Connect with us

MARKETING

11 Hype-worthy Features Revealed at Google Marketing Live 2023

Published

on

11 Hype-worthy Features Revealed at Google Marketing Live 2023

After the conclusion of Google I/O 2023, the stage was set for Google Marketing Live 2023, which brought a global hybrid experience to brands and advertisers. In-person viewing events were organized across different locations worldwide, allowing participants to convene locally, while virtual attendees from all corners of the globe tuned in to watch the livestream.

The immersive event serves as a catalyst for empowering marketers with the latest tools, strategies, and best practices – covering a wide range of topics from generative AI to new campaign goals. Attendees (including Tinuiti’s own expert team) scored a front row seat to valuable marketing insights across Google’s expansive advertising ecosystem.
 

AI Takes Center Stage at #GML2023

 
It goes without saying that AI capabilities took the center stage at Google Marketing Live 2023 with a variety of notable product announcements including:
 

  • Conversational AI Campaign Creation: Exciting developments are taking place in the realm of campaign creation, with a shift towards leveraging conversational AI. This advancement offers advertisers a potent tool to enhance their audience engagement and foster more effective communication.

 

  • AI-Powered Asset Targeting: Google Ads introduces AI-powered assets, supported by the existing AI-powered campaigns, that precisely target search queries, empowering advertisers to deliver more relevant and personalized content to their target audience.

 

  • AI-Generated Images with Google Product Studio: Through Google Product Studio, advertisers gain access to AI-generated images, revolutionizing the way they visually represent their products and drive engagement.

 
These advancements highlight Google’s commitment to harnessing the potential of AI and delivering innovative solutions to enhance advertisers’ marketing efforts.

However, aside from AI, what are some of the other announcements that stood out?

This week, we spoke with our internal experts at Tinuiti to find out what they deemed as the most valuable takeaways at #GML2023. Let’s dive in!

Advertisement

 

Credit: www.googlemarketinglive.com

 

Google Performance Max: 6 Standout Upgrades for Marketers

 
Google Performance Max campaigns are goal-based, automated campaigns that enable advertisers to promote across all Google networks from the same campaign. Google announced Performance Max campaigns in October 2020 as “a new way to buy Google ads across all our inventory.” 

Performance Max—or PMax, for short—is designed as a complement to your existing keyword-based Search, Shopping and fully-automated campaigns, building on learnings from the latter “to deliver a comprehensive solution that works for all advertisers across a wider range of marketing objectives.”

Per the updates shared during GML 2023, the latest features within Performance Max that we are most excited about include:

Advertisement
  • New customer acquisition with high value optimization goal in Google Ads
  • Access to re-engagement goal for improved retention
  • Test and learn opportunities with custom experiments
  • Improved insights to better understand performance
  • New features within the Ads Creative Studio
  • Generative AI to create text assets and images

 

“These changes create additional ways to leverage Performance Max and make it an even more flexible marketing tool, capable of optimizing towards impactful business objectives. These updates also further solidify the need for advertisers to have robust first-party data / Customer Match infrastructure and execution capabilities.”

Josh Brisco, Group Vice President, Acquisition Media at Tinuiti

 

1. New Customer Acquisition with High Value Optimization Goals in Google Ads

 
What is it? The existing New Customer Acquisition (NCA) works by using first-party data lists to analyze users’ characteristics and then implements the power of AI to predict and find new high value users. This new iteration will allow advertisers to specifically target users who are predicted to have high lifetime values.

How will it benefit marketers? NCA allows marketers to optimize for the highest value new customers, in addition to maximizing their bottom line sales. Overall, this feature (along with many others released at GML 2023) provide marketers with new ways to leverage Performance Max to execute specific business outcomes.

According to Google, NCA leverages data from a variety of sources include customer lists, global site tags and auto detection to:

  • Grow overall revenue but optimize for conversions from new customers because new customers bring long term revenue to the business.
  • Grow market share with a dedicated budget for customer acquisition either maximizing the number of new customer conversions with a Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) or maximizing the revenue from new customers to also meet near term return of investment (ROI).

 

“As we look to leverage an audience-first approach to Performance Max, advanced functionality as it relates to NCA is an exciting addition. This will allow us to not only focus on new customers, but focus on new customers who can drive the highest value”.

Evan Kirkpatrick, VP, Shoppable Media at Tinuiti

Advertisement

 

2. Access to Re-Engagement Goal for Improved Retention

 
What is it? Google’s re-engagement goal allows marketers to optimize their campaigns to reach customers at every decision-making point in their lifecycle journey. In addition to new customer acquisition, marketers can use re-engagement goals to optimize for other lifecycle stages, like retention and re-engagement of churned customers.

How will it benefit marketers? Google’s re-engagement goal allows marketers to bid more effectively to re-engage lapsed customers, report conversions from lapsed customers directly in the Google Ads UI.

