In this session of our conference, we welcomed Alex Noirot-Cosson Head of Marketing, Live Games, at Socialpoint and Matan Naim, Customer Success Team Leader at Storemaven.
What are the basics of contextual marketing? In a world without any device IDs, contextual marketing will be looking at the data points around showing an ad to a user (like which app/time of day/day of the week/country/region etc), to see patterns on why it is/n’t successful. Contextual marketing isn’t knowing the device ID you want to advertise a campaign to, and showing those devices the ad. Ready now? Great.
The tectonic shift in UA towards privacy-first advertising and marketing.
The industry has partially lost from the self-reporting networks granular attribution based on devices. Probabilistic attribution is still there (though the limitation is that it’s hard to justify ad spend when you’re not sure whether users are quality users.)
SKAdNetwork as an alternative – will it help?
Privacy wins over efficiency. Apple’s deterministic attribution solution doesn’t fully answer the needs of performance marketing, providing only limited data points and preventing tying an impression to an install. SKAd won’t be sustainable when probabilistic attribution isn’t available in the future. Incrementality (the causality between a marketing investment and the actions happening in an app) and removing the notion of attribution is holistic, fair, and the future of measurement.
Don’t resent losing the past, embrace the future.
We’re in a time of learning, and the industry is versatile in picking up opportunities.
Now that the industry can’t leverage knowing what users liked from device identifiers that built a memory of past behaviors, looking at big patterns to understand where the biggest yield for marketing dollars is coming from, will be key. When users aren’t curated to engage with our app/game, we have to ask: “where are the most users that are valuable to me? In which app can I find them? In which vertical are they? In which country? On what day of the week is my advertising more efficient?” This is the context – driving patterns from those data points and combining them together to understand what works and what doesn’t.
Motivation-led creatives are crucial.
Creatives will need to be specific enough to appeal to the desirable users, yet generic enough to catch those who aren’t. Because the industry has lost the ability to curate the users they want, they have to speak to everyone, and the creatives will be the catalyst for attracting and retaining great users. Ads will be seen by many different users, even those who the networks believed historically wouldn’t have been interested in the app/game, so they must be enticing enough to be clicked.
Use contextual advertising to craft new install funnels.
Great users could be anywhere! Take different motivations into account (a hardcore RPG user won’t have the same motivation as a casual gamer). Run the same ad creatives and messaging through to the product page to optimize funnels accurately.
First-time user experience as part of the funnel.
An app/game will no longer be a destination point for pre-qualified, curated users (who act more or less in the same way). After losing the capability to decide who to show ads to, it means tons of different user profiles could be driven to the product page and they can’t all be treated equally. Therefore, the 1st time user experience will have to adapt to serve different profiles and make users feel that there’s something for them. Depending on the app/game, it’s important to identify the user profiles and the types of users the app/game could be appealing to. One funnel for all is a thing of the past, dynamic experience and segmentation is king.
Incrementality and App Store data are key to making UA decisions.
Are you prepared for using funnels? Have you tested ads and products pages for when Apple launches the iOS 15 capabilities? Look to figure out what works (or doesn’t) and try to develop your skills for tying your creatives to your product pages and the first time user experience, so you can go more granular.
Actionable tip: Don’t be stuck in the past! Probabilistic attribution will likely go away (and building tools to try and get it to last longer will be a short term solution.) Continue with Android advertising that’s still ID driven, and don’t pause probabilistic attribution on the networks that still have it. But do invest in incrementality.
Check the full discussion here:
