user panel, YouTube allows you to download additional all the data that may otherwise be not accessible in a machine-readable format.

• Videos that you’ve uploaded
• Video metadata
• History
• Subscriptions
• Playlists
• Comments
• Live chats
• Community posts
• Community posts attachments
• Stories
• Chats
• Community contributions (e.g. translations and transcriptions that you’ve contributed for videos on other channels)

Google Maps

Like for many other Google products, data can be easily accessed and amended by accessing the account settings. Through a dedicated page called Google Takeout, you can also download the data (i.e. exercise the right to data portability), and download your data directly from the website.

What Google Maps Knows About You

Google Takeout offers an automated form/link to download the data directly from the website. The data is available in multiple formats (JSON, GeoJSON and CSV) depending on the type of data, and includes:

• Preferences and personal places in Maps,
• Food and drink preferences,
• Commute routes,
• Added dishes, products, activities
• Labelled places
• Location data collected (while opted-in to Location History),
• Records of your starred places and place reviews,
• Your preferences and personal places in Maps

Slack

Users can update their basic profile information at any time by accessing and editing their accounts. GDPR’s removal and portability requests, however, are typically only possible through the administrator of you Slack instance. Go to the bottom of your Team Settings page to check whether compliance exports have been turned on for your team.

Slack offers your space’s administrators various data portability and management tools:

• Import and export tools allowing to access, import, and export their Customer Data using Slack’s tools.
• Profile deletion tool. Allows to respond to user requests to delete personal information, such as names and email addresses, from a Slack account.
• Workspace settings center. See your workspace’s plan and settings, or contact an admin who controls the workspace.

The content available for export may be limited depending on the organization’s plan and data retention settings. The download is prepared in CSV and text formats.

What Slack Knows About You

Slack data download is prepared in a .zip file and contains your:

• Message history
• Private channels
• Direct messages

Final Thoughts

The EU was the first mover with data-protection laws and many other countries are now following suit, such as Brazil, India, and the US. 

Many data-protection authorities in Europe have already started making use of their newly acquired powers. 

Case in point: the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recently imposed a fine of £99,200,396 ($123,705,870) on the international hotel chain Marriott for non-compliance. 

But these high-profile cases are not the only examples. By browsing GDPR Enforcement Tracker, a website that keeps a regularly updated, comprehensive list of all companies fined under the new data-protection law, we can see that various EU DPAs have already handed down fines in over 66 separate cases. 

The future of online advertising, and the internet more broadly, is one that respects user privacy by default and adheres to privacy and data-protection laws.

Many companies are changing to become compliant with laws like the GDPR, but there are so many that have done next to nothing.

History will show that those who don’t act now will be the ones that get left behind.

Data & Privacy

Don’t Fret – the GDPR Is a Good Thing for AdTech

Maciej Zawadziński, +1

Dec 08, 2017

Data & Privacy

What Is a Data Clean Room and How Does It Work?

Mike Sweeney, +1

Apr 07, 2022

Data & Privacy

What Does the EU’s DSA and DMA Mean for AdTech?

Mike Sweeney, +1

Oct 10, 2022

The post How Well Are Big Brands Handling User Rights Under The GDPR? appeared first on Clearcode.

The goal is simple: maximum knowledge at minimum reading. All you need is five minutes of spare time and a cup of good coffee.

Here’s a list of three interesting AdTech news stories for June 2019:

Exposed: The Users Behind the Ad Blockers [ExchangeWire]

The article provides insights into the profile of the average user of ad blocking software, outlines the impact it has on AdTech, main motivations behind using adblockers, as well as discusses the future of adblocking.

Key points:

• The number of American users of blocking ads is still growing, and likely to exceed 27% next year
• The demographic most likely to use ad blockers is tech savvy young males – which hasn’t changed much over the years
• Motivations for using ad blocking include frustration with intrusive ad formats that interrupt and slow down the browsing experience or block access to content, as well as concerns over privacy
• The rise of adblocking cannot be countered easily, but the industry needs to push towards non-intrusive ad formats and targeting techniques with limited use of personal information, and to promote the use of data only when users’ consent is given.

