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Approaching Robust Data: Tips and Tricks From the Front Line

The task at hand was clear: collect, organize, and interpret data for the upcoming Retail Mobile Benchmark Report, which examines the disparities between mobile and desktop performances for average US websites. A broad topic like this could easily span 20 or 30 industries.

As this was my first time approaching this data (based on analyses of more than 290-billion visits to more than 16,000 mobile sites and over 85-billion app launches), I’ll admit that I was a little more than overwhelmed. But, knowing that it would take significant effort on my part to familiarize myself with the data well enough to report something interesting, I jumped right in. What I learned along the way will, undoubtedly, save me time as well as a lot of headaches in the future. Following, you will discover some of my takeaways — the lessons I learned, key insights I gained, and perspectives that shaped my experiences all along the way.

1. Manage Expectations From the Beginning.
Almost immediately, I discovered that the key to approaching data of this size was to understand, in advance, exactly what it was that I wanted to deliver. Access to this much information can surely seem imposing, but without a plan, it’s almost impossible not to become lost in the process. This meant that I had to look closely at the kind of data I had access to and think about how I wanted to present it. Taking time in the beginning to devise a strategy helped me plan, so not only could I deliver what my audience was seeking, but also manage expectations for the results.

2. Plan for Both the Data and Its Analysis.
A. Pull Data in Advance.
One of the first challenges I faced was trying to decide how I wanted to slice the data. Should I break it down by states or by industries? Did I want visits to retail websites separated by state or by mobile-device type? The most efficient method was to plot all the different options and pull all the data up front — which meant you wouldn’t find yourself halfway through a project, wishing you had sliced the data by industry rather than state.

B. Know What Your Audience Cares About and Align Data Accordingly.
With a robust dataset, it’s easy to simply dive right in and create tons of charts. However, if you don’t know what your audience cares most about, you could very likely be wasting your time. An internal, pre-analysis review helped us make sure expectations were aligned before we began tackling main ideas.

With regard to this report, for instance, I knew a shift was taking place. People are moving away from using desktops (the traditional browsing method) and toward using mobile instead. While interesting, the crux of the issue isn’t the move itself, but rather, how much the move is costing companies. After identifying what my audience cared most about, I focused on the implications associated with people leaving desktops and moving toward smartphones, and then I was able to align the data accordingly.

3. Build the Case, Visualize the Results, and Make It Interesting to Your Audience.
The ultimate goal for any data analyst is to communicate insights clearly and effectively — to build the story behind the data. Internal support is critical to achieving this, and asking senior-level analysts for technical assistance is a very smart move. Having an expert on hand with whom you can collaborate and bounce questions off of is invaluable. In many cases, a senior manager can resolve an issue in mere minutes that could otherwise take several days to resolve. It was extremely helpful to have an expert nearby, especially in the beginning phases when I was slicing data.

A. Step Back and Look at the Bigger Picture.
Often, data contains contradictions or unexpected surprises. In this case, for example, I knew smartphone usage was climbing, as tablet use was dwindling. I also knew that there were major behavioral differences between smartphone shoppers and desktop shoppers. But, what was happening overall? What were the net effects? Taking a step back to view the full context surrounding the data helped me to compare a specific data piece against other views of it to solidify the narrative.

B. Balance Tech With Storytelling.
Any great data analyst is driven to capture audiences’ attentions using compelling headlines. But, it’s also imperative that you guarantee technical accuracy so you can defend the results to your peers. This is why the time you spend vetting data and making sure it’s clean is so crucial. Nevertheless, what you ultimately create must also make sense. A strong manager is an excellent resource for helping to balance tech-heavy aspects while shaping the story behind the data.

C. Welcome Feedback.
To ensure accuracy, data analysts are often required to vet data against any questions senior analysts have. Doing this well means spending some time studying the industry, understanding trends, and making sure that whatever you find is defendable. Identifying the reasons behind various findings, uncovering issues, and adjusting for them via feedback are critical steps in the process.

Ultimately, the Best Tips Begin With You.
The biggest lesson I learned in the course of this project also turned out to be the simplest: remain organized. From the very beginning to the absolute end of the process, carefully following steps, avoiding shortcuts, and doing things right the first time proved essential. If you can manage those things correctly, you’ll have set yourself up for success.

The post Approaching Robust Data: Tips and Tricks From the Front Line appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/adobe-digital-insights/approaching-robust-data-tips-tricks-front-line/

The Power of Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) Beyond Retargeting

Many advertisers are using dynamic creative optimization (DCO) for retargeting high-value website visitors who, based on their actions on the brand’s website — such as visiting product pages and adding items to shopping carts — have shown purchasing intent. Advertisers get a second chance to drive a conversion. Retargeting is a proven, always-on tactic for most advertisers. DCO allows deeper personalization of retargeted ads, driving better engagement and performance.

While we hear a lot about using DCO for retargeting, what about employing DCO for prospecting campaigns?

Advertisers can use DCO across the marketing funnel — for everything from retargeting and loyalty programs to new-customer acquisition and awareness campaigns. Even if very little is known about the audience or user that is viewing the ad, DCO can deliver a lift in performance. For one Adobe customer, using algorithmic creative optimization for geotargeted campaigns resulted in a 10-percent lift in click-through rate (CTR) over standard display ads. The more we know about the audiences across the funnel, the better the performance. Performance results for this brand ranged from a 10-percent lift in CTR for prospecting campaigns to a 71-percent lift in performance when retargeting users who visited specific property pages.

Target Audiences Across the Funnel With DCO.

Algorithmic Creative Optimization
For prospecting campaigns, the creative elements within the ad — images, border and button colors, messages, offers, call-to-action text, data-feed components, and recommended products, for instance — are optimized to meet the advertiser’s performance objectives. An advertiser could simply target their ads by region or zip code and allow DCO to optimize the ad’s creative elements to drive the best engagement and performance.

The DCO algorithm evaluates all possible ad permutations and optimizes delivery to the winner. Below is a simplified example.

Advertisers are able to turn creative optimization on or off as desired. For retargeting campaigns, an advertiser may prefer to set rules to drive ad-content decisions using the data feed. Once the feature is turned on, the settings below — some of which are customizable — are activated.

• Confidence level (99.1-percent default settings)
• Optimization key performance indicators (KPIs): Clicks, conversions
• Impressions per permutation (75,000 default)
• Lookback window: Data to be considered in learnings (30-day default)
• Test allocation: Percent of test-campaign impressions (15-percent default)

Other Cool DCO Capabilities
DCO has many features that can help deliver better performances for your prospecting and retargeting campaigns. Personalize your ads with DCO and spice them up with some of these features:

• Promotion Countdown Clock: Your ad includes a timer that counts down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until your next sale, promotion — or the weekend.
• Search Box: Users can search for city location, zip code, product, and more.
• Drop-Down Menu: Users can select an option from the menu and be directed to a relevant landing page.
• Product Carousel: Users can scroll through product recommendations within the ad.
• Retail Circular Ads: Promote products from weekly circular ads within the ads.
• Product Price Comparison: Within the ad, you can show your low price compared to competitors’ rates.
• Adobe Marketing Cloud Audiences: Both Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager segments can trigger an ad layout in DCO for deeper personalization. Audience Manager segments can include first-, second-, and third-party data.

Moving Beyond Retargeting to Get the Most of DCO
DCO allows an advertiser to target audiences across the marketing funnel. Beyond using DCO for reconnecting with and retargeting site visitors, advertisers can use DCO to deliver relevant experiences and better performances — for new-customer acquisition and awareness programs — and help fill the upper marketing funnel. Consider applying the full power of DCO to all your marketing programs to deliver deeper personalization and more relevant experiences for your users as they travel through the customer journey.

