Google walling off its inventory garden

A lot has been said and talked about the impending move by Google going to ban third party cookies, web beacons or other tracking mechanisms on its Google Display Network. The move will come in effect from the new year and it will prohibit collecting of impression level data by third party pixels for purposes of subsequent re-targeting, interest category categorizations and/or syndication to other parties.

In the wake of this scenario becoming a reality soon, lets see what are the effects of this move on various entities in the display ecosystem -

Impact - Marketers are affected the most because they will not be able to figure out the number of times their ad is seen by users on Google inventory versus non-Google inventory. Global frequency capping will not work now for the campaigns running on GDN. 

Publishers,on the other hand, will not be able to lay claim to the success of marketer's campaign(running on GDN, except where they are last touch points in the campaign funnel) to themselves  and hence will have some effect on their ability to command premium price for their audience data and inventory. 

Reality and Way forward -The impact on publishers side of equation is minimal though, because the publishers deploying the services of a DMP would not be selling their inventories using adsense in most cases. Marketers should try other inventory sources. With the advent of programmatic, multiple supply side exchanges have gained prominence. Chief among them being FBX, Right Media Exchange, Microsoft Exchange, Pubmatic, Rubicon Project, Appnexus, OpenX etc.

Also this rule of not allowing third party pixels will not have any effect wherein the DMP also owns the system that is biding for the impression and hence there is no data flow from one system to other. This will give more weight to the much talked about consolidation in the display ad-tech with more of the DMP and DSP players coming together. Rocket Fuel bought [x+1] few months back. Adobe has Audience Manager(DMP) and have built out a DSP through their Efficient Frontier acquisition. Turn and Ignition One also offer a combined solution to their customers. This is an okay approach for now but not a great one given that different DSP's give differing results and hence marketers prefer not to stick with just one and use many depending on campaign objectives, inventory qualities and  win rates. Also DSP's are now vertical specific and hence more and more DMPs vendors wanting to be platform agnostic. 

Why is Google doing this? There is some merit to Google's point of view. With the ad technology expanding every day, the number of pixels placed on the publisher's inventory are huge and it is difficult to figure out the pixels resulting in data leak. Google in its bid to curb the data leak across its inventory has decided to ban all the third party pixels. While the intentions are good, this has some undesirable effects too. And the worst ones of these will be for the Google itself as publishers will start shying away from putting their inventories through adsense. 

In the end, Google will have to come up with a solution which can identify and certify certain pixels. DMPs give brands a chance to trust the digital channels and result in a bigger and healthier ecosystem and that is something that Google is a pioneer of.

Confused about web analytics tools to use? Here's the solution.

Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics are two of the industry leading tools that are used most commonly by businesses in India.

Many marketers and business owners are generally confused on which web analytics platform they should use. Most also don't know whether they should be investing in a paid analytics platform or should make do with a free one. 

In reality, both these tools(GA and AA) are great and your requirements define the tool that suits your needs the most. Answers to some of the questions below will help you figure out which tool fulfills your need.

The first thing to understand is how big is your website? Are you selling hundreds of products and have a vast traffic and transactions volume? Do you publish a lot of content which generates huge traffic volume and powers advertising revenues?

Adobe Analytics suits you here

Or do you have a simple operation wherein the transaction volume is low and the website is simple? Google analytics works just fine for you.

How important is the real time data across marketing campaigns and attribution to you? Do you want to see the performance of your campaigns, products sold, articles and sections read in nearly real time? Do you want to optimize things on the website daily based on real time data? If the answer is yes, you should go for Adobe analytics.

If you are okay with looking at the audience, behavior and acquisition data at a 24 hour delay and you optimize things monthly instead of daily, go with Google analytics.

Does your business have a mobile app as well and you want to understand the mobile app analytics as well? Or do you have a video website with a lot of videos playing and you are interested in detailed video reporting? Adobe analytics in a single platform covers web, mobile, social and video which helps in understanding the holistic picture of the visitors of your online properties.

Most of the businesses in India in Ecommerce, Travel, Media and entertainment domain think their website data is very valuable and confidential to their business. These businesses do not want to share that data in lieu of a free analytics tool. With Adobe analytics, you own your data. In case of Google analytics, Google owns the data and your website data can be used to power Google's interests in advertising and other domains. If you do not have concerns with respect to Google using your data,  Google analytics is an option for you.

Cost and Support: Google analytics, base version, is free and will process upto 10 million hits per month. Google analytics premium is priced at $150,000 annually and will process upto 1 Billion hits a month. Adobe analytics does not have a free version and is priced as per the traffic volume of the site. Adobe analytics comes with 24x7 customer support and set up services. With Google analytics free version, you are on your own and support is provided only with the premium version.

