Category: Agency & Digital News

Google Analytics Best Practices Event

On the 29^th of June, we hosted our first in-house event, Google Analytics Best Practices, led by our Head of Data Analytics, Ben Johnston.

We welcomed our clients, partners and digital marketing professionals for a morning event, breakfast and networking session.

During the event, we covered Google Analytics basics, view filtering, goal tracking, event tracking, the difference between goal tracking & event tracking, common issues and measurement planning.

If you have missed this event, check out the presentation below.

Google Analytics Best Practices

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Client’s Recognition

We are thrilled to announce that our clients Tiffany Rose and TOWER London were recognised in 2018 for their excellent work.

Tiffany Rose has been awarded for the second time The Queen's Award for International Trade 2018. The Queen’s Awards for Enterprise are awarded to businesses for outstanding achievement in four categories International Trade, Innovation, Sustainable Development and also for Promoting Opportunity, to recognise businesses who promote social mobility.

“We want to thank you, all of our lovely customers and incredible partners that we work with, as none of this would be possible without your incredible support.”
Tiffany Rose

We are also proud to announce that our client TOWER London has been awarded Independent Footwear Retailer of the Year for a third time at Drapers Footwear Awards 2018, the most highly-respected industry awards aimed at recognising the top performing businesses. As the only footwear focused fashion retail event the Drapers Footwear Awards recognise and celebrate the very best in the industry.

“The whole team wanted to say a massive thank you for your continued support and partnership”. TOWER London

Congratulations Tiffany Rose and TOWER London for the achievements.

Bell Digital & Quantcast Partnership

The Partnership

One of the hallmarks of Bell Digital is our algorithmic attribution software, which allows us to monitor activity and conversions across all of the digital channels. In order to bring even more capabilities to this platform and to display advertising measurement specifically, Bell Digital has partnered with Quantcast, a real-time bidding and audience measurement specialist. Together, they integrated Split Funnel Insights into the current reporting platform, providing marketers with a better way to evaluate display campaign specificities and performance.

Split Funnel Insights

“Split Funnel” is a methodology that allows advertising campaigns to be analyzed across different stages of the conversion funnel, and can be applied to any display advertising provider. “Splitting” the conversion funnel means dividing it into two spaces: prospecting and retargeting. Prospecting refers to any impressions shown to a user before they first visit a site, while retargeting refers to any impressions shown after the first visit occurs. This method allows Bell Digital to assess whether a banner view is prospecting or retargeting, which in turn helps to ensure that display advertisers are respecting the terms of the contract signed with clients (especially if the agreement is to focus on prospecting or retargeting only).

Banner advertising is a particularly difficult channel to measure the performance of since the branding impact needs to be taken into account. It is therefore important to measure not only clicks on display banners, but we also need to measure the view through impact (the impact on an internet user of seeing a banner ad, even if no click ensues). With the Split funnel implementation, Bell Digital is now in a position to offer both prospecting vs retargeting splits and view-through impact, which contributes to making it one of the most advanced multi-channel attribution softwares available on the market today.

We are excited about the valuable insights, knowledge, and increased understanding of user activity that will result from the integration of Split Funnel Insights.
For more details about Bell Digital’s SEM tool, our methodology, and our PPC expertise, follow us on twitter @BellMarketing or on LinkedIn.

Everyone Could Be Ironman

Who wouldn’t want Jarvis - the complete AI-based assistant Tony Stark (Ironman) uses in his home, lab and metal suit - to help them as they go about their business? Well, more and more of us are stepping into this brave new world with baby steps, beginning with assistants like Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana.

Voice Search Technology

The popularity of these voice search-driven technologies has exploded in the past few years. Voice search is still a relatively new development -- although the technology has existed for a while, voice-first devices were still being perfected and introduced in 2014. By the end of the year, just 3 years later, there are set to be over 30 million devices in circulation. This exponential rise in popularity illustrates the impact of voice search and voice-first devices, as well as users’ fascination with them.

Beyond this, voice search is integrated into computer operating systems - the latest versions from Microsoft and Apple have their respective voice guided assistants embedded in their UI. 72% of people, according to this survey by Fivesight Research, say they use Voice Assistants to supplement standard search engines.