This is the fourth article in a five-part series on DCO. Check out the first three articles:

1. 5 Reasons Now Is the Time to Implement Dynamic Creative
2. Creating Relevant Ad Experiences Without Thousands of Ad Units
3. Supercharge your Retargeting Campaigns with Dynamic Creative

And stay tuned to learn more about what DCO can do for advertisers.

The post The Power of Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) Beyond Retargeting appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/power-dynamic-creative-optimization-dco-beyond-retargeting/

Driving Competitive Advantages With Enterprise Mobile Apps

The mobile app landscape is changing — no one can argue with that. But, the results of the 2016 Enterprise Mobile Apps Report — conducted by Edelman in partnership with Adobe — shine a very bright light on a key corner of the industry: the enterprise app landscape. These internal-facing apps are changing industry-wide discourse in many ways, pushing companies to reexamine not only their enterprise mobile strategies, but also the processes and workflows that have often defined these businesses since day one.

It’s a seismic shift — and one that the report delves into, providing comprehensive insights into today’s enterprise mobile app landscape, including the priorities, preferences, and barriers to entry. Together, these powerful forces are shaping all aspects of enterprise mobile adoption, integration, and ultimately, evolution — from who’s investing to who has the true competitive advantage at the end of the day.

Where We Are TODAY
So, what does it all look like right now? According to the Enterprise Mobile Apps Report, two-thirds of companies already have these apps in place, and of those, nearly 7 in 10 have 2–5 in use. Further, for those who have integrated enterprise mobile apps within their organizations, it’s clear that employees are embracing them at higher and higher rates over time — 66 percent of companies that use these apps say the number of employees tapping into them has increased year over year.

All of that said, it’s evident that we’re both in the enterprise mobile app adoption period, and that we’re seeing a massive uptick in usage simultaneously. In many ways, this one-two punch is what fueled the added investments and increased push to get these up and out the door. And, as a result, they’re receiving solid ROIs.

Though the specific goals tied to these mobile apps vary from company to company, they tend to revolve around a few key objectives:

• Increase employee productivity;
• Enhance and streamline task performance;
• Ensure employees have immediate access to tools and information they need to succeed; and
• Connect with customers and stakeholders in simplified, real-time formats.

Now, for the big question: What’s driving this rapid adoption and breakneck growth? According to the report, it’s a fear of being left behind. More than three in five respondents agree: companies that haven’t deployed enterprise mobile apps are at a clear disadvantage. Why? Because they have less-efficient operations (61 percent), seem outdated (51 percent), and miss out on new client/sales opportunities (47 percent). In other words, if companies don’t have these apps in place, they see themselves as missing out on these essential performance indicators. That’s why enterprise mobile apps have become such a buzzworthy topic — that’s why they’re becoming must-haves in all corners of the industry.

Understanding Employee Adoption and Corporate Integration
Again, these apps aren’t being launched into the abyss. Employees are increasingly integrating their companies’ enterprise mobile apps into their job functions, helping them navigate a host of key tasks and responsibilities. Usage is up since this time last year, and performance is improving and increasing right along with it. On average, companies with enterprise mobile apps are seeing their ROIs hover around 35 percent — and, with numbers like that, it’s no surprise that more than half of these departments expect to increase their investments in the next 12 months.

The ROI is driven by a number of different factors; though, the majority center around one thing: productivity. Enterprise apps enable employees to do more work, communicate better, and remain motivated from start to finish. Think about the sales reps at typical tech firms — specifically, think about the number of emails and newsletters flying into and out of their inboxes 24/7. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to have all of that essential sales information available in a mobile app, one that sent a push notification every time new and important information was added? Wouldn’t it streamline communications and, as a result, ensure stakeholders were more in the know?

But, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. ExxonMobil, for example, is using enterprise mobile apps for recruitment. Their recruiting app, Working at ExxonMobil, enables prospective interns and entry-level employees — in most cases, millennials who are used to getting all of their info and intel through their devices — to get a taste for life inside the company. The app offers a preview of the new Houston campus and digs into different career paths within the organization.

And, ExxonMobil isn’t alone. In 2014, REI launched its first enterprise mobile app, a Floor Set Guide Trainer that leveraged Adobe Digital Publishing Suite — now Adobe Experience Manager Mobile. The goal of the app was to help associates set up visual displays in their own stores while ensuring their sales teams were promoting the right merchandise and, above all, best serving their customers. The results were staggering: two out of three associates who participated in the 10-store pilot said the app enabled them to spend more time on the sales floor, and all participants said the app was a “valuable resource.”

The REI enterprise initiatives continued, and today, the brand has 5 apps and 63 folios boasting more than 10,000 downloads that, together, have elevated employee engagement and overall service. What’s more, through built-in analytics, REI is able to gauge usage, engagement, and other key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure future rollouts deliver meaningful employee and customer value.

The TRUE Competitive Advantage
While it’s clear that enterprise apps deliver major internal and external advantages, many companies still haven’t embraced the trend. Furthermore, even those that have may not have fully evolved strategies, which can leave them at a definite disadvantage. While more than three in five say it’s important to be ahead of the competition, nearly two in three consider themselves on par with — or even behind — their competitors. It’s a major disconnect that rests solidly in organizations’ inabilities to modernize their strategies and execute on those strategies before their competitors do.

Ultimately, your success in building and using enterprise mobile apps comes down to selecting platforms that will position your company to achieve success — now and in the future. They should integrate well with your existing business systems and, of equal importance, be able to scale and grow as your business needs change. App content management is key to delivering an exceptional user experience. And, it all begins with making sure you have the right tools and processes in place to drive continuous updates and easily integrate, edit, and organize content on the go. Enterprise content management systems, like Adobe Experience Manager Mobile, can support this piece of it by utilizing content from across the enterprise and keeping it fresh and up to date. From there, they can help companies understand KPIs, analytics, and other personal indicators. It’s a more positive user experience on both sides.

The (Not-Too-Distant) Future of Enterprise Mobile Apps
To evolve and bolster your organization’s enterprise mobile app initiatives, it’s essential to focus first on mission-critical apps that meet the needs of your increasingly mobile workforce. According to the Enterprise Mobile Apps Report, some examples include:

• Customer service (61 percent);
• Customer-relationship management (60 percent);
• Sales enablement (59 percent); and
• Messaging/collaboration (59 percent).

Once established, the next step is to scope out and integrate the core capabilities necessary for success — from security and business systems to ease of publishing and multiple-platform support.

Another key step is to be sure you have a team in place to oversee challenges, opportunities, and barriers to adoption. Respondents indicated that their biggest challenges included security, update-driven errors, and lack of in-app customization — your team should be able to deftly maneuver through these common barriers, providing efficient, effective solutions to steer your company through. This team can also help with employee adoption and perception, including making sure apps are productive and make employees feel empowered. Close to 9 in 10 respondents agreed that this is essential to success.

There’s much more to the conversation and a lot more to come on the enterprise mobile app front. Download the complete 2016 Enterprise Mobile Apps Report to learn more about how enterprise mobile apps can help guide your business’s productivity.

The post Driving Competitive Advantages With Enterprise Mobile Apps appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/driving-competitive-advantages-enterprise-mobile-apps/

Website maintenance: 404 error pages

Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles explore the influence of customer-relationship management (CRM) data on data-driven marketing, the best methods for driving influencer engagement through retail, the most beneficial timing for reminding shoppers of abandoned carts, and much more.