Amazon’s Deals With The Trade Desk And Dataxu Bring RTB To CTV [AdExchanger]

Amazon has established new partnerships to allow media buyers on The Trade Desk, dataxu and Amazon’s own DSP to access Fire TV impressions through a private marketplace (PMP) developed by Amazon Publisher Services (APS).

Key points:

• Although some broadcasters have addressable TV capabilities – AT&T’s Xandr or Comcast’s FreeWheel, impressions are not sold programmatically in real time
• Because major broadcasters are reluctant to expose inventory to exchanges, Pogrammatic integrations are rare.
• Amazon’s CTV product is closer to real programmatic because it serves ads in real time based on deal IDs
• Publishing an anonymized ID outside DSPs is a breakthrough move which can help Amazon revolutionize CTV.

Here’s Why Facebook’s FTC Settlement Is a Joke [Gizmodo]

Facebook has finally made public the details of its deal with the Federal Trade Commission to end a probe into its handling of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. 

Key points:

• Facebook paid $5 billion fine, which is basically its monthly revenue
• On top of the fine, the government will vastly increase oversight into Facebook’s day-to-day activities
• Facebook’s board will be buffered by “an independent privacy committee of Facebook’s board of directors”, whose members are still unknown
• This settlement seems too little, but nothing less than the complete dissolution of Facebook would suffice to undo the level of distrust Zuckerberg has sown.

Soft enforcement’: DSPs are beginning to enforce app-ads.txt [Digiday]

Better late than never: the industry is embracing app-ads.txt the mobile in-app and OTT version of ads.txt. The anti-fraud measure has received enough momentum among app developers that major demand-side platforms are now prepared to enforce it.

Key points:

• The platforms implementing app-ads.txt involve Centro and The Trade Desk
• For now, app-ads.txt enforcement applies to mobile in-app ads. Connected TV ads are waiting for the support from app stores like Roku or for a third party that would provide match the CTV app store data with app-ads.txt files posted online.  
• The introduction of ap-ads.txt is expected to clean up the mobile in-app programmatic ad market, limit fraud and give advertisers more confidence when buying inventory programmatically.

New York City to Consider Banning Sale of Cellphone Location Data [The New York Times]

Mobile apps are known collect detailed geolocation data of their users. This then sold to other parties, e.g. digital marketers, roadside emergency assistance services, retail advertisers, hedge funds or even bounty hunters. New York City is considering a bill that would make it illegal without explicit consent of the user.

Key points:

• Telecommunications firms and mobile-based apps make billions of dollars per year by selling customer location data to marketers and other businesses, offering a vast window into the whereabouts of cellphone and app users, often without their knowledge.
• If the legislation is approved, it is believed that the city would become the first to forbid the sale of geolocation data to third parties.
• The bill, which was introduced on Tuesday, would make it illegal for cellphone companies and mobile app developers to share location data gathered while a customer’s mobile device is within the five boroughs.
• In the absence of a federal law specifically protecting consumers’ location data, cities and states have stepped up to enforce privacy regulations and location data rules (e.g. in San Francisco and LA).
• The bill would restrict cellphone companies and mobile apps from sharing location data to situations where they were “providing a service explicitly requested” by the customer. 
• The language is designed to challenge the vague agreements customers click on when signing up for an app or a cellular service. 
• The legislation would also exclude the collection of location data in “exchange for products or services.”
• The bill provides for steep fines, ranging from $1,000 per violation to $10,000 per day per user for multiple violations, while giving customers who have had their location data shared without their explicit permission the right to sue.
• It is not yet clear whether the bill will pass

Firefox Is Running A Test To Ensure That Killing Third-Party Cookies Doesn’t Also Kill Its Own Revenue [AdExchanger]

Firefox is switching to blocking third-party tracking cookies by default. The change could undermine the business models companies that rely on cookies.

Key points:

• Firefox has been testing a small subset of users – fewer than 5% of its base – to determine how disabling cookies through Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP), Firefox’s version of Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention, will impact Firefox’s main revenue stream.
• Mozilla receives a percentage of ad revenue anytime someone uses the built-in search engine provided by Firefox. In 2017, the Mozilla Corp. generated $542 million from a mix of royalties, subscriptions and advertising revenue
• It seems clear that killing third-party cookie tracking won’t endanger Firefox’s search or advertising revenue all that much.
• The same can’t be said for independent AdTech companies. ETP makes it harder to track users across sites and to build a third-party targeting profile based on browsing activity.
• Advertisers and AdTech vendors will just have to start using targeting options that don’t involve collecting user data, like contextual.

