Consider one statistic…

According to eMarketer, programmatic ad spend is predicted to account for almost two-thirds of digital advertising in the US in 2017 – to the tune of over $27 billion.

And obviously these kinds of numbers just can’t be ignored.

Which will explain why almost all RTB-capable platforms have signed on to use the OpenRTB protocol.

Its efficiency, along with its advantages for both advertisers (quick access to competitively priced ad space) and publishers (greater yield on inventory combined with data monetization possibilities), have pushed RTB and programmatic to new heights.

It’s not hard to see where the popularity of the OpenRTB protocol has come from.

Who Benefits From OpenRTB?

The OpenRTB project was not formed by one single company, but rather as a consortium of supply- and demand-side companies interested in creating (in their words) “a lingua franca between buyers and sellers” to help them communicate and operate better.

In particular, that meant establishing object models and specifications for, among other things, the following:

• Bid requests and responses
• Ad formats
• Publisher and placement types
• Geolocation, device and other data definitions

The latest version, released for public comment in November 2016, also supports:

• Header bidding
• Billing and loss notification
• Outstream video

The result is a protocol that can truly benefit both sides of the equation.

Brands

A unified “language” to facilitate real-time bidding obviously makes life easier for advertisers. They can easily tap into any and all inventory sources that support RTB without worrying about being able to integrate their platform with their supply-side tools.

Thanks to OpenRTB, a brand’s DSP, for example, can support several different SSPs and add new ones if necessary. The end result is that they have way more opportunities to reach their target audience.

Agencies

The same can be said for ad agencies that want to offer their clients real-time bidding opportunities. In this instance, there is even more need for “universality” as agencies may be working with a wide range of brands that need access to worldwide inventory.

AdTech/MarTech Vendors

Finally, vendors of AdTech and MarTech solutions who want to incorporate RTB capabilities into their tools will find that adopting the standards of the OpenRTB project can make their offering much more attractive. Whether their clients already have an DSP or DMP in place or want to adopt one, they will want be sure that the tool they are spending money on isn’t going to be useless because it doesn’t work with other platforms.

Why Real-Time Bidding Capability Is Essential

Taking a step back, it is also important to not only to understand the numbers behind the growth of programmatic advertising and RTB, but why exactly it is so useful and why an initiative like OpenRTB is so essential.

Advertisers (and publishers too) have become attached to real-time bidding for media-buying and -selling for several reasons:

Data driven: Instead of hit-and-miss campaigns and rough insights into performance, RTB allows brands to continually optimize their campaigns based on all kinds of data, from ad placement, time of day, page content, visitor data, etc. Now that brands are getting used to having and using this data, they have come to expect it from their AdTech tools.

Scalability: One great advantage of real-time bidding is the ability to quickly and easily tap into global inventory – in real time. This means targeting wide swaths of a market across several countries or individual, high-value customers with ease – all without having to have a direct relationship with the media sellers and their platforms.

Personalization: One primary result of RTB’s scalability and data-driven operations is being able to personalize ads down to the most granular level. Now, when a visitor arrives on a site, he or she can be served distinctly personal ads that have a much greater appeal. Advertisers love this because of higher conversion rate potential and publishers love it because they can maximize the value of a single impression based on data and the ability to connect brands with the visitor in real time.

There are other advantages of RTB but these serve to highlight the main benefits advertisers and publishers derive from it. And as they become more and more used to them, they will not be able to do without RTB.

Benefits of Implementing the OpenRTB Protocol

Of course, advertising technology is a competitive industry. No one could expect that one single platform could take over and offer a fully integrated system in and of itself.

And yet with so many different tools available – from DSPs to DMPs to ad networks and ad servers – there needed to be a way to coordinate in such a fast-changing space.

This was the original impetus for the OpenRTB project in the first place – and it remains valid today.

With a common “language” of standardized communication, AdTech platforms can be more confident about scalability and their ability to integrate with a host of other players on the market.

More specifically, a universal protocol can help SSP & DSP platforms and ad exchanges by:

Saving maintenance costs: No need for SSPs and DSPs to support different integrations with multiple exchanges.

Reducing time to market: Ability to implement multiple integrations without added development costs for each additional integration. Some customization may be necessary but the core implementation will be the same thanks to a unified protocol.

Making it possible to switch platforms without substantial upfront integration costs: Flexibility when choosing a new partner/platform to work with.

And finally – since the OpenRTB standard has already been widely adopted with other tools, making it the basis of a new tool makes it infinitely more attractive (and useable) for potential customers.

AdTech

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The post How An OpenRTB Integration Makes AdTech Platforms More Valuable appeared first on Clearcode.

The dark art of selling – with its mysterious mixture of persuasion, psychology and personal engagement is in the process of becoming more data-driven than ever.

That’s why Salesforce is the main choice of companies, both B2B and B2C, for handling leads, tracking customer value, sales-client interactions, all of which makes it one of – if not the – leading platform for sales management in business today.

Of course, that’s good for Salesforce – but it’s also great news for AdTech and MarTech companies who are looking to build a new platform.

Why?

Because integrating with Salesforce is an easy way to add value to your tool and make it more attractive to users.

Here are three reasons users want (and need) their AdTech/MarTech tools to be integrated with Salesforce’s software and why Salesforce development is one of the keys to making new platforms truly useful.

1. All Roads Lead to Sales

The AdTech and MarTech space is one of the most innovative areas of technology today. New developments spring up all the time.

But when it comes right down to it, they all exist for one reason: to bring customers to the point of making a purchase.

In other words, the promised land at the end of the road is sales.

It only makes sense, therefore, that advertising and marketing tools would be integrated with Salesforce solutions.

Whether your platform is geared for lead management, marketing automation, campaign optimization or any other part of the customer journey, it will inevitably be more useful when connected to the tool that users’ sales team rely on at the end of the funnel.

2. Users Want Easy Workflows

Not all the data flow in advertising and marketing technology is one-way.

So while information about a white paper download might need to be transferred to a Salesforce lead profile, the email exchange between a sales rep and that potential customer is also valuable data that can enrich a marketers next automated email campaign and help make it more personalized.

This is just one example of the way marketing and sales teams must work together. But there are plenty more:

• creating and sharing email lists
• filtering promotional campaign audiences by transactional data
• collecting and analyzing online surveys

With integration with CRM tools like Salesforce, marketers (and sales teams) would be forced to spend hours upon hours grappling with data manually, sending it back and forth and generally wasting time and energy.

2. Data Integration Is King

Beyond the streamlining of work between teams, building on top of Salesforce meets a basic need in AdTech and MarTech today.

Better utilization of first-party data.

Targeting potential customers based on 3rd-party segments may be great to boost campaigns’ lift and reach – but the data they are based on may or may not be very accurate.

Brands know that a far better option is onboarding their own data and maximizing its potential when utilizing AdTech and MarTech tools.

In fact recent studies indicate that the market for data onboarding (combining offline and online data) could reach $1 billion by 2020.

With this much emphasis on data integration, plugging into a powerful system such as Salesforce makes perfect sense.

Example Salesforce Integration for AdTech/MarTech Tools

Opportunities to build on top of Salesforce are almost endless – given the wide range of services that it offers, but here are just a few of the ways 3rd-party AdTech and MarTech tools could be integrated.

1. Content personalization solutions

With so many of the AdTech and MarTech tools on the market today focusing on the need to create more personalized customer experiences, it’s no wonder that brands want to be able to hone in on prospects and serve promotions, offers and valuable content that matches the needs and desires of individuals, instead of large swaths of potential customers.

Content personalization solutions can take different forms: on-site suggested content/products, email nurturing campaigns, retargeting campaigns on 3rd-party websites. But each one can benefit from being able to integrate with the data from Salesforce’s CRM tools.