• CRM Strengthens Data-Driven Marketing [eMarketer]: A new survey reveals customer-relationship management (CRM) data is the most popular method for augmenting data-driven marketing data and decisions.
• How to drive influencer engagement through retail [Mobile Commerce Daily]: As more than 70 percent of consumers turn to social media before making purchasing decisions, the role of influencers has become even more significant, and opportunities abound for organizations that want to make the most of influencers’ voices in the market.
• When Should Retailers Remind Shoppers of Abandoned Carts? [eMarkteter]: A new study finds that retailers achieve the highest conversion rates when they send the first retargeting email within an hour (compared to 24 hours) after consumers have abandoned online carts.
• HALLOWEEN BY THE NUMBERS [INFOGRAPHIC]: CASHING IN ON SALES LIKE A PIRATE [The Shelf]: Halloween is an important holiday for retailers to consider — especially since nearly $8.4 billion is estimated to be spent on Halloween this year.
• Experience-Based Commerce: Zero Friction. Total Engagement [Adobe Blogs]: Twelve tips for becoming an experience-led commerce business.
• Applying the Scientific Method to Ecommerce Marketing [Practical Ecommerce]: By applying the scientific method to digital marketing, e-commerce marketers can increase return on ad spend and support growth.
• Huge majority of passengers willing to trade personal data for better airline experience [Tnooz]: More than 80 percent of airline customers are willing to give airlines and airports more personal information to gain better travel experiences.
• Travel brands poised to grow exponentially with mobile marketing [Mobile Commerce Daily]: With a majority of mobile hotel bookings made within 24 hours, brands need to consider the aspects of mobile marketing — such as local SEO, social media, and personalized content.
• Growth of Mobile Travel Bookings in 6 Charts [Skift]: More and more travelers are turning to mobile to book flights and hotels, but growth hasn’t included all markets.
• Ancillary spend by passengers on airlines has many regional differences [Tnooz]: Many airlines are moving to an à la carte approach for additional purchases — and across global regions, variety exists with regard to what is purchased.

The post Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/news-and-resources/point-sale-retail-travel-weekly-26/

Let Big Data Make A Big Difference for Your Marketing

The post Let Big Data Make A Big Difference for Your Marketing appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/let-big-data-make-big-difference-marketing/

Why every developer should read Plato

Adobe’s 2016 Holiday Shopping Predictions: Tips for Capitalizing on 2016’s Holiday Shopping Season

In the short span of 61 days — November 1 to December 31 — a large number of transactions will occur between consumers and brands, positioning the 2016 holiday shopping season to bring in over $91.6 billion dollars in revenue. The nature of those transactions will also change, as an increasing number of shoppers will be completing transactions online, using mobile while in brick-and-mortar stores, and more. Brands must understand how the consumer experience is changing if they want to remain competitive — especially during the holiday season. Adobe Digital Insights’ (ADI’s) Holiday Shopping Predictions are focused on providing robust data to help brands understand both what to expect and how to maximize revenue this holiday season.

Based on the data we’ve collected, we’re expecting the typical high-revenue shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. However, the data also indicates major growth in revenue at the end of the holiday season (last two weeks of December), indicating consumers are taking advantage of options, like Click and Collect and express shipping, to continue shopping up to the last minute. Successful brands will address this prolonged season using solid strategies and compelling digital-marketing experiences to capitalize on additional purchasing time and the potential to increase revenue.

What Is the Adobe Holiday Shopping Predictions Report?
It might be helpful to begin by explaining how we develop these insights. At Adobe, we measure roughly $7.50 of every $10.00 spent online as well as 80 percent of all online transactions from the top 100 retailers. To create this particular report, we viewed over 55-million SKUs to obtain product and pricing information and more than 1-trillion visits from thousands of retailers to obtain shopping information. The compilation of this data helps us understand not only how consumers are interacting with brands, but also the current behavioral trends. This knowledge, in turn, allows us to help brands understand the best practices for both providing stellar customer experiences and driving in revenue this holiday season.

This includes understanding the anticipated growth of particularly big shopping days throughout the holiday season. For large shopping days, Thanksgiving sales are predicted to grow the fastest with a projected 15.6 percent year-over-year growth. Black Friday is next, with an estimated 11.3 percent year-over-year growth, and is anticipated to bring in over $3 billion for the first time ever! Cyber Monday, on the other hand, is not projected to grow as quickly; our report indicates retailers should expect a 9.4 percent year-over-year growth. However, with an expected $3.36 billion in revenue, Cyber Monday will continue to be the largest revenue day of the holiday season.

Nevertheless, while these traditionally large shopping days are always part of a brand’s holiday strategy, it’s important to note that we’re anticipating a 5 percent year-over-year growth in the first two weeks of the holiday season and a 24 percent year-over-year growth in the last two weeks of the season. Meaning, if you want to have a competitive advantage in the marketplace this holiday season, you must have a strategy in place for motivating consumers to purchase from you not only during the more popular and well-known sales days, but also throughout the entire season.

Another thing that correlates with our longer purchasing season is that we’re seeing data indicating that 12 percent of all Christmas décor will be purchased before Halloween — 20 percent more than last year. Retailers should consider this part of the longer holiday season and strategize its potential impacts on both displays and on Halloween and Thanksgiving décor.

So, What Are These Anticipated Holiday Shopping Trends for 2016?
To craft a solid holiday marketing strategy, it’s important for brands to understand not only what the anticipated revenue changes are, but also what the anticipated marketplace behavioral changes will most likely be. This can help you create a strategy that generates the best user experience possible, which often results in higher revenue and stronger brand loyalty. Following are some of the holiday shopping trends we expect to see this season.

1. Online Shopping
The trend toward making purchases online is expected to continue. However, there is a slight shift in people’s motivations for shopping online: while people were focused most intently on free shipping and great deals in 2015, consumers in 2016 are increasingly more likely to cite the convenience of online shopping as one of their motivating factors. This means that, since online shoppers don’t have to deal with traffic or long lines, they may be willing to pay a premium for this convenience. This trend may be too new still and not yet used by enough consumers for brands to begin testing it, but it is something to consider as you craft your strategy.

2. Mobile Conversion
In 2016, mobile will continue to play a major role in holiday shopping. In fact, ADI is predicting that mobile will overtake desktop for the first time in terms of driving visits to a website during the holiday season. The issue here is that, even though the prediction shows that more than half of all web traffic will come from mobile, the same devices will drive only 34 percent of revenue. This means there is currently a gap between customers engaging on smartphones and the brands’ abilities to convert. In fact, our data shows that desktop conversion rates are almost three times those of smartphones. Consumers also tend to put less in their carts via smartphones — an average of $35 less per transaction! These are major issues that brands have to tackle. How do you increase both conversions and average transaction amounts on a smartphone? This consumer trend is not going away, so this is definitely something brands will have to approach strategically by offering more seamless customer experiences.

3. Consumer Research
In our survey, consumers reported checking an average of four or five websites before making any purchasing decisions. Thus, brands that believe they can devise a strategy without looking at what their competitors are doing are probably going to have difficulty succeeding. Online research allows consumers to check multiple retailers quickly, so they can find the best possible products for the best possible prices. You simply must verify that your deals are truly competitive.

4. Digital Display
If you want to drive people to a specific discounted product or popular category, the best way to do so continues to be through digital display advertising, followed by social and email channels. Having a robust email, social, and digital display campaign strategy increases the likelihood that you will gain consumers’ attentions and drive them to particular products or offers. These channels also offer effective ways to retarget customers based on their behaviors. In previous years, consumers were open to receiving SMS or text messages to alert them to sales, but that seems to be trending downward. Email allows them to access sales information when it’s most convenient for them and seems to be their preferred medium for receiving marketing materials via mobile while they are on-the-go and shopping for the holidays.