Particularly now, with physical devices designed principally to be driven by hands-free assistants like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, voice search and voice commands are being used much more often than in the past. Rather than only being relied on to make calls or search the web, voice search is now being used to help with simple, day-to-day tasks. You can control your home’s heat, lighting, music and appliances with voice. They’re on board TV streaming boxes, gaming machines like XBox and the range is growing all the time. Because of this, voice devices are becoming a big part of many individuals’ everyday lives.

Voice Search and Advertising

Because these tools are still in their infancy, there are no advertising options yet. This is complicated by the fact that rather than directing users to web pages, voice-first devices can, in many cases, provide users with an answer directly. It may be worth noting, by the way, that only Google’s voice search/assistant has its web search features powered by Google. The others - Amazon (Alexa), Siri and Cortana - are powered by Bing search.

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, recently wrote on their blog that the Google Assistant and subsequent Google Home were the result of advances in artificial intelligence, specifically in areas like natural language processing and voice recognition/translation. These developments allow users to interact with voice search devices more naturally, because “the assistant is conversational—an ongoing two-way dialogue between you and Google that understands your world and helps you get things done.”

Rather than focusing solely on providing information, the Google assistant and similar devices operate with the goal of helping users with everyday tasks like playing music, making reservations, checking movie times or sports scores, getting directions or making calls. The unique way that users interact with this new technology is what makes voice search a new frontier, particularly in the realms of advertising and paid search.

The Future of Voice Search

None of the major players have commented on if and when they will present options to market to users. Amazon has a model for now of using Alexa to make ordering from Amazon easier (and more likely), but for the others, beyond simply selling dedicated hardware and adding value to existing hardware and software, there are no obvious ongoing returns they can utilise if they don’t eventually embrace advertising in some form.

Currently, there are potentially “second hand” benefits of the likes of Google’s Assistant in that they can plug into apps businesses provide to book or order from them. But often, this is not an open plain for any business who wants to do it - although Alexa is leaning more open source than the rest. Right now, such plug-ins are anything but easy and intuitive and a better way needs to be worked out so that the boundaries of these voice assistants are not so apparent as they are now.

Because these devices are still so new, their rapid rise in prevalence raises many questions: Who is using voice search, and why? What opportunities will there be for advertisers to respond to voice search? How may it change the search industry? What could be the future developments? When will I be able to order a flying metal exo-skin armed to the teeth and giving me superhuman strength?

While it is difficult to predict exactly how voice search will continue to grow, it is clear that it will eventually have a huge impact on the search field in the next couple of years. With richer, more customised results, voice search and voice assistants have the potential to revolutionise both how people use search technology and how advertisers and businesses can link up with them to serve their needs. There may be a longer wait for the metal suit, though.

For updates on how advertisers are responding to voice search, tweet us or follow us on LinkedIn.

Fraud: The Hidden Face of Digital Advertising

After drugs, fraud in digital advertising is one of the most lucrative illegal activities in the world.

When talking about digital fraud, the reaction is often to think about hackers and computer security issues. However, there is a lesser known digital fraud, but its financial impact is far greater: fraud in the field of digital advertising. The World Federation of Advertisers estimates that the impact could be up to 30 to 40 percent of global digital media investment in 2025, an amount that could amount to $ 150 billion.

Fraud in digital advertising is divided into five main themes:

The false traffic. Robots accounted for 6% to 9% of impressions recorded in 2015. (2)
The biased returns. Some publishers manipulate the format of ads to increase their returns, for example by forcing users to click on an advertisement in exchange for participating in a lottery or other material benefit.
The visibility. More than 40% of advertisements invoiced and broadcast on the Internet are not actually seen by visitors, in particular because they are placed below the page break or because they are loaded after the user has already left the page.
Poor targeting. Certain target settings, based on socio-demographic criteria or personal interests (age, geography, sex, occupation, hobbies ...), do not correspond to the reality of the Internet users actually exposed to the advertising campaign.
The safety of brands. More than 10% of ads are placed on sites with violent or pornographic content which any mainstream advertiser would want to avoid.

In order to assess the extent of the fraud of which the advertiser is a potential victim, the latter has two coupled approaches to evaluate the quality of its digital investments:

A purely quantitative approach to analysing and cross-analysing data available in analytics and allocation tools, ad servers, advertising auction platforms, and programmatic purchasing management tools (DSP) to detect metrics that do not match the expected values.