Index Exchange’s Mike O’Sullivan Discusses Identity Solutions in the Post-ITP Landscape – [ExchangeWire trader talk TV]

ExchangeWire’s Ciaran O’Kane talks to Mike O’Sullivan, VP, Product, Index Exchange, to discuss identity solutions emerging as a result of the limitations associated with the use of third-party cookies.

Key points:

• In a world where the third-party cookies no longer exist, one way for publishers to run addressable advertising (i.e. knowing who their audience is) is by creating a “free wall” — i.e. asking users to sign in using an email address in order to view the content (sites like thedrum.com have already started doing this).
• The email address can then be hashed and passed on to LiveRamp (one of the main ID providers).
• LiveRamp then uses it’s Identity Graph to identify that user on the publisher’s site.
• If the user uses the same email address to log in to different sites, then advertisers (via DSPs) will be able to identify them and run frequency capping etc.

On a side note, LiveRamp’s ID solution is the only one (as far as I know) that uses email addresses as a way to identify people. Most of the other popular ID solutions (e.g. the Trade Desk’s ID solution) relies on third-party cookies, which, as we all know, are essentially dead.

AdTech

How to Build a Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) Tool

Mike Sweeney, +1

Jan 23, 2023

AdTech

What Are The Benefits of In-Game Advertising?

Paulina Zawiślak, +1

Mar 03, 2023

AdTech

What Is Retail Media & Retail Media Networks (RMNs)?

Natalia Figas

Mar 23, 2023

The post Clearcode’s AdTech Month In Review: July 2019 appeared first on Clearcode.

The goal is simple: maximum knowledge at minimum reading. All you need is five minutes of spare time and a cup of good coffee.

Here’s a list of three interesting AdTech news stories for June 2019:

Demystifying App-ads.txt [IAB Tech Lab]

In its June 20 blog post, the IAB Tech Lab addresses some of the main misconceptions surrounding the app-ads.txt initiative.

Key points:

• Ads.txt is an IAB-led initiative that’s designed to help media buyers purchase inventory only from authorized sellers by reducing certain types of ad fraud, such as domain spoofing.
• App-ads.txt aims to do the same, but for mobile and OTT applications.
• The process for obtaining an app-ads.txt file is slightly different than with ads.txt.
• AdTech platforms need to match the app ID with the developer URL, and then translate, retrieve, and interpret the app-ads.txt file.
• There are a few ways to obtain this mapping data, such as by including this data in the app store itself (Google supports this, but Apple and do not), via direct store APIs, and data licensing.

Salesforce And Adobe Dominate The DMP Space, As Oracle Continues To Slip – AdExchanger

Key points:

• A recent survey by Advertiser Perceptions revealed that Salesforce, Adobe, and Oracle Bluekai are the most popular DMPs among marketers with annual digital ad budgets of over $1 million.
• Marketers that took part in the survey said the Salesforce DMP was innovative, flexible, and easy to use.
• The popularity of Adobe’s DMP has increased over the past year, mainly because many marketers use other Adobe products.
• MediaMath, The Trade Desk, and Google’s DV360 are popular solutions for marketers wanting to use a DSP-DMP bundle.
• There’s confusion around CDPs — many respondents said they favoured the Salesforce CDP, even before Salesforce released the beta version of their CDP.
• There were also numerous definitions of the term CDP.
• GDPR compliance is a low priority for marketers when choosing a DMP. The reason could be that many marketers simply expecting the popular DMPs to be compliant with many privacy and data protection laws.

‘Only enforcement will bring change’: Ad tech responds to regulator’s GDPR warning – Digiday

• The UK’s data protection authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), has warned AdTech not to continue activities that violate the GDPR — mainly mass data sharing and the inclusion of sensitive data categories during real-time bidding (RTB) transactions.
• The ICO states that Legitimate interest cannot be relied on for RTB and special-interest category data (e.g. ethnic origins, health and political orientation) requires explicit consent.
• The ICO will work with the IAB and Google to help make their GDPR frameworks compliant.
• Many people within the AdTech industry question with RTB, in its current form, has a future due the pressures being applied by organizations like the ICO, other data protection authorities, and privacy groups.