How Are Holiday Shopping Trends Affecting Brands?
As part of our report, we looked at the top-5,000 public products during the holiday season. We wanted to find out how much revenue they brought in during the holiday timeframe versus the rest of the season. We actually see that, between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, the top-growing products sell, on average, 25 percent of their annual sales — five days drive 25 percent of their sales! This highlights the fact that — from a retail perspective — you have to get it right, especially for the customers who are already familiar with and loyal to your brand.

We found that an average of 5 percent of a company’s customers drive 35 percent of their total revenue. That’s an average of 7 percent of your revenue that you can potentially lose just by eliminating a fraction of your best customers. As a result, attention to customer loyalty is going to be a major factor in driving revenue this holiday season. Marketing to and taking care of your most loyal customers will be a huge driver for revenue — plus, this core customer is not one you can afford to have the competition woo away from you. This is where delivering a seamless, personalized customer experience really becomes critical. Delivering a stellar customer experience allows you to retain the customers who mean the most to your business while you continue to develop new relationships.

Brands also must understand that it’s increasingly more apparent that they need to have a strong plan in place for increasing conversions via mobile. The mobile trend being a crucial factor in consumers’ shopping experiences is only increasing. Mobile must be factored into your sales and marketing campaign strategy — even more so during the holidays than any other time of year.

So, What’s to Be Expected This Holiday Shopping Season?
This holiday season, we are expecting to see more than 57 days that bring in $1 billion of revenue each. We are also expecting 53 of those days to occur consecutively versus the 31 consecutive days we saw last year — an increase of 71 percent year over year. The holiday season is growing at breakneck speed, but it’s also slowing down. Just a few years ago, we were excited about having three $1-billion days — and this year, we’ll have as many as 57 of them! That’s an incredible increase! If you’re a brand that really wants to capitalize on this rapid growth, it’s important to strategize for all of it — the traditionally big shopping days (like Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday), the increasingly long holiday season, and the average holiday shopping days. Without actively planning for the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, the last two weeks of December, and everything in between, you’re likely to leave revenue and market share on the table.

The post Adobe’s 2016 Holiday Shopping Predictions: Tips for Capitalizing on 2016’s Holiday Shopping Season appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/adobe-digital-insights/adobe-digital-insights-adis-2016-holiday-shopping-predictions/

Adobe Analytics Fall 2016 Release: Empowering Organizations With Smarter Analysis

As we talk with people — from thousands of companies all over the world — about their efforts to drive growth through smarter, data-informed decisions, a few clear trends emerge. First, analysis tools must make it easier for everyone in the organization — from top to bottom — to obtain insights. Second, and relatedly, analysis tools must assist all data consumers with achieving more relevant insights by bridging the gap between Big Data and human intuition with machine learning and other “smart” capabilities.

I’m excited to be part of the team that is realizing the vision of these two themes. The Adobe Analytics Fall 2016 release, available now, includes a handful of new features and capabilities that will directly help you drive better decisions through “smarter analysis,” aided by powerful machine learning within Adobe Analytics. In the rest of this post, I’d like to walk you through what our team has done to make your analysis tools smarter.

There’s a lot of great stuff in here, so grab a coffee, and let’s get going. By the way, everything I share in this post is available today in Adobe Analytics.

Intelligent Alerts
You can now receive an early-stage “heads-up” that something truly significant is happening in your business. We have updated our built-in email- and SMS-alerting capability to use Anomaly Detection as the default mechanism for determining whether to notify you of a spike or dip in a key metric. Anomaly Detection looks at your historical data to determine an expected range of values for a metric, and now it also takes seasonality and major holidays (including Black Friday) into account. This means that you can expect no more false-positives in your alerts — if your traffic always decreases on the weekend, you won’t be alerted every single Saturday morning. Alerts that you set up based on Anomaly Detection will be triggered only when there is a statistically significant spike or dip.

Another huge improvement here is that you can “stack” alerts. Let’s say, you have six different metrics that a certain team is interested in. You can set up a single alert that includes all six metrics and set it to be sent to everyone in the given user group. This carries several advantages. First, you will only need to manage one alert instead of six. Second, if all six alerts happen to spike simultaneously, the recipients will only receive one email instead of six, meaning it cuts down on what we might call “alert fatigue.” Third, by sending to a user group, new employees who are added to that group will automatically begin receiving these alerts; similarly, employees who move out of that group won’t need to be manually removed from the alert.

You can set up alerts a few ways. You can always go to Components > Alerts to create a new alert or manage existing alerts. But, you can also right-click just about anywhere in Analysis Workspace to set up an alert based on the data point you have highlighted. That’s my preferred way, because it preconfigures the alert for you and allows you to stay in your workflow without leaving Analysis Workspace.

Take special note of the “Alert Preview” window in the upper-right corner of the Alert Builder. This view lets you know how many times the alert you’ve configured would have been triggered based on your recent data. By observing how often the alert would have triggered, you can adjust your anomaly thresholds or other criteria so you are not alerting your users too often.

Distribution of alerts has also been improved. The email you’ll receive looks a lot nicer, and you can send alerts by both email and true SMS. International telephone numbers are supported, and you’ll want to enter the country code as well (as shown in the screenshot above).

Automated Anomalies in Analysis Workspace
If you’re like most of us, you value anything that saves you time. This effect is probably multiplied in the world of data, where separating signal from noise can be difficult for even the most polished analyst. That’s why I am so excited about improvements to Anomaly Detection, as we bring this powerful machine-learning technology into Analysis Workspace.

Adobe Analytics has featured Anomaly Detection since late 2013. But to this point, it has only been available for daily data, and it has been confined to a report in Reports & Analytics. With this release, any hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly time-series data in Analysis Workspace — whether in a table or a line graph — will automatically show anomalies based on your historical data and predicted trends.

Create a freeform table, using date as my dimension, and I immediately start receiving insights into statistically significant spikes or dips in my metrics. Add a line graph, and anomalies are called out as hollow data points on the graph. Hover over any of these points in the table or on the graph to gain more details about the anomaly.

As a bonus, if you are an Adobe Analytics Premium customer, you can right-click on these data points to run a Contribution Analysis, which scans hundreds of thousands of values of dimensions to find the likely causes of an anomaly — directly in Analysis Workspace, so you can embed the why along with the what in your projects.

In keeping with the idea of automated insights, there is nothing you need to do to turn this on or to activate this feature — just start building time-series data tables and visualizations, and away you go!

Histograms
Averages (means) are good for quick snapshots, but as any analyst will tell you, they often hide tremendous insights behind their single-number façade. Histograms, which we’ve added as a visualization in Analysis Workspace, tease out those insights by showing the distribution of your audience across buckets (“bins”) representing escalating tiers within any metric. This makes it much easier to identify high- and low-value segments and market to them accordingly.

To use a histogram, just drag it from the collection of visualizations onto one of your panels. It will ask you for a metric, which you can also supply from the left. The histogram will bucket your visits or visitors according to how much/many of the selected metric they had. For example, if I use revenue as my metric, by default, it will bin my visitors by how much revenue they had. Using the advanced settings, I can adjust the number of bins, the size of each bin, and the starting bin (primarily, so I can choose whether to include visitors who had zero of the selected metric).

The distribution of revenue per visitor in my dataset is mostly normal; however, there is a bit of an uptick on the right side, so the group of customers who are spending $600–700 is larger than I might have expected. If I want to analyze that segment further, I can click the dot in the upper-left corner of the visualization and choose to show the data source. In the data table that is revealed, I can find this segment and begin to explore it directly in that data table. I can also drag it to the top of the panel to apply it as an ad-hoc segment, so I can add other data tables and visualizations that will help me better understand this group of customers who are behaving interestingly.

