From Theory to Practice – 5 Ways to Do Cross-Device Right
Every year there’s a white-hot topic in digital marketing. This year it’s cross-device marketing. In theory, cross-device sounds like a winning strategy to reach consumers with fragmented attention across multiple screens – but doing cross-device right requires a building plans around the customer and their cross-device usage patterns, not platforms or devices. Put theory into practice by learning the 5 key drivers of cross-device marketing effectiveness.
First I want to thank everyone for participating in this event. As we all know, cross-device is a hot topic and I hope that this webinar will help shed some light, answer some questions and help people determine the best way to go forward. Today we’re going to talk about the state of cross-device advertising and five best practices to get great results using cross-device marketing. We’ve got three main topics today:We will start by talking about today’s multi-device consumerRandy will discuss research findings from a study conducted by Advertiser Perceptions. He will use the findings to show you what leading strategic marketers like you are saying about cross-deviceThen I will try to take us from theory to practice. Specifically, by discussing the 5 essentials for doing cross-device advertising right.So let’s get started. NEXT
Consumer behavior has shifted dramatically over the past 5 years. We all see it in our own behaviors and those of practically everyone around us. We are now living in a multi-device world. A world where consumer’s digital time is fragmented across multiple devices. Today’s consumer jumps across multiple devices to do lots of things. We see this every day and we all do it. Here’s an example from my own life. I started evaluating vacation options while waiting in line to order lunch. Then I went back to my desk and did a bit more research on a PC. Then later that evening booked the trip on my tablet. According to a variety of industry studies, the average person now uses just over three digital devices. For some, that’s two computers and a smartphone, for others a computer, a smartphone and a tablet, still others have multiple smartphones. Having three plus devices makes understanding someone’s digital behavior harder to track. What makes it even more complicated is that the average person’s digital behavior is recorded across just over 12 cookies. That’s because every browser used, and potentially every app used has a separate cookie. So whereas we used to have a digital environment where most of your activity could be understood with one or two cookies, now we need to aggregate it all from many many places.
I don’t know if you all saw this, but Comscore this week released a report that indicated that fully HALF – actually a little more than half - of digital time is now spent using tablets and mobile phones. That’s really important because it means that if you only understand what someone is doing on PC, or only on Mobile, you only have half the story. By focusing on a single device, marketers have an incomplete picture of their target consumers. And without a complete understanding of someone, it’s difficult to know if they are a good target for your brand or not. OK. So in order to understand the best approaches regarding cross device we commissioned a study to understand how marketers are using cross-device and what their perceptions are about best practices and its effectiveness.Now Randy will take you through some of the most interesting findings. NEXT
Thanks, Randy. It is clear that marketers are interested in cross-device advertising, are seeing increased effectiveness with cross-device initiatives, and are allocating more money to these initiatives. Now I want to switch gears and provide a few tips and ideas on how to make cross-device advertising more effective for your brand. I am going to talk about 5 essentials for doing cross-device advertising right. First, as you will see, a common thread here is the need to focus on the consumer, not the device.Second, in order to develop a complete picture of a consumer’s digital life and a full understanding of the effectiveness of marketing efforts, we must bring together all their behavior consumer behavior across multiple devices into a single profile. That means we need to be sure that we are using a great methodology for matching users to devices. Third, I’ll talk about the importance of leveraging rich consumer insights across all devices. Fourth, I’ll talk about creative and how we can leverage the strengths of each device in order to deliver a powerful and persuasive message that will drive conversions. Finally, I’ll also touch upon the importance of COMPLETE learning and insights in order to understand what works and improve your future efforts for even greater effectiveness. So let’s start with the first one. NEXT
1) Focus on the consumer, not devicesEarlier we talked about the multi-device consumer – that a consumer’s digital time is spread across multiple devices and that today’s consumers jump across multiple devices throughout their days to complete an activity. Consumer behavior is not siloed and marketing plans should not be siloed either. Cross-device is really about focusing on the consumer instead of a device. At it’s core, cross-device is about delivering an integrated campaign to reach the same consumer on all devices that consumer uses.So forget silos. The end goal is all about engaging the consumer in a meaningful way. In order to do this, we need to understand how your consumer spends his/her time on tablets, smartphones and computers. How that consumer interacts with media across devices and jumps across devices to complete an activity. This understanding provides a more complete picture of a digital consumer’s life, a better ability to find the right people to target, and ultimately, a better understanding of where, when and how to target that person. Example – a marketer wants to reach a frequent business traveler via an advertisement on that user’s computer. More and more business travelers are leaving computers at home and taking smartphone and tablet on short trips. So unless you were observing a user on Mobile devices, you’d never know she was a frequent business traveler. After all, her PC stays at home. This is just one example of what’s wrong with siloed thinking. Net net, focusing on devices results in missed opportunities and wasted marketing efforts. So keep the focus on the consumer. NEXT
