If you’re not planning the right ad journeys by analysing the most appropriate ad metrics and customer touchpoints, your campaign is not optimized enough! Jason Wulfsohn, Co-Founder and COO of AUDIENCEX weighs in:

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Welcome to this martech chat Jason, tell us more about AUDIENCEX and its journey over the last few years and especially new (latest) innovations!

AUDIENCEX has grown to become the largest independent programmatic trading desk for performance marketers and agencies. We empower agencies and brands to effectively target and acquire customers throughout the entire purchase funnel, by offering them access to powerful enterprise technology to run accurate, targeted campaigns.

Our proprietary machine learning technology offers unbiased media recommendations across 22 DSPs, search and social platforms, helping to identify the ideal mix of channels and platforms to reach each campaign’s individual KPIs. We call this “Marketing to the Power of X”: combining the best people, process, and products to deliver outcomes that exceed our customers’ performance goals – exponentially, and without limits.

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We’d love to hear your thoughts on the current top trends on mobile advertising and in-app marketing and advertising; what are some ways in which you’ve seen this change over time?

Mobile media and attribution companies have had their hands full working to address the loss of Apple’s IDFA with the recent iOS 14.5 release and enforcement of their Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework. Adoption of Apple’s SKAdNetwork will help partners mitigate loss of tracking due to default user opt-outs, and developers and advertisers alike are looking forward to future iterations that will help support the ability to re-engage users that previously were accessible via IDFA. We should expect to see Apple further expand with support of attribution of web-to-app conversions as well.

We’ve seen more media budgets (from an inventory POV) and performance (driving lower CPAs)  across programmatic campaigns skew towards mobile web over desktop web. This presents a great opportunity as more users are browsing online via their mobile devices. For more mid-market clients, we are waiting to see creative catch up and take a mobile first approach. Most ad copy and imagery isn’t mobile optimized, nor are clients’ sites – so the user might be driven to a mobile web experience vs. desktop.

We have also seen performance app markets shift their budgets to mobile programmatic channels vs. ad networks. There’s a huge benefit from a buying and bidding perspective on a cost per impression model (CPM) vs. cost per install (CPI). This method offers a lot more data on how and where that impression is served, and this is giving marketers more insight on the user journey.  In-app advertising is still lagging behind mobile web but we are seeing more mid-market clients develop this into their strategy especially reaching out to mobile gamers and mobile shoppers.

What are some top best practices that you feel marketing teams need to follow to optimize ROI from advertising experiences today?

 We are all surrounded by more data than we can use, but it’s important to take time to dig into the marketing analytics you have. Which of your channels, tactics, or creatives are working best for your campaigns? Set aside time in your calendar every week to take a closer look at how each campaign is performing so you can continuously optimize and improve your performance.

Marketers need to focus on each touch point in the user journey from the customer, including ad size, landing URL load, length of form fill or conversion point. Every aspect of the user journey will affect the overall ROI. It’s also important to uncover more about your target audience and narrow down on high propensity groups who convert. This can be as simple as understanding the conversion rate between genders or ages.

Tell us your thoughts on the evolving and growing use of AI in mobile advertising and adtech today and how you feel this will influence the future of marketing and advertising?

Machine learning is key to help model ID-less audiences from signals across screens, which is growing in importance as third-party cookies are disappearing. AI is also helpful in terms of predicting when a user will convert.  There are great companies like Black Crow offering unique prediction scores that can tell us how a campaign will perform  2 – 3 days ahead of the time it takes a DSPs algorithm to optimize (usually 7 – 14 days). They also can tell you in real time which audiences to skew your budgets towards and which are considered as waste.

A few of the core marketing technologies that you feel marketing teams should not be doing without, today, in the B2B and tech marketplace?

Programmatic trading desks are an important part of digital campaigns across display, CTV, video, mobile, native, and audio channels. Because they are connected to multiple DSPs and other platforms, the technology offers unbiased recommendations on which platform and channel will provide the best performance and results for each campaign. Rather than committing to one particular DSP, working with a trading desk takes out the guesswork of which one to choose, while also offering more flexibility, and ultimately better performing campaigns.

In regard to B2B, it’s very important for marketers to have a strong analytics partner to help them uncover nuances within their own data. Working closely with a DMP or CDP to scale campaigns or to market to a certain first-party audience will be key for B2B marketing in the future.Ensuring that all CRM data can be translated into compliant data used in performance marketing will be especially important for remarketing efforts.

Your quick-predictions for the future of martech and adtech?

We expect for user privacy and regulation to continue to be a moving target and fragmenting the ecosystem throughout the process. The time is right to help reinvent our approaches and aX is ever-evolving to help marketers navigate industry changes; we will continue to enhance our technology to drive sustainable solutions and help refresh the focus toward building trusted, meaningful connections with brand customers.

We’ll see more value exchange partners come into play or ways in which to incentive users to share their data for remarketing. We may also see an expansion or loyalty and reward programs from non-retail clients. We may also see a shift towards more traditional efforts where creative and placement come before audience and data.

Parting thoughts for marketing leaders and CMOs / CEOs in 2021 before we wrap up!

The biggest thing on every marketer’s mind this year is the deprecation of third-party cookies, with Google’s plans to end third-party cookies in early 2022. As marketers build out their media plans for the remainder of the year, the focus will be on gathering as much first-party data as possible, as well as keeping an eye on other announcements and industry moves in support of data privacy.

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