Conclusion
I’m sure you can see how we are advancing our goals to empower your organization with more recommendations powered by machine-learning intelligence and advanced analytics, but these features, and the benefits they provide, are just the start for us. We’re excited to continue our journey in helping you turn your company into a truly brilliant enterprise.

The post Adobe Analytics Fall 2016 Release: Empowering Organizations With Smarter Analysis appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/adobe-analytics-fall-2016-release-empowering-organizations-smarter-analysis/

The Experience Business — From a Web of Pages to a Web of Experiences

We’re in a major period of transition, as our Web of pages shifts to become a Web of experiences. The ‘last millisecond’ and the behaviors it triggers have become less a consideration and more the norm in this always-on, customer-first universe. Consumers don’t just expect — they demand more spot-on experiences and personalized journeys from the brands they frequent. They don’t want websites. Websites are boring — necessary evils in their fully integrated lives. Web experiences, though, are something special. That’s what pulls consumers in and inspires purchases, viral chatter and other key actions. A Web experience is something you — as a consumer — can climb on board for, feel good about or get behind. It’s something you relate to on a bigger level.

This shouldn’t surprise us — we’re in the experience business and have been for a while. The next phase? Optimizing those experiences with our collective eye on creating perfect experiences. It’s doable. Since you have a site, you already have the data, the content and the context — three key pieces to building a Web experience. The next step is to tap into the brave new user experience (UX), design and tech worlds to create something even bigger and better — a true experience.

THE WORLD OF NEW UX — AND THE NEW WORLD OF EXPERIENCES
Brian Solis, a thought leader in the space, unpacks this even more in his book, X: The Experience When Business Meets Design. He mentioned that this is “…a new era of business in which your brand is defined by those who experience it.”

Your job, intrepid marketer, is to understand how customers experience your brand and work to define those experiences to benefit both sides. No longer are great products enough to win over consumer sentiment, he explains; instead, we all need to be razor-focused on building and cultivating the most meaningful experiences possible — experiences that stretch across all of our brand platforms.

Why does it matter now? Because, we’re in a website crisis, really. On the average website, nearly two in five users don’t complete even the simplest tasks. Design and UX are issues. The simplest transaction is loaded with steps and page after irrelevant page of info. It’s not surprising that so many people ditch their carts before buying their shoes, downloading their music, or booking their flights — they’re just not good experiences. They’re not meant to be. They’re meant to be websites. And the average person will give a website about 60 seconds before calling it quits — that last millisecond is a powerful pull.

HOW WE’LL SHIFT TO A WEB OF EXPERIENCES
This goes beyond just finding (or not finding) our way through cluttered and poorly organized pages. Once upon a time, websites provided dazzling new ways to communicate our brands. They were cutting-edge methods that boasted transactional experiences without the hassle — things that, prior to the Internet, we had to do in person or over the phone (the horror!).

Fast-forward two decades, and now, we casually toss around the term “digital experience” to describe the exchanges that have become utilitarian in nature — for example, booking a flight, contacting customer support, ordering new sneakers, paying a credit card bill. They’re totally transactional, but still, we assign the term “experience” to them, too. Because, today, everything’s become a brand experience.

But, is everything an experience? Within a typical website, there’s a set construct — it’s a Web PAGE, after all. As technology has evolved, and we’ve seen things like CSS, Angular, and app-development take center stage, a new path has begun to take shape — and it’s filled with opportunities for more elegant experiences. A good example? We can accomplish things on one screen that once took many — gone are the days when users had to be catapulted from one section of a site to another to download PDFs, check size charts, and review dates and times. We can now engage consumers in ways that truly reflect the way they do things in “real life.” It’s human-centered design, explains Solis, and there’s a real humanity to it that adds the qualities of authenticity and experience.

CHALLENGES BEHIND CREATING AN AMAZING WEB OF EXPERIENCES
I recently had a chance to sit down with a large media brand that shared with me their plans for the next iteration of their website — and it’s really cool. The new visually striking homepage is comprised of modular content blocks or tiles. Tile-based design is growing in popularity among designers, and many brands are testing it on their websites with great results (check out Thomas Haustein’s Pinterest board to see some great tile-based design). But, in this case, what’s so interesting is not so much the design or tiles themselves, but rather the engine behind the experience they want to deliver.

Some design lends itself better to personalization than others do, but something as modular and, therefore, flexible as a tile-based UX provides seemingly unlimited abilities to personalize. In the case of my media-company example, there is no shortage of tiles — content with offers, stories, programming suggestions and much more. So, how do they decide which tiles appear when and to whom given the context variables of the interaction (such as device type)?

The challenge, when it comes to any kind of personalization, lies with the ‘decision’ — how do we decide which piece of content or experience variation should manifest for a particular person in a given moment. We compound this challenge when we increase the number of decisions that users must make, which is why today’s companies are starting to heavily leverage data and automate personalization through machine learning. This is — hands down — a Web experience.

We’re talking so many experience permutations that, literally, no two individuals ever need to see the same “page” (if you don’t believe me, give this handy calculator a try — simply to understand the factorial power!). My media-company friends are beyond excited about data science’s potential to help them deliver hyper-relevance at scale. They acknowledge that this is the only way to figure out the right experience for their large and vastly diverse customer base. The result of this design-meets-data-science marriage? They’re architecting something that’s infinitely bigger, bolder, and better than just a website.

As always, testing and optimization are critical here. Does this experience prevail over that one? Are customers more apt to apply for credit cards, book flights or buy those sneakers within a Web page — or within a Web experience? Is this the right thing, or do your customers still prefer the page over the experience? What wins?

Done well, the power is unparalleled. Done right, you’ll craft powerhouse experiences that are so rich, so authentic, and so enjoyable that consumers will want more, more, more — and, they’ll travel across your platforms and other interactive experiences to fuel that desire.

Take a lesson from experience pioneers like Steve Jobs and advice from experts like Solis; then, look to your own experiences across the incredible brands you love: step back from the page and start building the experience. It’s where Web is going, and where you need to be now. By tapping into your data, content, and context, you’re already halfway there. The rest boils down to UX and human-centered design.

This post originally appeared on WebsiteMagazine.com. 

The post The Experience Business — From a Web of Pages to a Web of Experiences appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/personalization/39034/

How to get Google to crawl your site faster

Experience-Based Commerce: Zero Friction. Total Engagement.

There is no doubt about it: customers choose to visit your digital assets because of the quality of the experience more than the quality of the product or service. It’s a new world, and powerful experiences change the way we interact, entertain, work, and relate to the world around us. In simple terms, this commerce model is built around the consumer rather than products or processes; this model can transcend boundaries and create new ways to connect. Experience can be its own product.

The world’s biggest taxi company owns exactly zero taxis. The largest provider of rooms for travelers in the world owns no hotels. Uber, Airbnb, Rent the Runway, Birchbox, and the Dollar Shave Club all sell experiences first — not products.

Consumers face infinite choices and assume they have access to a wide range of prices from global retailers like Amazon and Alibaba. With pretty much anything being available at any time, experience becomes the only true differentiator, providing a pathway to an emotional connection with the consumer like never before. And, because of this, those experiences must be compelling, personal, efficient, engaging — and everywhere.

To create offerings that are in exactly the right places and occur at the perfect times for your customers, producing sensations and emotions that compel them to buy whatever it is that you have to sell, you must have technology in place, make some changes to the nature of your organization, and approach the entire concept of commerce with a fresh outlook and new standards and methods.

Become an Experience-Led Business.
If you aren’t yet up to speed with this new way of thinking, here are some tips to help you get started!

