Earned media refers to brand exposure or publicity obtained through organic promotional efforts. Brands don’t pay for this content, nor do they have direct control over it.

What is earned media?

Earned media, also known as earned content, refers to the genuine recognition and coverage your brand receives from third-party sources. Customers leave reviews and recommendations, share your content, mention your brand, repost your material, and more — all because they genuinely love what you do. 

This kind of exposure isn’t paid for or controlled directly by your brand. Instead, it’s the organic buzz that builds around your offerings, events, and products. You’ll see your brand naturally popping up in videos, images, and other popular examples, proving how much people appreciate what you offer.

Nowadays, savvy marketers are increasingly turning their focus to earned media opportunities. With the power of social media marketing and online public relations, they’re strategically positioning their brands to reach and engage with their target customers more effectively.

Earned media vs owned media vs paid media

Before we dive into the differences, let’s define owned media and paid media.

• Owned media refers to those exclusive web properties that you have full control over and that are uniquely tailored to your brand. With this complete autonomy, you can curate engaging content, deliver captivating stories, and foster meaningful interactions with your audience, leading to deeper connections.

The most familiar example of owned media is, of course, your website — the virtual hub where your brand story comes to life. Blog sites and social media channels also play crucial roles in representing your brand’s essence.

• Paid media encompasses marketing efforts where you pay to promote your brand. Its purpose extends beyond standalone promotion; it plays a crucial role in generating earned media and driving traffic to your owned media properties.

By investing in promoting content, you can achieve immediate visibility and broader exposure. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn offer excellent opportunities for paid advertising, which can amplify your content and direct traffic to your website. Collaborating with influencers is another effective tactic, allowing your products or services to reach a wider audience.

Here’s a table outlining the differences between earned, owned, and paid media: 

Integrating earned media with paid and owned media 

Each media type serves a distinct purpose in a well-rounded marketing strategy. But the best marketing campaigns often combine all three — earned media, owned media, and paid media — to achieve optimal results, such as:

• Maximized reach and impact: Integrating all three media types allows you to cover a wider range of audience touchpoints. Earned media generates word-of-mouth, owned media controls brand messaging, and paid media expands visibility to targeted demographics.
• Increased credibility and trust: Earned media’s authenticity, along with aligned owned media content, reinforces brand credibility. Paid media amplifies positive experiences, fostering trust and brand loyalty.
• Optimized marketing ROI: Combining media efforts aligns your marketing efforts to work harmoniously towards common goals. Leveraging earned and owned media prepares your audience for paid campaigns, leading to higher conversions and improved ROI.

Wondering how to seamlessly integrate your earned, owned, and paid media efforts? Here are some tips:

• Employ consistent brand messaging: Unify your brand message across all channels. Use owned media (like your website and social media) to show your unique voice and values, reinforcing your brand through earned and paid media efforts.
• Leverage user-generated content: Amplify user-generated content on owned platforms. Share positive reviews and testimonials to enhance credibility. Then use this content in paid campaigns to encourage engagement.
• Cross-promote content: Integrate media types by cross-promoting content. Share positive earned media coverage on owned platforms and consider promoting it through paid channels for maximum impact.
• Work with influencers: Collaborate with influencers who share your brand values. Have them talk about their experiences with your brand and also participate in paid campaigns for increased exposure, bridging the gap between earned and paid media.
• Measure performance: Use data analytics to track integrated media performance and optimize your marketing strategies. Measure earned media impact, monitor owned media engagement, and evaluate paid media ROI.

Why is earned media important?

Earned media offers a wealth of benefits that can greatly enhance your brand’s presence and reputation. Let’s take a closer look at these advantages.

1 — More brand exposure 

Favorable mentions of your brand without paid promotion often lead to word-of-mouth publicity and other forms of engagement. This could include people following your social media accounts or showing deeper interest in your products and services. While earned media might not immediately result in direct purchases, it leaves a lasting impression on potential users that can lead to future conversions. 

2 — Enhanced brand credibility

Praise from others automatically boosts your brand’s credibility and builds trust with your audience. Picture your brand featured in respected publications like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal — it’ll enhance your reputation and borrow credibility from these sources, solidifying your market position and instilling consumer confidence in your brand.

3 — Increased brand loyalty

Earned media helps deepen the connection with your existing customers. When they come across positive coverage of your brand, it cements their loyalty and love for your products or services. As a result, they get even closer to becoming enthusiastic brand ambassadors, happily spreading the word about their fantastic experiences with your brand to others.

4 — Improved search engine rankings

Earned media offers more than just exposure and reputation benefits; it also has a substantial impact on your search engine rankings. 

When you earn backlinks from authoritative and credible websites with a high domain or page authority, it significantly enhances your SEO efforts. Search engines value backlinks from reputable sources, and earning them through earned media coverage can positively influence your website’s ranking in search results.

Earned media examples

Next, let’s check out some of the most popular examples of earned media.

User reviews and ratings

Positive app ratings and reviews on platforms like Google Play Store or Apple App Store are earned media gold. Users’ genuine appreciation sparks valuable app promotion, influencing others to try your app.

Search engine results 

Earned media and SEO work in unison in the realm of digital marketing. Valuable website content catches search engines’ attention, potentially landing your blog post on the first page of results. Mastering the right SEO strategies allows you to earn “free” organic placement, making high-quality, relevant content crucial for success.

Social media mentions and shares

When users share their experiences on social media, it generates earned media. Influenced by your brand’s behavior, product quality, and engaging content, organic mentions increase visibility and attract new users. Encouraging users to share their experiences through social media contests or using user-generated content campaigns can further amplify earned media.

Influencer endorsements

Influencers, especially in the tech or app niche, provide valuable earned media through authentic endorsements. When like-minded influencers share their positive experiences with your product, their audience perceives it as a genuine recommendation. The end result? Expanded reach and credibility.

Media coverage and blog features

Product or app coverage in tech blogs, industry news outlets, or online publications generates earned media. Features and articles discussing your product or service’s unique features, benefits, or impact lead to more brand exposure. Consider engaging with journalists and bloggers to secure more opportunities to build market authority.

User-generated content campaigns

User-generated content, such as tutorials, gameplay videos, or creative app use cases, demonstrates real experiences and fosters an enthusiastic community. Reposting and sharing this content on your official channels further amplifies earned media impact.

App awards and recognitions

Winning awards or being recognized in global rankings results in earned media, highlighting your product’s excellence and innovation. This external recognition not only boosts brand credibility, but also attracts media attention and new users seeking top-rated products and services.

Earned media limitations and challenges

Earned media, while a valuable aspect of marketing, does come with certain limitations. These include: 

Unpredictability

Earned media is unpredictable, because you’re dependent on third-party sources to share their experiences about your app. There’s a chance of negative reviews or coverage spreading rapidly, potentially harming your brand’s reputation. For example, a popular gaming influencer endorsing your new gaming app may lead to a surge in downloads. But then, a negative review can equally harm your brand’s reputation, making it a double-edged sword.

Time and effort

Securing coverage from influential bloggers or journalists requires persistent outreach and showcasing the value of your app. And despite this, you can’t control the timing or content of the coverage. This makes trust-building with these external parties crucial, yet challenging and time-consuming. For new brands, this is especially daunting as they’re still unfamiliar with the market and need to establish themselves in the industry.

ROI measurement

Earned media boosts brand visibility and reputation, but directly linking it to specific financial outcomes is tricky due to the absence of precise metrics. For instance, featuring your health app in a prominent blog enhances awareness and credibility, but pinpointing the exact impact on downloads is complex. Word-of-mouth and other factors also influence user decisions, making it challenging to isolate earned media’s sole effect.

Earned media tactics and best practices

Building a positive brand reputation through earned media requires a genuine and customer-centric approach, focused on providing value to your audience and industry stakeholders. Here are some effective earned media tactics and best practices to build strong relationships with your audience:

1 — Build an earned media strategy

A robust earned media strategy makes it easier to achieve your marketing goals and measure outcomes. Here’s how you can create one for your business:

1. Set clear goals: Define your marketing objectives, whether it’s boosting brand awareness, promoting a specific product or service, or targeting a new audience segment.
2. Know your audience: Identify and understand your target audience to tailor your strategy effectively.
3. Analyze content preferences: Conduct simple Google searches to research what B2B content your target audience prefers. Tools like BuzzSumo are also helpful to understand user preferences.
4. Find the right partners: Seek out publications, review sites, influencers, and supporters that genuinely resonate with your brand values instead of resorting to paid coverage.
5. Craft personalized pitches: Create tailored pitches for your targeted outlets and influencers, ensuring these align with their interests.
6. Amplify on social media: Once you secure earned media coverage, maximize its impact by sharing it across your social channels. Encourage employees, investors, and stakeholders to promote the content too.

2 — Generate more earned media

Take action to generate more earned media by focusing on brand ambassadors. Identify enthusiastic fans on your social channels who actively engage with your content. Think: Facebook fans who frequently like and share your posts, Twitter followers who retweet you, or bloggers who mention your products.

Regularly engage with these brand ambassadors to cultivate their loyalty. Show gratitude by thanking them for their support and consider rewarding them with coupons or sharing their posts on your brand’s social channels. By cultivating these relationships, you can boost your earned media as these advocates authentically promote and advocate for your brand.

3 — Foster long-term relationships with journalists and influencers

To succeed in your earned media strategy, prioritize building strong connections with journalists and influencers. Avoid generic requests and instead, focus on cultivating genuine relationships. Understand their topics and target audiences, and use tools like HARO and Qwoted to connect with journalists seeking expertise.

When approaching new contacts, thoroughly research their content preferences and follower engagement and then craft personalized pitches to match. Strengthen existing influencer partnerships by actively engaging with their content and sharing it when relevant. Remember, long-term collaboration is key for effective B2B influencer marketing, so invest in nurturing these relationships for lasting impact.

4 — Attend industry conferences and trade shows

At conferences and industry trade shows, seize the opportunity to interact personally with other brands, bloggers, journalists, and industry experts. This presents a chance to expand your network and secure earned media opportunities. 

These events often have real-time social media coverage with unique hashtags for participants. Engaging with fellow attendees by mentioning their brands on social media, and receiving mentions in return, creates a collaborative environment. This approach can result in valuable earned media coverage and significantly enhance your brand’s presence.

5 — Leverage experiential marketing

Enhance your earned media through experiential marketing, a powerful approach centered around events and shared experiences with customers. These branded events often receive coverage from both traditional media outlets and online platforms. 

To maximize this impact, implement an event-specific hashtag and actively engage with attendees’ posts through your social media manager, including retweeting, liking, and sharing. Don’t forget to encourage attendees to share their experiences on their own social networks, creating a ripple effect of organic promotion.

6 — Get more positive product reviews

Positive product and service reviews on third-party sites make a big difference in how customers perceive a business. Case in point: a whopping 94% of people are more likely to use a company’s offerings if they read good reviews about them elsewhere.

Here are some actionable tips to drive website traffic and influence customer behavior in your favor using reviews:

• Keep it real: When it comes to reviews, authenticity is key. Stick to using feedback from real customers — no fake names or email addresses allowed!
• Spread the love: Don’t just keep those great reviews to yourself. Share them across different platforms like social networks, online forums, and blogs. This will help you reach a wider audience and build trust with your potential customers.
• Strategic publishing: Take charge and post those shining reviews on platforms like Amazon, Facebook, Yelp, TripAdvisor, or even on your own website. This way, you can proudly showcase all that positive feedback while having control over the content.