Notes on interactions between sales teams and prospects, survey results, even data from Salesforce’s IoT cloud can all be critical in delivering just the thing a person may want or need to see.

2. Data visualization tools

Data is at the heart of what marketers and advertisers do these days. But with so much data to choose from, there comes the need to present it clearly and make it easy to share – both internally and sometimes externally.

When building a tool that helps users combine and present complex data from multiple sources, there’s no doubt that adding Salesforce information is critical as well. Management teams can have all the information they need about sales, customer service, marketing performance and more – right at their fingertips.

3. Real-time media buying

The real power of integrated data (as mentioned above) is revealed when it comes time to spend money on digital advertising. No one likes to waste money on ads that don’t bring results – which is why connecting 1st-party data from a powerful tool like Salesforce can be infinitely valuable for brands.

One tool that can benefit from Salesforce integration is a data management platform (DMP) which allows advertisers to audience dynamically segment data to buy target ad campaigns on programmatic media-buying tools.

Not only can they personalize their ad content to better match customer needs, but also better choose when and where to target customers based on their knowledge of likes/dislikes and previous buying behavior. With Salesforce data about customer satisfaction, brands can also boost retention by targeting dissatisfied or inactive customers with special offers.

DMPs often work in close conjunction with demand-side platforms (DSPs) for buying digital ad space – and often work all in one. Here again, connecting with Salesforce provides even more added value as the flow from sales to marketing to customers and back again becomes more integrated.

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The post What Can AdTech/MarTech Platforms Gain From Salesforce Integration? appeared first on Clearcode.

Like it or not, advertising technology has revolutionized the way brands connect with their audiences and the way advertisers and publishers interact with each other.

Which is why any advertiser or publisher worth their salt should really have a solid understanding of what AdTech is and how it works.

Yes, it’s complicated and yes, it’s in a constant state of flux.

This is AdTech.

But if you need an in-depth look at the most important parts of AdTech, you’ve come to the right place.

AdTech & the Advertiser-Publisher Relationship

Let’s start with the fundamental question: Why do we have AdTech anyway?

What exactly is the purpose of having a complex system of platforms and technology for advertising?

Answering the “why” of AdTech will make it easier to answer the “what” and “how” of it as well.

In a nutshell, advertising technology brings together advertisers and publishers in a way that helps both sides get what they want and need:

Advertisers: successful ad campaigns targeted at high-value audiences
Publishers: ad inventory sold at the best possible price

In essence this has always been the point of advertising and the relationship between the advertiser (demand) side and publisher (supply) side goes back as long as the concept of advertising has existed.

And then the internet came along and changed everything.

Now, instead of an advertiser in Chicago (or the advertiser’s agency) calling up a newspaper and placing an order for a full-page ad in the Sunday edition of the Tribune, that same brand would want to buy ad space on multiple publisher websites and only for site visitors that would be likely to buy their product.

Publishers soon found they had tons of ad space on their hands. At the same time, the number of advertisers wanting to show ads across multiple publishers also increased.

In order to connect the two sides of the advertising equation, there needed to be technical solutions that could handle the enormous number of the advertisers and publishers wanting to do business together.

That’s why there is AdTech. Because it’s needed.

Keeping in mind that all the various elements of the AdTech ecosystem exist to meet the needs of either the advertiser or the publisher, we can better understand what the different platforms are and how they work.

Supply-side (Publisher) Needs

Publishers with ad space to sell want to make money. That’s not hard to understand.

But selling ad inventory in the digital space presents several specific challenges and creates needs which AdTech addresses.

1) Serve ads in real time

Publishers must have a way to quickly and efficiently serve ads every single time there is an opportunity to do so, because every time an app user logs in or a visitor opens a page, a new ad creative can be loaded.

2) Manage (direct) campaigns

Publishers – especially when working in direct relationships with brands – need to be able to quickly implement ads, generate reports, and provide campaign insights to those who advertise with them.

3) Maximize impressions sold

Because the internet made it easy to become a publisher (think bloggers, app developers plus traditional news outlets plus digital-only outlets) the opportunities for buying and selling ads have exploded. This means increased competition and the distinct possibility that some ad impressions may go unsold – especially for non-premium publishers and in non-premium ad slots.

4) Optimizing ad inventory yield

Obviously, publishers don’t want to sell their ad space for peanuts. But with such a wide range of advertisers out there, and so many others on the supply side fighting for ad revenue, publishers needed a way to make sure they could get the best price for every ad slot.

5) Gather audience insights

In order to get the highest price for their inventory, publishers also need to know who is coming to their site or using their application, how often, and what kind of behaviour they are demonstrating. Only with insights like this can they attract advertisers willing to pay higher rates for their ad space.

6) Collect and monetize audience data

For publishers, selling ad space isn’t the only way to make money. They can often monetize their audience data by working with data providers and data vendors to sell it to advertisers who want to use it to target potential customers on other sites.

7) Gather data on ads served

Neither publishers nor advertisers are interested in just slapping ads up on a website for the fun of it. They need hard data on the ads they sell – and not just because advertisers demand this. Publishers also want to know which ad networks/SSPs generate the highest yield or which type of ad is most successful and which partners allow them to monetize their data best.

8) Provide a unified, pleasant user experience

Although publishers are anxious to profit from their ad space, they also need to ensure that the process of serving ad doesn’t hinder the overall UX on their site or in their application.

Demand-side (Advertiser) Needs

On the other side of the digital advertising relationship, advertisers (and often the ad agencies they work with) have their own set of needs.

They want to know how many impressions were served, how many were visible and how many lead to conversions, while publishers need to be able to provide them with this information in order to get paid.

1) Serve targeted ad campaigns

Top of the list for advertisers is the need to be able to serve their ads to the people who are most likely to be interested in them. This may vary depending on the type of campaign and its purpose, but more than anything else, advertisers want to be able to reach out to their most valuable customers.

2) Measure campaign success

How will brands know if they are reaching the right people? Only if they have a way to effectively track their campaigns, attribute conversions and measure engagement.

3) Track the customer journey

Because customers interact with different content at different stages of the decision-making process, brands want to know which touchpoints led to a sale, where they need to improve and how they can provide a more unified customer experience. That’s why marketers and advertisers need AdTech to provide accurate data to pinpoint attribution across all the channels they use.

4) Save time and money

Advertising takes a lot of time and a lot of money – so obviously brands are always looking to trim costs and keep from wasting time on sales processes, campaign trafficking and reporting.

5) Protect brand image

In the wide world of digital, there is the real danger that a brand could create a negative impression of itself by being associated with undesirable content on a publisher site. Other than sticking to direct (and often more expensive) deals, advertisers need to be able to control and verify where their ads are being served.

6) Optimize ad spend based on data

Information about campaign success, conversions and revenue all figure into the equation as advertisers measure their ROI or ROAS. When one campaign produces stellar results, a brand wants to know this and be able to push it to an even wider audience. Likewise a less than optimal campaign will need to be changed or eliminated before it gobbles up a ton of money.

How AdTech Processes Meet Demand- and Supply-side Needs

AdTech wouldn’t be anything without the tools that make it work, but before we get into AdTech platforms themselves, we should understand some of the main processes which go with them.

These processes were born out of the needs (both of publishers and advertisers) mentioned above.

1) Programmatic media-buying and -selling: At the heart of the AdTech system is programmatic media-buying (and -selling.) Basically this means an automation of the process whereby publishers sell their inventory and advertisers (or agencies) buy it. Instead of direct contact between two sales people, both sides use a technology platform to place an order, purchase ads as well as select and serve the appropriate creative.