“I’m most excited about the potential for customer reactivation and lifetime extension. Our job as marketers is not over when the customer comes in the door. As the saying goes, it’s cheaper to keep an existing customer than to get a new one.”

Aaron Levy, VP, Paid Search at Tinuiti

 

3. Test and Learn Opportunities With Custom Experiments

 
What is it? Performance Max Custom Experiments will let you test changes within your Performance Max campaign. This feature helps you A/B test different features, settings, and campaigns to drive improvement. For example, you can test if using a value based bidding strategy for your campaign drives more results for your business.

Advertisement

How will it benefit marketers? When you test different campaign settings, you reach more customers and drive better results quickly and efficiently for your business. You can also use experiments to help you measure the incremental lift of using Performance Max campaigns.

“This will provide an improved way to measure the efficacy of your current Performance Max structures as well as potential improved strategies overall.”

Josh Brisco, Group Vice President, Acquisition Media at Tinuiti

 

4. Improved Insights to Better Understand Performance

 
What is it? According to Google, new insights will highlight additional data on your assets to help marketers better understand their campaign performance. You’ll also get easy-to-apply recommendations on how to improve your assets. 

Additionally, search term insights will now include historic insights and insights for custom date ranges. You’ll also be able to download your Search term insights and access them in the Google Ads API. You’ll be able to see all your Search term categories now, instead of having some listed as uncategorized.

How will it benefit marketers? Google’s improved insights will provide information on which assets are or are not resonating with a given audience, provide potential suggestions on better creative, and will call out any missing asset types.

Advertisement

“The more data we can get from the black box, the better. These changes should help inform advertisers how optimize their PMax campaigns for maximum effect” – Josh Brisco, Group Vice President, Acquisition Media at Tinuiti

“We’re cautiously excited about this one. Performance Max has a ton of potential as a research testing ground. Ultimately, the more insights we can get access to, the more we can use that data to amplify additional marketing efforts.” Aaron Levy, VP, Paid Search at Tinuiti
 

5. New Features Within the Ads Creative Studio

 
What is it? Ads Creative Studio is a creative management platform designed for creative teams to build ads, manage creative assets, and share them with media teams. Ads Creative Studio can improve collaboration and transparency between your creative and media teams and help you create effective ads with more efficiency and scale.

How will it benefit marketers? Thanks to the preview and export feature, marketers will be able to see best practices and specifications to ensure that creative is set up for success ahead of deployment. New insights in Ads Creative Studio will also provide information about trends within Search. This supplementary tool will give marketers exploratory access to the latest and greatest Search data to help plan and develop future creative.
 

6. Generative AI To Create Compelling Text Assets and Images

 
What is it? With the revamped asset creation flow in Performance Max campaigns, marketers can harness the power of Google AI to curate and generate high-quality text and image assets.

According to Google, this Generative AI feature can easily create compelling creative assets to be implemented in Performance Max campaigns. 

Advertisement

Here’s a closer look on how it works:

Credit: Google

 

How will it benefit marketers? Setting up Performance Max campaigns can feel overwhelming due to the necessary content and imagery. The inclusion of a helpful feature that provides assistance and even generates new creative is a valuable addition, guaranteed to save advertisers precious time and resources. Adding a diverse range of assets and keeping them fresh over time can help improve results by maximizing the eligibility to serve on a full range of ad inventory.

“AI Generating Performance Max is an exciting new feature that can boost our creativity and give us new opportunities to develop effective PMax campaigns. Based on our findings, brands that include the suggested 20 image ads and 5 videos per asset category see a +10% boost in conversions. So this functionality can be useful for brands that are having trouble reaching the recommended levels.”

Courtney O’Donnell, Senior Director, Shoppable Media at Tinuiti

“Visual creative has long been a neglected part of the SEM ecosystem; this new tool will enable advertisers to test far more iterations of creative while greatly reducing the burden on creative teams.”

Aaron Levy, VP, Paid Search at Tinuiti

Advertisement

 

Google Ads Campaign Types: Introducing Video Views and Demand Generation

 

7. Video View Campaigns

 
What is it? Video View Campaigns are designed to maximize views. According to Google, a study revealed that advertisers using Video View Campaigns experienced an average of 40% more views at comparable costs compared to in-stream skippable CPV campaigns.

How will it benefit marketers? These campaigns leverage a range of formats, including skippable in-stream ads, in-feed ads, and Shorts ads, to optimize budget allocation and achieve optimal results. Video Views can also combine 3 formats in a single campaign for a single goal.
 

8. Demand Generation Campaigns

 
What is it? Demand Generation campaigns leverage AI to engage and drive action with consumers. These campaigns work across a variety of placements including YouTube in-feed, YouTube Shorts, YouTube in-stream, Discovery Feed and Gmail. 

How will it benefit marketers? At Tinuiti, we are eagerly awaiting more info on Demand Generation campaigns, but it seems like this feature has great potential to help advertisers more readily access the mid and upper funnel inventory that Google has to offer.