7 — Focus on generating more word-of-mouth recommendations

Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most powerful forms of earned media, and the best part is, it happens organically. People will recommend your business without you even asking, and once that spark is ignited, it spreads like wildfire. 

To maximize word-of-mouth publicity:

• Focus on building trust. Respond promptly to customer feedback and show you genuinely care about their experiences. Creating credibility through quick responses goes a long way in winning customers over.
• Provide exceptional customer experiences. Friendly, helpful, and responsive service creates lasting impressions and builds loyal relationships. Take the time to make every interaction special, and treat each customer like they matter. 
• Ask for referrals. Those who already recommend your products or services are your best advocates. Offer incentives like discounts or coupons to fuel their enthusiasm and get more people talking positively about your brand.

Remember, word-of-mouth doesn’t happen overnight; it requires continuous effort and investment in building a positive reputation. But over time, these efforts lead to big rewards, and your business will thrive as satisfied customers become enthusiastic advocates, spreading positive word-of-mouth and boosting your brand’s reputation.

8 — Run a social media contest

Capture your audience’s interest with an engaging social media contest that generates excitement and buzz around your brand. To maximize impact, set clear rules and align the prize with your target audience’s interests.

You can amplify visibility by promoting the contest vigorously across all social channels. Don’t hesitate to collaborate with influencers for added reach while you’re at it. And once the contest ends, celebrate the winners and their entries on your social media platforms to create a ripple effect of engagement, forging lasting connections with your audience.

Key takeaways

• Earned media is genuine recognition and coverage a brand receives from third-party sources, like user reviews, social media mentions, and media features. It’s unpaid and not directly controlled by the brand.
• By integrating earned, owned, and paid media, brands can maximize reach and impact, increase credibility and trust, and optimize their marketing return on investment (ROI).
• Advantages of earned media include greater brand exposure, improved brand credibility, and increased brand loyalty. However, it can be unpredictable, time-consuming, and hard to measure accurately..
• Building a positive brand reputation through earned media requires a customer-centric approach. Set clear goals, know your audience, and craft personalized pitches for an effective strategy.
• To generate more earned media, focus on building and nurturing relationships with brand ambassadors, journalists, influencers, and other industry stakeholders. Genuine engagement and appreciation can lead to increased advocacy for your brand. 
• Amplify earned media through tactics like industry events, experiential marketing, and social media contests. Focus on word-of-mouth recommendations, product reviews, and exceptional customer experiences to boost your brand’s reputation.

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AdTech is the market of technology providers and systems that make up the infrastructure of the online advertising industry.

What is AdTech?

AdTech, short for advertising technology, describes the software, tools, and systems that enable the buying and selling of digital advertising. AdTech allows advertisers to segment their audience, buy online ad space, serve up ads, and analyze their performance. 

Buying and selling online advertising is a complex process, involving a network of advertisers (brands with content to promote), publishers (sites or apps with ad space to sell), and intermediaries. AdTech brings all these players together, providing the tools and platforms they need to negotiate and run campaigns.

AdTech vs MarTech: What’s the difference? 

It’s easy to confuse AdTech with MarTech (you guessed it: marketing technology), but there are several clear differences. MarTech is an umbrella term that covers all marketing technology products, from podcasting to content management to social media management platforms. You can think about AdTech as one branch of the big MarTech tree.

In-house marketing teams build a stack of MarTech platforms to help them communicate directly with leads and customers through email, social media, and their website. However, they may not play a hands-on role in the bidding or placement process for online advertising. 

Instead, AdTech platforms, often directed by agencies, act as an intermediary to automate the ad-buying process and purchase audience impressions on behalf of a company. 

What are the benefits of AdTech to advertisers?

As online advertising has grown more complex, new tools and solutions have emerged to help advertisers manage and measure their campaigns. AdTech enables advertisers to run campaigns across channels, reach specific audiences, and analyze performance. 

Here’s how AdTech can save you time and help you optimize digital campaigns. 

1. Automation and scaling

Before AdTech, advertising managers had to manually research, select, and approve individual ad slots or placements. Now, brands can use automation, including AI and machine learning, to buy ad space and optimize campaigns based on real-time results. 

In short, AdTech tools have made it easier to launch campaigns at scale without a large marketing team.

2. Optimized ad spend

AdTech enables you to identify and reach a precise demographic, so you don’t waste your budget on general advertising that may or may not get to your ideal audience. 

3. Cross-device tracking

With AdTech, you can run omni-channel campaigns across devices. This works by recognizing a user based on their email address or cookies and matching them to other devices. Once a match is made in the network, ad networks can deliver re-engagement ads to give consumers multiple touchpoints. Cross-device tracking also enables better analytics, giving a fuller picture of the customer journey across devices.

4. Speed

Since AdTech can put campaign collateral out to bid in fractions of a second, you can launch a relevant campaign quickly, cutting out lengthy negotiation and placement. This brings you brand exposure, leads, and sales in a shorter time frame.

Programmatic advertising: The core of AdTech

AdTech is essential for programmatic advertising — an automated ad-buying process that allows advertisers to buy access to precisely segmented audiences in real time. Programmatic has been dubbed the future of online advertising: Allied Market Research valued the programmatic advertising industry at $451 billion in 2021, and estimated it will grow a further 36% by 2031. 

Here’s how AdTech makes it all possible:

1. The advertiser engages an ad network to start a campaign. Through a demand-side platform (DSP), they tell the market what the advertiser is looking for: their desired audience and number of impressions. 
2. The advertiser delivers their ad content (primarily display, video, social, and audio) to the network.
3. Meanwhile, the publisher  uses a supply-side platform (SSP) to list their available ad space (inventory). 
4. The ad exchange connects the two sides, and uses real-time bidding (RTB) to run an open auction for ad content. The SSP bids on ad content on behalf of ad networks and publishers. Auctions take just fractions of a second.
5. The winning bidder publishes the ad on their platform, and shares analytics back to advertisers through the ad networks.

All of the various intermediary parties and infrastructure used in programmatic advertising can be described as AdTech. We’ll explore them in more detail below. 

The AdTech ecosystem

To help you understand the complexities of AdTech, we’re going to unpack each of the different components that make up the AdTech ecosystem. 

Agency trading desk (ATD)

This is the part of an advertising agency that handles media planning and buying on behalf of clients. While brands can manage this directly through a DSP, ATDs offer expert guidance and agency buying power. Since they represent many clients, ATDs can work with multiple DSPs and negotiate in bulk to bring prices down.

Demand-side platform (DSP)

A DSP is an automation platform that allows advertisers to bid for, buy, and place online advertising. It lets advertisers manage multiple ad exchange accounts through a single interface and make real-time changes based on campaign performance.

Supply-side platform (SSP)

An SSP is a platform that manages a publisher’s ad inventory (the advertising space it has available) across ad exchanges. SSPs help publishers sell and manage their inventory at scale, earning revenue through real-time programmatic selling. 

Ad network

Publishers manage their inventory and earn revenue directly through ad networks. An ad network pools together bids and inventory from multiple exchanges to mediate sales between publishers and advertisers. Ad networks use algorithms to match advertisers with publishers that best fit their target audience.

Ad exchange

An ad exchange is the technology that brings together the DSP and SSP sides of programmatic advertising in a neutral and transparent environment — similar to how the stock market connects buyers and sellers. It’s essentially an open pool of impressions that uses algorithms and machine learning to facilitate the bidding process in milliseconds. 

Ad server

An ad server is a platform that stores a campaign’s creative assets, selects which version to serve to the user, and collects data about the campaign performance. 

Data management platform (DMP)

A DMP is a centralized database that collects, stores, and deploys user data for online advertising. DMPs collect data from multiple sources to build a profile of a user’s demographics, interests, and behavior online.

AdTech trends and challenges

The AdTech industry has grown and matured over the past twenty years, adding new technology and providers to make ad buying and selling faster and more efficient. During that time, the technology has adapted to reflect user preferences and an ever-changing regulatory environment.  

Let’s take a look at the top trends and challenges shaping AdTech today, and how the landscape could evolve.  

1. Privacy and data security

Programmatic advertising was largely built on cookies for matching IDs and re-engagement. However, consumers and regulators have mounted opposition to cookies and cross-device tracking due to privacy concerns. Ever adaptable, the AdTech industry has been developing alternative tracking methods that will still allow advertisers the data and analytics they crave — without compromising user security.

First, Apple implemented its app tracking transparency (ATT) framework, limiting the data available to advertisers. Next, Google announced it would eliminate its dependence on third-party cookies by 2024. Now, advertisers are braced for more change as Google, whose Android advertising is heavily based on Google Account ID (GAID) tracking, prepares to phase out GAID in favor of Privacy Sandbox. 

Starting in 2024, Google will transition a portion of its users to Privacy Sandbox. Instead of recording and storing individual behavior, Privacy Sandbox pools users into anonymized groups with similar interests and serves them ad content based on their group demographics and interests. Google will seek input from advertisers and developers throughout the transition process, as it attempts to protect customers while giving advertisers the insights and impressions they want.

2. CTV measurement

Streaming reigns supreme: 87% of U.S. households now own at least one connected TV (CTV) device. CTV devices include smart TVs, streaming boxes, and connected video consoles.

With streaming comes the opportunity for ad networks to deliver targeted video ads between shows, rather than linear ads for a general audience. CTV offers advertisers the chance to reach valuable audiences based on their interests, demographics, geography, and time of day. 

In addition to targeted brand exposure, CTV offers powerful measurement options for advertisers. With cross-device data, advertisers can track CTV-to-mobile attribution to measure app installs and post-install events in a customer lifecycle. And in today’s economic climate, it’s more important than ever to understand the true impact of every marketing dollar spent. 

3. In-game advertising

Another fast-growing trend area in AdTech is in-game advertising. While mobile games soared in popularity during the pandemic, the buzz has died down and gaming app marketers are going all out to boost user acquisition. Global ad spend for gaming app installs totalled $26.7 billion in 2023.

Watching a video ad to get another life or a reward is just one example of how in-game advertising works. This partnership benefits both advertisers and publishers, though app developers need to balance in-game ads with user experience. AdTech facilitates bidding and delivers ad content to apps, just as it does to websites and video platforms.  

4. DOOH advertising

If you saw a billboard near your office, chances are that an ad rep worked directly with the billboard owner to manually select each billboard placed in your city, street by street. AdTech can seriously streamline this slow, manual process. 

Experts value the global DOOH (digital out-of-home) market at $18.8 billion and predict growth of 11.6% by 2030. With programmatic advertising, advertisers can launch a DOOH campaign at any moment. They can also target audiences with specific factors like weather or time of day for a powerful impact.

Key takeaways

• AdTech is the infrastructure that supports programmatic advertising – the future of digital advertising. 
• With programmatic buying and selling, advertisers can automate the entire ad delivery process, gather detailed user insights, and bid for the most relevant ad placements in real-time.  
• AdTech allows brands to launch campaigns faster, scale quickly with automation, and optimize their ad spend with more precise targeting. 
• AdTech companies are adapting to changing user preferences and regulations, making changes that embrace customer privacy and limit tracking. Initiatives like Google’s Privacy Sandbox reflect the shift away from tracking with cookies. 
• Alongside in-game ads and DOOH, CTV is a powerful AdTech tool that allows advertisers to reach their ideal audience through smart TVs, gaming consoles, and streaming devices. CTV offers precise targeting capabilities, interactivity, and measurable results, making it an attractive option for brands wanting to stay ahead of the curve. 