So in order to find the right analytics tool for your business, you need to look at the business and answer some of these questions above.

6 things to note before investing in advertising platforms

I discussed in my last post the need to have a technology platform in place for managing your digital media effectively. Once you decide to go ahead with that decision, the next step is to choose a technology platform from among the many that are currently being offered. The problem in doing this is that often these platforms makes similar claims about functionality and features and end up confusing the marketer more than educating him.

In order to avoid that, a marketer needs to be smart enough to see through the bull shit and to not get swayed by falsely claims.As an enterprise digital marketer, you must strictly adhere to the below points during evaluating an adtech platform so as to get the bang for the buck.

Multiple channels - Digital marketers work across multiple channels from Search, Social, Programmatic and direct Display, Video and Mobile Apps. A single platform should be present across multiple channels to suffice many of these needs. This helps in efficient management and removes the overall burden of correlating the massive amounts of data generated in individual platform silos.

Not a Point Product - Even if your need of the hour is to cater to just one channel, you should always be looking at platform which does more than just fulfilling your current needs. A new channel may gain prominence tomorrow or your digital strategy might change. Changing a platform, although now much easier because of the cloud based platforms, still requires considerable investments in terms of time and effort.

Analytics Integration - An adtech platform works best when it is tied to a good analytics platform and by good I mean a two way native integration. Data should flow seamlessly between your adtech and analytics platforms so that you can do a deep dive on your campaigns performance in analytics and build specific metrics within analytics, in line with your business goals, for optimizing campaigns in your adtech platform. Look out for platform providers who claim to have integration but in reality involves a lot of manual effort in data transfer. Safest bet is to look at adtech providers which also offer analytics platforms. A good example here would be Adobe which offers both Media Optimizer and Analytics.

Simulations - Gone are the days when marketers used to spend money on advertising campaigns and hope for the campaigns to perform well. An adtech platform should have predictive analytics built-in, in order to run the campaign simulations across channels before a marketer actually goes ahead with launching the campaign. This feature helps in saving a lot of marketing dollars which otherwise
would have gone into ineffective campaigns.

Attribution - It is not a secret anymore that correct attribution of your advertising money is the key to successful media planning and buying. An adtech platform should provide you with detailed attribution reports that can clearly tell the channels that work for you the best and the channels that assist your business objectives.

Local Support - Technology works towards success when it is provided as a service and not just as a product. Make sure that the product you are going to license comes with support from the provider. I cannot emphasize enough the need to have local support here and not from someone sitting thousands of kilometers away from you because you are going to need it a lot. You should clearly ask the platform provider who their support guys are and if they sit out of your country of operation. Any platform provider with support teams based in a different geography should be strict no.

Should you be investing in tools to manage your digital marketing monies?

This is a question which multiple marketers are trying to figure out for their organisations.
Marketers are confused since they are unsure of whether to invest in a tool, which invariably
includes investing in the hands-on training of the in-house people to use these tools, or to outsource the entire complexity of advertising management to a media agency.

It is no secret that if used properly, a tool increases the productivity and efficiency of the organisation thereby deriving higher rate of returns on marketing spends.

So the real issue is to decide whether to invest in media management tool and equip the internal teams with it or to outsource this entire business to a specialized digital media agency. Both the options comes with their own pros and cons.

The answer to this problem differs from business to business and depends on multiple factors like organisations strategy, capability of the internal teams, type and amount of media to be managed and also the relationship and trust of the business with their agency.

Lately many of the big enterprise marketers are investing in enabling their in-house teams with the advertising platforms to drive efficiency to media spending. Chief among many reasons to go down this road are to bring the branding/product/marketing teams to work in conjunction with the media
buying and spending towards common goals. Investing in technology in-house also allows businesses to circumvent the hefty commissions that agencies charge. Also investing in technology to solve problems brings in a culture which is self sustaining, forward looking and more future safe.The rapid growth of cloud powered technology solutions have made taking this option more appealing than it has ever been in the past. Marketers are free to experiment with these solutions without the risk of being stuck with one type of technology forever. This in-turn results in pushing the
marketing platform companies to out perform each other by building and offering more capabilities and services.

Agency business on the other hand is not dying anytime soon. Most of the big agencies have successfully transformed and have made themselves useful in the increasingly digital world. These agencies have the experience and know how of the real world media business and are steadily building the skill sets required in the digital age.Agencies themselves use multiple technology platforms and most of these agencies have people who are trained on using these tools. In many cases, businesses license these platforms and agencies use them thereby providing the best of both worlds.

