Pinterest Adds More Third-Party Measurement & Data To Ad Platform

What Happened
Pinterest is beefing up its Marketing Partners program, which the company launched last year, by integrating with several more third-party measurement and data companies. With the addition of measurement companies like Adjust, AppsFlyer, Apsalar, Kochava, and Tune, advertisers can now use these third-party tools to track the reach and impact their campaigns on Pinterest.

On the marketing data side, Pinterest is adding companies including Epsilon, Experian, Salesforce’s Krux, Acxiom’s LiveRamp, and Neustar to help advertisers apply their own data, such as a list of customer emails, to targeted ads on Pinterest. The social scrapbooking site introduced email-matching targeting to its ad product in June.

What Brands Should Do
Pinterest has long enjoyed its reputation among social networks as a “Sales Conversion Powerhouse.” A recent study by Oracle Data Cloud showed that Promoted Pins drive 5x more incremental in-store sales compared to campaigns on other platforms. As Pinterest continues to build out its ad products and make its platform more brand-friendly, advertisers now have more options to reach their desired audiences and keep track of their campaign progress. Brands with an overlap between their target audiences and Pinterest users should take advantage of the integrated third-party tools to improve their campaigns.

 


Source: Marketing Land

LinkedIn Adds Conversion Tracking To Display Ads

What Happened
LinkedIn has added conversion tracking to its Sponsored Content and Text Ads. With this new feature, LinkedIn advertisers can now measure how many leads, sign-ups, and purchases are generated from specific ad units and campaigns. Marketers simply need to add a piece of code called LinkedIn Insight Tag to their websites to enable this tracking feature.

What Brands Need To Do
If your brand advertises or is considering buying ads on LinkedIn to reach its network of professionals, this addition should come as welcome news as it improves the attribution measurement of LinkedIn ads, granting marketers the ability to judge their campaign performance and adjust campaign budgets accordingly.

 


Source: AdWeek

Facebook Offers Advanced Metrics For Live And 360-Degree Videos

What Happened
Facebook has added some advanced metrics for video creators, aiming to help them better understand who their audience is and what they are interested in. Among the new metrics are demographic information for viewers of all videos, a breakdown of the most engaging moments in Live videos based on viewer activity, and a heat map of where viewers are paying attention while they watch 360-degree videos.

What Brands Need To Do
Facebook has been making a strong push for its video products in the past few years in pursuit of user attention and video ad spending. For example, earlier this week, the social network added support for Apple’s AirPlay and Google Chromecast on its mobile app to allow users to stream in-feed videos and Live videos to their TVs. These new video metrics should come as welcome additions for brands publishing videos and hosting live events on Facebook, allowing them to delve into viewer behavior to gain insights that could help guide future video production.  

 


Source: TechCrunch

Snapchat Partners With Oracle To Track Offline Attribution

What Happened
Right on the heels of introducing its ad API, Snapchat announced on Wednesday a new partnership with Oracle to use its Data Cloud service to measure how its ads impact offline sales. As part of the partnership, Oracle analyzed twelve Snapchat campaigns for CPG brands, concluding that 92% of the ad campaigns increased in-store sales, although Snapchat did not say by how much.

Lately, Snapchat has been on a tear, partnering with third-party analytics firms such as Nielsen, comScore, Moat, and DoubleClick to improve its ad products, with Oracle being the tenth measurement partner it has added in the last 12 months. Last week, Oracle also announced a similar deal with Pinterest to help it measure offline attribution of its Promoted Pins.

What Brands Need To Do
This partnership should bring more accountability to Snapchat ads, enabling CPG brands to effectively measure the real-world impact of their Snapchat campaigns. As Snapchat strives to shed some light on its ad performance, brands looking to reach the app’s young-skewing users will have more data at their disposal which they can utilize to adjust their Snapchat campaigns and inform future ones.

 


Source: Bloomberg

Google Offers A Free Version Of Its Visualization Tool Data Studio 360

What Happened
Google has released a free version of its reporting and data visualization tool, Google Data Studio 360, for U.S. users. The free version, simply dubbed Google Data Studio, allows users to create up to five reports to visualize data from AdWords, Google Analytics, YouTube, BigQuery, Attribution 360, and Google Sheets for comprehensive reporting. You can access the new product at datastudio.google.com.

What Brands Need To Do
This new tool should give marketers and local businesses a useful tool to track their site traffic or measure their ad campaigns on Google properties. If they find the data visualization helpful for gaining audience insights or measuring campaign performance, they may even consider paying for the Google Data Studio 360 to access the advanced features.

 


Source: Marketing Land

Pinterest Taps Millward Brown to Offer Brands Advanced Measurements

What Happened
Pinterest announced on Monday that it will soon provide its U.S. advertisers with advanced measurements to show how their Promoted Pin campaigns are performing beyond standard metrics such as number of impressions or re-pins. By working with market research firm Millward Brown Digital, Pinterest will start telling brands how their ad campaigns are doing in terms of lifting brand awareness, brand affinity, and even purchase intent.