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Cost per click (CPC) is a term used in paid online advertising to demonstrate what an advertiser pays every time his/her ad receives a click.

What is CPC?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In a pay-per-click advertising model, advertisers pay the publisher (the party that owns the ad space) only when someone clicks on their ad. Your cost per click (CPC) is the amount you pay for each of those clicks. 

With spending on digital advertising projected to reach 836 billion dollars by 2026, brands want to know their investment is paying off. Clicks are a good indicator that your ad has captured attention, so this model means you’re paying for action, rather than spending money on passive views. 

Keeping track of your CPC is vital to get the most from your ad budget, but there are various factors that can influence it. Let’s find out how it works.

How to calculate CPC

You can calculate your CPC using the following formula: 

Let’s look at an example.  

Hotels.com decides to advertise in the British Airways app. Once someone has completed a flight purchase, they receive an ad offering them hotel deals in their destination of choice. Hotels.com paid British Airways $5,000 for their ad campaign, and received 20,000 clicks over the course of the campaign. This brings their CPC to $0.25.

Benefits of using CPC

CPC is one of the most widely used metrics — here are some of the reasons why. 

1. Control your costs

The CPC model offers value for advertisers, because you only pay the publisher when your ad is actually clicked on. And you can set daily limits so that you don’t go over budget. 

2. Understand ad performance

The number of clicks your ad receives is a good indicator of how well it’s performing. If it’s on the low side, you can quickly take action to change or stop the campaign, protecting your budget.  

3. Focus on an engaged audience 

Measuring clicks is important because, unlike impressions, they show a level of engagement from a user. This makes them a better indicator of intent which can lead to conversions further down the funnel. 

4. Maximize your ROI

Pay-per-click campaigns are a big part of online marketing, so you want to get your money’s worth. Understanding what each click costs you, and making sure you don’t overpay, is vital to protecting your bottom line and getting a solid return on your marketing investment. 

Challenges of using CPC

While CPC is certainly popular, it’s not all roses and there are some drawbacks to be aware of.

1. Costs can be high

If you manage to run a successful campaign with a high click-through rate, then you could see a large bill at the end of it — particularly if you’re using competitive search terms. Be sure to keep an eye on your campaign, your conversions, and your daily CPC budgets to make sure you stay profitable. 

2. Clicks don’t mean conversion 

Clicks do indicate interest, but they don’t always translate into paying customers. To boost your chances, make sure the content in your app or on your site is top quality. It should align with your advertising and clearly sell the benefits of your product, making it irresistible. 

3. Every click counts (even if you don’t want it to)

With CPC, you don’t only pay for “good” clicks (users with a genuine interest in your brand). You’ll also pay if someone clicks by accident, or, worse, for fraudulent activity. If fraudsters repeatedly click on your ad, you’ll be charged but see no conversions in return. 

How does CPC work?

Some campaigns have a fixed price per click, which is negotiated in advance between the advertiser and the publisher. 

Alternatively, pricing can be based on a bid. Here the advertiser tells the publisher the maximum they’re willing to pay per click, and how many clicks they’re looking to achieve. 

It then gets a bit more complicated. In Google Ads, for example, CPC is calculated as follows: 

Let’s explain these new terms.

Quality score

Think of your quality score like a credit score. Just like your credit score will affect your ability to apply for a credit card, your quality score will affect your CPC. 

Your quality score will depend on many factors, including: 

• Keyword relevance
• Click-through rate
• Historical performance 
• Landing page quality and relevance 

The higher the bid and quality score, the more likely your ad will appear in front of the right audience. You CPC will never exceed your maximum bid. It may be the same or lower, but never more.

Ad rank 

Ad rank is used to determine where on a search page your ad will appear (if at all). There are multiple factors that go into the ad rank, for example the quality of your ad at the time of auction, the bid amount, and your position relative to your competitors.

The price per click varies depending on the vertical. For example, keywords for legal services often demand the highest costs. Financial and other professional services like insurance aren’t far behind. That’s because there is a lot of competition for these keywords which are also relatively niche. 

The price per click varies depending on your industry. For example, keywords for legal services often demand the highest costs, closely followed by financial and other professional services. That’s because there is a lot of competition for these keywords which are also relatively niche. 

Your ad rank, quality score, and maximum bid combine to determine what the CPC will be. 

CPC bidding strategy

If you’re bidding on search terms to generate clicks, you have two options: manual or automated bidding.

Manual bidding means you can fix your maximum CPC yourself. You can set a budget for each individual keyword, and adjust it as needed, giving you complete control. While this has its benefits, it can be time consuming and hard to scale up.  

Automated bidding uses AI to take out the manual effort, setting bids for you based on your campaign goals. In Google Ads, for example, you can set targets like “Maximize clicks” or “Maximize conversions”. This approach saves you time and enables better audience segmentation and scaling than manual bidding. But it does require a good amount of historical data for the algorithms to be effective.  

What’s an average CPC? 

CPC varies hugely across verticals and formats. In 2023, the average CPC for Google Ads is $4.22. As mentioned earlier, ads for legal services cost much more (over $9), while in other industries it can be as low as $1.55.

Even among social media platforms the cost can vary significantly, with LinkedIn and Instagram typically more expensive than X (Twitter) and Facebook. There are various reasons for this: for example, LinkedIn has the advantage of reaching a targeted professional niche, while Instagram is keen to attract high-value advertisers prepared to pay a high CPM.  

As always with social media, the best strategy is to know your audience and invest in meeting them where they are, rather than trying to be everything to everyone. 

CPC vs other metrics

CPC shares similarities with various other marketing metrics. Let’s untangle some of the acronyms. 

CPC vs CPM 

CPM means cost per mille — in other words, the cost of displaying your ad 1,000 times (known as impressions). 

CPM is often used when a brand wants to increase awareness and engagement. The focus is on visibility, rather than specific actions (such as clicks) which carry a higher cost. However, if your goal is to drive conversions then you’ll be more interested in your cost per click. The publisher may have to serve far more than 1,000 impressions to reach the desired number of clicks. 

CPC vs CPA

CPA stands for cost per action, or sometimes cost per acquisition.

Isn’t a click an action? Well, yes. But CPA can cover various actions depending on your campaign goals, for example: 

• Installs 
• Level passed 
• Registration completed
• In-app purchase 

CPA is a target agreed between the advertiser and the publisher before the start of a campaign. Not to be confused with eCPA, which is the effective CPA and a measure of the actual results of the campaign.

CPC vs PPC

PPC stands for pay per click. If this sounds similar to cost per click, it’s because they’re two sides of the same coin. 

PPC is a marketing campaign strategy, whereby marketers agree to pay a certain amount to the publisher whenever their ad is clicked on. (You can see this in action on Google, where the first few search results have the word “Ad” next to them.) CPC is used on the campaign measurement side, to show the cost to the advertiser of each individual click. 

CPC vs CTR

CTR stands for click-through rate: the proportion of users exposed to an ad who actually click on it. Both metrics focus on clicks, but while CTR can indicate how well your ad is resonating with your audience, it doesn’t tell you anything about the cost. 

CPC vs CPV

CPV stands for cost per view. If you’re running video ads, this lets you calculate the cost of getting one person to watch your ad to the end. Unlike CPC, this measures passive views rather than actions (clicks), making it more suited to awareness campaigns. 

CPC vs CPI

CPI is your cost per install, a metric used in acquisition campaigns to calculate what you have to spend to win each new user. The more users you attract, the more effective your campaign and the lower your CPI. It’s similar to CPC in that they both involve users taking action, but ad clicks don’t always translate into those all-important installs.  

CPC vs CPL

CPL stands for cost per lead. A lead isn’t a customer — yet — but they’ve expressed a definite interest in your service, for example by completing an online form. Whereas users might click out of curiosity, boredom, or just clumsy fingers, a lead has serious intent. CPL is most used for high-value subscriptions and professional services.  

How to lower your CPC 

Clearly, paying less for your clicks will benefit your budget. So how can you keep your CPC under control?

1. Improve your quality score

The fastest way to lower your CPC on search engines is to improve your quality score. 

Typically, a higher quality score receives a lower CPC. Maintaining a quality score of 6 or higher can unlock discounts of 15 to 50%. Ensuring your ads are highly relevant and your landing page is top quality will help. 

2. Continually refine your audience and keywords

As with any marketing, CPC is all about reaching the right audience. After all, the goal of the ad is to have them click through and progress towards converting. 

Refining your audience and keywords helps you to be as specific as possible with your targeting. Cheaper isn’t always better — a higher-priced search term might deliver better results, but you may want to balance it with some lower-budget options. And remember to remove keywords that are no longer relevant or haven’t delivered the desired results. 

3. Expand your reach

Through your keyword research, try to discover new and valuable avenues for clicks. You can also expand into new target audiences, geo locations, or advertising channels to try and expand your reach. 

4. Adjust your bids based on key criteria

As part of ensuring your ads are properly targeted you can adjust your bids to focus on specific locations, time periods, and devices. Understand which combination of factors brings the best results and adjust your bids accordingly. In turn this will increase your quality score and further decrease your CPC. 

5. Use A/B testing

For display ads, experiment with different versions of your creative to see which delivers the best results. An ad that drives more actions will be deemed more relevant, resulting in a lower CPC.

6. Prevent fraud

As mentioned earlier, click fraud can cost you dear. Google Ads has some safeguards in place, but you can always do more to stop your ad budget falling into the wrong hands. 

Keep a close eye on your clicks and your budget — a flurry of clicks from the same IP address could signal someone up to no good, and you can have it blocked. Consider investing in a fraud protection tool to detect and block criminal activity across your mobile marketing campaigns.   

Key takeaways 

1. In a pay-per-click advertising strategy, CPC tells an advertiser how much they’re paying the publisher every time a user clicks on their ad. 
2. CPC can be fixed, or you can set it by bidding. Bidding may be manual (where you set keywords yourself) or automated (based on AI). 
3. Clicks are a good indicator of engagement, so you’re paying for a relevant audience. CPC enables you to keep an eye on costs and protect your ROI. 
4. That being said, clicks don’t always lead to conversions, and they can be vulnerable to fraud. Keep an eye on your daily budgets to ensure you stay profitable.
5. Average CPC varies greatly depending on your industry and the platform you’re using. Figures tend to be highest for professional services, where keyword bidding is very competitive. 
6. CPC shouldn’t be confused with other marketing metrics, such as CPM (which is useful for awareness and engagement) or CTR (which indicates the effectiveness of your creative). 
7. To lower your CPC, try to improve your ad’s quality score. Refining your audience and keywords, expanding your reach, and regularly adjusting your bids will also help — and always be alert to fraud.

Mobile marketing dictionary from A-Z

Thanks for your download!

The post Cost per click (CPC) appeared first on AppsFlyer.

Ad spend is the amount of money spent on paid advertising for a mobile marketing campaign.

What is ad spend?

Your ad spend describes your paid investment in mobile advertising campaigns – in other words, how much you paid to place your ads. Depending on how you want to use the data, you can calculate ad spend for a specific channel or for a total campaign. 

Why is ad spend important? 

Tracking and understanding your ad spend helps you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and allocate budget accordingly. If you know your ad spend and can attribute leads or sales to specific ad campaigns, you can calculate key performance indicators (KPIs) like ROAS (more on that to come). With this knowledge, you can stay within budget, tweak underperforming campaigns, or divert more money to high-performing ones. 

