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Kochava, a company that provides real-time data solutions for multi-channel measurement and attribution, has acquired Machine Advertising.
A London-based company, Machine Advertising, has developed app marketing technology that still works in a post-IDFA world. Apple stopped using Identifiers for Advertisers (IDFA) in 2021 to emphasize user privacy over targeted advertising. When this happened, it became more difficult for advertising companies to determine the effectiveness of a particular marketing campaign because they could no longer rely on individual user data.
As a result of this change, Machine Advertising has become one of the companies that has focused on "steps", that is, the use of new types of experiences as one of the tools to calculate the impact of marketing campaigns. , said Charles Manning, CEO of Kochava, in an interview with GamesBeat. Growth is a tool that can measure attribute or moving averages in a post-IDFA world.
"We have been working on this for a long time. It's another one of those tipping points where things are moving and an indication of how advertising is being evaluated and reviewed," Manning said. "We're opening our eyes to how the world is changing. I think it will be very valuable for marketers in the future Distribution replacement Not as, but as an addition.
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The acquisition of Machine Ads will allow Sandpoint, Idaho-based Cochava to enhance the company's measurement solutions with Machine's growing Continuous Measurement (AIM) products and expand its presence in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, he said.
Kochava has already worked with machine ads in search ads. That's how he got to know the company and appreciated the team's communication with Koçava.
"The machine's goal of providing continuous step-by-step measurement aligns perfectly with our goal of creating immediate value for our customers," Manning said. "As a customer-centric innovation-driven company, we're always looking for new cutting-edge solutions to add to our suite of solutions."
In recent years, there have been significant changes in how digital advertising performance is measured. Performance and direct response campaigns have traditionally been based on last-click attribution methods. But under the new privacy regime this can no longer happen so easily. (Indeed, the Federal Trade Commission is suing Kochava for alleged privacy violations with its metering solutions; Kochava has denied its allegations of data activity. It has also acquired other privacy-related companies in litigation ).
Apple's SKAdNetwork replacement, which others have called a weak candle in the dark, is based on this last-click attribute. It's a humble mobile ad measurement platform that protects user privacy and delivers results within 24 hours of ad serving. Eliminates the function of measuring the impact of advertising on third-party measurement companies. And the data it provides can be misleading.
Explain growth
This is where scalability comes into play. Based on my interview in March 2021, I learned that marketing is only effective when it is incremental. Traffic is the increase, regardless of target, that you receive from advertising that exceeds all other average spend and organic demand. Since some media spend cannibalizes organic growth or overlaps with other media, the true value of any given campaign is unclear because you can't see what complicates the ad spend picture.
With something like the SKAd Network, it's easy to fall into the trap of relying on the "last touch" which is the last ad seen within a certain period of time, before the user takes an action, such as downloading a game. For work. This isn't necessarily true if you don't measure things properly. The only way to get to the truth is to conduct a well-designed experiment.
"Finally, what's the difference between attribution and attribution, between last click attribution and attribution, no matter what stage the ad interaction is in the customer journey?" Manning said. “At the end of the day, it's important to keep spending with customers until the revenue drops based on lifetime value.
The key to a marketing experiment is that you need a control group. If you have two equal markets and stop spending on ads in one market, you can measure the cumulative effect by looking at the difference in downloads between the standard market and the one you didn't spend on.
As part of this experiment, imagine that a marketer is running a campaign in Germany and several other countries. The Finishing Touch Award provides Germany with about $1,000 in revenue for the seventh day of this campaign. In other words, the last ad measured in Germany generated about $1,000 seven days after the campaign started
The standard way to measure growth is to stop Germany's participation in this campaign and compare the reduction in German 7th World Day income to a parallel universe without a spending pause. This parallel universe is called control. Since we only have one universe, we have to create a clone or control Germany. How?