How it helps: Using technology to speed up the process of buying and selling ads helps both sides keep up with the pace of digital interactions. It also makes it possible for advertisers to connect with publishers who aren’t close enough to contact personally. Now a brand in the US can advertise in Brazil without having to call up and place an insertion order.

2) Programmatic Direct (Automated Guaranteed): Two of the main varieties of programmatic media-buying and -selling are programmatic direct and real-time bidding. The first of these provides a way for brands and publishers to buy and sell ads in an automated way but still in a one-to-one relationship.

How it helps: Publishers are glad to make direct deals with brands they trust when it involves premium inventory. They can usually charge a set (often premium) price and they can also get more control over which ads show on their pages – which makes for a better user experience. Both advertisers and publishers benefit by being able to accurately predict their cash flow, because the price (per thousand impressions served) and inventory volume is set in advance.

3) Real-time Bidding (RTB): The other main kind of programmatic advertising involves real-time bidding, in which ad slots are sold on an “on-demand” basis, usually through an ad exchange where different advertisers have access to inventory from different publishers.

How it helps: Real-time bidding originated as a means for publishers to sell their remnant inventory and it continues to offer this advantage. With RTB, publishers have to worry less about leaving impressions unsold and advertisers can be more assured of getting a fair shake since prices are determined by market demand. Real-time bidding also helps publishers monetize their audience data by letting them connect with advertisers who want to target the publisher’s traffic based on that data.

4) Header Bidding: As an improvement to the waterfall auction process used to connect multiple demand sources on the publisher’s site, header bidding eliminates the sequential prioritization of demand sources and gives all advertisers equal chance to “see” the inventory being sold and bid on it.

How it helps: By removing the preferential treatment involved in waterfall auctions, publishers have the opportunity to make sure that they receive all the possible bids for an ad slot and therefore truly get the highest price. Advertisers get an equal chance to reach their target audiences if they are willing to pay the highest price.

5) Cookie-syncing and data exchange: Because advertisers and publishers track their traffic separately (using cookies) the process of cookie-syncing and data exchange allows different AdTech tools to communicate with each other. Without this ability and the data involved, display advertising would be one big guessing game.

How it helps: If cookie-syncing didn’t exist, publishers would have a hard time interesting advertisers in their ad inventory, because advertisers wouldn’t know if the site visitor was worth targeting. Cookie-syncing also helps advertisers optimize their campaign spend by buying only that inventory which will be viewed by valuable potential customers. Being better able to track audience members also helps advertisers attribute sales and conversions and measure campaign success.

How AdTech Platforms Meet the Needs of Advertisers & Publishers

Now that we know what digital advertisers and publishers need from their technical solutions, and how different AdTech processes help meet those needs, we can look at some of the major components of the advertising technology ecosystem.

Ad Server: To place ad creatives on their site publishers can use a first-party ad server (if there is a direct publisher-advertiser relationship) or a third-party server which is used by advertisers to serve and measure campaigns across multiple publishers and sites.

How it helps: Ad servers help automate the process of placing the ad creative in the ad slot that needs to be filled when a visitor loads a publisher’s page in his or her browser. The ad server can also count impressions and in the case of clicks on an ad, redirect a visitor to an ad’s landing page and record the conversion if the visitor decides to perform a certain action on that page. Without ad servers, the whole process of media-buying and selling would have to be done manually by modifying the HTML code of the website.

Supply-Side Platform (SSP): When publishers want to serve their inventory on ad exchanges (to maximize impressions sold) they need a tool to make inventory available for bidding on by DSPs. This tool is an SSP. It helps the publisher set a price floor (minimum price) for its inventory, receive and accept bids and communicate with the DSPs involved. The SSP is also responsible for adding additional information about the visitor (if possible) so that the advertiser can tell if that person is worth targeting.

How it helps: Obviously, an SSP allows the publisher to quickly sell inventory – often non-premium – so that it doesn’t miss out on revenue. The auction process that the SSP plays a part in makes it possible for demand-side technology to make real-time decisions so they can offer the best price and also helps the publisher maximize the value of audience data by matching it with interested advertisers’ campaigns.

Content Delivery Network (CDN): When creatives are served on web pages or in apps they must be loaded quickly and smoothly (all in the time it takes to open the page). A CDN hosts the creatives until the moment the browser receives the ad markup from the advertiser’s ad server and there is a call for a creative.

How it helps: A CDN further enables the process of serving ads in real time, helps pages load faster and help create a better user experience. With the advent of programmatic video ads (with much bigger creative files) the role of a CDN becomes even more important.

Ad Networks: Ad networks (such as Google AdSense or Taboola) bring together ad inventory from a number of publishers and give advertisers a wider range of choices than they would have in a direct, one-on-one relationship with one publisher. Ad networks can support both open auction buying and “guaranteed” media buys.

How it helps:Advertisers gladly make use of ad networks to increase the reach of their campaigns. With the help of media-buying platforms such as a DSP and in conjunction with a DMP for data-driven decisions, advertisers can access an ad network’s inventory and make intelligent choices about what to buy.

Ad Exchange: Ad exchanges are the platform that connect advertisers (with their DSPs) and publishers (with their SSPs) and allow them to make an ad inventory transaction. Exchanges also offer publishers the possibility of setting up private marketplaces for restricted media-selling.

How it helps: Ad exchanges allow publishers to get rid of any remnant inventory while getting the highest possible price. Advertisers can serve targeted, real-time campaigns through ad exchanges taking advantage of the data that SSPs provide about the visitor that will be viewing the ad.

Agency Trade Desk: Ad agencies have a vested interest in using AdTech and many brands rely on their ad agency to manage their campaigns. Agency trade desks buy ad inventory, repackage it and connect their clients with publishers using DSP-like technology.

How it helps: Advertisers who work closely with their ad agencies expect them to be able to help serve targeted campaigns, gather insights and manage their budgets. For brands who don’t want to invest in a DSP or a large in-house team to handle their campaigns, trade desks offer the advantages of stand-alone AdTech tools (with knowledgeable staff who are qualified to run campaigns on them) plus the possibility to connect with premium publishers that might not work directly with the brand itself.

Data Management Platform (DMP): DMPs are becoming a more essential tool for both advertisers and publishers. They combine data from online and offline sources to create specific audience segments for ad targeting, track campaign data, connect with ad exchanges to buy ads and report data on campaign success.

How it helps: A DMP can help a publisher monetize his or her audience data by letting them gather behavioural data about site visitors, segment it and sell the segments through a DSP. Advertisers like a DMP because they can combine 1st-party and 3rd-party data to find out exactly who to target when buying ad space. They can also use it to measure which audience segments perform the best and analyze their customers’ journey.

Demand-Side Platform (DSP): Demand-side platforms are the tool that advertisers use to communicate with ad exchanges and ad networks to bid on ad space. They can integrate and import data about which audiences to target from a DMP as well as information from the supply side about what kind of user the ad is being served to.

How it helps: Advertisers would be blind without a DSP to make intelligent bids on inventory that publishers and networks put up for sale. They wouldn’t know whether their ad spend was worth it or not. Additionally, they might be cut out of the 3rd-party data available through a DSP, meaning that they would have no way to intelligently extend the reach of their campaigns beyond the 1st-party data they possess.

Perhaps most importantly, thanks to a DSP, brands get access to worldwide ad inventory through a single platform. They don’t have to coordinate with AdOp teams from individual publishers and they can manage all their campaigns across a range of channels in one place.

Summary

Yes, AdTech is complicated.

But it is also a vast improvement over what advertisers and publishers used to have before. And as we have seen here, AdTech exists to meet some very specific needs. As those needs change and grow, so will advertising technology.

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The post What Exactly Is AdTech? appeared first on Clearcode.

After reading this, you should have a complete picture of the MarTech landscape and how it is revolutionizing many areas of business today.