AdTech

What Is In-Game Advertising and How Does It Work?

Mike Sweeney, +1

Jan 13, 2022

AdTech

7 Great Examples of In-Game Advertising

Natalia Figas

Jan 17, 2022

Data & Privacy

What Is a Data Clean Room and How Does It Work?

Mike Sweeney, +1

Apr 07, 2022

The post Clearcode’s AdTech Month In Review: June 2019 appeared first on Clearcode.

Email automation allows marketers to schedule targeted messages or send them when a user performs a specific action on a website. It is a very effective method to nurture existing leads, but it can also be used to engage with new customers and regularly interact with past customers, reminding them about your brand and informing them about new deals, promotions, etc.

There is a long list of benefits of using email automation.

While newsletters and one-off campaigns will always have their place in your email-marketing strategy, the smartest companies set up automatic email campaigns that trigger based on a user’s actions.

These automatic emails are timely, personalized and hyper-relevant to the reader. As a result, they are opened and clicked more frequently and drive visits and revenue for your business.

What Is Email Automation?

Email automation is the process of sending emails to an individual or multiple people at a specified time in the future. Marketers can automate the delivery of emails based on a number of conditions, such as time and day (e.g. 4pm on Monday), actions of contacts in their database (e.g. when a contact views a specific web page) and rules defined in workflows (e.g drip and lead-nurturing campaigns). Automated emails eliminate the manual process of having to send emails to people on an individual basis at a given time.

How Does Email Automation Work?

Each email-automation tool is going to work differently, but the basic flow can be illustrated this way:

Here’s an example of how email automation works:

• A person visits a website and downloads an ebook, fills out a form, etc.
• They are added to the email-marketing database.
• They are placed into different audience segments based on their location, interests, behavior, etc.
• The marketer creates an email campaign. They set the rules/triggers, create the drip campaign, schedule the emails, etc.
• The person receives emails based on the conditions and campaigns set by the marketer.

Email-Automation Best Practices

Email-marketing platforms are powerful tools that can grow your business regardless of your industry. However, like with any formidable tool, it comes with specific dos and don’ts. Consumers today don’t want to get irrelevant commercial messages. They already get plenty.

Below are some of the most common email-automation best practices.

1. Send a confirmation or welcome email

When someone signs up to your newsletter or fills out a contact form, send a confirmation or welcome email. The confirmation email reassures them that you’ve received their signup, and the welcome email helps foster the newly formed relationship.

2. Send emails based on time zones and analytics data

As many marketers have no doubt experienced, most emails are opened within the first 24 hours of receiving them.

If you want your emails to be opened, look at the time zone your contacts are in and your analytics data to identify the best time to send emails. Looking at research conducted by email-automation tools like Mailchimp on the best day and time to send can give you a headstart.

3. Segment contacts based on location, behavior, interests, etc.

Another surefire way to improve open rates, click-through rates (CTR) and overall engagement is to personalize emails.

The way to achieve this is via segmenting contacts by location, behavior, interests, purchase history, lifecycle stage (e.g. lead, MQL, etc.) and many other attributes.

By doing so, you are able to target specific contacts and personalize the emails so they are more relevant to the recipients and thus are more valuable to them.

For example, sending an email to contacts living in Melbourne about your upcoming Melbourne event will be more effective than sending it to every contact in your database.

4. Quality in, quality out

How effective your email automation really is at helping your leads convert and driving your sales really depends on the quality of the contacts in your database.

Running email automation only for the relevant, valuable contacts is the easiest way to improve and maintain high open and click-through rates, user engagement and, ultimately, high conversion rates.

Rather than adding any contacts to your database, it is worth asking users for a double opt-in. This is a way to ensure you only have contacts that really want to hear from you regularly.

Unresponsive contacts, on the other hand, can be displayed opt-in boxes from time to time, which helps to prune away uninterested people. This can be done by displaying a message similar to what CXL does:

This way, your database is a self-cleaning, quality source of leads.

