Retargeting Ads Come To Instagram

What Happened
Advertisers on Instagram are now able to retarget users as the social network adds Dynamic Ads – a retargeting unit that Facebook launched last year – to its platform. This ad product enables data-driven ad customization so that users are served relevant ads based on their online activity and interests. Facebook is also rolling out two updates to its ad products: a Dynamic Ad unit specifically designed for travel brands and more control on its “lookalike” custom audiences so that advertisers can prioritize different types of users to focus on.

What Brands Need To Do
Instagram has been following the steps of its parent company Facebook in improving its ad products and making its platform more brand-friendly. The photo- and video-sharing network currently serves over 200,000 monthly active advertisers. This new addition should be helpful to brands, especially those in the travel sector, for reaching target consumers more effectively on Instagram.

 


Source: TechCrunch

Adobe Makes Its Ad Platform “History-Aware” For More Effective Retargeting

What Happened
Adobe promises to help retailers eliminate ads for products that the targeted consumer has already bought. It is making its Marketing Cloud ad platform “history-aware” by incorporating past behavioral data including purchase histories into retargeting, the company announced at the National Retail Federation’s annual retail conference earlier this week. Moreover, Adobe is also tapping into contextual data to help retailers send more relevant triggered messaging to prospective customers via email, texts, or push notifications.

What Retailers Need To Do
Adobe’s new addition to its ad platform helps eliminate one particularly annoying part of digital advertising – being retargeted by ads that are no longer relevant. It also highlights the value of integrating customer data into their digital efforts, something that retailers should work with their ad tech vendors to implement, which will make for more effective retargeting and ultimately drive better sales.

 


Source: VentureBeat

Fast Forward: How Yext’s Xone Can Reach Black Friday Shoppers On Cyber Monday

•  Yext launched Xone, a beacon network for offline-to-online engagement
•  Retailers can message shoppers in real-time or retarget later on Facebook and Twitter
•  Analytics dashboard gives transparency to repeat visits and increased footfall driven by ads

What Yext Announced
Yext, a leader in digital location management and one of the 500 fastest growing private companies in the US, launched a location-based real-time audience engagement tool which is integrated with retargeting and online-to-offline attribution analytics. The new product is called Xone (pronounced “zone”). The Lab had a chance to sit with the Yext team on Friday, and we came away impressed.

Yext Xone App

Working with commodity beacon hardware, the SaaS tool allows retailers to accomplish three main goals. First, if a customer opens a Xone partner app while in range of a store’s beacon, the retailer has the option of displaying a “Xone Tip” that could promote a specific product or offer a discount. Note that this only happens inside a partner app as Xone does not do push notifications. Second, all customers with a partner app and bluetooth on that come within range of the beacon have their device IDs added to a database and can be retargeted on Facebook and Twitter now and soon on Instagram, Pinterest, DoubleClick, and more. That audience retargeting can be filtered by location, number of visits, and visit age. Third, there is an analytics dashboard pulling everything together, including attribution and analysis of visits to stores after online retargeting.

What Retailers Need To Do
The holiday shopping season is coming soon and it’s not too late to install and implement a complete system in your stores. For example, if you want to retarget customers that come in on Black Friday for Cyber Monday sales, Xone is the best way we know of to do it. While you’d have the option of in-store messaging that most people associate with beacons, you can also buy ads for both real-time or later placement in Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline. Black Friday or Christmas Eve deals are a great reason to target in real-time, even with different messages throughout the day, followed by retargeting on Cyber Monday or later in the holiday season. The retargeted ads on Facebook and Twitter can be cross platform, to appear on mobile, desktop, or both.

Xone’s attribution analytics can also help you calculate ad effectiveness in driving customers back to your store, even without new creative. For example, you could measure repeat customer visits for an audience that is seeing your ads versus a control group. Xone is the first beacon ecosystem product we’ve seen that completes the full circle from in-store data aggregation and messaging, retargeting, through attribution. If you’ve been waiting to try beacon technologies in your stores, the cost and time associated with setup have past the point of impediment.