Technology for Marketers – Why?

Yes, why? Why do marketers need technology? Simply put, the field of engagement with customers and potential customers has moved to the digital world.

Whether it is bargain hunters looking for discounted shoes as Christmas presents or an enterprise management team researching a new accounting firm, customers use digital means to find the things they want to buy. And statistics back this up.

According to research by We Are Social, residents worldwide spend up to 5.2 hours per day on the internet. This increasingly translates into their buying decisions being made online. For instance, online reviews play a huge part in influencing choices.

So – marketers have a great chance to reach their customers through digital channels, and they NEED to, because that’s where people are and where they are deciding about what to buy and what not to buy.

That’s why marketers need technology.

The digitized customer journey

But MarTech isn’t just any old technology. It’s purpose is help marketers do their job and facilitate their interactions with their target audience at every stage of the customer journey.

Remember the different steps of the customer journey?

Awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, decision, satisfaction

They still apply in the digital world – as much or more so than ever before. So if we wanted to put it into one sentence, we could say that marketing technology is the applications and platforms that allow marketers to engage with their potential customers in the digital space at every stage of the customer journey.

In the process, marketing technology helps brands:

• Target their potential customers in a more personal way
• Measure the success of their campaigns more accurately
• Collect and utilize data to make decisions and optimize their marketing spend

Now let’s take a trip through the customer journey and see how marketing technology helps throughout the entire cycle.

MarTech for Awareness

Whether a customer has previously interacted with a brand before or not, getting his or her attention is vital. In the old days, this would be where marketers came up with ideas for print ads in newspapers and magazines, TV commercials or special branded events.

Now marketers need to reach out to their potential customers across an exploding number of digital channels:

• Display ads
• Search text ads
• Native ads
• Social media (organic and promoted posts)
• Organic content (text/audiovisual)

Of course, each category could be broken down even more and applied across the multiple devices that people use – desktop, smartphone, tablet. How can marketers deal with all of these possibilities? By using MarTech, of course!

Marketing technology allows marketers to control their messaging on these different channels and devices to:

• Build overall brand awareness
• Spark interest in new products or services
• Target specific, high-value audiences

What kind of technology is involved in the awareness stage of digital marketing?

1. Content Management Systems

1. Content Management Systems

To host a brand’s site, native content (blog/video channel), landing pages (integrated with search and display ads).

Examples: Unbounce, WordPress, Ion Interactive, HubSpot

2. Programmatic advertising platforms

Demand-side platforms (DSPs) and Data Management Platforms (DMPs) – or solutions that combine elements of both, help marketers buy desktop, mobile, video or interactive ad inventory based on data about their potential audiences.

Examples: Sito Mobile, 7suite, The Trade Desk, Google AdWords

3. Content/Native ad/Social Media Marketing platforms

To control the workflow of content publication for awareness both on-site and on social media.

Examples: Contently, Pressly, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Outbrain

4. Search Engine Optimization/Marketing (SEO/SEM) tools

To support awareness-building through organic and paid search campaigns.

Examples: SEMRush, Yoast, Moz

MarTech for Measuring Interest

After a person is first exposed to a brand, they may (or may not) start to become interested in engaging with it. Hopefully, the marketing “net” is starting to work…

But how will you know? How can you gauge whether a person is truly interested…and more importantly how much should you spend on trying to gain him or her as a customer?

Outside the digital space this information might be very hard to gather and even harder to quantify. In digital marketing, interest (or engagement, as it is often referred to) can be easier to measure on the basis of concrete data.

And because the internet is so incredibly vast, it is extremely important that marketers be able to decide what is working and what isn’t.

That’s why they need more MarTech.

1. Web analytics

The bread-and-butter tool for analyzing the most common metrics from on-site or in-app traffic. Web analytics platforms allow marketers to capture specific events linked to customer engagement (product pageviews, time/scoll-depth on-page, button clicks, etc.)

Examples: Piwik PRO Web Analytics, Google Analytics, WebTrends

2. Tag management

For easier, even more detailed measurement of everything from on-site behaviour to conversions and results of optimization testing, marketers need tags. And the more they want to measure, the more tags they need. Tag management systems make it possible to handle large amounts of tags with limited technical knowledge.

Examples: Piwik PRO Tag Manager, Google Tag Manager, Tealium

3. Marketing automation platforms

Part of the process of measuring interest involves recording the data and setting it up to be used later. When working on a large scale (think hundreds, if not thousands of potential leads) an automated tool to support this process is absolutely necessary.

• Lead capturing: Gathering email addresses and contact information from visitors who download or access some gated content.
• Automatic scoring: Rating visitor actions based on importance in order to rank prospects by their likelihood to convert.

Examples: HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce

4. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

To facilitate the link between marketers and sales teams, transfer data about prospects collected in various ways online (see above).

Examples: Salesforce, SAP, HubSpot, Insightly

MarTech for Mid-Funnel Marketing

After the interest stage comes the harder part – moving potential customers along the journey towards converting. In the typical marketing funnel, this includes consideration, intent, evaluation.

At any of these mid-funnel stages, a prospect may “bounce” or disappear off a brand’s radar Conversely, a potential customer may do his or her research regarding a product or service and exhibit the first signs of interest after having already begun to evaluate it.

Either way, the challenge for marketers is to nurture new customers along or re-engage returning customers. The technical solutions listed above – when used effectively – can set up a marketer to do this very well.

Without some or all of the MarTech solutions mentioned below, a brand might benefit from an initial wave of interest because of a piece of popular marketing content, but never be able to turn it into a sale.

1. Lead nurturing/management tools

Most often the same tools that allow marketers to collect prospects’ contact information and capture data about important touchpoints, also allows marketing and sales teams to monitor their progress and initiate activities based on that progress.

Email marketing: One integral part of the lead nurturing process is email drip campaigns to maintain contact with past/prospective customers. Direct contact via email offers many opportunities for:

• Serving personalized content (articles/posts, recommended products)
• Offering special promotions

Examples: HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce, AgilOne, SAP

2. Data management & data-driven campaigns

Once a prospect reaches this stage of the buyer’s journey, the brand will (hopefully) have collected enough information to have a general picture of the prospect’s level of interest as well as the content (advertising or organic) that piqued his or her’s interest. Being able to capture and use this data is what makes MarTech truly powerful.

• DMP: A Data Management Platform helps combine data from a variety of sources (online and offline) and make it actionable for buying ad inventory across many publisher websites.
• Retargeting campaigns: If the data collected shows that someone has visited a brand’s site, made a purchase or otherwise engaged with a brand, that data (email address, tracking cookies) can be used to “retarget” that person with ads on sites they visit (including social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn).
• Content customization/personalization: Data about prospective customers can also be used to nurture them using customized content within an application or on a brand’s website.

Examples: Piwik PRO Analytics Suite, Lotame, Neustar, Oracle (BlueKai)

3. Optimization and Mid-Funnel Analytics

As with interest measurement, marketers will want to know how well their mid-funnel activities are performing. But not only will they want to know how many customers are converting, but also at what point they are leaving the funnel, what elements of a web site or app are causing problems.

For this they need tools to evaluate customer interactions, test page elements and perform site and SEO audits. They may also want to get even more direct answers to why customers don’t convert and use automated site surveys directly on page or through email blasts.

Examples: Optimizely, CrazyEgg, HotJar, Unbounce, Qualaroo

MarTech for the Purchase & Post-Purchase Stage

The whole goal of MarTech – of course – is to eventually achieve success. That success can be defined in many ways, but most often it includes a sale.

But as everyone knows, a marketer’s job doesn’t end the moment the moment a customer decides to buy. It continues into the post-purchase stage with satisfaction measurement, re-engagement…and hopefully a repeat sale.