In related news, the social scrapbooking service also announced that it is once again broadening its ad sales focus to cover brands in financial services, travel, and other verticals. The news came about 5 months after the company decided to narrow its ad efforts to only retailers and CPG brands last December.

Why Brands Should Care
According to a study by Millward Brown in partnership with Pinterest, 83% of active Pinterest users have purchased a product because of something they saw on the site. With the advanced measurements, brands advertising on Pinterest can now better understand which part of their campaign is driving conversion and brand lift to adjust their campaign efforts and use the insights to inform their future campaigns. The expanded ad sales focus should also come as good news for brands, as they can now receive some hands-on support from Pinterest’s ad team.

 


Source: AdAge & WSJ

Tubular Labs Introduces Measurements For Branded Video

What Happened
Digital video analytics firm Tubular Labs wants to set the standard for branded video with the launch of its Tubular Video Ratings. The metrics are designed to be what Nielsen ratings are to TV ads for the online videos that brands create with publishers and social influencers. One of the metrics, for example, is the “ER30,” which stands for “engagement rate of a video during its first 30 days.” The metrics are calculated based on the data Tubular collects from Facebook, YouTube, and other video platforms, specifically engagement data points such as Likes, comments, and shares.

What Brands Need To Do
As more and more consumers start to use ad-blockers and opt for the ad-free experiences provided by SVOD services such as Netflix, more and more brands are turning to branded or sponsored video to reach their audiences on social and digital channels. However, the lack of a measurement standard in digital video is making it difficult for brand advertisers, especially those transitioning to digital from traditional media, to effectively plan and evaluate their branded video efforts. It remains to be seen whether the industry will embrace the Tubular Video Ratings, but it can at least be a point of reference for brands venturing into branded content.

For more information on how brands should leverage interesting branded content to earn consumer eyeballs, check out the Ad Avoidance section of our Outlook 2016.

 


Source: Wall Street Journal

Facebook Partners With Three Third-Party Firms To Improve Its Ad Metrics

What Happened
Facebook is expanding its third-party verification program to incorporate ad metrics from Nielsen, comScore, and Integral Ad Science into its ad platform to improve Its ad measurement and viewability transparency. Now brands advertising on Facebook can choose from these well-known audience measurement firms when they want an outside perspective to measure the effectiveness of ads on the social network. The integration of Nielsen metrics, for example, will allow brand marketers to buy video ads on Facebook similarly to the way they buy traditional TV ads and use Nielsen’s day-parting and DMA targeting tools,

What Brands Need To Do
This move from Facebook echoes with Snapchat’s decisions earlier this year to partner with Nielsen and comScore to improve its ad measurement and appeal to brand advertisers. As the social and messaging platforms continue to improve their video ad products, making it easier for advertisers to transition from buying TV ads to video ads on digital channels, brands should also consider reevaluating their media mix and reallocating the video ad spending accordingly.

 


Source: AdWeek

ComScore To Measure Snapchat Discover Traffic

What Happened
Following its deal with Nielsen to provide brand advertisers with some transparency on how many times their ads are shown, Snapchat is now reportedly teaming up with online measurement firm comScore to bring traffic measurement to the Discover channels, Snapchat’s content portals for publisher partners. By introducing a respected third-party like comScore, Snapchat can offer advertisers a clear idea of how many views each of the Discover channels receives. Last October, Snapchat started allowing brands to sponsor non-permanent Discover channels to showcase their branded content, and on Monday, Burberry became the first luxury brand to get its own Discover channel.

What Brands Need To Do
This partnership should bring more transparency to Snapchat ads, enabling brand advertisers to choose which Discover channels to advertise in. It also puts pressure on publishers to improve their content quality and compete to attract more traffic to their Discover channels, which would in turn bring in more eyeballs for brand advertisers. As Snapchat offers more clarity on its ad performance, brands looking to reach the app’s young-skewing users will have more data to adjust their Snapchat campaigns with accordingly.


Source: Digiday

Google Sharpens Its Ad Tools With New Analytics 360 Suite

What Happened
Google has stepped up its ad measurement game with the launch of Analytics 360 Suite, a set of data and analytics products to help brand marketers better engage consumers during “micro-moments,” i.e. the brief moments when customers are actively searching for a solution and are most open to brand messages. The suite consists of six ad products, including a data management platform, a testing and optimization tool, and a visualization product for generating reports and building dashboards, all designed to provide actionable insights on how to reach customers in those small windows of engagement.

What Brands Need To Do
While this new enterprise-facing suite does not come with any ground-breaking features, it should be a helpful tool for brands to monitor purchase intent and sharpen their ad focus on a solidified ad platform. For brands looking to connect with today’s easily distracted consumers in “moments that matter,” this new suite should be worth a try.

 


Source: Marketing Land