1. Know Your Audience Well.
You must understand the actual characteristics shared by various segments of your customer base and map out how they experience your brand at every touchpoint and on every channel. Audiences exist naturally, but it’s up to you to identify them. You’ll find them among existing customers by using a data-management platform (DMP) that lets you explore different variables and parse groupings of customers who behave in similar ways. The customer profiles you create will be the keys to creating personalized messages and experiences.

2. Map Out Appropriate Experiences.
With your audience profiles in hand, you can create targeted campaigns throughout all your channels. You are creating expansive strategies using deep demographics that reach your audiences wherever they may be. Lenovo (a PC manufacturer) uses the Lenovo Index for Scoring Audiences (LISA) in conjunction with analytics software to predict when a website visitor will make a purchase. They then deliver the content that’s most likely to meet that customer’s needs based on that score. With regard to LISA, Lenovo’s senior manager of global business intelligence, Ashish Braganza, says, “It’s almost 90% accurate—and with the Adobe Target solution, it’s actionable in real time.”

3. Use Audience Profiles to Find New Customers.
You can now purchase audiences through third-party providers based on specific understandings of who your current customers are. This increases the likelihood that your new audiences will become new customers. Since 2014, Under Armour has acquired several popular fitness apps and combined them to form UA Record. With 120 million users, this is now the world’s largest platform for listening to and learning from consumers. And, the company is just beginning to explore the vast insights from this source for its current and future customers.

4. Create Personalized Web Experiences.
Companies that create personalized experiences see a 19 percent increase in sales as well as increased loyalty and customer retention. But, the personalization has to be authentic and relevant, or your customer will reject it as superficial and annoying. You need solid automation and access to the right data, so you can offer the right product or service at the right time based on your customer’s actual needs — not guesses.

5. Truly Understand Your Multiple Channels.
Are you observing four different customers — one using a smartphone, one a tablet, one a laptop, and another a desktop — or the same customer on four different devices? You must be able to obtain a single view of each customer to have a 360º view. To develop and nurture a brand evangelist, your customer must receive consistent experiences across all devices and through every interaction with your brand. To accomplish this, you must link technology, data, teams, and workflows to create seamless experiences across all channels. Tell a single story with all your content.

6. Mobile Must Link All Your Experiences.
Mobile now accounts for 50 to 70 percent of all consumer interactions with brands. Consumers who engage with some form of digital technology before and during visits to brick-and-mortar stores are 40 percent more likely to convert. No device is more personal than a mobile phone, and it opens the door for intelligent contextual marketing in which mobile is viewed as a behavior rather than a separate channel or technology.

7. Let Your Products Become Touchpoints.
We already have refrigerators that know when you are running low on milk. Determine how your products can improve your customers’ lives and engage them. The Internet of Things offers the potential for even more data and insights about customers and the real problems they face in their daily lives. The key will be to think about consumers first, using technology to address those problems — not just to show off a shiny new toy.

8. Build Emotional Connections With Compelling Content.
Immersive, interactive content that resonates with your customers’ lifestyles, needs, and aspirations is vital. The goal should be to tell a single story, woven together using the strengths of each channel. Brands must instill a perception of increased value — a content-driven experience rather than a commerce-driven one. This is where experience is elevated, becoming a product in its own right.

9. Make Shopping Effortless.
Let your customers buy from anywhere — shoppable media, blogs, lookbooks, videos, and any other lifestyle content you provide. Every step the customer has to take to get from product to purchase is an obstacle that will cost you sales. For example, until recently, customers who viewed products of interest in videos would have to close the video and begin searching for the product, often costing brands conversions as customers became distracted. Shoppable media breaks down barriers and eliminates obstacles to closing the sale, allowing consumers to view product details and buy buttons in nontraditional shopping channels. Now, customers can be connected to product pages simply by hovering over or clicking on the video that featured the product of interest, reducing risk for brands and delivering seamless experiences for customers.

10. Manage Your Digital Assets.
Some large brands manage photographs of 20,000 products a day. Asset and content management systems can ease the burden, centralizing elements of content — video, audio, images, text — where they can be easily managed and deployed as needed across all brand communications and adapted to each use or device.

11. Know Where Your Customers Are.
Use the abundance of analytical data available to learn how your customers are engaging with your brand as well as how you can make experiences better — ultimately, making each interaction more memorable than the last. Once you learn about their wants, needs, and frustrations, you can implement data-driven solutions and measure the results.

12. Constantly Measure, Adjust, and Try Again.
Why are people bouncing from your site? Why is your app going unused? Why are your videos only being watched partway? Answers to all these questions are waiting for you as you develop a culture of experimentation, testing and adjusting constantly without guesswork. You can know for a fact how consumers experience their relationships with your business. When data comes out of the shadows, when you use this new understanding to inform future decisions, you move from what Forrester calls a “system of record” to a “system of engagement.”

Final Thoughts
The key is to start where you are and move forward to create compelling, personal, omnipresent, and engaging experiences that delight and satisfy your customers, turning them into brand ambassadors. There is no more business as usual — experience is the currency of a new age.

See more about how to use experience as commerce with the new Adobe report, The Path of Experience.

The post Experience-Based Commerce: Zero Friction. Total Engagement. appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/experience-based-commerce-zero-friction-total-engagement/

Use Yoast SEO to make your content findable

The Art of the Click: Actionable Insight for Email-Marketing Success

The average person spends close to 6.5 hours a day checking and responding to emails. Clearly, we’re addicted. It’s understandable why most marketers believe email is the most effective channel for driving ROI.

The key to creating more satisfying email campaigns is to understand how, when, where, and why people use email. After monitoring more than 40,000 email-marketing campaigns over the last two years, we have some compelling insights to share. Here are a few of the main takeaways from our latest report — actionable strategies for email marketers looking to create great email experiences.

Tip #1: Content is (still) king

Consumers today are inundated with noise. Email on Acid reports a 52 percent increase year-over-year in email volume—a  whopping 61 percent more emails delivered to inboxes compared to 2014. How can your brand stand out? Strive to create personalized moments using customer insights to deliver unique content for each subscriber. The full impact of personalized email has yet to be seen and eye-catching content will entice higher open rates.

Tip #2: Timing is everything

Interestingly, the vast majority of marketing email is sent before 9:00 am because brands assume they’ll be able to catch people before they become consumed with work. However, here’s the reality: email sent at this time competes with every other daily email sent at the same time, forcing consumers to skim or delete content quickly. It’s the well known morning ritual of uncluttering the inbox. Data confirms that open rates are higher in the evening and delete rates are lower in the evening. Consider A/B testing to determine the ideal timing for your email-marketing campaigns. Of course, the value of your message should be clear and concise because average read time on email is only 12.3 seconds.

Tip #3: Great email experiences are compelling, personal, useful, and contextual.

Customer expectations are higher than ever before and marketers are scrambling to create unique experiences that strengthen the brand. To drive extraordinary email experiences, emails should be compelling, personal, useful, and available everywhere.

Compelling emails draw readers in with perfect imagery and content that appears seamlessly across devices. Personalized emails employ meaningful customer information in ways that connect with customers not only with regard to who they are, but also what they like. Useful email serves a purpose—it helps customers accomplish something quickly or makes recommendations based on prior behaviors or reminds them to do something that will benefit them. Finally, great emails reach customers at the moment where they are working, reading, watching, purchasing or doing whatever else it is that you as a business want to touch.  Whether they are in a store, on their mobile device, or using a dashboard in their car—your email needs to be there.

The Future of Email: It’s all About the Customer.