Sometimes a person gets right to the point of sale and then changes their mind. It then becomes a marketer’s job to find the “almost-customer” and bring him or her back.

Not such an easy task in the wide world of the web.

Fortunately there is…yes, MarTech…for that.

1. Attribution/Analytics

While the sale (or conversion of any kind) might be the ultimate goal of a marketer’s efforts, the first thing he or she will want to know afterwards is: “What brought this customer to us and what was effective in helping them convert?” This is why marketers need technical solutions to help attribute the various touchpoints of the individual customer’s path.

Examples: KissMetrics, PiwikPRO, BrightFunnel

2. Ecommerce platforms

Helping ecommerce brands market their products on-site or in mobile apps, collect and aggregate information about purchases and other micro- or macro-conversions

Examples: WooCommerce, Shopify, Squarespace

3. Cart abandonment tools

To help track and re-engage customers that have jumped ship during the checkout process, ecommerce marketers can use tools that capture partially filled forms, identify returning visitors etc.

Examples: Rejoiner, CartStack, CrazyEgg

4. Data enrichment/management

Part of the success of marketers at this stage of the funnel is not only understanding how a customer converted, but also having all the data from that conversion for use in further marketing efforts. This means adding conversion data, purchase values and other data to the information already used to target interested parties with ads and promotions.

Examples: Piwik PRO Analytics Suite, AdForm, Krux, RocketFuel

Summary

MarTech has significantly influenced the way that marketers do their work in recent years. It has given them the ability to interact with wider audiences, make smarter decisions and leverage the power of the internet to grow their businesses in ways that would not have been possible at all even 5-10 years ago.

Despite its sometimes intimidating complexity, the function of MarTech remains to support and improve the traditional marketing funnel, while making it more effective at every stage.

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Our technical teams build some of the most innovative solutions being produced in the MarTech space and our own marketing team uses the latest and greatest solutions available.

In recognition of this, MarTech Advisor editor-in-chief, Ankush Gupta sat down for a Q&A with Clearcode Head of Marketing, Marek Juszczyński.

1. Could you tell me a little about your background and how you came to be the Head of Marketing at Clearcode?

I’ve been involved in online marketing and the startup industry for around eight years and got started as a university student. Over time, I’ve discovered how much startup success depends on proper marketing and sales. While most of my startup colleagues focused on programming and development, I was more interested in online marketing.

I started with search engine marketing, which at that time was the most popular segment of online marketing. I spent countless hours learning SEO and PPC at every possible course and seminar I could find (there wasn’t much available in Poland during that time). I even remember buying my first AdWords and SEO books through Amazon U.S. and waiting one month for them to arrive.

In 2010, I led a team of students in a Google Online Marketing Challenge competition and soon after moved from working with startups to a full-time position as a performance marketing manager for one of Poland’s largest e-commerce stores. There, I expanded my performance marketing and SEM experience and discovered how much effort and money was spent in e-commerce on traffic and how little attention was paid to optimizing the sales process and customer experience.

This discovery changed my focus from traffic acquisition to web analytics and conversion optimization. It took me a few more years and another job as a performance marketing manager in a startup company, which was behind memorable projects such as FilesTube, before I moved to a marketing agency in conversion optimization role. I spent two more years building my experience in conversion optimization and web analytics while working for some major Polish brands, corporate clients, and e-commerce platforms.

Before joining Clearcode, I worked for a company in the online dating industry where I oversaw all the optimization processes. My job was to optimize the flow of everyday new users, user acquisition costs, user lifetime value, and overall ROI in every marketing channel they used. This job gave me an excellent opportunity to put into practice my SEM skills and conversion optimization experience.

In 2015, I connected with Clearcode’s CEO, Maciej Zawadziński, on LinkedIn, and he eventually brought me on as performance marketing manager, a position that was non-existent at that time. Over the next two years as Clearcode grew, we were constantly hiring new people for our young marketing team, and the need for a team leader emerged. Due to my experience and knowledge of the company, I was appointed Clearcode’s Head of Marketing.

2. What is the core marketing technology capability of Clearcode that you bring to a marketer? Where does your product fit in vis-a-vis the customer life cycle?

As a service provider, we deliver a range of custom Adtech and MarTech solutions. One of our areas of expertise is designing and building custom AdTech and MarTech platforms, such as:

• Demand-side platforms (DSPs)
• Data-management platforms (DMPs)
• Supply-side platforms (SSPs)
• Re-marketing platforms
• Dynamic ad-serving technology
• Data-measurement & analytics platforms
• Other real-time bidding (RTB) ecosystem components

By providing software development services, we offer clients more than just out-of-the-box Adtech and MarTech solutions. These solutions are not enough for many marketers, as they often need to adjust the technology based on the specific needs of their business or industry. They often do not need a complex set of features, but instead one or two single features that are highly customized. This is when they turn to us to build marketing tools not found on the market.
The technology we build for marketers is used to support marketing activities during different phases of the customer life cycle:

• The awareness phase: Custom RTB and programmatic media buying solutions to help marketers promote their product or service.
• The consideration and decision phase: Custom DMPs and web analytics solutions to help segment and retarget audiences.
• From the awareness phase through to the post-sales process: Custom tag management solutions that help integrate the whole marketing technology stack together.

3. Since the inception of Clearcode in 2009, what in your experience has been the most radical change in the AdTech and MarTech space, which has set the pace of technologies to come for the coming decade? Conversely, which are the gaps that remain to be filled despite the extensive advances in marketing technologies?

In 2009, MarTech and AdTech didn’t differ that much. At that time, marketers were still obsessed with traffic acquisition and media buying. Over the past seven years, attention has moved towards process optimization and automation. Advertisers figured out they need to do a better job at media buying optimization in order to lower media costs and at the same time leverage traffic quality.

This is what encouraged some major changes in AdTech and MarTech. The following has also caused some major changes in the AdTech and MarTech industries:

• It became obvious that it is more cost effective to maintain current contacts and customers than to acquire new ones, which led to the popularity of remarketing and marketing automation technology.
• Marketers started paying attention to the conversion optimization aspects of their websites and landing pages, which led to explosion of new A/B testing and UX tools.
• Mobile and multi-device usage became very popular. As a result, advertisers had to find a way to avoid paying for the same users across many devices, which caused multi-device attribution technology to emerge.
• Companies realized that they have many data points and data sources, like CRM, web analytics, and brick and mortar stores but are unable to merge them into a single customer profile, which caused data management platforms to emerge.

Those are the trends that I see as influential on the MarTech and AdTech industries today, and I believe they will keep on doing so in the coming years.

Despite the rapid development of marketing solutions, technologies like cross-device attribution and data integration are very niche and imperfect. Not many marketers know how to use and leverage them to improve their marketing, and not many software vendors provide fully reliable solutions. I predict this gap will be filled once marketers learn what they really expect from the new technology, what data they’re missing, and as a result, will force software vendors to improve their technology to satisfy those needs.

4. From a technology perspective, what are some of the biggest challenges that your marketing team faces today?

We face problems that are typical for teams that rely heavily on data. One of our biggest challenges is cross-channel attribution. As a B2B company, our sales cycles can last for more than a year. During this time, our potential customers interact with many of our marketing channels. This creates a challenge for us to be able to properly attribute credit for the final conversion to each channel. On one hand, it’s a technology challenge, as we need to implement proper tools and solutions that can track our leads across different channels and devices for longer periods of time. On the other hand, it’s a challenge connected with know-how, which means knowing how to build and use attribution models that fit our company best and act upon insights we get from our data.

5. Are there any new features or upcoming upgrades that you’re excited about and would like to give us a sneak peek into? Could you elaborate on the 7Suite and how it helps marketers to achieve their multiple objectives?