5. Don’t always go for the sale

This may seem counterintuitive, but email marketing, just like other areas of marketing, does not have to be all about selling. Constantly asking for the sale may seem intrusive and spammy.

Instead, make sure your emails present real value to their recipients. Your email-marketing activities should be more about educating your audiences (and even entertaining them) than about asking contacts to buy or download something all the time.

Naturally, the CTA at the bottom of the email should still be there, but the sale shouldn’t be the main goal of every email.

6. Make it easy for people to unsubscribe

Respect your subscribers’ time and decisions. Allow them to easily unsubscribe whenever they feel like it. When people don’t want to hear from you again, don’t make the process unnecessarily hard.

This point is intrinsically tied with ensuring your database only contains high-quality contacts. By cherry-picking only the audiences that would be genuinely interested in your messages, you minimize the risk of unsubscribes in the first place.

7. Test, test and test

There are many things that can go wrong when sending automated emails. Testing allows you to catch any broken links, images and tracking tags before the email is sent.

Also, testing can help hone your email to perfection in terms of load time, or scan your subject line for potential improvements.

With testing, you can learn how to streamline your content. Knowing what links your users click can give valuable, strategic insights for future emails. This way, you can fine-tune your content to improve your CTR – adjust the length, design or layout to find out what works best for conversions.

On top of that, some email automations enable spam testing. Because spam filters can defeat even your most elaborate content, some marketing tools automatically run your email against major spam filters, identify when it’s getting flagged as spam and give you actionable advice to tackle it.

8 Popular Use Cases of Email Automation With Examples

There are many ways email automation could come in handy from a marketer’s perspective. Have a look at the most popular use cases of automated emails below:

1. Welcome email

Your visitors may not come to your website to buy something straight away, but since they have already expressed interest in your services or products, they are most likely to do so in the future. Communicating with them on a regular basis is a good way to remind them of your brand the moment they decide to convert. What better way of implementing it with email automation?

Subscribing to your newsletter is a small step towards conversion, and there are several tactics that a marketer can take to help people convert without distracting them too much.

To give your subscribers the feeling that they would be missing something by unsubscribing, offer them some incentives like discounts towards their first purchase or other bonuses.

2. Transactional email

Transactional email typically informs users about the progress of their orders and delivery, but its name is a bit misleading. Such types of email messages can also be triggered by a number of other specific actions on a website or mobile app, not only connected with transactions (purchases, invoices and receipts).

Examples of automated transaction emails include emails informing about the password-recovery process, shipping progress, account notifications or social media updates.

3. Lead-nurturing and drip campaigns

According to research, 96% of visitors to your website aren’t yet ready to buy. However, since they have shown interest in your product or services, they are perfect candidates to continue communicating with to try to get them to buy later on. A great way to do this is to get them to subscribe to your email list.

For a user, subscribing to your list is a much smaller step towards conversion than immediately handing over money to you, and therefore people are much more likely to do it.

With an email-automation tool, you can set up a series of lead-nurturing emails or drip campaigns (read this post to better understand the difference) to regularly remind people about your brand.

• Lead-nurturing campaigns are designed to convert leads into customers over a series of automated emails. Such a campaign could start with very mild, general emails that showcase the benefits or focus on various use cases of your product. Over a period of a couple of weeks, the messaging can change to a more salesy tone.
• Drip campaigns can be used for different, non-sales-oriented purposes such as onboarding new clients. The goal of these emails, instead of selling, would be to get new customers to use the new software.

Check out this post from Moosend for some drip-campaign ideas.

Lead-nurturing and drip campaigns can be used for different purposes. Some CRM systems like Salesforce or Highrise allow you to mark certain leads for nurturing. Then, the platform sends messages to these leads through an integrated email-automation tool like Zapier.

Key points to remember when doing drip campaigns:

• Keep people engaged with your brand over a period of time and help slowly turn them into customers.
• Educate, don’t sell.
• Provide something valuable – e.g. send your recipients email courses.

4. Newsletters informing about new content or products

If you run a company blog, email automation can be a convenient way to inform your audiences about a new product or content you’ve created: blog posts, videos, etc. This is a way to grow your blog’s audience and expose your new posts to people who are most likely to interact with them.

According to Neil Patel, email subscribers are also much more likely to share your content on social-media channels.