Advertisement

“We’re interested to see if this will be similar to Performance Max in that it will be used in addition to existing campaign types not instead of. Or, will it replace much of how we buy YouTube today?”

Courtney O’Donnell, Senior Director, Shoppable Media at Tinuiti

We expect more details will be shared on this specific campaign type at Cannes 2023. 

“As we continue to see the evolution of AI driven campaigns across various inventory types, having an audience-first approach and strong creative to match are going to be keys for success in driving action from the consumers.”

Brian Binder, Senior Director, Programmatic at Tinuiti


 

Additional Noteworthy GML 2023 Announcements

 

9. Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) Integration With Search, Shopping

 
What is it? Google is currently conducting experiments to seamlessly integrate Search and Shopping ads directly into the AI snapshot and conversational mode. SGE has the opportunity to create customized ad experiences (across Search and Shopping) that align with the user journey.

While Google has not disclosed specific metrics like CTR for these SGE (Search, Shopping, and Google Express) ads due to their experimental nature, they offer immense potential. It’s important to note that since this feature is still in its early stages, there is currently no option to opt in or out of ads appearing in SGE.

Advertisement

 

How will it benefit marketers? Google’s AI integration with Search and Shopping provides marketers with an opportunity to drive more engagement and visibility of their ads. The new Search Generative Experience (SGE) can be found in Search Labs, a new program to access early experiments in Search. Ads that show up as a part of this experiment will be from existing Google Ads campaigns.

Want to give generative AI in Search a try? Tap the “Labs” icon in the Google app or Chrome desktop to express your interest, and visit labs.google.com/search to learn more.

“SGE represents the long awaited manifestation of conversational search and ads on Google’s results page. It will be interesting to see the ways in which this impact how we buy Google Ads”

Josh Brisco, Group Vice President, Acquisition Media at Tinuiti


 

10. Product Studio Leverages AI To Create High-Quality Images

 
What is it? Product Studio is a new suite of free, AI-powered tools available within Merchant Center Next and the Google & YouTube app on Shopify that helps save marketers time and resources  – while helping enhance and create high-quality product images.

How will it benefit marketers? According to Google, these tools can help marketers generate scenes, increase image resolution, and edit backgrounds. Recent data indicates, fresh images may attract more customers when you scale them across various marketing channels. 

Advertisement

 

 

“This was one of the more eye-catching updates of the day and speaks to the importance of leveraging new creative within Google’s suite of ad types. It will be interesting to see how this solution works at scale but it definitely has the potential to open the door to far more creative testing, especially around seasonal campaigns, promotions, and new releases”.

Evan Kirkpatrick, VP, Shoppable Media at Tinuiti


 

11. Google Merchant Center Next Streamlines User Experience

 
What is it? The Merchant Center Next platform gives Google advertisers an opportunity to manage how their products appear across Google, and provides valuable insights about the business, products, and market.

How will it benefit marketers? Google’s latest iteration of Merchant Center offers a more streamlined and user-friendly experience, particularly for newcomers to the channel. 

Notably, the update enables direct product imports from a client’s website, simplifying the process for marketers. Google is also doubling down on Product Merchandising, enhancing the visibility of crucial information such as product pricing, competitiveness, and other relevant data. This update promises to empower advertisers with improved functionality and valuable insights.

Advertisement

“Similar to other feature announcements over the past couple of years – as it pertains to Merchant Center, this change will make it easier for smaller advertisers to get up and running on Shopping. Allowing products to be automatically populated from a merchant’s website is the most notable change, but one that is unlikely to move the needle for larger advertisers. Sophisticated merchants will want to ensure they are still leveraging product feeds to optimize and improve the data for their program, rather than simply relying on the data from the website.”

Evan Kirkpatrick, VP, Shoppable Media at Tinuiti

Have questions about any of the announcements you read above? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear from you.

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address

MARKETING

Unlocking Hidden Revenue: The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

Published

on

Unlocking Hidden Revenue: The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

Page conversion rates have ALWAYS been a problem. The simple fact is most people don’t convert even on the most optimized pages. 

What’s why traditional retargeting on ad networks has been so dang powerful. While retargeted leads come cheap, they still aren’t free. Worse, you’re back competing against your competition in the ol’ ad auction system.

For the last 6 years, I’ve been using a tactic called Inbox Retargeting to identify who lands on my key pages and directly reach out to them in their inbox.

No more ads. No more auctions. Just a targeted contact that showed they were interested, but didn’t quite take the leap yet.

Before I dive into the “What’s” and “How’s”, this tactic can only be used in the good ol’ US of A. If you aren’t in the states or don’t have clients in the states, you’re out of luck. Sorry!

How It Works

Inbox retargeting doesn’t take a lot of heavy lifting. I’ll share the strategy next but I wanted to start with some of the logistics.

Advertisement

DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer or coder, so keep that in mind if technical or legal questions pop up.