Ad spend post-iOS 14

Apple’s ATT privacy framework, introduced after the 2021 launch of iOS 14, requires apps to ask for user permission before collecting and sharing data. As not all users consent to this, advertisers have less user-level data to accurately measure campaign performance.  

Additionally, due to the data collection restrictions, mobile marketers have experienced changes to Facebook Ads, including higher costs and fewer metrics for tracking.

Faced with these challenges, marketers are increasingly diversifying their ad budgets across multiple platforms, including Google, Facebook Messenger chat, and other search and social media platforms. Some have shifted their ad spend from Apple to Android, which has yet to implement such strict data privacy updates.

Google (including search, YouTube, and Google Play Store) has grown in popularity for app marketers as an alternative advertising platform.  It not only enables Facebook data tracking through Google Analytics, using UTM parameters on a website’s URL, but offers the advantage of targeting users based on their search intent.

How can you calculate ad spend?

Different advertising platforms may price their ads by click, impression, or download. With fragmented metrics, it’s important for mobile marketers to understand how each one is calculated and to be able to compile their own KPIs to compare how different channels are performing. To help you calculate and compare ad spend across metrics and platforms, here’s a basic explainer of the popular ad spend KPIs. 

Cost per click (CPC)

CPC measures ad spend by the cost charged to advertisers for each click on their mobile ad. This is a cost-effective pricing model for advertisers because they only pay when users engage. It’s important to track CPCs for budgeting, as clicks can add up quickly. 

While it’s a good measure of engagement, CPC doesn’t guarantee conversions: in short, you won’t get installs unless you can clearly demonstrate your app’s value. Advertisers can improve performance by working on aspects like keyword relevance, click-through rate, historical performance, and landing page quality.

Cost per mille (CPM)

In the CPM pricing model, advertisers pay for every 1,000 (“mille” in Latin) impressions of their ad. This helps you understand how wide an audience your campaign reached. 

While CPM is a great method for tracking awareness, it can also become costly with little return, as it’s focused on views rather than  conversions. Its measurement is also limited as it may include just partial views of an ad.

Cost per lead (CPL)

CPL measures the ad spend required to generate one lead. A lead is typically defined as a user who has demonstrated interest in your app through actions like completing a form field or downloading a content asset. In this pricing model, advertisers only pay when they obtain the lead’s contact information. 

CPL can be expensive, but directly translates to leads and, ultimately, sales and revenue.

Cost per action (CPA)

In the CPA pricing model, advertisers pay for a specific action taken by a user, such as an app download or item purchase. This action is determined by the advertiser and is paid at a fixed rate. 

CPA provides a way to measure the profitability of a campaign with minimal risk for the advertiser, since they only pay when a user completes a specific action. This pricing model is not offered as frequently by ad platforms, but can be calculated internally to assess a campaign’s performance. 

Cost per sale (CPS)

CPS is a pricing model where advertisers pay for each purchase completed by a user. This model carries a low risk for the advertiser, since they only pay when a sale is generated. It’s also more specific than the CPA model, as it focuses solely on actual sales. 

Cost per install (CPI)

In the CPI model, advertisers pay when a consumer installs an app. CPI is an effective way of gauging user engagement, as higher install rates indicate a successful campaign and can help forecast sales. If your CPI is too high, your campaign may not be profitable: you might need to refine your audience or creative for better results. 

Reaching the intended audience in the CPI model often requires significant investment in the right channels, which can be costly and time-consuming. CPI is most effective when combined with other engagement KPIs, such as ROAS, to ensure the continued success of the campaign.

Ad spend vs. Return on ad spend (ROAS)

Calculating your ad spend is a critical step to be able to measure your ROAS (Return on advertising spend). Knowing your ROAS helps you evaluate your campaign’s overall return on your investment (ROI). To calculate ROAS, follow this formula: 

The higher your ROAS ratio, the more successful the campaign, and vice versa. But keep in mind that ROAS only considers the money spent on ads — not other marketing overhead costs like salaries, software, or ad production.

While ROAS is a quick way to assess your campaign’s performance and find areas to improve, it can fall victim to data inaccuracies. Tracking costs, conversions, and revenues across multiple channels can be challenging, particularly when privacy restrictions limit data collection. Also, don’t forget to factor in after-tax deductions and store commissions for an accurate evaluation.

Remember, ROAS isn’t a one-size-fits-all measurement. It’s best to review it regularly as campaign goals and dynamics change over time.

Key takeaways

• Ad spend is the amount of money you spent on a particular advertising campaign or channel.
• Ad spend is about the cost of placing ads on paid channels: it does not take into account your total marketing costs, including ad production or marketing staff.
• The privacy restrictions brought in with iOS 14 have led many mobile marketers to diversify their ad spend, due to higher costs and more limited analytics. 
• There are many ways to measure ad spend, including CPC, CPM, and CPA. Different ad networks provide different metrics depending on their pricing models.
• Mobile advertisers can dig into their mobile analytics platform to calculate any KPIs their ad platforms don’t provide, like CPI or CPS.
• When you know your ad spend, you can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and adjust your ad messaging and design to improve results.

The post Ad spend appeared first on AppsFlyer.

A data management platform (DMP) is a centralized database used to collect, store, and deploy customer data for digital advertising purposes. DMPs compile data from multiple channels to paint a picture of a user’s demographic information, interests, and online behaviors.

What is a data management platform?

A data management platform (or DMP for short) is a tool that can form a profile about individual customers, give big-picture analytics, and facilitate personalization in marketing campaigns. 

Think about it: most marketers create campaigns based on personas, or fictionalized profiles of their ideal customer. But what if you didn’t need to rely on fiction and guesswork to launch a successful app marketing campaign? What if you could automate your digital ad buys based on real-time behavior and interests?

You can use a DMP to: 

• help you make the most of your data with business intelligence and automation
• gain valuable insights into your customers’ behavior and preferences, optimize your advertising spend, and comply with data privacy regulations
• enhance your tech stack by interacting with customer relationship management platforms, customer data platforms, and demand-side platforms 

Why are data management platforms important to app marketers?

DMPs are critical for programmatic advertising, the automation of media buying using AI and machine learning, and play a key role in mobile user acquisition. 

Think about all the different information that you gather about your audience: 

Bringing all your data together makes it much more powerful — and with a DMP, you can combine first-party, second-party, and third-party data for a clearer picture. Let’s review these different types:

• First-party data is data collected directly from a source, such as a website or app, and is usually owned by the company itself. 
• Second-party data was originally collected by one party, but is shared with another party through an agreement. It includes things like social media profiles and customer reviews, that are shared with you via a trusted partner. 
• Third-party data is data that has been gathered from multiple sources and is aggregated and sold by a third-party organization. In programmatic advertising, this type of data can be used to target specific audiences, track user behaviors, optimize campaigns, and measure results.

Without a centralized system, app marketers are stuck pulling insights from multiple data types and sources, wasting valuable admin time, and making manual decisions about how and where to place ads. 

A DMP not only centralizes data from these different sources, giving a unified view of customer behavior — it also provides management software for app marketers to activate that data into campaigns. 

Development of data management platforms

The first DMP, called BlueKai, was pioneered by a tech entrepreneur named Omar Tawakol. Tawakol realized that companies had general information about their customers but were missing the golden key that is buyer intent. When a person clicks on a travel website like Expedia, for example, that event shows an intent to plan a trip.

Though it took some time for the concept to take off, DMPs are now a mainstay of the digital advertising industry. Oracle acquired BlueKai for $420 million in 2014 just six years after its founding. 

DMPs have removed the guesswork and negotiation when it comes to placing ads. They facilitate programmatic advertising by segmenting audience data, identifying efficient placements, and letting marketers both buy and sell ad impressions with automated bidding.

DMP vs. CDP, DSP and DCR

Before we go any further, let’s distinguish between a DMP and a CDP, or customer data platform. A CDP aggregates customer information into a single database from multiple sources. This can include both personally identifiable information and anonymous behavioral data. However, a CDP is simply a database — it doesn’t give marketers the ability to analyze the data or take any actions. It acts as a bridge to share data with any platform that needs it, like a CRM or DMP.

A data management platform (DMP) is a SaaS platform that not only stores data, but delivers insights into customer behavior and has the ability to deploy campaigns and generate leads. DMPs are most commonly used by app marketers for segmentation, targeting, and personalization. 

Two other terms you need to know are DSP and DCR. 

• A demand-side platform (DSP) is a platform that enables advertisers to buy ad space from multiple publishers with real-time bidding. Advertisers can bid on impressions in an auction-style marketplace and target their ads based on user data stored in the DMP. For instance, Facebook Ads Manager is a DSP that allows you to purchase Facebook and Instagram ad inventory.

• A data clean room (DCR) is a data-sharing solution that allows two parties to merge first-party data sets in a secure and compliant way. With iOS privacy updates eroding advertisers’ first-party data, DCRs have become increasingly popular as they allow companies to build more robust data profiles for targeting while safeguarding customer privacy. DCRs are a separate but complementary platform to a DMP. Google, Facebook, and Amazon each have their own DCR services.

How does a DMP work?

At a high level, a DMP collects first-, second-, and third-party data from different channels and devices, and anonymizes it. Let’s take a closer look at the steps.

1. Marketers set up their DMP and feed in initial data to set a foundation. This can include:
   1. Online data from mobile apps, websites, analytics, and so on 
   2. Offline data from sources such as your CRM, purchase history, or email.
2. The DMP compiles and anonymizes the data and categorizes it.
3. Marketers can add tags or further categorization to the data.
4. The DMP provides reporting and audience insights.
5. The DMP connects with common ad networks and digital channels for data activation.
6. Based on insights, marketers can set up campaigns to run based on real-time customer data.

What you can do with DMPs

Now that you know what a DMP is, the magic begins: leveraging data to boost advertising engagement. 

Here are six ways a DMP can supercharge your app marketing efforts.

1. Segment your audience

Before the advent of programmatic advertising, app marketers would mostly segment audiences based on broad demographic strokes. With rich data augmented by AI, DMPs can segment audiences based on interests, behavior, needs, and more. Algorithms can even enable you to find similar audiences to the ones you build and segment.   

2. Personalize your ads

Once you have audience segments, you can launch personalized ad campaigns. Take an eCommerce company, for example. Rather than running a general ad for your brand or current sale, you can run an ad for specific products that the DMP determines particular users may be interested in. 

3. Retarget across devices

Since DMPs integrate data from across devices, you have the ability to launch personalized ad campaigns that leverage impressions across devices and channels. By connecting your DMP to a DSP, you can set up ad campaigns that “follow” a user from site to site or from desktop to mobile.

4. Improve your marketing ROI

Another benefit of using a DMP is that it can help you optimize your advertising spend. By analyzing data on customer behavior and preferences, a DMP can help you identify the most effective channels and messages for reaching your target audience. This can help you allocate your advertising budget more effectively and achieve better results.

5. Get audience insights

Since you’re able to track ad campaigns to purchases, you can also follow the information trail retroactively to glean insights about who’s actually buying your product or service. Advanced analytics can produce market research for you to share key demographic and behavioral attributes about your customers.  

6. Stay compliant

Perhaps the most important benefit of using a DMP is that it can help businesses comply with data privacy regulations. With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other privacy laws in place, businesses need to be careful about how they collect and share customer data. Fines for mishandling EU citizens’ data under GDPR start at €10 million or 2% of a company’s revenue. A DMP can help your business stay within the bounds of the law, avoiding costly fines and protecting your reputation. 

