Ad tech vendors offer new capabilities for customer targeting

The rising need to target consumers across devices and channels is putting pressure on marketers to deliver advertising more efficiently and effectively. This week, a number of ad tech vendors announced plans promising to do just that, offering new tech features and partnerships aimed at helping improve visibility, data insights, and uniting desktop clicks and conversions with mobile activity.

Tackling big data for brand ad targeting

In order to leverage the data minefield and empower advertisers, data management company, Eyeota, has partnered with Lotame, a data management platform (DMP), to provide targeted data segments to brand advertisers across the Asia-Pacific region.

Lotame claims to help marketers and publishers drive more revenue, efficiency and engagement through audience data. The partnership will give its clients access to Eyeota’s premium data via its DMP to supplement their own first-party data.

With more in-depth data, clients can gain further insights on customer behaviour, Lotame said in a statement, better targeting the exact user with the right ad at the right time.

"Having Eyeota’s third-party data available within Lotame’s DMP gives our customers all around the world a distinct advantage over their competitors,” claimed Lotame APAC MD, Mat Ward. “Customers can now combine these rich new data sets with their own first-party data to gain deeper insights into their most valuable audiences. They can then use those insights to underpin smarter and more scalable advertising and monetisation strategies.”

The agreement will apply globally and be available to Lotame customers in Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Lotame’s branded data is gathered from partners such as Roy Morgan Research.

“With further insights gathered from high quality data, advertisers will be empowered as they understand their customers as human beings,” Eyeota CEO, Kevin Tan, said.

Improving customer experiences across multiple devices

According to the recent Forrester State Of Retailing Online 2014 Marketing report, nearly two-thirds of online retailers are not using comprehensive attribution models and relying on imperfect single-touch-point measurement tactics.

Cross-device tech company, Drawbridge, and marketing software leader, Kenshoo, have struck a new partnership which they claim will help marketers better tie desktop clicks and conversions to mobile activity without relying on consumer login data.

The alliance leverages the Drawbridge Connected Consumer GraphTM, which includes over 1.2 billion consumers connected across more than 3.6 billion devices. When activated through the Kenshoo Infinity Suite, marketers can make decisions and optimise campaigns based on a full understanding of customer lifetime value and path to conversion across desktop and mobile.

“With device fragmentation increasing among consumers, marketers have difficulty measuring how advertising impacts the behaviour of their customers across devices,” Drawbridge VP of product management and partnerships, Rahul Bafna, said. “Since those journeys often start with a mobile search query and end on tablets and desktops, it’s critical for marketers to use a solution that can understand the consumer across devices.”

The Drawbridge Connected Consumer Graph was recently found by Nielsen to be up to 97.3 per cent accurate in connecting consumers across devices. Together, the combined platforms claim to enable advertisers to understand the interplay of search, social, mobile, and display ads while optimising cross-device investments.

Kenshoo SVP of product, Will Martin-Gill, said as many as 50 per cent of clicks on ads come from smartphones and tablets, yet consumers also switch to laptops and desktops to complete transactions, resulting in gaps in attribution.

“Our goal is to empower marketers with technology,” he said. “Kenshoo’s agile marketing software with Drawbridge’s leading cross-device identity solution enables marketers to optimise campaigns based on a clearer picture of the consumer purchase journey"

Smart algorithm aims to increase ad viewability and CTR

With the vast volumes of digital content consumers are exposed to everyday, it is getting harder and harder for advertisers to be heard and seen from the crowd. A 2014 report produced by Google revealed 56.1 per cent of served ads are never seen.

In its latest bid to tackle ad visibility, AdRoll has deployed a new version of bidding algorithm, BidIQTM, across all of its advertisers’ campaigns. The latest version, code-named ‘Beethoven’, uses proprietary machine learning technology to factor in attributes such as viewability and predicted impression-level ROI to drive increased performance.

In development since 2014, AdRoll claims Beethoven has driven a 37 per cent increase in ad viewability, while platform click-through-rates (CTR) increased 46 per cent over the same time period.

“AdRoll has always been dedicated to building the best products and helping our customers navigate the complex ad ecosystem,” said AdRoll CTO, Valentino Volonghi. “With our scale, AdRoll is in a unique position to leverage data from a wide variety of sources to get breakthrough results for our customers. We are continuously testing and updating BidIQ and Beethoven is the latest result of that focus.”

AdRoll claimed the BidIQ Beethoven release improves predictive elements to automatically optimise bids and win impressions that are more likely to convert.

With more than 20 petabytes of uncompressed data ingested by AdRoll each year, BidIQ analyses thousands of granular exchange and user-level features in real time. The algorithm combines these into millions of different signals which are used to determine the optimal bid amount for each impression on an advertiser by advertiser basis.

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