If you have a website, you have tracking scripts, e.g.,  GA4, the Facebook Pixel, Heatmap software, etc…

To get started with Inbox retargeting, you just need to be able to copy and paste two scripts on your site:

  • A collection script: This fires and tries to identify the visitor

A suppression script: You’d fire this on your conversion confirmation pages, you don’t want people who converted to land in your Inbox Retargeting campaigns.

1710795438 253 Unlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

The tech works off of a database of contacts in the United States that are eligible for emails, so it’s completely above board with your ESP. However, you’ll want to do a few things before you start treating them like a regular member of your email list.

We initially tested this on one of our paid media campaigns. We already had a really strong campaign that we wanted to squeeze more leads out of…and boy did we.

We were driving traffic from Meta (Facebook for the OGs) to this landing page:

1710795438 272 Unlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

This page converts at 58%. Yeah, that’s a humble brag…deal with it.

Even with a 58% conversion rate, we’re still missing out on 42% of the traffic we’ve already paid for. That’s kind of a bummer.

Advertisement

After we added the collection script to the page, they were able to capture a lot more leads. The conversion rate jumped from 58% to a very sweet 87% – that’s a 50% increase!

That was the impact on a single page, that’s when we knew it was time to go bigger.

The Strategy

Most of the tools out there, whether it’s Retention.com or Customers.ai, are going to charge based on the number of contacts. So it can get pretty easy to burn through contact credits if you run the script on every page you manage, your site and your clients’ sites included.

That’s why you’ll want to make sure to select pages that capture intent versus targeting all of your traffic.

ID Key Pages

Here are some of the pages you should consider adding the collection script:

  1. Campaign Landing Pages – If you’re paying to send someone to a page, the referring source piqued their interest. If they didn’t convert, you’d definitely want to follow up.
  2. Product Pages – If someone is viewing this page they’re evaluating a particular product they were interested in.
  3. High Intent/Value Content Pages – This could be your pillar content on your blog pages, podcast pages, or your top level service pages.
  4. Registration Pages – This is a subset of a landing page, but if someone got all the way to a registration or sigh up page, they’re a prime candidate for outreach.
  5. Cart Pages – People abandon carts all the time. If you weren’t able to catch their details during checkout, this is an ideal opportunity.

Effectively it’s any page where you’re pushing a specific action. While the above pages are the pages to choose from, a homepage is acceptable but will require a little more finesse when you follow up.

Map to Email Campaigns

Now that you’ve identified where you’re going to identify leads, you’ll need to map it to your automation tool.

Advertisement
Unlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting MethodologyUnlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

GET CERTIFIED. Discover the proven plan for effortless, automated email marketing. Click Here

Most tools have a direct integration with your email service provider, but worst case scenario you may have to pass the data through a no code integration tool like Zapier.

Once you’ve worked out the digital plumbing, you’ll want to follow up based on the page the contact was collected on. Here’s how you should approach follow up:

  1. For Campaign Landing Pages – Give them the specific asset. They were interested in it, you’ve got their contact information, just hand over the goods. This builds good will at the start of the relationship.
  2. Product Pages – Send over the details of the product or product category they were viewing. This could be as simple as a reminder or you could build goodwill with a special offer or coupon.
  3. High Intent/Value Content Pages – Send over some of your best content or freebies that move people to the next phase of the Customer Value Journey.
  4. Registration Pages – Treat these like an “abandoned cart” type of email and get them to take that next step.
  5. Cart Pages – Same as “Registration Pages” but it’s, you know, an actual abandoned cart reminder. Similar to the product pages you could entice them to come back with a deal or coupon.
  6. Homepages – If you do run these on the homepage, you’ll need to do more of a reintroduction then transition to showcasing your best stuff.

Email Structure

The initial message you send needs to have a very specific flow. There are four critical things that need to happen when they open up your Inbox Retargeting message.

First, remind them about who you are and how they know you. This can be as simple as a, “Hey, thanks for stopping by…” message. Have some fun with it.

Next, you need to provide highly specific value based on their browsing intent. If you get this wrong, they’re just going to file your message under SPAM.

After that, you’ve got to set expectations with what they’re getting and now you’ll be communicating with them moving forward.

And Finally, you need to give them an EASY OUT. These campaigns have our highest unsubscribe rate, but that’s because we outright ask people to unsubscribe if they don’t want any additional contact.

Advertisement

Once you’e gone through this, you treat them like one of your regular subscribers with all your fancy ascension automations, content emails, and promotional emails.

Here are the email stats from one of our PPC Campaigns:

1710795439 568 Unlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

With an average open rate of 53.87%, we know there’s a base line interest in the deliverable. The click rate is DANG good for messaging visitors who didn’t convert.

Sure the unsubscribe rate is a little high for this campaign, but that is intentional. We push them to opt-out in the first email so we don’t get dinged later with complaints.