Data management platforms and your marketing tech stack

DMPs are just one cog in the wheel that is an app marketer’s tech stack. Building a tech stack that’s right for your business is complex, as you’ll likely need to choose between vendors and find multiple platforms that will work together. The number of martech options is overwhelming — platforms have grown nearly 10x in the past decade (2012-2022), and now include marketing automation, analytics, attribution, and more.

Do I need a DMP?

Wondering if a DMP is right for you? Well, startups may not need a DMP if they don’t have a dedicated marketing team to build and run it, or may choose to have a digital marketing agency manage one. Many small startups start with free products analytics tools for basic analytics before they advance to more robust, paid product suites for scalable growth.

Medium and enterprise companies with established marketing teams should have a DMP to enable them to automate and optimize their mobile ad campaigns. Let’s look at the different types of tools that can help app marketers succeed through each of your product life cycles. 

Testing

• Product analytics for app measurement

Deployment

• Attribution providers for measurement and marketing automation for advertising orchestration

Growth

• Media partners and location services for advertising orchestration
• CDP as a stack connector

Maturity

• Cloud storage and data visualization for measurement
• DMP and marketing cloud platform as stack connectors

Lay your martech foundation for user acquisition

DMPs function as a stack connector to support app growth and lead a product into maturity. In order to use a DMP effectively, you need a few foundations in place:

• A CRM platform to house your lead and customer information
• A CDP to clean and compile your data in a centralized database
• A DSP to purchase ad inventory

In addition, your team needs to set best practices for collecting, storing, and categorizing your first-party data in order to keep your data practices clean and compliant with international regulations.

Go further with data intelligence

To bring your app marketing strategy to maturity, you need to go a step further. Adding attribution is the ultimate data intelligence to let you measure results and understand which marketing channels are resulting in app downloads. Mobile attribution is the process of documenting and attributing each app install and app engagement to the marketing or media source that referred it.

Finally, you can bring your marketing efforts full-circle by measuring in-app analytics. In the free-to-install app ecosystem, installs may not translate into revenue. You still need a tool to measure retention and in-app engagement. Find a mobile measurement partner (MMP) like AppsFlyer that can measure campaign analytics across devices and platforms.

Key takeaways

• A DMP is a centralized database that compiles and categorizes first-, second-, and third-party data, as well as providing  an interface for data activation.
• A DMP is distinct from a CDP, DSP and DCR, but complements each of these martech tools in a marketer’s tech ecosystem.
• DMPs are a key component of programmatic advertising: they help marketers segment their audience, find similar audiences, and deploy personalized ads through automated bidding.
• While start-ups may not need a DMP, it’s an essential component of an app marketer’s tech stack to bring a product to maturity.
• Before you start using a DMP, you need to put the foundations in place including a CRM platform, a customer data platform and a data clean room.
• With a DMP, marketers can automate their ad buying for improved ROI and continued growth, while sophisticated analytics and intelligence help measure campaign success.

The post Data management platform appeared first on AppsFlyer.

Connected TV, or CTV for short, is a device that can access content via the internet, including on streaming services, social media platforms, and internet browsers.

What is CTV?

CTV (short for connected TV) refers to a device that connects to the internet and can stream content through streaming services, internet browsers, and social media. CTV devices include smart TVs and gaming consoles like Xbox and Playstation, as well as Fire Sticks, Apple TV, and other streaming-specific devices.

Unlike traditional TV, CTV allows advertisers to accurately measure viewing behavior, clicks, and conversion rates, while making it easy for consumers to watch their favorite shows on multiple devices. It’s a win-win.

What’s the difference between CTV and OTT?

These acronyms are sometimes confused, but they refer to two separate things.

Connected TV is the physical device that connects to the internet and streams content. Over-the-top, or OTT for short,  specifically refers to the content and streams that are being shown on a connected TV. 

In short, CTV shows OTT content.

What are the benefits of CTV advertising?

CTV is growing more popular with advertisers as privacy changes in a post-IDFA world are making campaign measurement harder than ever before. Not only does CTV help you reach the right audiences more effectively, it enables you to do this safely without having to navigate the changing rules and regulations around IDFA and cookies. 

Let’s walk through a few more benefits.

Precise audience segmentation and reporting

Unlike traditional linear TV, CTV allows advertisers to reach specific audiences by demographics, interest, context, time of day, device, and geography. And with so much content available, advertisers can be confident they’re placing ads that are contextually relevant. 

This improves efficiency, reduces ad waste, and ensures your ads are being shown to the most relevant audiences. It also enables more comprehensive and granular reporting, so you can optimize ad performance over time. 

Show up in the right places

Large-scale advertising buys, like programmatic banner ads, come with the massive risk of showing your ads in inappropriate situations that could ultimately hurt your brand image. With CTV advertising, advertisers can be much more prescriptive about where their content will be shown, minimizing the risk of being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Reach an ever-growing viewerbase

In 2022, 92% of American households could be reached by CTV advertising. While Gen Z and Millennials still make up the majority of the cohort, the rate of adoption has snowballed across all age brackets. This means advertisers can reach a wider audience at lower cost, and viewers can be served more relevant ads than they’d see on traditional TV.

Common CTV ad formats

While some platforms like Hulu offer a wide variety of ad formats, there are three main ones you should know about: in-stream video ads, interactive video ads, and display ads. What they all have in common is the ability to show your ad while the audience is highly engaged. 

In-stream video ads

The most common form of CTV advertising is in-stream video ads, which play while the content is being watched. They typically range from 15 to 30 seconds, and can be placed before the show (pre-roll ads), during it (mid-roll ads), or at the end (post-roll ads). 

In-stream video ads typically benefit from good viewing figures (measured in CPM or cost per mille), as your audience is engaged and ready to watch a video. On the flipside, they can be seen as intrusive, particularly if they interrupt the content at a crucial moment. 

Interactive video ads

Next up are interactive video ads, which are exactly as they sound – ads that viewers interact with. They might do this via a clickable button on the screen, a carousel, or a QR code. These ads provide an extra layer of engagement data, but may not be available across all CTV platforms. Rakuten, Roku, and Prime Video all use interactive video ads. 

Display ads

Display ads are shown on the homescreen, as an overlay, on the bottom, or on the side of the video content. They’re typically smaller and have much lower viewability than the former two ad formats. They’re usually static and have limited inventory in the streaming space.

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The CTV measurement dilemma

CTV measurement is still maturing, and that means there are some teething troubles to be aware of. The most common pitfalls and challenges are to do with data fragmentation. 

Making sure you’re combating fraud and getting accurate attribution across all your marketing channels is a challenge as old as time. However, working with an MMP like AppsFlyer can help you connect your data, ensuring it’s accurate and fits in with your larger media planning strategy. 

Key takeaways

• Connected TV (CTV) is a device that accesses the internet to stream content, such as a smart TV, streaming stick, or gaming console.
• CTV is the physical device, while over-the-top (OTT) refers to the content streamed on a connected TV.
• CTV allows advertisers to accurately measure viewing behavior and engagement, while making it easy to stream on any device for viewers.
• CTV advertising’s biggest strength is its precise audience segmentation and data reporting.
• CTV advertising allows advertisers to reach a wide and growing viewer base, with the potential for cheaper and more relevant ads compared to traditional TV. However, there are still some teething troubles, primarily around data fragmentation and attribution.

Mobile marketing dictionary from A-Z

Thanks for your download!

The post CTV (Connected TV) appeared first on AppsFlyer.

Ad impressions indicate the number of times an ad is displayed within an app. They’re different from ad clicks, as the number of impressions does not reflect the number of times the ad was clicked.

What is an ad impression?

An ad impression, also known as an ad view, quantifies the number of digital views an advertisement, post, or web page receives. It’s a numerical value that tells you how many sets of “eyeballs“ have potentially viewed your content.

There has been some debate about the accuracy of ad impressions as a metric, as they don’t reflect whether a viewer actually interacted with the content. Regardless, impressions remain one of the most critical digital marketing metrics out there.

Why? Because they tell us how many potential customers have been exposed to a piece of content. And that’s priceless information for marketers. 

The two types of ad impressions

Ad impressions can be classified under the following two categories:

1. Served impressions

Served impressions tell you how many times your ad has been delivered to a web page by the ad server. This is the most common way of measuring impressions and is often used as a baseline metric for ad campaigns.

But, there’s a catch: even if the ad isn’t visible to users (for example, it’s buried below the fold), the ad server will still count it as a served impression. So, you can sometimes get a false impression of how many people are seeing your ad.

2. Viewable impressions

Viewable impressions measure the actual number of times your target audience sees the ad. 

The Media Rating Council and Interactive Advertising Bureau base viewable impressions on a pixel metric and a time metric. As per the body, an impression is considered viewable when:

• at least half of the content asset is on an active, open browser tab and viewable on the page; and
• the pixel standard lasts for at least one second so a potential viewer sees it after the ad loads.

Served impressions help you understand an ad campaign’s reach, but If you really want to gauge its impact on your target audience, you need to look at viewable impressions. But here’s the catch: not all ad servers count viewable impressions, which makes tracking them slightly more challenging for website owners and advertisers.

Nevertheless, both metrics have a place in the world of digital advertising to help you make informed decisions about your campaigns and ensure your message is getting through to the right audience.

Ad impressions vs. ad clicks vs. ad reach 

Yup, all three are different terms and cannot be used interchangeably. Let’s review how impressions differ from clicks and reach.

Ad impressions vs. ad clicks

Ad clicks count the number of times users engage with your ad by clicking on it.

Impressions give you an idea of how many people have seen your ad, but clicks are where the real action happens. Clicks show how many people are actually interested in your product or service and take action to learn more.

Let’s say you’re running a Facebook ad campaign targeting young women aged 18-24, and you see that your ad has been seen 10,000 times but only received 100 clicks. 

While 10,000 impressions are great, 100 clicks are not, resulting in a click-through rate (CTR) of just 1%. It’s clear your ad isn’t resonating with your target audience as much as you’d like it to.

Ad impressions vs. ad reach 

Ad reach measures the number of unique individuals who see your ad, indicating a higher level of interest in the advertised product or service.

Reach gives you a more accurate picture of your ad’s impact by showing you how many people are viewing your ad and are potentially interested in your product or service. In contrast, impressions do not indicate the level of interest or engagement with the ad. 

Let’s say you’re promoting a new healthy drink on social media. 

If your ad has 1,000 impressions, that just means it was displayed 1,000 times — it doesn’t necessarily mean 1,000 different people saw it. But if your ad has a reach of 500, that tells you that 500 unique individuals have seen it and are potentially interested in what you’re offering. 

Why are ad impressions important?

Ad impressions may not necessarily indicate interest or engagement with an ad, but they are an important tool for marketers, enabling them to measure the reach and impact of their campaigns — or how many people are exposed to their ads. 

They’re relevant to multiple disciplines and tasks in the mobile marketing niche, including:

User acquisition campaigns

As a marketer, you know that acquiring new users is crucial for your app’s success. That’s where impressions come in, as the more impressions your ad gets, the more likely it is that you’ll acquire new users for your app.

Let’s say you’re launching a user acquisition campaign for a fitness app. 

You create a series of eye-catching banner ads aimed at health enthusiasts. By monitoring impressions, you can keep track of how many times these ads have been served and check the click-through rate to gauge their effectiveness.

And that’s not all. With this data, you can optimize your ads by tweaking their placement, modifying the target audience, or even changing their design. 