2) Ensure Sound User-to-Device MatchingIn order to focus on a consumer, that means we need to understand all of the devices that they use, and what they do on them. This picture makes it seem so simple to tie multiple devices to a consumer. But it is very complicated. As I mentioned earlier, the average consumer has 3 devices and may look like 12 different individuals across those devices. All of these various activities and devices need to be tied together.There are two main approaches to tying all of a person’s devices to a single anonymized profile. I can spend hours going through the intricate details, but let’s just stay high level. I want you to leave here with an understanding of different approaches and equally as important, the key questions to ask any cross-device media partner. Let’s start with the approaches: There are 2 approaches:Login-based (e.g., publisher has a service where a user logs in on a mobile application, mobile web site and computer-based website; such as gmail)Probabilistic approach (which ties devices together devices through a variety of signals and approaches, like where they access WIFI, what content they consume, etc.)I’m going to focus more on the probabilistic approach, because login method is pretty self explanatory, and it also often has scale issues that limit its use for larger advertisers.A probabilistic approach considers a variety of signals and data elements to match multiple devices to a consumer. This approach requires a lot of scale, a tremendous amount of data, and a sizeable capital investment in order to get it right. It is not something that can be solved with a $10M in venture investment. It’s done in 3 steps (CLICK)Consistently identifying a device each and every time it is seen. The average smartphone consumer has over 25 different applications installed and traditional cookie-based approaches are not able to integrate this activity to a single device. At Greystripe & ValueClick Media, we utilize a software development kit, or SDK to consistently identify a device. This SDK is embedded in the publisher’s applications we work with. The next step is to build rich device-level profiles. What we’re doing here is observing the behaviors on a particular device, and using them to develop a rich user profile – one that provides insight into demographics, interests, lifestyles, and more. Again, this requires hundreds and hundreds of data points for each device - sometimes thousands. Multiply that by hundreds of millions of users and hundreds of millions of devices and you are dealing with massive amounts of data. The last step is to link devices to the individual. Let me be clear that household matching or IP address matching is not sufficient. We live in a real-time world where we need to make real-time decisions about device matching and about marketing campaigns. For example, many tablets are shared and real-time decisions need to be made when executing an ad campaign - does the tablet belong to user 123 (male in a house) or user 456 (woman in the house)? Hundreds and often thousands of data attributes need to be analyzed to determine if two devices belong to the same consumer.
Getting this right is complicated. Unless you have a PhD in statistics, the reality is evaluating cross-device advertising capabilities comes down to a bit of common sense. You should ask yourself and any potential media partner a few questions:Does this company have core capabilities in both mobile and online advertising? Do they have complete ownership of - and expertise in - all platforms?Or are they piecing a solution together via a string of partnerships? What data are they using to link users to profiles?Type of data (site/app browsing data? Location data? Purchase data? Device data?, etc), How is inventory sourced? Direct publisher relationships or exchange based?Size and quality of dataHow and where it is sourced (1st, 2nd, 3rd party)?How accurate is the methodology of a particular vendor, and how was that accuracy verified? Accuracy: Is its 50%, 60%, 80% accurate? Ensure you understand how that accuracy rate is verified. NEXT
3) Leverage Rich Behavioral Insights Across All DevicesWhen you are building a user profile, you want a lot of different kinds of data to create the maximum insight:I’ve mentioned the concept of a complete picture of a digital consumer’s life a few times. That complete understanding includes not only different devices but different types of activities that that user performs across his/her lifeMedia browsing – what types of content is the consumer actually consuming?Purchase data – consumers vote with their wallets; consumers do transact in mobile but the computer remains the primary point of purchasing for consumersProduct search data – what is the consumer searching for?Device data – what devices does a consumer have? How does that consumer interact with media across devices?Location data – I mentioned the fact that some business travelers leave the computer home and travel with his/her smartphone and tablet. The consumer is at the center of all of this data – the consumer is the focus and the unification point across all of the data.The more data you have the better your targeting. And if all your data from across devices is in one place, you can use it to target across devices. Again, companies that use only Mobile data for Mobile targeting, and only PC data for PC targeting, are really missing the boat, and robbing your program of richness. You might think that the data from one channel is enough to go on, but remember data from one channel results in missing out on 50% of a consumer’s digital interaction time. In our experience bringing all of the user data together across devices yields much better results. Here’s an example. NEXT