We recently rolled out a major upgrade to one of our products, Piwik PRO, which is an enterprise-level web analytics platform. We extended the functionality of Piwik PRO to include a tag management system (TMS). This upgrade will move Piwik PRO from a standalone web analytics tool to a web analytics stack.
Another product that Clearcode developed is 7suite – a fully customizable data management stack. The 7suite stack comprises of three main components, which together form a powerful tool for data-driven marketing and advertising.

1. A data management platform (DMP): allows users to combine, segment, and activate a wide range of data from web, CRM tools, ecommerce shopping carts, and more.
2. A tag management system: provides an easy-to-use tool for managing tags and collecting information that can be processed in a DMP or analytics platform.
3. A content personalization engine: utilizes audience segments created using a DMP in order to serve dynamic, personalized content, including website elements and pop-ups.

6. Considering you have transcended both the AdTech and MarTech space, how alike or different would you say both these industries are? What are their common meeting grounds and do you agree the relationship is more symbiotic rather than at cross purposes?

The line dividing AdTech and MarTech, especially regarding technology becomes thinner every day. There will of course always be platforms that are suited only for advertising purposes (e.g. ad exchanges) and only for marketing purposes (e.g. marketing automation platforms), but in general, both marketers and advertisers will eventually end up using technology from both industries. This is especially true for large companies that conduct advertising and marketing activities on a broad scale (e.g. from online display advertising campaigns to email marketing) as eventually there will be some kind of cross-over from advertising to marketing.

Technology is one common meeting ground, with data management platforms (DMPs) being a prime example. The growth of DMPs is connecting the two industries. Both advertisers and marketers can use DMPs and can store data from a range of sources, including online advertising and marketing campaigns, which they can then use for a variety of advertising and marketing activities. For these reasons, I agree that the relationship between ad tech and martech is symbiotic.

7. What is your take on the massive explosion of MarTech cos across so many categories? Do you see competition, opportunities to partner and/or integrate?

In 2009, we started as a software house building all kind of solutions, but our CEO, Maciej Zawadziński, foresaw that AdTech/MarTech space was the place to be. Since then, we’ve been actively striving for customers from the MarTech sector and building our own MarTech startups. A few years later when the MarTech boom left the station, we were already on board.

We don’t see much competition because there are very few software development companies on the market that specialize in building AdTech and MarTech solutions. Generic software houses that try to enter this market often fail because they do not understand the needs of MarTech customers, and they do not cooperate with marketing people when building new solutions, which is often crucial.

We see many opportunities for our company as more marketing and advertising companies move from out-of-the-box solutions towards custom solutions that can meet their individual needs. Often companies do not need an expensive marketing stack, they just need a specific feature that can be highly customized. We see many opportunities to partner with:

• Vendors who would like to integrate with our solutions and products and extend their functionality
• Vendors and companies who would like to whitelabel our solutions and add them to their marketing stack or simply become a re-seller.

8. How do you weigh in on the whole ‘buying into vs building a marketing cloud’ choices that marketers have to face today?

Many marketing teams today find more and more benefits from building in-house marketing solutions, and for many good reasons. Instead, they need a few of them but highly customized and adjusted to that company and industry.

Taking into account the high costs of marketing cloud licensing, it makes a lot of sense for those marketing teams to build in-house solutions within the same budget with fewer, but highly customized functionalities. Another aspect of the cloud versus in-house choice is control and data maintenance. Many companies are obliged by the law and internal policy to store their data in-house. This applies especially to telecoms, banks, and the financial and healthcare sectors. For these companies, pushing valuable marketing and customer data to an external cloud is not an option. Those two factors – the need for fewer highly customized features, and the need of data control and protection – will drive private marketing cloud popularity even further.

9. Between AdTech and MarTech companies, who would you say are less skeptical about building data analytics in the cloud? Would you suggest an amalgamation of public and private clouds for those as yet uncertain about possible data security breaches in for customizing analytics in the cloud, where they have sensitive data in the private cloud?

It depends on the company and industry, as some industries require stricter data privacy rules than others (e.g. finance and health care). However, a lot of companies, not only those operating in the AdTech and MarTech industries, are now looking for software that provides them with greater control over their data – such as analytics solutions hosted on-premises or in a company’s private cloud.

10. Could you share for our readers, an infographic or description depicting your marketing stack (various marketing software products or platforms your team uses or subscribes to)?

This interview originally appeared on MarTech Advisor.

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The post MarTech Advisor Interviews Marek Juszczyński, Clearcode Head of Marketing appeared first on Clearcode.

And I mean actually clicked on it, not just by accident.

Most research puts banner ad click-through-rates (CTR) at around 0.06%.

That means an advertiser who purchases ads on a CMP (per thousand) basis, only gets about 60 clicks per 10,000 impressions. And there’s a good chance that some of those clicks will be accidental or the work of bots.

So how can you improve the measly 0.06% CTR on banner ads and get more users clicking through intentionally?

Well, content personalization is a great way to start.

What Is Content Personalization?

Online content can come in many forms. It may be a blog post, it may be an embedded video clip, it may be a display ad – or it may even be products on an ecommerce website.

Anyone who has an online presence – whether on their own website or on an ad publisher’s website – is in the business of serving content to internet users.

But the thing is, the choice of what kind of content to produce and display is often a hit or miss process. At best it is well thought-out and creative, at worst it is totally useless.

Judging by the average CTR of online display ads, we could assume that most of them are closer to the second description.

One main problem, of course, is that content creators are shooting in the dark – for the most part. They may have an idea what visitors want, but quite often they are way out in left field.

Content personalization is the practice of using data (more on that later) to serve content that more closely matches the interests, needs and intents of the individual.

Need an example? Just think of the last time you typed a word or phrase into Google’s search bar.

Does the search engine give you a random list of sites?

No.

It uses its complex algorithms to serve you results that come closest to what you were looking for.

And you’re happy! (Usually…)

That’s the power of content personalization.

Is It Effective?

In a word – yes!

Personalizing the look and feel of display ads can go a long ways towards creating a positive reaction to your brand (and by extension, products and services).

The most common form of personalization – dynamic retargeting – has already gained popularity as it moves into a tie with search ads and email marketing for effectiveness.

Research shows that display ad personalization has the distinct ability to boost click-through-rate, especially when customers are in the first stages of their buying process.

This echoes the findings of the Harvard Business Review which point to personalized ads based on simple pixel retargeting (and without specific product recommendations) as having the greatest effect in the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey.

How Is It Done? – The Mechanics Of It All

Now the big question – how can I take advantage of this?

The most straightforward answer is: get a handle on your data.

Because when it comes right down to it, personalization is all about using visitor behaviour data more effectively.

But before diving into the nitty-gritty of display ad personalization, it’s important to point out that content personalization can take different forms and different processes are used to make it work in different situations.

Since we’re talking about display ad or banner ad personalization, we’ll assume that these creatives are being served on 3rd-party publisher sites.

However, content personalization can just as well occur on a brand’s own website, when products or services are presented to a site visitor based on the brand’s data about that visitor.

Personalization Based On Site Visits

If I take the time to visit a site, this clearly shows that I have some interest in the brand.

I could arrive on a site in several ways:

• By directly typing in the site address
• By clicking on a Google AdWords search ad
• By clicking a referral link in another piece of web content.

In every case, my visit will be recorded and if the brand wants to retarget me as I further surf the internet, a retargeting pixel will be fired. In many cases this will be a retargeting pixel from a specific ad service such as Google AdWords, Facebook or Twitter.

If the brand uses these services as its primary source of retargeting campaigns, the retargeting pixel will then allow the service to automatically call for a creative from the brand the next time I visit Facebook or Twitter or the service in question.