Some marketers also attempt to hire a lot of workforce in order to outdo the benefits of a tool and to avoid the related cost. This is definitely not a wise decision given higher attrition rates, increasing demand of higher ROI from marketers, complex algorithms working across digital channels ,challenge to manage large teams
working on different digital pieces and to make sense of it all to drive unique marketing objectives.

I would like to conclude this piece by saying that investing in a technology platform is today's demand and a critical necessity for tomorrow. The way you choose to go about it - via agency or through internal teams, depends on your organization's strategy. Once you decide to invest in a platform, equally important is the decision to choose the right platform from the many currently being offered in the market. In my next post, I will list down the factors that a marketer must look at while evaluating any media management tech platform.

Rocket Fuel acquires [x+1]; signs of consolidation in display ad-tech

Rocket Fuel, a programmatic ad network focused on providing performance advertising to digital marketers, today announced that it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire [x+1], an ad-tech firm with dual Demand side platform (DSP) and a data management platform (DMP) offering. The value of the total deal is $230 million.





Six months ago, Rocket Fuel had tried to bid for BlueKai but Oracle got there first.  Rocket Fuel was searching for a decent DMP technology for a while now. Since the other major DMP player, Demdex was acquired by Adobe in 2011, this had left only [x+1] and Aggregate Knowledge, other 2 possible leaders in the DMP space, to be considered.

Rocket Fuel has a complete managed services offerings(except in Japan, where a self service model exists) for its clients wherein it runs their performance advertising campaigns. This takes away the headache of campaign management for the clients and need to invest in people, tech and processes. [x+1], which has a fantastic DSP+DMP product, on the other hand is a tech-only vendor with self serving offerings to its clients. This allows for a much greater control and customized execution to the campaigns.

Customers of both these companies is set to benefit from the amalgamation since Rocket Fuel gets access to world class technology which can power its offerings and [x+1] customers can look forward to the experience of Rocket Fuel in deriving success from the programmatic display advertising .Still a lot of future success will depend on the integration of technologies and the go-to market strategy of the combined entity.

This acquisition ,and a few others in this space in the last one year, also signals  the growing need to provide a  complete set of solutions for marketer's needs - starting from tag management and ending at marketing attribution. End to end solution also allows for a higher share of the marketer's wallet and his/her confidence in you. Quite frankly, no marketer would want to work with multiple technology and service vendors and spend their days in only correlating the data and information.

The display programmatic ad-tech space is still somewhat murky with a lot of point products solving small parts of the marketing puzzle. Consolidation is imminent and necessary for the growth of the category and we will see some more players getting acquired in the days to come.

Is paid search data still available? Hell YES !!!

Google's algorithms are changing fast and you need to adapt your search tools and strategy to continue to be successful in the new world.

Last September, Google announced that it will eliminate the organic search query data making life miserable for marketers relying on SEO. In April 2014, Google announced that it is going to make the paid search data more secure. This led many to believe that Google is going to eliminate the search query data for the paid searches too.

There has been a lot of confusion regarding this release on what is going away and what is available even after many days of this coming out. I will address this confusion in this post. Before I go into the details, there are 2 main points that you should keep in mind -

• Search query data for the paid search is still going to be available via search term reports in your adwords account
• If you are using third party tools like Adobe etc, this data will still be available to you. 

The only thing that has changed over from the past is that Google has changed the structure of referer URL wherein the referer is Google. Earlier upon searching for a query on Google, the referer URL for the page visited would include the search query. This ceases to exist and now the referer URL would not include any search query when originating from Google. 

But is it actually a very big deal here? I would say no, because of two reasons -

• The Search terms report within the adwords and all the major third party tools like Adobe's Media Optimizer remains unaffected. So life for an SEM marketer remains the same.
• While the actual referer URL structure is changing, If you still want the referer URL to have the search terms reflected in, for analytics systems to read it and tie it to other reports like pathing and flow reports, Google provides a workaround in the form of ValueTrack parameter.

ValueTrack is a parameter within adwords which once added to the ad's destination URL, mainly tracks the keyword and match type( Broad, Phrase, Exact) upon the click. So although this is not the exact search query data, this is still very very close to that. Using ValueTrack within your Analytics systems like Adobe Analytics, you can get the keyword level data which you can use to tie it back with your campaign data to measure the effectiveness of your campaign across multiple success metrics like ctr, clicks, revenue etc and site engagement metrics like time spent, page views, bounces etc. 

 

Another reason of using ValueTrack to tie the keyword data with the rest of the data within analytics systems is to get the campaign reports faster. Search terms reports within adwords is delayed by 24 hours and the search terms shown are only those which are used within the last 30 days or by a significant number of people. So to get the data for each keyword within the search query, value track provides a much better real time alternative.  

Who's truly a leader in the web analytics space?