Understanding how customers engage with email can be tough and most marketers today employ a reactive strategy, sending emails and waiting for users to engage. However, with customers sharing more and more about their habits and preferences, marketers have unique opportunities to transform email programs into foundations upon which incredible experiences can be built.

The future of email is here, and it’s all about the customer experience. Data-driven campaigns are the cornerstones of exceptional customer experiences—dynamic, relevant, cross-channel, and cross-device. Using the full power of customer data to drive meaningful experiences and deliver holistic, in context email marketing programs isn’t just smart—it’s expected.

You can learn more about best practices in email marketing in our latest email excellency report, “The Art of the Click”

The post The Art of the Click: Actionable Insight for Email-Marketing Success appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/email/email-on-acid-actionable-insight-for-email-marketing-success/

Don’t Be Guilty by Association: Seven Ways to Maintain Brand Safety

Once upon a time, digital advertisers had to approach publishers directly to place their ads on websites. It wasn’t cost-effective, and it definitely wasn’t a very scalable way to operate, as marketers had to piece together each advertising campaign by individually contracting with hundreds of individual websites and publishers. However, on the up side, it gave advertisers control over where their ads were being placed.

Then, ad networks emerged as middlemen, offering a way to reach audiences across many publishers. But, ad networks are not necessarily transparent about their fees, margins, and inventory, and they lack efficient controls (like frequency-capping or budget-management) across multiple exchanges.

Now, over the last few years, the programmatic — or automated — purchase of display ads has been on the rise. This year alone, more than two-thirds of all digital display content will be purchased programmatically. Advertisers can now access multiple inventory sources and ad exchanges through a single unified platform (called a demand-side platform, or DSP). An auction is held to serve an ad to a particular visitor, and the price can be determined in real time. Further, with DSPs like Adobe Media Optimizer (AMO), there is transparency in the margins the advertiser is paying, which was never the case with the cloudier ad-network buys.

But, with all these advantages, there has also been a rise in concern regarding where ads are appearing.

• Is the publishing site agreeable with the advertiser’s brand?
• Is the content on the specific page where the ad will appear consistent with the messaging of the ad, or will the ad/brand perhaps appear insensitive given the content on the page?
• Are there any legal issues that may arise when advertising certain products and/or services with regulatory restrictions adjacent to certain types of content?

The Importance of Brand Safety
Countering risks such as these is what we refer to as brand safety. For instance, a reputable news site may be an ideal advertising destination to place an ad for a truck manufacturer — except if the ad were to be placed on a page reporting an attack in which suspects used a truck to carry out the tragedy. Another example of poor ad placement is an airline advertisement being displayed on a page covering news of a recent flight disaster. Brands also may not want to show their ads on pages that contain pirated content. In some countries, ads for products like cigarettes and alcohol are banned from sites that children may frequent.

Failing to pay attention to where your ad is appearing, as well as the resulting audience sentiment, can make even the most reputable brands appear insensitive and expose them to both legal and social scrutiny.

According to the Integral Ad Science’s (IAS) H1 2016 Media Quality Report, brand-safety risk within programmatic advertising is 62 percent greater than publisher-direct ad buys. In a world where people are growing progressively more aware of brands’ images — and are more likely to support the companies they perceive as being ethical and fair at all levels of their product’s life — it makes sense for advertisers to become familiar with ways in which they can preserve their brand safety in the world of automated digital-ad buying.

Seven Ways to Ensure Brand Safety
Below are some tips that advertisers can use to counter brand-safety risk. The first two are basic steps that any responsible advertiser should take, but they deserve mentioning, nevertheless.

1. Partner Responsibly.
It is important for an advertiser to partner with a reputable DSP that is either certified in brand safety or has partnered with a certified vendor. Among other things, this will allow only a filtered inventory of sites to be made available for bidding, and thus, reduce brand risk.

2. Know Your Audience.
Most advertisers know the age, gender, and location of their target audience. Layering on more targeting — for instance, education level, memberships, or family size — may decrease your audience size but will give you access to the right people in the right environment or domains. This especially works for advertisers that are focusing on more than just impressions.

3. Use Pre-Bid Decisioning. (Highly Recommended)
Often, brand-safety analysis is done in hindsight, as many companies rely on post-bid reporting to show where ads were placed. However, if inappropriate content is discovered, it’s often too late to protect the brand’s reputation.

By contrast, DSPs like Adobe Media Optimizer have partnered with IAS to do pre-bid decisioning before ads are placed. Pre-bid decisioning involves thorough evaluations of webpages on multiple variables, including URL analysis, semantics analysis, images, inbound/outbound links, and metadata analysis. Each of the areas can be further customized with keyword blocking, geo-compliance, and custom site lists. Pre-bid decisioning is a preferred strategy for brand safety because most sites can be assessed both thoroughly and quickly before any advertising appears.

4. Run Your Domain Report Post-Bid.
If advertisers lack access to a sophisticated DSP that provides pre-bid decisioning to prevent ads from being placed on questionable websites, they can at least run their domain report after-the-fact to determine what sites received the impression. Though this obviously won’t prevent ads from being published on offensive websites initially, it does allow advertisers to exclude offending sites from future ad buys.

5. Eliminate Harmful Websites by Category.
Sites on the Internet are filtered into categories based on their content, and these category names are then made available to advertisers to include or exclude. Generally, the following entire-site categories that tend to be eliminated as harmful are adult-themed, alcohol, adware/malware, hate speech, illegal downloads/pirated content, illegal drugs, offensive language, and violence. Of course, these are just the most common categories that brands should consider — each brand is different, and there is no right or wrong answer. Each brand will need to weigh the opportunity presented by the audience it can reach with the impact of the content it associates with.

6. Create Keyword Lists.
Keyword lists can help identify content that may exist on sites in otherwise “safe” categories. They are also used to block content and geographies, as needed, in an advertising campaign. To build upon an earlier example, an airline may want to include keyword terms related to flight disasters that may be reported on news sites or blogs to avoid showing ads on those specific pages.

7. Buy in Private Marketplaces.
A private marketplace is an invitation-only, real-time bidding (RTB) auction in which a publisher (or several) will invite a select number of buyers to bid on its inventory. The purchases are fully transparent, and the buyer knows exactly which site the ad will run on. There are some platforms (including Adobe Media Optimizer) that allow both programmatic and private marketplace buys via a single platform.

It is obvious that, although automated buying may increase brand risk in the short term, it is this very same automation that is now working to create scalable ways to maintain brand safety. With the right partnerships and correct proactive measures, advertisers can eliminate brand risk entirely.

Partnering With IAS: The Way Forward for Adobe
Adobe Media Optimizer is a leading DSP that has chosen to partner with Integral Ad Science (IAS), the industry’s recognized leader in brand protection, ad verification, and ad-viewability data. IAS is a global technology and data company that empowers the advertising industry to effectively influence consumers everywhere and on every device. IAS references its certification by the Media Rating Council (MRC) to validate their brand-safety technology. By partnering with IAS, Adobe ensures brand safety at the page level while remaining protected against fraud and several content risk categories.

The post Don’t Be Guilty by Association: Seven Ways to Maintain Brand Safety appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/dont-guilty-association-seven-ways-maintain-brand-safety/

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The Message is Maturity: Adobe Is a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Analytics

“Gartner analysts call digital marketing analytics the core of successful digital experience.” And having the right tool for the job — a differentiator that helps support customer journeys across multiple channels and devices — is everything. Leaders today are imploring their analytics teams to provide more robust, cross-channel insights to allow for better understandings of strategic objectives. And they’re looking for technology that can keep pace.