We recently ran an advertising campaign to reach automotive intenders with household income above $75k. The marketer wanted to reach the same user across multiple devices.After the campaign, we analyzed the source of every critical component of targeting information. Was it from the person’s PC-based activity, or his Mobile-based activity? What we found was pretty surprising, because 60% came from the PC side, and 40% from the Mobile side. That was, frankly, a lot more from the Mobile side than we expected.What we know about this consumer based on mobile activity (40% of time)New auto research in an applicationVisited Dallas, TXRequested a quote for truckWhat we know about this user base on PC activity (60% of time)Searched for trucks / pickups$150k HHIPurchased hunting / fishing equipmentTying all of this activity together at the consumer level allows the marketer to target the right consumer, engage in an individual conversation with that consumer - where the product is married with the consumer’s lifestyle at the right time. In this caseA ad for a new truck, was placed in the consumer’s lifestyle, which included hunting / fishing, HHI, when the consumer is in-market to purchase a new vehicleWe have this data for just about any target consumer segment imaginable. If anyone on this webinar would like to see how their target consumer spends time in mobile and the computer, please email me and we can send you the information. NEXT
4) Engage Using the Interactive Strengths of Each DeviceI’ve talked a lot about focusing on the consumer, matching devices to a consumer, and the rich behavioral profile needed to effectively target the right consumer. Let’s go to Creative. We always need to engage a consumer with a compelling brand experience. While standard units can play a key role in this process because they can efficiently drive both reach and frequency, our experience shows that using ad formats that capitalize on the particular strengths of a device can be critical. Marketers need to make sure to maximize the strengths of each device. Marketing tactics should be considered in the context of the most engaging ad formats available for any given device. For example, mobile offers touch, shake, tilt, camera features, video and other interactive features that television and other platforms can’t offer. Computers offer standard display, video, social media and take over ads that capture the user’s attention for maximum results. Challenge digital advertising partners to translate marketing objectives into compelling ad experiences that capitalize on the interactive strengths of each device. NEXT
5) Make Learning and Insights a PriorityLast, but not least, we need to make sure we are generating maximum learnings and recommendations from our programs. Finding the cross-device consumer, reaching that consumer and engaging the consumer are the starting points for any marketing campaign. It is just as important to evaluate campaign performance in a cross-device manner – again with a core focus on the consumer. Make sure that you and your cross-device partner make learning and insights a priority. I’m going to walk through a few examples of selected insights we provide as a way for you to understand what is possible. The first is cross-device brand lift. Utilizing a control-and-exposed methodology, we are able to understand how reaching a consumer on the computer impacts brand lift as well as how reaching the same consumer on the computer and mobile impacts brand lift. How does cross device media impact awareness, attitudes, favorability, purchase intent and product preference? Is your media plan creating value that drives your business forward?NEXT
The second example is to understand how cross-device media impacts conversion. Is the campaign a cost effective program? How does reaching both prospects and previous site visitor across different devices impact conversion rate?Across all of the cross-device campaigns we have done, we’ve seen a 3x increase in click-through rates and a 5x increase in conversions.
Finally, its important to look at not just where the consumer was reached, but also the device in which the consumer converted. We know that consumers jump across multiple devices to complete an activity. If we reach consumers on a smartphone, some consumers will convert on the smartphone, but we also know that some will convert on the computer or the tablet. In order to evaluate marketing campaigns in light of today’s cross-device consumer, it is critical to understand more than a siloed device view of a campaign. A full suite of integrated cross-device reporting and insights is critical to not only understand the impact of a marketing campaign, it is also critical to inject that learning into marketing strategies that reflect today’s real-time consumer behavior. As the Ad Perceptions study highlighted, marketers are seeing increased effectiveness with cross-device advertising campaigns
In summary, the 5 essentials for doing cross-device advertising right are:Focus o the Consumer, Not DevicesEnsure Sound User-to-Design matchingLeverage Rich Behavior Insights Across All DevicesEngage Using The Interactive Strength of Each DeviceMake learning to and Insights a PriorityQuite simply , continuously break down device siloes and focus on the consumer when planning, implementing and evaluating marketing campaigns.
That concludes the presentation portion of the webinar. Now we’d like to open it up for questions.