The Payoff: An Additional 109k Last Year

I mean, who doesn’t want another cool 100 grand for adding a script to your website and writing a couple of emails? Here’s how the numbers work out:

Last year, we identified 3,714 leads using this method. IMPORTANT: When I was pulling these numbers, I realized we installed the code wrong on some pages and missed out on about another 2k leads…oops!

Our average lead cost was ~$7, so the leads themself were a $26,000 additional value. This alone would be a reason to use the tech.

Advertisement

BUT JUSTIN, did they convert?!

Yes!

We closed $36,000 in IPPC business from this lead source. For what we spent on those leads we’re looking at a 750% ROAS. Not too shabby.

The rest of the money we made was by selling this service to our clients. Since we run paid ads for clients, this method is a complete no brainer. We ran a pilot program and only offered this to a handful of clients last year, we averaged about 4k/month in sales.

We sold clients the leads at ~$2/lead for some of the niches we work in, that’s a steal. 

If you decide to sell this you need to make sure the client knows these are lower intent leads and will require longer term nurtures. If you follow the email strategy I shared above, you’ll be good to go!

Advertisement

Protip: Charge for building the follow up sequence! 

So that’s it! If you’re running your own business or are an agency owner, you’ve got to consider Inbox Retargeting. Though, I do have some bad news…

Not to be “Chicken Little” but this is starting to get way more attention, there are services popping out of the woodwork so this will become a table stakes method. So get ahead of this today.

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

MARKETING

What’s Media Mix Modeling? [Marketer’s Guide with Examples]

Published

on

What’s Media Mix Modeling? [Marketer’s Guide with Examples]

Privacy


By Emily Sullivan

Have you ever felt in the dark when it comes to understanding the real impact your marketing dollars are having across multiple channels? 

Determining where and how conversions are occurring is crucial in optimizing your budget to drive the most impact with your marketing budget. Media mix modeling (MMM) is an analytical approach used to gauge the effectiveness of various marketing channels in driving sales and conversions. This method allows us to decipher the true influence of advertising spend across diverse platforms by accounting for a myriad of factors, both within their control (like media channel spend, promotional strategies) and outside their control (such as economic conditions, competitor actions, and seasonal influences).

Advertisement

One of the key strengths of media mix modeling is its ability to incorporate long-term brand building effects alongside immediate sales impacts, offering a comprehensive view of marketing effectiveness. It helps in identifying which channels are most efficient, how different channels influence each other, and how external factors affect marketing performance.

Media mix modeling is a powerful tool for marketers seeking to optimize their marketing investments. By providing a holistic view of how various factors contribute to sales and conversions, MMM enables data-driven decisions that enhance marketing efficiency and business growth.

In this article, we explore how media mix modeling works, and how businesses can use analytics to drive smarter ad spend decisions.

What Is Media Mix Modeling?

Media mix modeling (MMM) is a type of analysis that measures the impact of media buys across multiple channels, showing the role various elements play in achieving a desired outcome—often a conversion or revenue KPI. With this information, marketing stakeholders are able to make specific adjustments to campaign spend to improve their progress toward reaching a given goal.

Media mix modeling can be used to address common brand marketing questions and pain points, including:

  • Which of our marketing efforts are having the biggest impact on reaching our goals—or, more simply—what’s working?
  • How big of an impact does seasonality have on our marketing performance?
  • How closely is our performance tied to promotional efforts? 
  • Are shifting consumer trends negatively or positively impacting outcomes?
  • Which specific mix of spend allocation drives the highest ROI?
  • How will these channels likely perform in the future based on their optimized spend allocation?

“Media mix modeling is a top-down , privacy resilient approach that evaluates how historical media activity, promotions, pricing, seasonality, and uncontrollable factors—such as economic activity—impact key business outcomes such as sales revenue. MMM is a scientific approach to attribution in the sense that it applies statistical methods to analyze and interpret marketing data, providing a systematic understanding of how different marketing channels contribute to overall business goals in the broader context of the market. The quality of insights derived from MMM heavily depends on the quality and granularity of the data used.”

— Annica Nesty, Group Director of Marketing Science at Tinuiti

Advertisement

MMM leverages aggregate data, and can measure both online (digital) and offline (traditional) advertising channel performance, including (but not limited to): paid media channels such as social media channels, traditional print advertising, linear TV advertising, and other performance marketing efforts, organic media, operational factors like promotions, external factors like seasonality, economic conditions, outcome KPIs such as sales revenue, new customers, and conversions. 

How Does Media Mix Modeling Work?

The MMM framework is a type of statistical analysis that uses statistical methods and econometric models such as a regression analysis. This econometric model helps analysts determine the strength of relationships between a single dependent variable and an array of independent variables.

Media mix modeling analysis measures the impact of your media spend today, and is also helpful in predicting the future outcome of your marketing investments on a given variable.

Example:

Let’s assume a scenario where our target metric, or dependent variable, is revenue, a critical indicator of business success. We aim to dissect the influence of various marketing initiatives on this revenue. These initiatives, our independent variables, encompass a diverse array of digital advertising campaigns, including those run on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, as well as broader Display and Streaming platforms.

The number of independent variables under scrutiny does not dilute our core objective. The mission is to measure the relationship between the marketing endeavors and the revenue they generate. This involves not only identifying the direct contributions of each campaign to revenue but also understanding the nuanced interplay between them by observing how changing aspects of those independent variables impacts the chosen business outcome

Advertisement

What can MMM Measure?

When using MMM to assess campaign success, marketers should leverage statistical methods and econometric models to get the most accurate picture possible. Data quality is essential in achieving an accurate media mix analysis, so take any needed time to clean your data before using it in your analysis. 

Key elements an MMM equation can measure include:

  • Base and incremental sales volume impact
  • Channel effectiveness and return on investment
  • Marketing spend saturation

Media Mix Modeling vs. Data-Driven Attribution Modeling

Like media mix modeling, attribution modeling also studies the efficiency of marketing strategies — but there are important differences.

Attribution modeling is a general term that refers to tracking engagement to better understand how specific tactics drive action at the user level. This modeling works well for analyzing specific customer touchpoints, focusing on elements like how a consumer converted, which creative on which channel led to that conversion, and what the expected ROI could be if more ad budget were shifted to that channel. 

Media mix modeling takes a higher-level, more comprehensive picture. This modeling isn’t designed to measure user-level engagement like impressions and clicks, rather its primary function is measuring the impact of an entire touchpoint on specific marketing objectives. 

Data-driven attribution modeling and MMM each have their own set of strengths. It’s not a matter of one being better than the other, rather one being better-suited to different types of marketing analysis. 

For example:

Advertisement
  • The precision of the data-driven attribution: Let’s assume you want to invest more spend in a social ad campaign during the holiday season. While MMM is an option for determining where to allocate those dollars, data-driven attribution excels in dissecting the intricate customer journey, offering a microscopic view of user interactions. For instance, if you’re keen on understanding the exact value of a single click from your social media campaign, Data-Driven Attribution can illuminate the path. 
  • The holistic perspective of the media mix modeling:  Media mix modeling, can consider the impact of offline actions and initiatives. Unlike the more narrowly focused attribution models, which might overemphasize the first or last touchpoint, MMM assesses the collective impact of all channels over time. This makes it an indispensable tool for strategic planning and long-term investment decisions in your marketing portfolio.

“Attribution modeling is based on a bottom-up approach while media mix modeling takes a top-down approach. Media mix modeling provides a long-term view of the marketing ROI of media activity, while attribution modeling evaluates individual-level activity to provide a short term view of marketing ROI.” 

— Annica Nesty, Group Director of Marketing Science at Tinuiti

Why Does MMM Make Sense for a Post-cookie/Post-IDFA World?

In the post-cookie and post-IDFA landscape, where privacy concerns and regulatory changes limit access to individual user-level data, media mix modeling has become a pivotal analytical tool. MMM’s emphasis on overall marketing spend allocation and its proficiency in establishing cause-and-effect models, address the challenges posed by the diminishing availability of explicit conversion information, providing marketers with a privacy-respecting and insightful approach to navigate the evolving digital advertising ecosystem.

An Example of Media Mix Modeling

With the right media mix model, a business can measure their past marketing performance to improve future ROI by optimizing the allocation of the media budget by channel and/or tactic, including: traditional and digital media channels, promotions, pricing, competitor spend, economic conditions, weather, and more.

Example:

An international ecommerce brand wanted to forecast their second-half of the year and create an optimal media mix to make their marketing dollars work smarter. A combination of client data, marketing data, and machine learning were required to create a powerful, custom media mix model. 

To build the model, the business used 2+ years of digital marketing and revenue data, analyzing it by market, tactic, and day. The data was then used to create model to assess future spend showing how changes in investment across channels could impact revenue and sales.

Advertisement
media mix modeling

The full digital media mix model gave the ecommerce brand a detailed analysis of where to optimize their spend across all digital marketing channels. 

One recommendation was to shift dollars away from social—which historically had been at or near 30%—to paid search. This recommendation came with another layer of insight: The brand realized they were overinvesting in awareness campaigns, and needed to invest more heavily in capturing current demand during the 2nd half of the year.

Results: Working with a robust media mix model, the brand was able to break down how much media spend was needed by each channel in order to achieve the 30% YoY revenue goal they targeted. 

The Benefits & Challenges of Media Mix Modeling

MMM helps you accurately connect all the dots, leveraging (ideally) a wealth of provided data, to understand how disparate aspects of marketing campaigns work together in helping you reach your business goals. 