A more qualitative approach to analysing the implementation process of campaigns by the advertiser and its agencies (briefing, reporting, choice of KPIs, objectives, targets, etc.) in order to contextualise and understand the analysed data.

After the analysis phase, it’s time for action recommendations. As an example, here are some typical actions:

Access and store data for ongoing storage and analysis.
Integrate technological tools to analyse the media mix and traffic, while being vigilant on the relationship between performance and cost.
Define processes within the advertiser (management team, marketing, digital) and the agency (brief, debrief, reporting).

For each proposed recommendation, it is important to evaluate the resources (internal or external, tools, processes, etc.) to be mobilised by analysing the relationship between full costs and impact in order to prioritise the actions to be carried out. It is important to emphasise that these actions will not eliminate fraud, which is an unattainable objective, but rather to limit fraud and limit its volume.

A biased promise

It is paradoxical to think that the share of fraud is larger in digital advertising than in traditional advertising, even though digital advertising promises total transparency of media investments: on the advertising used, on the site where it is published, on the target user (via cookies), whether he has been exposed to the advertisement in question (and in theory, on the price paid under the Sapin law), and on the conversion measure for each purchased advertisement. But in reality, it is the infinite granularity and the related complexity of the purchase of space on the Internet that opens possibilities to those who would like to defraud advertising on the Net. This granularity is the primary strength of advertising on the internet, which makes it difficult to control all the advertisements purchased and their compliance with the orders of the advertiser.

Control and measurement tools to limit fraud in digital advertising exist, but they alone will not suffice. Success depends on the cooperation of all players in the industry: advertisers, agencies, space vendors and technology solutions providers. It is important for the future of the Internet ecosystem and to preserve the confidence of the actors who trust it to take the subject of fraud in hand.

To learn more about how fraud in digital advertising might have an effect on your company, tweet us or follow us on LinkedIn.

2016 A Year In Review

As we begin making our way into 2017, it’s important to reflect on the year we’ve put behind us. 2016 was full of accomplishments for ESV Digital, leaving us feeling confident that the New Year will be full of success for both our company and the clients we serve. We’ve compiled our most memorable moments for our year in review below:

Growth

In 2016, ESV Digital experienced a worldwide growth in staff, including the hiring of new Account Managers and Mike Fury, our new CEO in the U.S. Mike has over 16 years of experience with both startups and mature enterprises in the Internet advertising / SaaS space. Having held executive leadership positions at Advertising.com, AOL, Compare Networks, Nextag, and ShopSocially.com, we are confident in his ability to lead ESV Digital’s U.S team into the new year.

Multichannel Platform Update

This summer, ESV Digital launched an updated version of our platform: Version 7.1. This updated version includes a complete redesign to make it more user friendly, as well as new technologies for improving the day-to-day of both our ESV Digital Account Managers and Self-Service clients.

Extended Text Ads

At the Google Performance Summit in June, Google announced the introduction of Extended Text Ads, and ESV Digital was able to offer these ads to our clients in the beta testing period.

We look forward to many successes and updates in the year to come, and we wish you and yours a happy New Year from everyone at ESV Digital.

Bell Digital Platform 7.1 Update

Bell Digital is proud to announce the new and updated version of our in-house platform 7.1. This tool is used by both Bell Digital Account Managers and Self-Service clients. We have added many new features that will help our clients achieve their marketing goals, combining new technologies with an easy-to-use platform.

The update includes the following changes:

UI Redesign: We’ve redesigned the platform in order to improve your efficiency and productivity when using it.

Automatic Bidding Strategies Enhancements: More layers of artificial intelligence have been built into the automated bidding strategies, which will make the setup of these much faster and more accurate right down to each keyword’s match type.

Google Callout Extensions: We’ve introduced the support of Google Callout Extensions management within the interface or via the COL. You can now enrich your ads in order to draw attention to unique services, important product details, and benefits.

Reporting Enhancements: The way to create reports has been revamped so as to be quicker and more efficient. Standard reports have been refreshed to make report generation take fewer steps. New stats have been introduced like Bounce Rate or Volume Change between date periods.