App store optimization (ASO)

ASO involves optimizing various elements of an app’s listing in the app store to improve its visibility and discoverability, ultimately leading to increased downloads.

Impressions data is a key component of ASO, as it helps app developers and marketers understand how often their app is being viewed by potential users. 

For example, if an app developer notices their app is receiving a high number of impressions but their download rate is low, the developer can focus on optimizing the app’s meta description (think: the app’s title, description, and keywords) so that it appeals to more people and attracts more downloads.

In addition, impressions data can help marketers identify the keywords or phrases that are driving the most impressions. Armed with this information, they can optimize the app’s metadata with the most relevant and high-traffic keywords to increase its visibility in the app store search results.

Creative optimization 

Advertisers should optimize their ad creatives regularly to improve performance and user engagement. 

By analyzing your ad’s performance, making necessary tweaks, and measuring the impact of those changes, you’ll see a marked improvement in the effectiveness of your ads. And what better way to analyze ad performance than by using impression data?

This data helps you calculate important metrics such as CPM (cost per mille — more on this below) and CTR, giving you a better understanding of how well your ad is resonating with your audience. For example, if your video ad has a high CPM but a low CTR, you may want to adjust the video’s length or content to improve its effectiveness.

How advertisers and publishers use ad impressions

Impressions are crucial to advertisers for the following reasons:

• Offer insights into the performance of ads within a specific channel
• Help determine the reach of an advertising channel, which is essential for evaluating the effectiveness of an ad campaign
• Required to accurately calculate click-through rate (CTR)
• Help optimize ads and their placement
• Calculate the cost of a cost per mille (CPM) campaign.

Impressions are crucial to publishers for the following reasons:

• Calculate the effective cost per mille (eCPM), which is the payment model used to compensate publishers for ad space. By using impressions data, publishers can determine how much they’re monetizing their traffic and optimize their revenue streams accordingly.
• Analyze the number of people viewing their ads and the revenue generated from ad space on their website. This data is valuable for optimizing ad space, increasing revenue, and identifying areas for improvement.

Ad impression and mobile marketing metrics

Ad impressions play a significant role in optimizing mobile marketing campaigns. This is because they’re closely tied to the following three key metrics that aid in the optimization process:

1 — Click-through rate

Click-through rate (CTR) measures the percentage of ad impressions that leads a user to click on your ad. This metric is particularly useful to determine the effectiveness of your ad campaigns and make data-driven decisions related to ad optimization.

For example, let’s suppose a banner ad running on a social media platform received 10,000 impressions and 300 clicks, resulting in a CTR of 3%. Based on this data, you can determine if the results are what you want and make appropriate changes to the ad’s design, message, or placement to improve performance.

A higher CTR indicates more user relevance and engagement, while a lower CTR suggests you may need to optimize the ad.

2 — Cost per mille

Cost per mille (CPM) calculates the cost of 1000 ad impressions.

You can use CPM to understand how much you’re paying to reach a specific audience and compare the cost of different ad placements. It’s also useful to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of an ad campaign and make data-driven decisions about budget allocation.

Imagine you‘re running a CPM campaign to promote your app’s premium subscription service.

If you pay $10 per 1,000 impressions and get 50,000 impressions, your total campaign cost comes to $500. Based on the conversions generated from the campaign, you can determine the ROI and decide if the campaign was successful and if the cost is justified.

3 — Effective cost per mille

Effective cost per mille (eCPM) measures the average revenue earned per 1,000 ad impressions displayed on your app. You can calculate this by dividing total revenue by the number of impressions and then multiplying the number by 1,000.

You can use this metric to evaluate the performance of each campaign without jeopardizing reach. It also indicates whether you’re using the most effective buying model to optimize campaign performance and revenue stream.

For example, if you have an ad space that generates 100,000 impressions monthly and you earn $500 in total revenue from it, the eCPM from the ad space is $5 (calculated by dividing $500 by 100,000 impressions and then multiplying by 1,000).

You can use this data to determine if the ad space is generating enough revenue or whether you should make changes to optimize it further.

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How does an ad impression work?

Ad impressions are like the eyes of the digital advertising world.

Ad servers assign a small pixel to a web page, and an impression is registered whenever the pixel loads. However, there are limitations to this approach, as each impression doesn’t guarantee a new user saw or interacted with the ad, leading to impression fraud.

To optimize ad impressions, marketers can target specific audiences and create appealing ad creatives. For instance, you can target users who have downloaded similar games in the past and use captivating ad creatives to drive clicks and installs.

Limiting the frequency of ad displays is also useful to avoid overloading users with the same ad repeatedly, thereby improving the ad’s overall effectiveness.

Key takeaways

• Ad impressions quantify the number of digital views an advertisement or web page receives, indicating how many sets of “eyeballs“ have potentially viewed your content.
• Ad impressions can be classified as served impressions (number of times an ad is delivered to the web page by the ad server) and viewable impressions (actual number of times your target audience sees the ad). Viewable impressions are more accurate than served impressions when it comes to  measuring ad effectiveness.
• Ad impressions are not the same as ad clicks, which count the number of times users click on an ad, demonstrating their interest or engagement. 
• Marketers can use impressions data to measure the reach and impact of their campaigns. It’s also useful for optimizing user acquisition campaigns and analyzing ad engagement to make informed campaign decisions.

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Media mix modeling (MMM) measures the impact of marketing and advertising campaigns to determine how internal and external elements contribute to a desired outcome, be it revenue or any other KPI.

What is media mix modeling (MMM)?

Media mix modeling, also known as marketing mix modeling, is a statistical method used to measure the impact of marketing and advertising campaigns. Specifically, it reveals how the 4Ps of the marketing mix — product, price, place, and promotion — are contributing to a particular goal, which is often increasing conversions. 

While the 4Ps represent the four broad categories, here are some of the most common elements measured in MMM:

• Sales data: Measures the effectiveness of various marketing strategies and campaigns in driving desired business outcomes, such as more app downloads or revenue.
• Customer data: Monitors demographic and behavioral information about customers, such as income, age, and purchasing habits.
• Media spend: Measures the total money spent on different media formats and types.
• Media exposure: Measures media reach, frequency, and gross rating points.
• External factors: Includes factors influencing sales and marketing performance, such as competitor activity, economic conditions, and seasonality.

We’ll discuss the elements in more detail later in the article.

Think of it this way: using MMM, you can identify which elements of your mobile marketing strategy are working and which aren’t, allowing you to tweak your approach and optimize your campaign.

How does MMM work?

MMM uses statistical analysis to understand how different marketing efforts affect business outcomes like sales. Using a technique called multi-linear regression analysis, it enables you to link independent variables (such as marketing spend on different channels or user engagement metrics) to a dependent variable (such as app downloads or revenue). 

The idea here is to evaluate multiple models to accurately answer the ‘What will happen if you make this change?’ question. 

For example, you can use MMM to measure the impact of in-app ads on total revenue. Then you can look at the effect of increased spending on these ads: would it earn you more, or less? 

To use MMM effectively, you need aggregated and cleansed data from internal databases and external sources. Ideally, your data will span two to three years to factor in effects like seasonality. Then, you assign a numerical value to every media channel campaign based on the return on investment (ROI), and use this to allocate future spend and create sales forecasts.

The four phases of an MMM process

A standard effective MMM process has the following four phases:

Phase 1: Data collection 

After the impending demise of third-party cookies, you need to focus on collecting first-party data for a more accurate representation of user reactions and behavior in response to your marketing strategy. 

Gather comprehensive historical data on your past marketing activities, non-marketing sources, and external factors. Think: user engagement metrics, target audience demographics, and ad spend. 

You also need to ensure data integrity, using methods such as second-party data partnerships (getting information from current or potential business partners for database enrichment) and data clean rooms (using aggregated and anonymized user information to protect user privacy).

Phase 2: Modeling

MMM works best with digital channels: traditional methods like print and broadcast are harder to measure. As a mobile app marketer, you can use multi-linear regression to determine the ROI with accurate, dependable insights for decision-making.

To create an MMM model, choose the dependent variable or business outcome (for example, revenue or app downloads) you want to explain. Then identify the independent variables, a.k.a. factors impacting the dependent variable (things like ad spend and target audience). 

Make sure you’re including both controllable variables like price and channel, and uncontrollable variables like competition and inflation. 

Finally, assign values to both the dependent and independent variables, and create a mathematical model representing the relationship between them.

Phase 3: Data analysis and insights

In this stage, you’ll use the model from phase 2 to uncover and analyze insights related to your marketing campaigns.

Evaluate the contribution of each channel to the business outcomes and dependable metrics you identified before. Continuing with our example, you can rank your marketing campaigns based on their impact on revenue or user engagement. From there, you can measure media effectiveness, efficiency, and ROI for each campaign.

Note that you can use your model for forecasting future user engagement and revenue. But models based on historical data assume past patterns will repeat in the future and, therefore, don’t account for landscape changes. 

Phase 4: Optimization

Optimization is the final MMM phase, where you optimize your marketing mix for future campaigns using your results from phase 3. 

Consider simulating different marketing scenarios, targeting different audiences, or changing ad spend levels to identify the optimal combination of tactics to achieve your revenue goals faster. 

MMM in action: an example

Suppose you want to determine the impact of your in-app advertisements on revenue.

Working through the MMM phases, you’ll first collect data on ad spend, target audience demographics, and revenue for the past year. Then, use multi-linear regression to create a model representing the relationship between these variables. 

Let’s assume the model shows that ad spend and target audience demographics have a significant positive impact on revenue. That means you can optimize your marketing mix for future campaigns by increasing ad spend on channels with the highest impact on revenue, and focusing your marketing efforts towards a more lucrative audience.

Is MMM the right model for you?

When it comes to MMM, there’s no cookie-cutter approach. You have to consider certain key factors to understand whether it’s the right model for your mobile app marketing campaign. Here’s what to think about:

Budget

Being a data-driven approach, MMM often involves a significant investment in data collection, modeling, and analysis, making the costs prohibitive for smaller app development businesses. Before committing to MMM, make sure you have a clear understanding of your approved budget.

Data availability

Having access to a large and diverse set of data, including historical marketing data and data related to external factors impacting your app’s success, is crucial for MMM to work. Consider the availability of this data and the level of effort required to collect and process it on your end, and whether that’s feasible.

Complexity of the mix

If your app marketing campaign has a complex marketing mix involving multiple channels and tactics, MMM will make a great choice to enhance your campaign outcomes. On the other hand, if your app marketing campaign is simple and straightforward, MMM may not be the most appropriate approach.

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Campaign objective

MMM is best when you want to understand the impact of different marketing activities on key business outcomes, such as app downloads or purchases. If your objective is to drive short-term results (for example, user-level engagements like clicks or impressions), data-driven attribution would be a better fit.

We’ll explore the similarities and differences between data-driven attribution and MMM in more detail later.

Skill and expertise

MMM requires expertise in data science, modeling, and marketing analytics. If your team doesn’t have the necessary skills and experience, you may find it difficult to implement the model effectively.

Timeframe

MMM is generally time-consuming, taking several weeks or even months to complete. So, if your app marketing campaign is time-sensitive, MMM may not be the best choice.

How do you measure MMM?

Analysts identify dependent and independent variables and put them into an equation. Depending on the relation between the variables, the equation can be linear or nonlinear, but monitoring and measuring certain elements is crucial when using MMM. 