Benefits of Media Mix Modeling

The benefits of MMM are multifaceted, offering marketers a strategic edge in navigating the intricacies of their advertising efforts. Let’s dive into each benefit in detail… 

Omnichannel Campaigns: MMM excels in providing insights for omnichannel campaigns, allowing marketers to understand and optimize the impact of their initiatives across various channels. This capability is crucial in today’s interconnected digital landscape, where consumers engage with brands through diverse platforms.

Improved Oversight Over Media Spend Impact: MMM provides a comprehensive view of the impact of media spend, enabling marketers to assess the effectiveness of their investments. This improved oversight ensures a clearer understanding of how each component of the media mix contributes to overall campaign success.

Advertisement

Media Spend Optimization: With MMM, marketers can optimize their media spend by identifying the most impactful channels and touchpoints. This data-driven approach allows for strategic adjustments in budget allocation, ensuring that resources are directed towards the avenues that yield the highest return on ad spend.

Effective Targeting of Audiences: MMM’s analysis helps in refining audience targeting strategies. By understanding which elements of the marketing mix resonate most with specific demographics, marketers can tailor their campaigns to effectively reach and engage their target audience segments.

Forecasting with Certainty: One of MMM’s strengths lies in its ability to forecast results with a high degree of certainty. This forecasting capability empowers marketers to make informed decisions based on predictive analytics, aiding in long-term planning and goal setting.

Reduced Reliance on Personally Identifiable Information (PII): MMM minimizes the reliance on personally identifiable information for analysis. This is especially crucial in an era where privacy concerns are more important than ever. 

Media mix modeling is a comprehensive and powerful tool, offering a range of benefits that contribute to a more effective, data-driven, and privacy-conscious approach to marketing strategy and decision-making. While there are many benefits to MMM, there are challenges as well. Let’s look into common challenges of MMM in our next section.

Challenges of Media Mix Modeling

MMM grows increasingly complex as the media landscape becomes more fragmented, and the customer journey more personalized. Whereas in the past, advertisers may have wanted to measure something as simple as the impact of a print ad in a Cleveland newspaper, today’s consumers are exposed to brands in a wide variety of locations and formats, from a subway transit poster to a Sponsored post on Instagram.

Advertisement

Working with high-quality data is important in any measurement initiative, but for MMM to work effectively, it also needs a lot of data to build a reliable model. For example, if you wanted your model to consider the performance impact of seasonality, it would ideally need at least three full seasons (three years) of data to consider in its analysis.

This makes media mix modeling a ‘long game’ initiative with infrequent reporting by its nature. Brands and advertisers who are more accustomed to daily or weekly updates may struggle with ‘waiting out’ the analysis.

Because it’s not designed to make considerations based on user-level data, instead providing aggregate insights, media mix modeling offers limited insights on brand impact, personalized targeting, and customer experience. However, advanced models are available that can provide highly granular insights, but traditional MMM provides aggregate insights.

Common Misconceptions About Media Mix Modeling

Media mix modeling, like many other analytics solutions, has also become a marketing buzzword that has generated its fair share of misconceptions.

Here are a few of the most common misconceptions around media mix modeling.

Media Mix Models Are Not Transparent

With large datasets and statistical analysis involved in media mix modeling, the methods behind the technique have been critiqued for their obscurity. If there is no perceived transparency in the process, how does a brand know if its media mix model is really accurate?

Advertisement

Any organization specializing in media mix modeling should provide a transparent approach, with deliverables such as outlines, milestones, and performance reports. Additionally, you may want to consider partnering with an agency that truly understands how media mix modeling aligns with your needs and expectations. Every business is unique and each media mix model is based on multiple factors.

Media Mix Models Do Not Provide Real-time Data

Today, results are often measured by the timeliness of their delivery, with the current digital marketplace allowing for almost instantaneous real-time data. Media mix models do actually provide compelling real-time marketing insights, perfect for evaluating new campaigns, new competitors, and assessing pricing actions or changes in promotional strategies. 

A powerful partner in media mix modeling will provide sophisticated tools and real-time approaches to satisfy your business performance assessments. Your partner should also be able to provide forecasting, simulation, or AI- and machine-learning-integrated models to suggest future movements. 

Media Mix Modeling is Biased to Offline Channels

Though media mix strategies do integrate and consider offline channels in their approaches, media mix modeling also considers all digital channels — including display, email, paid search, social, and more. Remember—it’s considering your media mix. If that includes ten different channels and you provide enough high-quality data for each, they will all be considered in your marketing mix analysis. 

In fact, as customers have become more intertwined with digital channels, media marketing models have adapted to go even deeper into the analyses provided by those channels’ respective insights to support better budgeting choices and customer segmentation reports. 

Conclusion: MMM Closes the Loop on Marketing Performance

In an ever-evolving digital landscape, MMM’s adaptability to the post-cookie/post-IDFA world positions it as an essential tool for marketers. As businesses seek to connect the dots, leverage data, and make strategic decisions, MMM is a crucial ally in the dynamic realm of mixed media advertising.

