5 Paths to Better Insights For Your Ad Targeting and Performance Using Adobe Analytics and Advertising Cloud
The greatest strides in online advertising today are predicated on ingenuity, and to many, what seems to be data alchemy – but that is not the case. Connected advertising and marketing technologies that enable bidirectional data flow between them is now the price of entry for delivering consistent messages across digital touchpoints in a targeted way. In 2020 and beyond, anything that deviates from this approach will be chalked up as wasteful spend.
Consider how analytics and adtech work together to deliver powerful capabilities that can yield great results. For instance, many Adobe Experience Cloud clients are using Adobe Analytics as a central reporting platform for their paid media and are feeding signals into Adobe Advertising Cloud for media optimization. Working together, data analysts using Adobe Analytics and media practitioners using Advertising Cloud can get more out of both solutions to drive better advertising experiences and results.
We announced this capability at Summit 2019, and now we’re going to show you how you can make the most of the integration.
The starting point is Analysis Workspace, a flexible canvas for building custom analyses including measuring and gleaning insights from onsite data. By adding in data from Advertising Cloud DSP, you can shift how you report on your paid media programs.
Analytics can now peer deeper into page entry types to shed new light on how people find your website. It can connect view-throughs to all downstream site activity, just like a click-through. It can also pass metrics back to Advertising Cloud to be used in advanced algorithmic bidding models.
Below are five ways that Analytics for Advertising Cloud opens valuable new opportunities:
1. Update marketing channels with Advertising Cloud channels
With Adobe Analytics and Advertising Cloud integrated together you can now create marketing channel processing rules for a view-through and click-through landing page event. First, some context: Marketing Channels help you determine your visitors’ site entry points. Historically, Analytics only captured click-through entries. With the integration, you can expose the entry type as either a visit that has previously seen an Advertising Cloud ad, (plus the type of ad) along with those who clicked through the placement. This means added ammo in your marketing analysis belt.
Using the Advertising Cloud DSP dimension, you can stack your main conversion events by the following columns as depicted below: total persisting downstream, last touch view-through, and last touch click-through. The total persisting column lets you see where conversions are being attributed based on the Advertising Cloud DSP being part of the path. The last two columns tell a story around of how much can we attribute to the display click-through and display view-through being the last channel to influence the success event.
Using this type of analysis, you can show the impact the Advertising Cloud DSP is having across the business. Prior to the integration you may have found it difficult to determine this kind of downstream impact across your marketing channels.
Even better use the 100% stack graph to show trended data over time to watch which last touch marketing channels are taking credit for your Display campaign efforts. This will inform you of what marketing channels, and in turn what marketing team, you need to work with more closely.
2. Easily show the value of your view-through and click-through data
Taking the first analysis to the next level, you can utilize participation metrics with a crosstab analysis to determine how each marketing channel is impacting the other. By using this reporting tactic, you can understand channel assists by either looking at the horizontal view, to see how each channel is assisting other channels, or the vertical view, for how each channel is being assisted by other channels.
This provides you with insights into how display view-through assists your last touch channels and helps prove the value of your advertising efforts**.**
A similar way to report on assisting factors is with Attribution IQ, a tool designed to gather insights into how channels are contributing to your marketing goals across different models. This can be easily accomplished by updating each metric row with a desired attribution model.
As the screenshot below depicts, you can reveal a different story for click-through or view-through conversions depending on the attribution model you choose.
3. Use Analysis Workspace for campaign monitoring and reporting
Dashboarding may mean different things across our industry, however a common thread throughout is that a good dashboard will provide a tactical snapshot for paid media performance.
With Advertising Cloud sending media spend, impressions, and clicks into Adobe Analytics, you can couple that with all the activity Adobe Analytics is already tracking on your site. You can then create campaign monitoring reports or executive dashboards that will report on total spend, pacing, and if the campaign is meeting the desired KPI–no additional pixels needed. These types of reports provide tactical insights into what type of onsite engagement your media is driving.
The below Advertising Cloud report is how you can use Adobe Analytics to organize, report, and inform your key stockholders towards how campaigns are performing. Key insights for stakeholders include weekly performance changes and summary numbers, as well as the KPI displayed prominently near the goals of campaign. Without having to scroll further down to more detailed areas of the dashboard, those who receive this report know what is happening.
All these insights derived from analytics data already being tracked on your site.
4. Understand Advertising Cloud impact on the conversion funnel
One of the great things about combining Adobe Analytics data with the Advertising Cloud is that it provides you a with a much clearer view of how marketing placements impact the conversion funnel. By understanding what pages, site activity, or product views a site visitor is performing you can begin to bucket these actions into segments to be utilized for reporting with Analysis Workspace or retargeting within Advertising Cloud. A simple participation metric allows you discover this activity for pages and custom events that are most influential towards your end KPI.
This opens three great uses cases without the need of placing any pixels:
- Exposes supporting and primary site events that power your Advertising Cloud placement bidding.
- Creates your Advertising Cloud retargeting pools by site activity funnels.
- Reports on what portion of the funnel your campaigns are influencing vs those that were not exposed to your advertisements.
5. Gain deeper knowledge into paid media performance
In the past, reporting for paid media campaigns depended on pixel fires placed on the site and tracked by an ad server or DSP platform. This meant limited insights into what variables make up that transaction data. By using the Analytics for Advertising Cloud tool you can not only look at specific eVars (custom variables) based on Adobe Analytics events but how paid media campaigns are influencing engagement behavior on your site. This can include metrics like bounce rates, page views per visit, average order value, and specific products sold–all the way down to the ad level. In turn, you can share with your creative team information about which ad creative generates the lowest bounce rate or the greatest product page views!
With Analytics for Advertising Cloud you can pull a simple report that not only provides what the persistent revenue is (with pixels the story ends here) but also what products make up that transaction with your Adobe Analytics conversion variables.
This opens entire new ways for analysis and optimization of your campaigns that have previously been disjointed across several systems. Unify the workflow with Analytics for Advertising Cloud.
In summary, if you have Adobe Analytics, it is already tracking all your site data. By adding Advertising Cloud to your stack, you can use it to help inform and drive your paid media campaigns.
What to read next
- Blog post: First-Party Data Expands to Unleash Greater Campaign Effectiveness with New Adobe Analytics and Advertising Cloud Integration
- Feature webpage: Analytics and Advertising Cloud
- Tutorial: Introduction to the Analytics for Advertising Cloud DSP Integration