By using the model to combine many other countries into a weighted average, other companies create a synthetic control that exactly matches Germany's. The synthetic control, which is a weighted average of World Games Day 7 revenues in France, the UK and Italy, works quite well for Germany in the long run.
Since you can only see what happened in Germany after the break, you need a synthetic test to understand what would have happened in Germany if you hadn't taken a break.
If you stop spending in Germany but continue to spend in the other three countries, you will see a difference in lost installs. After the break, the difference between German and synthetic checks is actually $400 per day instead of $1,000. So this is the actual additional income on the 7th day. Based on an average ad spend of $4,000 per day, you might have thought the ROI on day 7 was 25% when it wasn't, it was actually only 25%. 10%. 7-day returns of $600 per day are lower than expected. That's over $200,000 a year.
Kočava's perspective on growth
Kochava said changes in the privacy landscape have led to the rise of walled gardens where clicks are unavailable to advertisers and last-click metrics cannot be used. For some platforms, such as iOS, there have been structural changes to rely on alternative platform-based measurement methods such as SKAdNetwork.
Privacy changes have also given way to incremental measurement, which is gaining increasing interest as an alternative to last-click attribution to improve media performance and can be used across all media interactions, regardless of privacy considerations.
Traditional growth measurement is a time-consuming process that provides results 30-60 days after the campaign starts. Measurement delays show the overall delay in optimizing your campaigns Today's marketers are used to making daily or hourly changes to campaigns to better manage their resources and get effective real-time results.
"After the removal of IDFA, the question always arises, how do I understand the effectiveness of my media? Manning said. “As an advertiser, but also as a publisher, how can I help my advertisers evaluate my media resources? So the premise is that there are actually several different approaches to model augmentation.
Manning says this new attribution model "fits both sides of the jacket based on this aggregate data over a period of time."
The problem is that advertisers still want to understand where their advertising dollars should be spent.
"If you don't have information about the actual device ID, what the lift is for a particular channel or a particular ad. You're only seeing a set of those devices and they're statistically accurate, but they can't be ultimately identified, so this is a key theme that first Plan pushes growth, Manning said.
For the past four years, Kochava has led a services company that has developed custom reporting add-ons for clients. It used to be a custom job that took 30 to 60 days, and now he wants to make it real-time so that businesses can make decisions on a daily or hourly basis.
"Machine ads have been very excited to work with us" on products like Apple Search Ad Performance, Manning said. “Our relationship really took off and we finally realized that they were creating exactly what we were looking for.
Machine Advertising employs about eight people, while Kochava employs 190.
In 2022, Kochava and Machine Advertising partnered to use Machine AIM products with step-by-step analytics from Kochava for the company's clients. The result is a product approach that provides a continuous additional dimension in the form of a rich visual for Cochava's advertisers. The AIM product is designed to work with Kochava and other measurement tool sets.
The Kochava AIM solution will work with other mobile meter partners. As a result, customers do not need to change their MMP as part of the gradual adoption of machine learning.
According to Manning, AIM is a marketing mix modeling tool that helps advertisers perform better by providing additional real-time information. With AIM, advertisers can understand the impact of factors such as channel saturation and seasonality. AIM then provides AI recommendations for optimal budget allocation. In these volatile economic times, AIM is an important return on advertising spend (ROAS) tool for CFOs anticipating a downturn.
"We are excited to partner with Kochava, a company that shares our commitment to innovation and customer-centric values," said Gary Danks, CEO of Machine Advertising. "Our products fit perfectly into Kochava's already impressive portfolio, offering unmatched mobile measurement products and delivering even greater success for our customers. Our team will support Kochava's plans to expand in the region of EMEA and becoming part of a larger organization furthers our vision." Let's take it to the next level and make a bigger impact on the industry
Manning said the iOS experience is very different since the IDFA change and will be similar to Google Play.
"The other shoe will drop on Android," he said. "Device ID is not something you can expect easily. The additional layer of data and analytics on top of incremental growth is a critical factor for marketers."
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