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Kochava, a provider of real-time data solutions for multi-channel measurement and attribution, has acquired Machine Advertising.
London-based Machine Advertising has developed application marketing technology that still works in a post-IDFA world. Apple stopped using Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) in 2021 to emphasize user privacy over advertising. When this happened, it became difficult for ad tech companies to determine the effectiveness of a particular marketing campaign because they could not rely on individual user data.
Kochava CEO Charles Manning said this in an interview with GamesBeat. Zoom is a tool that can do the work of attribution or mobile media measurement in a post-IDFA world.
"We have been working on this for some time. It's an indication that things have changed and how ads are measured and viewed," Manning said. "We've opened our eyes to how the world can change. I think that's one thing. an area that will be truly valuable to marketers as an enhancement rather than as a replacement for the attribute.
It happened
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The acquisition of Machine Advertising will allow Sandpoint, Idaho-based Kochava to continue to enhance the company's measurement solutions and expand its presence in the EMEA region with its Machine Ever-Increasing Measurement (AIM) product, he said.
Kochava had previously worked with Machine Advertising on search ads, so I learned about the company and was impressed with the team's approach to Kochava.
"The machine's goal of providing ever-increasing measurements aligns with our specific goals of adding immediate value to our customers," Manning said. "As a company built on customer-focused innovation, we are always looking for the best solutions to add to our solution portfolio."
Approaches to measuring the effectiveness of digital advertising have undergone significant changes in recent years. Performance and direct response campaigns are traditionally based on last-click attribution methods. But because of new privacy measures, this can no longer happen easily. (Indeed, the Federal Trade Commission is suing Kochava for violating privacy with its metering solutions; Kochava has denied the claims in its data business. It also bought another privacy-related company that Manning says Kochava is suing.)
Apple's alternative SKAdNetwork solution, which others have called a weak candle in the dark, is based on this last click link. It is a curved mobile ad measurement framework that protects user privacy and delivers results 24 hours after an ad is launched. Removes Ad Impact Measurement features from third-party measurement companies. The information they provide can be misleading.
Further explanation
This is where the climb begins. Based on the interviews conducted in March 2021, I learned that marketing is only really effective when it is done gradually. Boost is what you get from ads that exceed organic demand and spend on other media for any purpose. If spending on certain media inhibits organic growth or overlaps with other media, the true value of a given campaign is hidden because you can't see it, complicating the picture when it comes to ad spend.
With something like the SKAd network, it's easy to fall into the trap of relying on the "last tap" or last ad before the user loads the game and takes action after a certain amount of time. It's easy to assume that advertising is responsible for action. But that's not necessarily true if you don't measure things correctly. The only way to get to the truth is to conduct a well-designed experiment.
"At the end of the day, the difference between referral and boost is last-click attribution and incremental optimization, regardless of where the ad is in the customer journey," Manning said. “At the end of the day, clients care about holding costs until LTV-based returns start to decline. This is the growing scale."
The key to experimenting with marketing is that you need a control group. If you have two equal markets and you stop spending on advertising in one of them, you can measure the incremental effect by looking at the loading difference between your target market and the market you stopped spending money on.
As an example, imagine a marketer running a campaign in Germany along with several other countries. The Final Touch appeal donates approximately $1,000 of Seventh Day Germany's proceeds to this campaign. In other words, the latest ad measured in Germany gets credit for roughly $1,000 in revenue over seven campaign days.
The best way to measure growth is to stop Germany's participation in this campaign and compare the drop in GD7 revenue to a parallel universe where there is no spending. This parallel universe is called Management. Since we only have one universe, we either have to create clones or conquer Germany. whom
Using a model that combines several other countries in the middleweight, growing companies create artificial control, such as Germany. Germany has long overtaken Germany as the average weighted average of Game World Day 7 revenue in France, the UK and Italy.
Since you can actually find out what happened in Germany after the break, you need a synthetic check to understand what would have happened in Germany if you hadn't stopped.
If you stop spending in Germany and continue in the other three countries, you will see a difference in the loss of funds. After the break, the difference between Germany and the synthetic check is $400 a day, above $1,000. So this is the real gain of the seventh day. Based on an average ad spend of $4,000 per day, it can be assumed that the ROI on day 7 is 25%, while the ROI on ad spend is only 10%. Day 7 revenue is $600 less than expected per day. That's over $200,000 a year.
Kochava's approach to incrementalism
Kochava said changes in the privacy landscape have increased the number of walled gardens where clicks are inaccessible to advertisers and where end-click metrics cannot be used. Structural changes have been made to rely on alternative cross-platform measurement mechanisms such as SKAdNetwork for some platforms such as iOS.
Changes in privacy have also led to incremental scaling, which is gaining attention as an alternative measure of last-click media performance and can be used in any media processing regardless of privacy architecture.
Traditional growth measurement is a long process, resulting in a campaign cycle of 30 to 60 days. Measurement delays result in an overall delay in optimizing your campaign. Today's marketers are accustomed to making daily or hourly adjustments to campaigns to better manage resources and deliver effective results in real time.
"After the abolition of IDFA, the question remains, how can we understand the effectiveness of the medium?" Manning said. “As an advertiser and publisher, how can I help advertisers evaluate the value of my media source? So let's assume that there are several ways to strengthen templates.
This new reference model, in Manning's words, "connects species on both sides of the spectrum based on these shared data points over time."
The problem is that advertisers still want to know first-hand where their ad dollars are being spent.
"What's incremental optimization for a particular channel or ad when you don't have a lot of information about the actual device identifiers. You just see a bunch of these devices and they're statistically accurate, but they may not be decisive. Absolutely. That was one of the biggest failures," Manning said. . This brought growth to the fore."
For the past four years, Kochava has been leading a service organization that builds custom reporting add-ons for clients. It used to be a big 30-60 day job, and now they're trying to do it in real-time so that companies can make decisions on a daily or hourly basis.
"Programmatic advertising was very eager to work with us," Manning said. "Our relations really began to develop significantly. And finally we realized that they were building the same thing we were looking for.
About 8 people work in automated advertising, and 190 people work in Kochava.
During 2022, Kochava and Machine Advertising partnered to leverage the AIM by Machine product, along with additional download analytics developed by Kochava, for enterprise clients. The result was a productive approach to measuring continuous progress as an improved proposition for Kochava's advertisers. The AIM product is designed to work with Kochava and other measurement tools.
The Kochava AIM solution will work with other measurement partners. As a result, customers will not need to modify MMPs as part of a staged machine learning implementation.
AIM is a marketing mix modeling tool that helps advertisers do better by providing additional real-time data, Manning said. With AIM, advertisers can understand the impact of factors such as channel occupancy and seasonality. AIM then makes recommendations to the AI on how best to allocate the budget. In today's uncertain economic times, AIM's return on advertising spend (ROAS) is an important tool for financial managers 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 complement Kochava's already impressive portfolio, providing unique measurement products for mobile devices and driving greater success for our customers. forward, take it to the next level and make a bigger impact on the industry."
The iOS experience has changed a lot since the IDFA change, Manning said, and the same will happen with Google Play.
"Another download will crash Android," he said. “Device ID is not something that can be easily predicted. The additional layer of insight and analysis associated with additional optimization is essential for marketers.
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