Newsletters can be used to create an aggregated list of popular articles from other companies. Moz does this with its newsletter.

5. Anniversary emails with a special offer

Send out emails to people on their birthday (if they have provided this kind of data) or when they’ve been a customer for a year, or other milestone, and reward them. Add an offer – e.g. 15% or a fixed amount off your recipient’s next purchase.

6. Product-related emails and updates

Keep your followers up to date about current events, new product launches, newly introduced product features, services, webinars, etc. Email is a great channel to keep your audiences informed about your product, to remind them about your company and to educate them about the different ways of using your product.

7. Research and feedback

Automated emails are also a great way to send out customer surveys, customer research, product feedback, etc. This will help you understand your customer’s pain points and needs and use such insights to further improve your product.

It may also turn out that your product is completely not what your customers were expecting it to be, meaning you might need to adjust your marketing messages.

Sending out short surveys to your customers will help you come up with ideas for new features and prioritize development pipelines. Surveys let you know what your customers would like to achieve with your product, and why they bought your product in the first place.

8. Product engagement and customer retention

If people haven’t used your product since they signed up or purchased it, the emails can showcase the features of the product and educate the audience. Such messages can also help increase the perceived value of the product in the eyes of the customer. By realizing how useful the product is and fully understanding it, people will more likely convert into regularly paying customers during the trial period.

If the client hasn’t started using the product at all, you can encourage them to do so. You can also ask them if they need help and provide more reasons for using the product.

If your clients have abandoned their cart before checking out, you can send them automated reminder emails to fight cart abandonment.

Losing existing customers can cost your business lots of money, but retention is relatively cheap compared to acquisition. According to Bain & Co, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%.

Sending customers email campaigns about their expiring subscription, space running out or unsuccessful recurring payment increases the chances of that client staying with you or upgrading their plan. Dropbox utilizes such emails to inform subscribers that they are running out of space (and encourages them to upgrade to the premium, paid account).

It is a good practice to send emails to people before the trial ends or give them a couple of days’ grace period before requiring them to upgrade to the paid version.

Popular Email-Automation Tools

Email-automation tools come in various shapes and sizes. While most of them share a number of the same core functionalities, they may differ by some smaller, nifty features for specific use cases. Because the competition is fierce, specific platforms are trying hard to differentiate.

For example, Moosend offers weather-based automation that allows you to send automation emails depending on the weather of the user’s location – especially useful for eCommerce stores that sell products like umbrellas, sunscreen, etc.

Also, Mailtrap is an Email Delivery Platform to test, send and control the entire email infrastructure in one place. 

Email-automation tools can be used individually or integrated with CRMs. Tools like HubSpot and Marketo also include email-automation software, but are more complete “marketing-automation” solutions rather than just email-automation tools.

For a more complete list of the leading email-automation solutions, read this post from OptinMonster.

Last Words

Email marketing is a very personal, inexpensive way of reaching your target customers. It is effective for informing people about your product or service and keeping them engaged regardless of the platform. Email allows you to reach mobile users just as it reaches desktop users – mobile accounts for 46% of all email opens, followed by webmail at 35%, and desktop opens at 18%.

Email-marketing automation has been getting a lot of attention recently due to increasingly challenged cookie-based targeting and various limitations imposed by new privacy regulations. Email-based campaigns simply pay off; when implemented properly, they allow your company’s messages to land in the same inbox as your customer’s personal messages, something that cannot be overestimated in the age of ad-blocking and ever-present banner blindness.

Bottom line: If you haven’t done so already, it is high time to get interested in email automation for marketing purposes. Personalized email is more relevant and thus more effective than any other kind of marketing communication. Automated emails can be triggered by specific customer actions, and made to appeal to their interests, driving online and in-store sales with discounts and promotions.

AdTech

AdTech Targeting Methods: The Ultimate Guide

Maciej Zawadziński, +1

Dec 19, 2016

AdTech

What is MadTech? The Convergence of AdTech and MarTech

Michal Wlosik

Aug 24, 2018

Data & Privacy

What Is a Data Clean Room and How Does It Work?

Mike Sweeney, +1

Apr 07, 2022

The post What Is Email Automation and How Does It Work? appeared first on Clearcode.