In the second-ever Magic Quadrant for Marketing Analytics, Gartner placed Adobe as the overall leader in the combined categories of ability to execute and completeness of vision. With comprehensive integration, advanced segmentation capabilities, and market-leading innovation, Adobe Analytics helps make complex data simple for delivering powerful marketing insight — and then, quickly turning that insight into action. More than being informed, Adobe Analytics provides seamless integration for immediate action across verticals, and the vision is now extending to customer intelligence. Here’s a look at the strength of Adobe Analytics — a best-in-class, cost-effective, practical solution for the retail, financial services, B2B, and travel and hospitality industries.

Retail: Providing Flexibility and Functionality for Critical Reporting and Insight Discovery
For online retailers, tying metrics to products is critical — so, shouldn’t reporting be as flexible as possible? Having the ability to view any report by product (and vice versa) is smart; but placing limits on this ability decreases analytics opportunities. Adobe Analytics makes it easy for online retailers to discover revenue-generating insights while helping customers find the products they need. Through robust product-category merchandising and product-finding methods, accurate pathing analysis, and advanced cross-sell reporting, retailers can better understand their customers and put the right products in the right places at the right times.

Financial Services: Measuring and Influencing Customer Journeys for a Competitive Edge
Advancing digital maturity across financial-services institutions means being able to not only see the full lifecycle of the account application process, but also understand which marketing campaigns led to approved applications so that promotional spend is targeted and optimized to customers with higher lifetime-value propensities. Adobe Analytics is the only tool that allows financial-services organizations to see the customer lifecycle and associated product affinities by customer groups, which helps optimize revenue via its industry-leading feature set and connects online behaviors to post-website revenues and profits. Additionally, Adobe Analytics enables users to study cohorts’ share-of-wallet trends from different time periods to indicate whether website and app promotions are growing or declining with regard to relevancy, so that you can work toward increasing product adoption.

Business to Business (B2B): Connecting Highly Complex Customer Journeys
B2B and tech companies achieve digital success by associating all metrics with customer engagement over time. The customer journey typically involves an entire buying team and is highly complex — never linear and rarely contained to just one channel — and analytical insights must be based on this reality. Adobe Analytics is the leading analytics vendor for discovering high-value audiences and creating segments to fuel customer-touching engagement activities. Adobe Analytics customers can easily break down reports by any number of variables, build and customize on the fly to streamline lead-generation activities, or discover hidden opportunities with anomaly detection and contribution analysis. Since most of the success for B2B companies takes place offline, Adobe Analytics can connect online leads to downstream sales and revenue, helping to optimize campaigns and prioritize customer outreach by sales team.

Travel and Hospitality: Maximizing Customer Experience Every Step of the Way
With an intense customer-experience focus, the travel and hospitality industry faces unique challenges. Maximizing capacity and upsells to reservations requires a clear understanding of key variables such as product-search merchandising, reservation reporting, advanced booking, cross-selling, cost and margin analysis, post-purchase analysis, and booking loyalty. It is critical that reservation reporting be as flexible as possible. The ability to create an unlimited number of persona-based segments, model them, and compare them via machine-learning innovations (such as Segment IQ) is unique to Adobe Analytics. Additionally, Adobe Analytics enables travel and hospitality companies to associate all their custom metrics with the reservation process and provides the ability to break down any report by reservation/product and vice versa. With Adobe Analytics, you can build or customize any report you want on the fly.

Future Plans: What Adobe Is Doing for Customer Intelligence
Adobe was one of the pioneers of web analytics and evolved the market from web to digital analytics to marketing analytics and is now focused on customer intelligence. The recently released Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Analytics 2016 confirms this legacy, positioning Adobe as a leader — in both execution and vision — with a comprehensive set of marketing tools for users of all skill levels. Paired with cross-channel enablement and advancements in our user interface, our dream of democratizing the power of data is coming true for our clients across many verticals.

The post The Message is Maturity: Adobe Is a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Analytics appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/the-message-is-maturity-adobe-is-a-leader-in-gartners-magic-quadrant-for-digital-marketing-analytics/

Four Reasons Smart Marketers Use Product-Feed Advertising on Social

Feed-based advertising on social media is attracting much attention nowadays and for good reason — it works. How do we know? For nearly 15 years, marketers have been relying on product display ads to boost advertising campaigns. With documented success in both search and display, isn’t it time to carry these results over to other marketing channels as well?

Social media has exploded in the past few years, but improved advertising is what’s really driving excitement for marketers. With sophisticated targeting capabilities, advanced analytics, and now, product ads — dynamic product ads on Facebook®, in particular — opportunities are available that weren’t possible just a few short years ago. Dynamic creative across social channels is a fairly new concept. But, if you’ve had success in the past with product-listing ads (PLA) in search or dynamic creative in display, now is the time to experiment.

Benefits of Product-Feed Advertising
Product-feed advertising on social may be your solution for delivering highly targeted, personalized ads to your audience in real time and at scale. Following are four advantages to consider with regard to product-feed advertising.

1. Boosts Ad-Performance Efficiencies
Reaching the right people with the right message isn’t always easy — and no one enjoys seeing ads they care nothing about. In truth, brands have work to do when it comes to improving ad relevancy and targeting. By automating much of the process, feed-based advertising creates efficiencies across the board, boosting ad performance in ways that truly move the needle.

How much efficiency can dynamic product ads drive? Here are the results from one US retailer that is using Adobe Media Optimizer to run Facebook’s dynamic product ads. The performance of dynamic product ads were compared to standard website custom-audience ads. You can see below how Facebook’s dynamic product ads significantly outperformed standard website custom-audience campaigns that were serving static ads. Improvements were observed across all key metrics:

• Lift in click-through rate (CTR): 75 percent;
• Reduction in cost per click (CPC): 78 percent;
• Reduction in cost per order (CPO): 60 percent; and
• Improvement in return on ad spend (ROAS): 23 percent.

2. Delivers Consistent Customer Experiences
If you’re serving product ads to your audience based on previous website behaviors, then it’s absolutely critical that the products you deliver in search and display as well as on Facebook are consistent. Consistency is important not only as consumers return to your website, but also in the ads they view on search or somewhere else altogether. As audiences move from device to device, feed-based advertising allows you to reach them with relevant products at the right time. In addition, since people are almost always logged in as themselves on social channels, you have access to a tremendous amount of personalized, authenticated data.

3. Streamlines the Creative Development Process
The purpose of programmatic feed advertising is to make things easier for marketers. As most of us know, it’s one thing to buy media and quite another to create it. Particularly with digital advertising, creative development can have a long lead time, and it’s easy to develop creative fatigue. Programmatic advertising addresses this issue by accelerating the development process. Because you’re assembling ads from the product feed itself — rather than relying on a creative agency or in-house team to put them together — you save time and money. Creative development can be costly, and feed-based advertising alleviates much of this expense.

4. Provides Ability to Scale
Think about the travel industry with hundreds — even thousands — of destinations to promote at one time, or a large retailer with hundreds of thousands of products to promote. Automation makes it easy to retarget users with relevant ads, reaching them with products they care about when it matters most. Feed-based advertising streamlines the process so that you can combine the right ad or destination with the data you have, effectively creating, managing, and optimizing social ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram at scale.

Bottom Line
Keeping your brand in front of potential buyers is key, and product-feed advertising on social is a smart, practical strategy that can be personalized and retargeted for maximum impact. If you’ve already enjoyed success in search or display, now is the time to experiment in social. Feed-based advertising can deliver consistent customer experiences across channels, accelerate the creative development process, and boost performance efficiencies across the board. With increased relevance, enhanced targeting, and customized experiences at scale, product-feed advertising on social just makes sense.

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/four-reasons-smart-marketers-use-product-feed-advertising-social/