The Web analytics domain is very crowded with multiple players playing in the field. Some of these are smaller analytics companies which provides some specific capabilities, like heatmaps; whereas others are technology behemoths that have tools that cater to the all the needs from digital analytics perspective and more.

Of all the names -  Adobe Analytics, IBM Coremetrics, Webtrends, AT Internet and Google Analytics are the ones that come out on top. Forrester in its wave report did an independent study of this market in May 2014 and have rated these vendors on their current offerings, strategy and market presence. You can get an access to this report here. The report has rated vendors on a total of 75 metrics.

Adobe Analytics comes out as the top performer in this category and is categorized as a leader. It leads the competition in over 60 of those 75 metrics. Also Adobe dominates the market with the largest number of web analytics clients. 

Adobe analytics, earlier used to be a set of different products - Site catalyst, Discover, Genesis, Dynamic tag management, Data warehouse, Report builder and Insight. To simplify its offerings in the market, Adobe has combined all of these into a single solution called Adobe Analytics Premium and made this solution as a part of its bigger Adobe Marketing Cloud.

Adobe marketing cloud has one common user interface through which one can have an access to all of its six solutions - Anlaytics, Target, Media Optimizer, Social, Experience Manager and Campaign.

 

  

Adobe's answer to audience management

                                               


Adobe Audience Manager , more commonly known as AAM, is a leading Data Management Platform. Independent research firm Forrester lists it as a leader in its report published on Q3 of 2013. You can access this report for free here.

Data Management Platforms or the DMPs are the hottest(although they have been around for a while now) buzzwords in the world of programmatic advertising.

A DMP sits right at the center of advertising ecosystem and acts as a repository of data from various streams- Websites, Analytics tools, Email marketing systems, CRMs, Social systems etc.

The collected data is then formed into intelligent reusable segments that are then exported to various platforms(called DSPs) for advertising and driving website personaliszation.

AAM is the leading DMP in the market which along with Adobe Media Optimizer(AMO), achieves display and search retargeting. AMO is paid media management platform which works across Search, Social and Display channels.

Audiences from the AAM gets available in AMO and then are targeted over the entire RTB inventory. These audiences can also be targeted over Google Search with the help of remarketing list for search ads(RLSA) feature.

Another attribute of AAM is that it acts as a marketplace for you to buy 3rd party data from various 3rd party data providers like Bizo, Exelate etc. Many successful marketers are leveraging AAM's capability to derive success in an increasingly digital world.
  

Why did Google sunset Wildfire?

Google recently announced that it is shutting down its social marketing platform wildfire as a standalone product. Read the press release here.

Wildfire was a good product. It was easily the most visually appealing platform of its kind when Google bought it in 2012 for $350 million. Although the platform was positioned as a Social marketing platform, the real power of the platform lied with the creation of apps and page management on social networks. Wildfire had one of the most exhaustive sources of beautiful templates that were used for creating pages and apps.

After Google bought it, over the next year and a half, they invested resources into multiple product and feature enhancements. The idea was to make it a fully functional Social marketing platform to compete with the likes of Buddy media & Radian6(Both Salesforce) , Sprinklr, Synthesios and Adobe Social. Because of that investment, wildfire can now do publication and moderation of posts and content, can run ads, monitor mentions along with page and app creation and management.

So why did Google decide to shut down the standalone version of Wildfire more than 2 years after it was acquired, in May 2014? The answer lies in this June 2013 post by Google's Doubleclick.
We know that it is difficult to estimate the ROI of Social if it is treated and evaluated in a silo. Marketers and technology providers have realized that Social is an additional channel of marketing and not an alternative one. And so Social platforms and social marketing will work best when they are tied up with other marketing efforts of the organization.

Doubleclick is being positioned as a complete digital advertising suite by Google which will encompass digital marketing activities and their measurement on Search, RTB and non-RTB display, Mobile and now Social. Various Google's products - DFA, Bid manager & DSP, Doubleclick Search, GTM and now Wildfire will form the entire suite of digital advertising solutions and measurement of digital marketing will be facilitated by Universal Analytics and Google Analytics Premium.

This integrated platform is named as Doubleclick Digital Marketing Platform or DDM. This move is on the lines of the rest of the industry wherein all big software giants like Adobe, Salesforce, IBM and Oracle have their stack of integrated marketing technology solutions. Gartner and Forrester also see the eventual destiny of a niche technology providing solution is to either get acquired and integrated with a bigger and more comprehensive marketing cloud solution or to not think of selling its solutions to the enterprise marketers.

In another post, we will compare how different marketing cloud solutions from Adobe, Google, Salesforce, IBM and Oracle stack up against each other.