However, if the brand is interested in serving personalized display ads on a variety of publisher sites, it will need a way to communicate the information about its site visitors to a wide range of ad servers.

The same goes for personalized ads based on more specific data such as purchase history.

Personalization Based on Past Purchases/Browsing History

One major usage of personalized display ads is to target people who abandon their shopping cart.

Think of it as a brand’s way of saying to you “Oh by the way, did you forget something? Did something go wrong during your checkout process?”

Let’s be honest – the goal is still to convert the customer, but brands are smart enough to know that people don’t always abandon their shopping cart just out of spite – there could be serious issues that hinder the customer experience.

In this case, a personalized display ad is a brand’s chance to make up with a potentially dissatisfied customer.

In order to do this, however, the brand’s marketing team needs more information than just one retargeting pixel.

For instance:

• Which products were added to the shopping cart
• How far through the checkout process a customer went
• If the customer is a first-time buyer or a loyal customer
• The average amount of their purchase (if they are a repeat customer)

In addition, they’d want to know how recently the customer attempted the purchase, and how frequently they carried out these actions (how often they make a purchase or how often they visit the site).

To collect all of this data – AND use it to serve a personalized display ad – an ecommerce brand needs a tool to collect data such as:

• Events (form submissions, page visits, product views, product additions to the shopping cart, click-throughs to payment pages, etc.)
• Profile attributes (age, shipping address, interests etc.)
• CRM data (whether a visitor belongs to a loyalty program, average order size etc.)

Not only do they have to collect this data, they also have to merge it together, so that the personalized ad can take into consideration ALL of the factors involved.

For this kind of advanced personalization, a data management solution is needed.

How To Use 7suite’s DMP To Personalize Ad Content

Does this sound complicated?

Well, it is – but thanks to the advanced features of a Data Management Platform (DMP), boosting your ads’ CTR doesn’t have to give you a major headache.

Let’s say that you decide to implement a DMP to optimize your banner ad campaign targeted at potential customers of your high-end dirt bikes.

To do this you would like to personalize your ads. Here are a couple of ways to do this:

• Show web users who have viewed multiple product pages (for lower-end bikes) an ad highlighting “cool” bikes – with a view to push customers towards higher end models.
• Serve a creative to those who have clicked on an AdWords link advertising “powerful dirt bikes” or “stunt dirt bikes.” that points to site page or landing page with embedded YouTube videos featuring well-known bikers

How can 7suite help you accomplish this?

1. The DMP will gather data from both the page views and the AdWords click using a tag installed on the website. In the first case, this will be the history of bikes viewed. In the second, AdWords will pass on the keywords that the user entered when they viewed the search ad.
2. The DMP will also label the user based on this information – as well as other factors such as browsing history or purchase conversion data (if he or she had actually purchased an item before.)
3. Based on this aggregated information, the DMP can assign the user to an audience segment for either those interested in lower-priced models or those who have shown interest in more powerful, stunt bikes. (Of course, these audience segments could be even more dynamic – for instance, if the user had already purchased a bike, he or she could be classified as a higher-value target. Or if the AdWords tracking data showed that he or she had searched for a particular model, the person would be added to an even more targeted segment which would receive a creative ad based on the model searched for.)

1. After this, the audience segment is then synced with the Demand Side Platform (DSP) that the brand wishes to use.
2. When the user continues to surf the internet and lands on a certain page where ads can be served, the user’s browser will send an ad request to publisher’s Supply-Side Platform (SSP) which will communicate to the Ad Exchange or Ad Network of its choice with data about the visitor.
3. The DSP receives the bid from the Ad Exchange and matches the visitor ID against the segments (audiences) you created in your DMP.
4. Your DMP will then try to match the ID it has created with the data provided by the SSP/Ad Exchange.
5. If the DMP is able to determine that the visitor matches the profile that you have created through your audience segmentation, it will allow the DSP to make a bid on that piece of ad inventory.
6. If the bid should happen to be the highest, the visitor’s browser will then communicate again to the brand’s DSP/Ad Server at which time a creative will be loaded via the advertiser’s Content Distribution Network (CDN).

And there – as if by magic – you have served a display ad that isn’t just a shot in the dark – but actually worth clicking on (from the customer’s point of view).

After all that’s the whole point of advertising, right?

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The post How to Boost Display Ad CTR With Content Personalization appeared first on Clearcode.

Forbes reports that 76% of B2C marketers and 88% of B2B marketers use content marketing and Business Insider estimates that native ad revenue in 2016 in the US will reach almost $14 billion.

However, despite what some people think, native advertising and content marketing ARE NOT one and the same.

Both have their own specific uses as well as their own challenges and opportunities – both from a technical and business point of view.

First, a brief definition.

Native advertising vs. Content marketing

Native advertising and content marketing share one thing in common – a focus on content that is inherent appealing and provides some value (most often entertainment or educational) for those who engage with it.

The defining aspect of native ads is that they are designed to fit contextually with the non-paid content around them. According to the IAB, native ads can fall into one of six broad categories including:

• “Recommended” articles/videos placed on a reputable publisher’s site
• Promoted listings (often included “in-line” as a part of a wider list)
• Contextual banners (banner ads that match closely the content of the page they are shown on)

Content marketing, on the other hand, utilizes an even wider range of options:

• Ebook/whitepapers/case studies available for download (after submitting an email address)
• Branded YouTube channels
• Branded Slideshare presentations
• Blogs/social media posts

How is native advertising different from content marketing?

Simply put, native ads are pieces of content for which the advertiser pays. In this way, a blog post innovation in heavy machinery that is featured on a company website would be considered a piece of content marketing.

However, if the same company paid a well-known publisher such as CNN to place the same post on a page containing a news article about manufacturing, it would be considered a native advertisement.

There are, of course, guidelines about marking native ads (or sponsored content, as it is sometimes called.) Unfortunately, they are often ignored.

Another difference is also that pieces of content marketing usually have some inherent value – and can be classified as useful in some way. So drawing on the examples above, an e-book or whitepaper may help its readers learn about a new technology. An infographic could present a range of uses for a new product. Podcasts or YouTube videos feature experts (or ordinary people) who have experienced a product or service in some way and share their insights).

It’s not hard to see why both content marketing and native advertising – whether for B2B or B2C marketing – are popular:

• They are less intrusive and less overt in their message, leading to higher conversion rates
• They are less susceptible to ad blockers
• They provide more value to customers and often give advertisers more space to convey the benefits of their products or services
• They have the ability to boost a brand’s reputation depending on their placement and content

So does this mean that both approaches are equal?

Different tools, different opportunities

The main difference between native ads and content marketing is the way in which the content is distributed. And this can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of each approach.

With content marketing, advertisers are responsible for maintaining their own channels of distribution and pushing content across them. This may include:

1. A company blog
2. A brand’s YouTube channel
3. Social media accounts
4. Content distribution via partnerships & guest posting

Focusing on content marketing has several advantages for companies, both B2C and B2B:

• More control over context and messaging
• Impact on SEO and organic traffic building
• Does not require a media budget. Usually content marketing only a one-time investment in creation (once published it starts to pay off, so no need to top up your marketing budget later on)
• Creates long term benefits & effects for the company (because it stays on the web forever and is not a part of one time marketing campaigns)
• Creates brand credibility and positions the brand as an expert in a field

On the other hand, companies are often hampered by the need to first build the reach of their channels in order to gain a wide enough audience. This also makes it more difficult to scale campaigns quickly and effectively.

• Can cost significantly more, on average over $50 000 for campaigns on top publisher sites
• Are harder to match to surrounding content in real time
• Are less closely connected to a brand’s message and image since they are created to closely match surrounding publisher content
• Benefits and effect last as long as the campaign itself – does not create long term value

Nevertheless, native ads hold one great advantage over content marketing: their ability to be served in conjunction with programmatic advertising platforms.