Weekday Budget Management: Campaign daily budget can now be defined depending on the day of the week. This way, you can easily and quickly pre-design your daily budget to cover your usual weekly activity peaks and troughs and cater your spend based on performance too.

Estimated Monthly Spend: Every day an estimation of the monthly spend is calculated to give you a vision of the potential monthly spend for each campaign. The platform uses the data specific to each weekday to ensure the intra-week patterns are taken into account when estimating spend for the rest of the month.

Performance Improvements: Mass update, data feed (e.g. for Shopping campaigns) and data loading speeds are enhanced by over 50%.

If you would like to discuss how we can marry our expertise and management methodology with this powerful platform to drive your digital advertising campaigns, tweet at us @BellDigitalMkt or follow us on LinkedIn.

Verizon Buys Yahoo

As if Microsoft purchasing Linkedin wasn’t enough excitement already, there’s a new deal this week that is bound to have an effect on digital advertising. Verizon, the largest wireless carrier, has purchased Yahoo for $4.8 billion in cash. This includes all of Yahoo’s most valuable assets, like mail, news, sports, and most importantly, advertising. They plan to unite the company with AOL, who they recently acquired for $10 billion. By bringing the two companies together, Verizon hopes to break into the digital advertising industry and likely become ad giant #3 behind Google and Bing.

What does this mean for marketers?

It’s too early to know exactly how this will pan out for Verizon, but what we do know is that they have millions of customers, and, in marrying this to AOL and Yahoo signed in users, they’ll know what those customers are doing. Whether or not they will actually be allowed to combine their customer tracking with Yahoo’s is still in question.

They do, however, have the resources for success. With Verizon’s 112 million retail subscribers, mobile advertisements are an extremely profitable option for them. Additionally, Yahoo includes Gemini and BrightRoll: two tech advertising assets that focus on video and mobile advertising. Verizon will also have access to 600 million mobile users on Yahoo’s many online sites. This audience plus the advertising technology plus an extensive data set about so many users them could result in significant mobile advertising growth for Verizon as a revenue source, and a competitive edge against companies like Google and Bing.

Ultimately, how this will drive competition depends on the strategy Verizon will use, and the scope they will have on user data.

The finalization of the whole purchase is unlikely to happen before 2017 but it will be something we will, of course, be keeping a close eye on.

Let us know what you think this will mean for the future of mobile advertising by tweeting us or following us on LinkedIn.

Apple Store Ad Launch

For companies with apps looking to use it as a sales channel, it’s a nightmare to work on that application only to have it disappear into the app store without a download. Recently, Apple announced that they will be including sponsored search results within the app store starting this fall (one per search), which will allow companies to advertise their apps to people that search for them.

Although these search ads have not launched yet, marketers are being encouraged to join the search ads beta now.

Here’s what we know about the platform so far:

It’s not going to have as many targeting and control capabilities as Google and Facebook
Apple plans to open up a dedicated auction-based platform (via API), which will allow for campaign creation, management, and reporting. As a result, this should give advertisers good control over the entire process of running an ad within the store.
The platform will include a Search Match Feature (which is similar to Google Adwords Universal App Campaigns), which will make it easy for advertisers who are new or pressed for time to create simple campaigns quickly.
Apple will limit creative use to what is already approved within the app store, preventing advertisers from using custom creative ad processes.
Apple is holding onto their data for the meantime, meaning they may not allow advertisers to track individual users.
There will be no minimum bid, meaning large app developers can’t buy out terms. The ads shown will instead be based on relevance.
You can use someone else’s brand in your keywords, which Apple hopes will help smaller developers sell apps that are related to other brands.

There are many details still to understand – what does to take to get the ad shown by way of some form of Quality Score-esque relevance and bid formula or something else? How quickly with the targeting options evolve (by leveraging Apple’s user knowledge, since 100% of users are logged in)?

In addition, advertisers will need some sort of keyword choosing tool to understand what searches are being made and at what volumes so they don’t waste their time building lists based on guesstimates.

Still, the undeniable outcome is that advertisers and developers can now actively promote their applications on both Apple and Android. We’ll see as they roll out how successful this is for advertisers in marketing their apps.

If you would like to hear more about how Apple Search Ads might fit into your marketing strategy, tweet us or follow us on LinkedIn.