Here’s a breakdown of each element in more detail:

1 — Sales volume

When analyzing sales volume in MMM, you need to divide total sales into two components: base sales and incremental sales.

• Base sales are driven by underlying factors, such as pricing, long-term trends, seasonality, app awareness, and user loyalty. These generally include economic variables that fluctuate over a specific period.
• Incremental sales are driven by marketing and sales activities. You can break down total incremental sales into segments impacted by each marketing initiative, to see what portion of sales is directly influenced by marketing efforts and how effective those activities are.

You can further analyze each type of sales volume to understand the specific impact of each marketing activity.

2 — Pricing

Pricing changes have a direct influence on sales volume, and MMM can help quantify this impact. 

You can get valuable insights into the direct effects of your pricing decisions by analyzing the relationship between changes in price and changes in sales. Then, using this information, you can optimize your app pricing strategies to achieve desired outcomes. 

Suppose you increase the price of your app from $3.99 to $4.99. Using the MMM technique, you find that the price increase resulted in a 5% decrease in in-app purchases, but because of the high price point, your revenue increased by 20%.

With this information, you can continue with your app’s new price point, knowing it’ll result in increased revenue with minimal impact on sales volume.

3 — Media and advertising

MMM is a valuable tool for analyzing the impact of media and advertising on sales across different mediums and channels, including online ads, print, and billboards. Although MMM results may not provide clear-cut answers, they can still give you valuable insights into how changes in advertising strategies influence app sales.

Some examples include:

• Short ads vs. long ads
• Running ads on Facebook vs. Instagram
• Airing ads during prime time versus non-prime time 

You can use these insights to optimize your ad spend decisions, making sure you get the most bang for your buck. 

4 — Distribution 

An efficient distribution system drives growth more effectively than any other element. So, the fact that you can use MMM to determine the impact of changes in distribution efforts on dependent variables is a huge advantage. It gives you a holistic understanding of all your distribution channels and related costs, helping you make informed decisions about the channels to invest in. 

Let’s assume you want to expand your distribution efforts for your mobile app. 

You can use MMM to analyze the sales data from different distribution channels, such as partnerships, social media platforms, and app stores. If you find that partnering with other popular apps drives app downloads and purchases, you can focus your distribution efforts on building more partnerships, rather than relying on app stores and social media alone.

Media mix modeling vs. data-driven attribution modeling

Data-driven attribution modeling refers to the various attribution models, such as single-touch attribution and multi-touch attribution, that monitor user-level engagements throughout the customer journey. 

As an app marketer, you can use these insights to help you understand which tactics have the biggest impact as consumers move through the app journey. These attribution models evaluate performance after a campaign ends.

Generally speaking, media mix modeling and data-driven modeling attribution models help you understand how your marketing tactics affect a specific business objective, like revenue. Both methods also use statistical and mathematical models to analyze data. 

But that’s where the similarities end.

MMM doesn’t factor in user-level engagements — instead, it measures the impact marketing efforts have on meeting predetermined business objectives, without considering the customer journey. On the other hand, data-driven attribution focuses on person-level data, such as the total number of impressions and clicks.

Here’s a table to help you compare MMM with data-driven attribution modeling, and the role each can play in mobile app marketing.

Advantages and disadvantages of MMM

Most app marketers today don’t have clear goals and KPIs, and rely solely on ‘vanity’ metrics (metrics that don’t have any solid impact on business outcomes). Others fail to segment their audience and end up launching generic marketing messages and campaigns that underperform in today’s era of hyper-personalization.

If you’re also finding it difficult to measure the impact of your marketing spend, adding MMM as part of your marketing strategy might just be the answer to your measurement woes. But, like any other modeling system, MMM also has its share of caveats.

Here’s an overview of the pros and cons:

MMM advantages

• Accurate, with complete coverage of digital and traditional marketing channels
• Captures the relationship between variables
• Measures both online and offline conversion outcomes
• Estimates and measures media saturation and yield levels, so marketers can pinpoint optimal investment levels
• Advanced MMM approaches provide scenario planning and budget optimization capabilities, enabling marketers to run simulations to forecast business outcomes
• Accounts for drivers that directly impact ROI
• Forfeits the use of personally identifiable information to ensure user privacy is never compromised

MMM disadvantages

• Requires a lot of historical data inputs
• Relies on a number of assumptions for non-marketing factors
• Provides infrequent reports
• Doesn’t consider the relationship between channels
• Doesn’t give any insight into brand or messaging
• Doesn’t factor in customer experience

Key takeaways

• Media mix modeling (MMM) is a statistical approach used to evaluate the impact of various marketing channels and tactics on a specific business outcome, typically sales revenue. 
• MMM uses historical data to analyze the relationships between marketing inputs and outputs, allowing marketers to understand the contribution of each channel to overall performance and optimize their media mix for maximum impact.
• When deciding if MMM is right for your mobile app marketing campaign, consider your budget, data availability, complexity of the mix, campaign objective, skill and expertise, and timeframe. 
• A standard MMM process has four phases: data collection, modeling, data analysis and insights, and optimization.
• MMM differs from data-driven attribution modeling, which draws on user-level data to measure how individual marketing touchpoints affect conversion.
• MMM can help marketers identify the most effective channels, measure marketing ROI, and make informed decisions about how to allocate budget to boost sales and revenue.

Mobile marketing dictionary from A-Z

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A conversion rate is a marketing metric that shows the percentage of times a user took a desired action.

What is a conversion rate?

A conversion rate is used to measure the effectiveness of a campaign or piece of content. Specifically, it shows how often viewers took a desired action such as clicking a link, registering for an event, or making a purchase.

A conversion rate is always expressed as a percentage: the higher it is, the more successful your campaign. Average conversion rates vary by industry, but they usually hover in the low single digits. For instance, just 2% of app downloads typically lead to a purchase. This means a small change in your conversion rate can have a big impact.

Why is your conversion rate important? 

Your conversion rate is valuable because it shows you how effective a page or piece of content is.

After all, you don’t produce content for fun — it all has a purpose as part of your marketing plan, whether that’s getting users to buy, sign up, or complete another action. While metrics like page views or impressions are informative, they don’t tell you if your content is doing its job of driving users to act. 

Let’s take the example of running a digital ad campaign with the conversion goal of growing app downloads. You may have a good click-through rate (CTR) to the app listing, but if few people download the app, your campaign isn’t performing as it should. 

Conversion rates help marketers understand where there may be weaknesses in their marketing funnel. In the example above, the ad itself is performing well (it’s clearly grabbing people’s attention), but the landing page or promotional offer may have issues you need to address. 

How do you calculate your conversion rate?

Many analytics platforms like Google Analytics or AppsFlyer calculate the conversion rate for you once you set up your goals. But you can calculate it yourself using a simple formula. 

Just take your number of conversions (users who completed the desired action) and divide it by the number of interactions with your content (views, opens, or clicks, for example). Then, multiply this fractional number by 100 to get your percentage: 

For instance, if a landing page has 1,000 views and 25 of those sessions resulted in a purchase, you have a 2.5% conversion rate (25 / 1,000 = 0.025 or 2.5%). 

What factors impact conversion rates?

Think about the complexity of the average buying decision online. Do I like the product? Will it work with the space or device I have in mind? What do the reviews say? Is it worth the money? Can I buy it somewhere else for less? Can I trust this company? You need to capture a user’s attention and overcome objections in a very short window of time.

Of course, you need to show the value of your product or service with strong messaging and images. But that’s not enough by itself. You also need a powerful call to action and a seamless user experience. Here are the top factors that impact conversion rates. 

1. Page load time. Consumers tend to bounce if a site takes more than a few seconds to load: they’ll lose interest or decide they don’t trust it. Research from Portent shows that a site that loads in one second converts 2.5 times more customers than one that loads in five seconds.  

2. Page design. Your website and page design are critical to your user experience and optimization. It goes without saying that your website should be optimized for mobile viewing and follow web design best practices. Use images, charts, videos, and subheadings to break up big chunks of text. Keep your content sharp and to the point, and make calls to action stand out.  

3. Differentiation. If your page is hosted on a third-party marketplace like Amazon or the Apple or Android app stores, you don’t have control over the page design. Your content will also be side by side with your competitors, possibly selling nearly the same product. Follow site-specific best practices to optimize marketplace conversions, and use social proof and eye-catching images to make your offering pop.

4. Pricing and offer. Your viewer may have an interest in your product or service, but be put off by your pricing. Benchmark your competition to make sure that your charges and pricing structure fall within the mean range for comparable products or services. Using promotional offers can create a sense or urgency to nudge users to convert. 

5. CTA message. The most important factor impacting your conversion rate is your call to action (CTA). Effective content uses prompts to keep a user moving. Give users a clear next step to take and choose the right words to get them there. Beyond standard CTA messages like “Sign up” and “Learn more,” think outside the box to highlight the value of taking action. For instance, try “Start saving” instead of simply “Sign up”, or “Discover your next destination” instead of “Learn more”. Find CTA inspiration from others, and test to find what works. 

6. CTA format and placement. The most common type of CTA is a button, but it’s certainly not the only one. Banners, pop-ups, slide-ins, forms, and in-line links are all options to prompt a user to act. If you stick with the tried-and-true button, pay attention to its design (color contrast and spacing) and placement on the page. For longer content, for example, you may want to include one CTA above the fold and another at the very end.

Top tips to improve your conversion rate

No one wants a leaking marketing funnel. Follow these tips for optimizing your conversion rate to help you grow revenue and return on investment (ROI) for your marketing spend. 

Three conversion rate mistakes to avoid

So, your conversion rate is lagging behind your peers. Now what? Make sure you aren’t falling prey to these rookie conversion-rate missteps. 

1. Measuring the wrong action

If you’ve built a solid content strategy, each ad or piece of content should lead toward a goal. However, the goal shouldn’t be the same for all content. Of course, your ultimate goal in marketing is for someone to complete a purchase. For bottom-of-the-funnel content, this is what you’ll measure. 

For top- or middle-of-the-funnel content, however, this may not be the goal that will define a conversion. You may want to look at lead generation and lead nurturing conversions instead. Examples include a user downloading a resource, subscribing to a newsletter, or liking your social media page. 

Once you’ve achieved the valuable step of adding someone to your email list, you can measure conversions according to your next goal — which might be someone signing up for a free trial, for example. 

2. Asking for too much information

Consumers abandon nearly 70% of eCommerce shopping carts. The likely culprit? Cumbersome checkout processes. The average online checkout process has 23 elements, twice the number the Baymard Institute found to be optimal. 

Lengthy lead generation forms can also cause people to abandon them before completing them. Customers abandon conversions when they feel that the time investment or experience outweighs the benefit they anticipate. 

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3. Not giving enough information

Finding the right amount of information to share can be a delicate balance. However, customers need to clearly see the value before taking the next step. You can accomplish this by:

• Listing tangible and intangible benefits
• Showing multiple images, videos, and product details
• Offering social proof such as customer reviews, industry awards, or media coverage

People are also cautious in how they give out their personal information. If you’re asking them to subscribe to an email list, for example, tell them how often they can expect to be contacted and what your privacy policy is (so they can trust that you won’t sell their data).

If you’re encouraging users to take advantage of a free trial or special offer, you may want to add the word “free” in your CTA or use other reassurances like “no purchase necessary” or “no credit card required”. This removes objections and helps people feel more comfortable taking advantage of an offer.

Three ways to boost your conversion rate

Once you’ve targeted the right conversion action and built your lead generation or purchase link, optimize your content to convince more users to convert. Follow these conversion-rate tips to help you grow revenue and boost ROI for your marketing spend. 