This means wider reach and scalability as well as more direct insights into ROI, which can be somewhat harder to measure with content marketing.

Already the range of native ad networks has grown exponentially. Some of the key players are:

• Taboola
• Nativo
• Revcontent

But the native ad landscape – if the numbers are to be believed – will only continue to grow, meaning the inventory is likely to increase and prices come down, especially as the marketplace opens up with more and more competition.

There is another aspect as well: as the adoption of data management solutions grow and advertisers and publishers learn better how to use a DMP for personalizing content, the mechanisms to drive an even smoother user experience with native ads will take hold.

All of this contributes to the dynamic growth of native advertising and points to greater long-term potential.

But don’t expect content marketing to go away – it will still serve brands well, but just in a different role.

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That means a whole lot of us like to search for goods and services on our smartphone or tablet and then make our final decision in person – either over the phone or in a store.

Not so strange, perhaps, but maddening for marketers who desperately want to be unravel the mystery of where those conversions come from and be able to attribute them to the first digital point of contact. In other words, offline attribution.

Is there a solution? Maybe.

It’s called beacons.

What are beacons?

Originally, the brainchild of Apple, who first developed and standardized the idea of a low energy-consuming, Bluetooth-based device to communicate with mobile phones and tablets, beacons have become quite popular over the last several years.

When placed within a brick-and-mortar retail store, a beacon lets brands recognize mobile devices who have been previously associated with them (by downloading a store’s mobile app, for instance) and interact with them in real-time.

So a visitor, upon entering a store, could receive a notification to his or her smartphone with a special coupon or alert about a new line of products. He or she could also use the connection through a store’s beacon locate items or even check out.

Beacons are finding their usefulness in a wide range of business applications. Airlines, including American Airlines are using them to help travelers at airports, hotels are implementing them as part of an advanced customer service system, and cinemas are starting to use them to engage theater-goers.

Beacons for mobile marketing

And yet, marketing is where beacons hold the greatest potential. That is why Business Insider estimates that this year beacons will drive $44 billion worth of sales or more than 10 times the amount they influenced last year.

That is also why some of the biggest names in merchandising have invested considerable time and effort into making them a part of their brick-and-mortar operations. Obviously the technology has great value.

Part of what makes it valuable is being able to offering a more personalized experience for customers.

The push for personalization in modern marketing has been well-documented and beacons make it possible in real-time, when customers are actually on-site and most likely to convert. Coupons and special offers can be tailored to individuals who have made previous purchases.

When customers are signed up for a retailer’s loyalty program and have the store’s app running on their smartphone, they can receive a special one-time-offer redeemable on the spot while they shop. This sort of incentive not only drives sales, but also encourages store visitors to remain connected while shopping, helping marketers gather more information for later use.

This also helps with the other area where beacons are set to make a big impact – solving the offline attribution puzzle.

Closing the loop with beacons

As mentioned earlier, the real holy grail of beacons for marketers, is being able to understand what online marketing campaign contributed to offline purchases.

And with more and more adoption of beacons for various purposes and cross-device tracking technology, the pieces are available to make it happen.

Here’s how this can happen:

• By recording the ID of mobile devices where in-app ads are served and comparing it to the in-store traffic picked up by beacons, it is possible to identify customers who visited a store after having been exposed to mobile ad campaigns. When the same customer takes advantage of a beacon-triggered coupon to make his or her purchase, it is even possible to attribute sales to the mobile ads which were served.By the same token, this process can be revered for the purposes of retargeting. When the beacon system recognizes that previous store visitors haven’t returned for a certain period of time, a retargeting campaign can be triggered with special offers, discounts and other personalized content to bring them back.
• Some new beacon-based systems such as Yext, provide solutions that are not based on one single application but rather a wider network of application. After engaging customers with various kinds of information – not just sales promotions and ads – and building a rich bank of customer data, this information can then be synced to ad servers like Facebook and used for retargeting. As the cycle of on-location connections and online ads continues, the attribution loop closes more and more.

One obvious and persistent problem, of course – is that consumers must allow themselves to be discovered – via Bluetooth or a brand’s mobile app. That can potentially be a big limitation, especially when it comes to the actual number of customers that can be retargeted or attributed.

But there is still great potential, especially if the major smartphone companies like Apple and Google start building in beacon-enabled apps to their operating systems.

This is why the first use case for beacons – serving promotions, coupons, inviting users to participate in surveys etc – may eventually unlock the possibility of achieving true success with offline attribution. The more people are inclined to engage with brands over mobile channels while shopping in-store, the more they will be open to letting their devices interact with beacon systems.

As beacons and connected objects become more and more commonplace, it is likely that barriers to sharing location information will decrease.

And that will be the day when beacons really come into their own.

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The waters get murkier, however, with claims of censorship and unfair dominance by advertising giants like Google and Facebook. What might have started out as consumer backlash to a flood of popups and banner ads, has become a much more complicated issue.

All the more proof that it’s time for Ad Tech to grow up.

Too much success?

Up until now Ad Tech has been a boon for advertisers and publishers alike because of its potential for improved reach, greater agility and most importantly, a wide range of revenue possibilities.

But – AdTech carries with it the possibility to make marketers lazy – much like a child enthralled with a brand new toy.

Being able to push ad campaigns across a large range of publisher sites with automated tools has given a false sense of effectiveness with minimum effort, while ignoring the effects on customer experience. The anonymous factor of programmatic buying and selling (particularly in RTB-powered open exchanges) means that creatives can get dropped onto any and every publisher page with little or no regard for how they match surrounding content.

In addition to this intrusiveness, longer page load times contribute to a deteriorating customer experience. The speed (creatives served in the blink of an eye) and efficiency (less unsold inventory) of programmatic media-buying and selling means that sites have become loaded to the brim with ads which often slows down load times, especially on mobile devices, to a snail’s pace.

Somehow these exciting, new – and very useful – toys have gotten used too much.

Online users, of course, have turned to ad blockers to deal with these issues – and understandably so.

Responses from the advertising players have been varied and for the most part self-serving, which doesn’t betray a very mature approach to the situation.

Some have looked to overcome ad blocking technology with innovative workarounds. Video platform Brightcove’s tool Lift is one application that deals with ad blockers’ detection of the ad call by serving ads “in-line.” But this “sneaky” approach doesn’t offer a long-term solution.

Several big players in advertising claim to have a solution, creating so-called “walled gardens” like Apple News and recently-introduced (and already controversial) Facebook Instant Articles for a cleaner customer experience. And yet, online users, like most everyone, value their independence, meaning that being tied into one stream for free news and having to pay subscription fees for anything else isn’t likely to make them too happy.

In neither case, however, have the answers been tied to a true focus on the end-user, in other words, those who consume online ads.

Towards a better Ad Tech ecosystem

What the AdTech industry needs in order to grow into a mature and sustainable ecosystem is to not only think about what is good for the bottom line of advertisers, publishers and those in between, but most of all what is good for online users themselves.

There are several areas which should help with this:

Finally, there needs to be more innovation when it comes to gathering online data since a large part of the page load time problem stems from tracking pixels connected to the ads. Better and more efficient tag management and cookie alternatives can go a long ways towards alleviating this part of the problem.

A better future

In the end, ad blockers may turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

Already the challenge thrown down by the current wave of ad blocking has started to unite the industry with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) calling for a coalition to analyse consumer attitudes towards advertising.

Hopefully this will encourage a more user-friendly outlook for the future and help shape the development of the next generation of tools as companies rediscover their conscience and put the customer first.

And that isn’t a bad thing.

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