Advertisement

“At Tinuiti, we leverage measurement best practices such as MMM and incrementality to understand media effectiveness, predict future outcomes, create deeper insights, analyzing what-if scenarios to provide recommendations that optimize media performance. This helps brands understand what channels they should be investing in, how they should shift budgets (media mix), creating a high-level view of what channels are driving overall sales and ROI. Our goal here is to deliver growth for our clients by maximizing the return on investment through best in class measurement”

— Annica Nesty, Group Director of Marketing Science at Tinuiti

At Tinuiti, we know, embrace, and utilize MMM. Our Rapid Media Mix Modeling sets a new standard in the market with its exceptional speed, precision, and transparency. 

Our proprietary measurement technology, Bliss Point by Tinuiti, allows us to measure what marketers have previously struggled to measure – the optimal level of investment to maximize impact and efficiency.  But this measurement is not just to go back and validate that we’ve done the right things. This measurement is real-time informing what needs to happen next.

Curious about how we can tailor strategies to hit your unique marketing bliss point, including Rapid Media Mix Modeling? We’re eager to chat. Contact us today for details.

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

MARKETING

Email Ready to Send? Make Sure to Tick These Things off First!

Published

on

Email Ready to Send? Make Sure to Tick These Things off First!

Designing and developing an email campaign is a complex mechanism; a few things will inevitably escape your attention during the process. So, before you hit that send button, you must draw up a foolproof checklist to ensure every single component in your campaign is in its rightful place. Wondering what an ideal pre-flight checklist looks like? We’ve carefully compiled everything necessary in this blog. Read on to find out!

Subject Line and Pre-header Text

A subject line can make or break your emails. It’s the first thing about your email that reaches the audience, and if it fails to hit the right notes, you’ll have a tough time convincing your subscribers to engage with your emails.

What makes a subject line tick, you ask? Let’s take a look!

  • Your subject line should prioritize an economy of words; this will help you on two accounts- firstly, a crisp and to-the-point subject line increases your probability of catching the reader’s attention. Secondly, longer subject lines run the risk of being clipped on mobile devices, thereby spoiling the subscriber’s user experience. By keeping your subject lines concise, you eliminate this possibility.
  • Ensure your subject line clearly explains what readers can expect upon opening the email. The more guesswork your subject line demands of readers, the less likely they are to open your email.
  • Steer clear of using words that might be considered spammy. With email filters becoming more and more sophisticated, usage of any sort of contentious term in your subject line will result in ISPs flagging your email as spam.
  • Personalize your subject line. In a climate of increasingly crowded email boxes, personalization is one technique you simply can’t afford to overlook.

Besides fine-tuning your subject line, you also need to pay attention to your pre-header text. Building upon the context provided by your subject line, pre-header texts give readers an additional nudge to open their emails. Two crucial things that you must keep in mind while curating your pre-header texts are:

  1. It must exist only as an extension of your subject line; it must not try to introduce any new ideas on its own.
  2. It must be mobile-optimized.

Broken Links

Given that the links embedded in your email eventually facilitate a conversion, it is imperative that you thoroughly evaluate their health prior to delivering your emails. Broken links aren’t just bad for business; they also spoil a subscriber’s user experience.

Here are a few things you must check after embedding a link in your email:

  • This might sound trivial, but do check if the link you have inserted is the one you intended to or not; the only thing perhaps worse than having a broken link is having an irrelevant one.
  • Check that the link is redirecting the user to the desirable destination.
  • If the download of a resource is supposed to be triggered by clicking the link, check if that’s functioning properly; you wouldn’t want subscribers clicking umpteen times on your link only for it to return nothing.

Accessibility

Apart from acing your content and design, you must also work towards making your email campaigns accessible; people making use of assistive technologies must be able to engage with and comprehend your emails in an absolutely hassle-free manner.

Given below are a few measures that will help you make your campaigns accessible to all:

Advertisement
  • Organize your email content. Break down long paragraphs into small sections of 2-3 lines. Use bullets and subheadings wherever necessary. This will make it easy for assistive technologies such as screen readers to parse through your content.
  • Write descriptive alt texts for the images you’re including. Besides improving accessibility, alt texts also enable search engines to crawl your page more efficiently, thereby boosting your SEO.
  • Use semantic markup; this will help screen readers navigate your emails in a smooth fashion.
  • Try to stick to a single-column layout while designing your email template.

This email from AllTrails is an ideal example of an accessible template.

Inbox Preview

Different email clients render emails differently, even if only slightly. Hence, before sending out your emails, you must preview them across different environments and clients to check if they appear as desired. If you are designing your email for dark mode, too, it becomes that much more important to preview it before delivering.

Wrapping It Up

For your email campaigns to be able to drive maximum impact, they must be free of blemishes of all kinds. We hope the pre-flight checklist we shared above proves to be of help to you when you sit down to create your next campaign.

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

Trending