1. Localize your content

Imagine clicking on an ad only to discover that the landing page is in another language, contains cultural references you don’t understand, or lists its price in another currency.

It’s essential to localize your content if you have a global audience, especially if you’re running paid campaigns in multiple countries. First, localize your messaging to account for language, dialect differences, and cultural references. Creating country-specific web pages and app listings can help you accomplish this. 

Next, localize your images to ensure they’ll resonate with the demographic you’re talking to. 

Last, ensure that the functional aspects of your conversion like currency, shipping, and product availability are localized upfront. It’s a poor experience for a customer to get to the end of a checkout experience only to find that shipping will be significantly more expensive or that a product isn’t available in their area.

2. Sharpen your messaging

If your ad is seeing good engagement but your conversion rate is lagging behind, take a closer look at your landing page content. Does it grab attention? Is the value of your offering clear?  Or could there be a disconnect between your ad message and your landing page message?

The best content positions the problem and how your product or service will solve it. If there’s no need or no clear solution, there’s no reason to buy.

It’s smart to hire a professional copywriter or agency to optimize your page content. Use market research or A/B testing through dynamic content to uncover which message resonates best with your audience. 

3. Create a sense of urgency

There’s a reason why sales give us such a buzz: they make us feel like we’ve won something. By creating a sense of urgency, you make people feel like they’re winning by saving money or getting something for free. Inversely, you create a sense of scarcity that they may miss out on something by not acting. Take a look at these examples:

• “Claim your special offer by Dec 1”
• “Register today to save $100”
• “Spend $50 and get a free gift”

Even if you don’t have a discount or freebie to offer, you can still use this tactic. In a B2C example, you can highlight when inventory is low (“Going fast!” or “Last few remaining”). In B2B SaaS, you can position value in a very direct way. If you’ve built an argument that a service saves time, for instance, use a CTA like “Save 2 hours of admin work this week”. 

Key takeaways

Your conversion rate may be a small number, but it packs a powerful punch. With this metric, you can strip away less meaningful ones like traffic to find out how effective your content is at driving users to act. With tools and strategies for optimization at your fingertips, you can inch your percentage up and drive more leads and sales. 

Just remember these principles:

• Determine what actions you want users to take as part of your marketing strategy. As well as sales, don’t forget about audience-building and lead-generation conversions.
• Pay as much attention to your format and design as you do to the message.
• Create a killer CTA to make your offer irresistible: show users the value your product or service will bring.
• Use emotion and a sense of urgency to compel users to act.
• Track your conversion rate over time. Use A/B testing or make small changes over time to ensure it’s on the up.

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What is programmatic TV?

Programmatic TV is a data-driven, technology-automated method of purchasing and delivering advertisements against television content. This includes:

• Digital TV ads served across mobile devices
• Video-on-demand streaming platforms (like Netflix and Amazon Prime)
• Connected TV (such as Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV)
• Linear TV advertisements served across set-top boxes (think Comcast and Time Warner)

Programmatic TV inverts the industry standard, in which television marketers rely on show ratings to find desirable audiences for their advertisements. Traditionally, the bigger the show, the more people you reach — and therefore, the more coveted (and expensive) the spot. 

Instead, programmatic technology uses audience data to achieve much more detailed segmentation, so TV marketers can reach a more specific subset of consumers — for example, men with a $40,000 income who own an iPhone device. 

Marketers don’t care if that advertisement shows up on X Games or The X Factor, as long as their ideal audience is watching. 

What is programmatic advertising?

Programmatic advertising refers to the use of software to purchase digital ads. While the conventional method includes requests for quotes, tenders, proposals, and negotiation, programmatic ad buying uses algorithmic software to buy and sell online ad display space.

This model helps connect publishers (individuals with ad inventory to sell) and advertisers (individuals or companies who want to buy that ad space to promote their brands). It involves a distinctive approach to TV service scaling, ad buying, and delivering. Advertisers can quickly search for their chosen audience and successfully deliver a personalized advertisement to them.

Advertisers and marketers can carry out an automated in-depth analysis of end users or consumers and personalize ad content to create a successful advertising marketing model. Publishers and distributors, in turn, can deliver television program formats based on viewer preferences and parameters, such as gender and age (the primary audience measurements in most TV purchases). 

Programmatic buying models

There are four main types of programmatic ad buying. Let’s dig into how each one works and when it’s best used. 

1. Real-time bidding

With real-time bidding (also called open marketplace), advertising spots are open to the public. This means anyone can bid on any location, over the internet in real-time. 

Bidders can buy these advertising spots through an open auction. If you’re the highest bidder, you get the location, but you won’t pay your highest bid amount. Instead, you’ll be charged $0.01 higher than the second-highest bidder for the same ad spot. 

The downside is that you won’t know where your ads will appear — and they could show up in less-than-ideal locations.

2. Preferred deals

Preferred deals allow you to choose ad spots before they go on real-time bidding auctions or private marketplaces — ideal if you want a preview of the available ad space. 

If you choose this option, you need to pay a fixed price for ad space (known as spot buying). When advertisers want to pay for an ad location on a publisher’s website, both parties agree on audience, pricing, and more before the spot is claimed. 

3. Private marketplace

The private marketplace operates on an invitation-only basis, meaning publishers offer their premium ad spots to a select list of advertisers. Publications and websites with massive amounts of reach typically use this approach. These platforms have plenty of brands vying for ad space, so they can afford to reserve spots for top-notch advertisers. 

With a private marketplace, you always know where your advertisements will appear. It eliminates the mystery of ad placement you get with the real-time bidding option. 

4. Programmatic guaranteed

This option takes the conventional approach to media buying. Publishers and advertisers negotiate the terms of the ad spot on a one-on-one basis, which means there’s no bidding involved. 

With the programmatic guaranteed approach, an advertiser can choose their price, their ideal audience and how frequently their advertisements appear. This option offers the most flexibility to advertisers, but it comes at a price. You’ll need a bigger budget if you want this level of control over your ad’s exact cost and placement. 

Benefits of programmatic TV

The global programmatic ad spending market is expected to grow by about $314 billion during 2022-2026, or around 26% per year. This sustained growth comes down to the following benefits that programmatic TV offers above and beyond conventional media buying.

More reach

A programmatic TV platform allows advertisers to easily connect and work with local broadcasts. Brands can then tap into a massive amount of reach, especially in small and mid-sized markets. 

This platform also helps publishers get to national brands or companies. With clients lining up for ad spaces, local TV stations can offer their inventory at high prices. Since programmatic TV introduces end-to-end workflow, it makes the process easy for both advertisers and publishers. 

More data

As mentioned earlier, programmatic TV incorporates new data sources with more width and depth, so you can deliver more personalized and relevant ads Multiple data sets (including publicly available social data and set-top box viewership) work together to help clearly define the behavioral traits of a potential brand and maximize an ad campaign’s performance. 

Fewer errors

Manual, complex processes — such as creating a media buying agreement, turning it into a schedule, and then putting that into a legacy delivery system — often cause errors at reconciliation stages. Eliminating these time-consuming and costly practices benefits both advertisers and ad spot sellers.

A programmatic solution means availability requests, proposals, and orders can all be automated. It can empower advertisers to reserve ad spots across multiple local stations from a single dashboard. Meanwhile, inventory owners trying to prevent money from being siphoned out by digital can modernize and streamline their workflows. 

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Disadvantages of programmatic TV

Programmatic TV depends on a flexible, granular data model that helps service providers, television producers, and brands manage and market their products or services. However, it’s certainly not without its faults — here are some of the downsides to bear in mind. 

Cost

Programmatic TV is usually more expensive than conventional advertising because it’s more personalized. The detailed level of audience segmentation needs more setup and analysis. For example, you may need to manually input specific targets. 

Data quality

Programmatic TV data may not always be valid and recent. Also, it’s challenging to determine where the data comes from and if you’re really reaching the right audience. Even if you are, there’s no guarantee they’ll convert. You may assume that more personalization equals more conversions. That’s not necessarily true because the data quality may not be accurate. 

Network uptake 

There’s a current fear that the value of television networks’ inventory will go down and commoditize if they make anything programmatic public. This makes networks nervous, meaning that many of them haven’t yet adopted a programmatic model. 

Programmatic CTV, programmatic linear TV,  addressable TV: what’s the difference?  

There are several ways of delivering TV ads to a household, including programmatic CTV, programmatic linear TV, and addressable TV. Here’s a closer look at each method.

Programmatic CTV

CTV (click-to-view) advertising is a type of digital advertising that appears within streaming content. For instance, it includes advertisements shown alongside live streams or TV shows viewed on streaming devices. Another example is interactive advertisements, which are shown to a particular audience and include calls to action. 

Programmatic linear TV

Programmatic linear TV is an automated approach to the conventional buying and execution of TV ads in spot-based programming. It enables advertisers to segment their audience at user level or media level. 

Addressable TV

With addressable TV, marketers can offer customized advertisement experiences to various audience segments. 

Addressable TV depends on audience data being safely collected and matched to their IP addresses. By identifying the websites people visit, the devices they own (and their cross-device behavior), the times when they watch television, and of course, the shows or programs they’re interested in, marketers can create incredibly detailed consumer profiles. 

Programmatic TV vs. addressable TV

Addressable TV uses advanced audience segmentation and programmatic technology to deliver specific video advertisements at a household level in real time. 

This is what makes addressable TV stand out from programmatic TV, even though they both leverage automation to serve television ads. It means marketers or advertisers can now buy audiences rather than programs — similar to the programmatic video and display buying processes used on mobile and desktop devices. 

Unlike standard programmatic television advertising, addressable TV doesn’t require advertisers to pre-select availability. Also, they don’t need to predict who will be watching, as the system determines audience composition in real time and then selects the most appropriate advertisements. This means each advertiser reaches only those audiences that qualify. Segmentation can occur at demographic, geographic, and behavioral levels. 

What does the future look like for programmatic TV? 

Programmatic TV is still in its infancy, and we’ve seen how it’s forecast to grow. Here are some key trends to look out for in the years to come. 

Ad fraud detection 

Programmatic CTV is disrupting the ad space with advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Already, people are seeing how the influx of data that AI provides is helping marketers to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time. This will only continue to rise. 

We’ll also see tech advancements to improve fraud detection in the programmatic space. The number of cases related to CTV advertising scams has been rising: in the fourth quarter of 2021, about 18% of the unprotected programmatic CTV advertisements were fraudulent or invalid traffic. Going forward, you’re bound to see the rise of technologies that reduce or even eliminate these threats.

Increased spending and viewership

As television viewers become increasingly unsatisfied with the high cost of conventional TV, cord-cutting is growing. In the United States alone, big cable providers collectively lost around 6 million pay-TV subscribers between 2019 and 2021. 

Key takeaways

• Programmatic TV is the automation of audience-based television advertising through a software platform. It presents an opportunity for advertisers to better segment their audience and show them more personalized ads.
• Programmatic advertising makes it possible to buy and place advertisements, including targeted ad content, in less than a second. It uses algorithms to determine where and when to deliver content to specific consumers.
• Buying ads across multiple ad exchanges allows advertisers to expand their reach beyond conventional means.
• This model also provides you with more data, and has fewer errors compared to conventional media buying. However, it’s more expensive than traditional advertising. 
• Programmatic advertising isn’t yet used by all networks, but is growing fast as the technology advances. 

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