We’ll soon have a demo of Xone in the Lab and can walk you through the setup, retargeting, and insights you’ll gain. Please contact us to schedule a demo.

Market Impact
Yext represents retailers’ digital location data for more than 500,000 locations, giving retailers an easy way to push updates to store hours, phone number, or other data to more than 100 app and map publishers, including Apple Maps, Bing, Facebook, Foursquare, Yahoo, and Yelp. With that foundation supporting it, we expect the platform to get buy in from more and more app owners. For now though, Xone partner app network is limited to 30 million monthly active users, not all of which have bluetooth turned on. However, with the growing adoption of wearable devices and bluetooth audio, more and more consumers are leaving their bluetooth on, so the reach of Xone’s network will expand accordingly.

How We Can Help
Please contact Engagement Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) at the IPG Media Lab if you would like more detail or to schedule a visit to the Lab to discuss strategies and tactics around retail technology and beacons generally, or Xone specifically.

For previous editions of Fast Forward, please visit ipglab.com. Please reply with any constructive criticism or feedback. We want these to be as useful as possible for you and your clients, and your feedback will help us immensely.

 


All pictures featured are promotional images courtesy of Yext

How Coca-Cola Tapped Proximity Tech For Precise Retargeting

What Happened
Coca-Cola worked with Norway’s CAPA cinemas and VG newspaper on a recent test campaign that leveraged Unacast’s beacon technology into high engagement and precise retargeting. The campaign ran on CAPA’s own app and targeted moviegoers with a free coke coupon, which 24% used. Unacast collected data about these users so that when any of them opened the VG news app, they would be retargeted with a Coca-Cola ad offering them a free ticket to be redeemed at the movie theater. The campaign proved successful, with 60 percent clicking on this ad and 20 percent redeeming the offer.

What Brands Can Do
As mobile-based proximity technology continues to mature, beacon-powered targeting has been winning over retailers with a high ROI, scalability, and precise targeting capabilities. For brands that are looking to connect their physical stores with digital assets, now is the time to tap into new applications enabled by beacons to create a holistic consumer experience across platforms.

 

Source: Mobile Marketer

Here’s How Marketers Are Using Mobile At This Super Bowl

Read original story on: Street Fight

The National Retail Federation estimates that the average American will spend $77.88 on Super Bowl-related spending this year. And this year, mobile, specifically location-based mobile ads, is playing an important role. Unlike the winter holidays where consumers often turn to online shopping, the bulk of the Super Bowl spending is centered on in-store CPG purchases such as food and beverages, where mobile-enabled hyperlocal marketing shines.

Besides using the data collected from devices to measure effectiveness of television advertising, mobile can also be utilized by brands to cash in on the awareness generated by a television spot by serving users more targeted ads in the days after the game.

 

How Beacons Can Help Link In-Store Behaviors To Online Ads

Read the original story on: Business Insider

Norway-based startup media platform Unacast and California-based marketing agency Total Communicator Solutions (TCS) have announced a global partnership that will allow brands to “re-target” online and mobile ads to shoppers by tracking what they’ve looked at while in-store. According to Erik Bjontegard, president and founder of TCS:

By combining the location-based marketing application with Unacast’s online/offline profiles, our clients will be able to connect to their customers in the store and then retarget the same customer online, with a more relevant and targeted ad, based on the customer’s recent offline behavior.

Ultimately, Unacast wants more beacon companies to join in order to create a global network to anonymously group and standardize beacon data for better retargeting. But the companies should be careful as to differentiate their retargeted offers—after all, just picking up an item in a store doesn’t necessarily demonstrate purchase intent.

Twitter Launches Retargeting

Twitter has entered the digital ad sphere full-force in 2013, launching its Amplify TV platform, and now they’ve launched cookies-based retargeting for brands, allowing them to use their e-mail lists and cookie IDs to serve users applicable ads.  This is standard practice for other online services, but has come with some concerns over privacy.  Twitter’s senior director of product, Kevin Weil, assures the public that all information is non-identifiable and there will be the option to opt-out of the promotions within Twitter’s interface, or via Do Not Track.