Make more money, save more costs with FouAnalytics, how?
Over the years, advertisers big and small have used FouAnalytics to more closely monitor and manage their own digital campaigns. FouAnalytics enabled them to reduce their reliance on self-reported data from the platforms and vendors they were buying from. It's like they had their own set of independent tools with which to measure the quality and humanness of their campaigns. For new advertisers just starting to use FouAnalytics, let me summarize four key areas that have been useful in thinking about the value of using FouAnalytics -- hint: it's not just about reducing the dark red (bots).
Hard (cost) savings
This one is simple. If you've been using legacy fraud verification vendors and have gotten reports from them that ad fraud has been 1% for the last eight years, you couldn't take any corrective action. When you add FouAnalytics in-ad tags and can see which sites and apps are fraudulent, you can add them to your block list and stop wasting ad budgets showing ads to bots. In the three examples below, advertisers achieved "hard savings" by cutting the dark red (bots) in half or more than half. Note that in all of the cases below, the legacy vendor was stupidly reporting 1% IVT. Obviously, advertisers realize that ad fraud is not the 1% that these vendors could catch; ad fraud is far more than that. With FouAnalytics, advertisers could save more obvious costs that went to bad sites and apps that the legacy vendors failed to detect.
Soft savings
This one is also simple. Ads that are not viewable are not useful to advertisers, obviously. If the ad didn't have an opportunity to be seen, users couldn't see them and they would have no impact on outcomes. Have a look at the 2 examples below. Advertiser A had viewability of about 10%. That's because 95% of the impressions went to crappy mobile apps, that loaded the ads in 0x0 windows (pixel stuffing). On the other hand, advertiser B had 78% viewability, normal ad sizes, and only about 2% of the impressions in mobile apps. Legacy vendors have also reported 80 - 90% viewability consistently to customers even though the viewability measurements were incorrect. Obviously an ad in a 0x0 window should not be marked as viewable. Advertisers using FouAnalytics can see viewability issues and where those problems came from (bad apps loading ads in 0x0 pixel windows). They can then take action and remove those apps by blocking them or categorically turning off mobile apps if those are not relevant to their campaigns. Note that more expensive video ads are also run in these 0x0 windows by the fraudulent mobile apps. Advertisers that are able to block the bad apps and increase viewable ads are able to realize soft savings -- i.e. reduce the cost of ads that were not viewable. Quick reminder, you can use the yellow line overlaid on the green volume bars to get a quick sense of the average viewability. Note in A, the yellow line is very close to the bottom (10% viewable) and in B the yellow line is very close to the top (80% viewable).
Soft gains
In addition to the above -- reducing the ads going to obvious bots and fraud (hard savings) and reducing the ads that are non-viewable (soft savings), advertisers using FouAnalytics are realizing soft gains too. Advertisers want to do more with the budget they have. Soft gains come from increasing the percentage of ads shown to humans -- i.e. humanness -- and also from increasing the attentiveness of users that arrive on the site. These go hand-in-hand. Advertisers can show more ads to humans simply by adjusting their budget allocation. For example, looking at 3 paid display sources -- A, B, and C -- below, advertisers can increase budget to C because it has more dark blue (humans) and reduce budget to A, because it has less blue and more red (bots). This way, the advertiser increases the overall humanness of their campaigns. No other legacy verification vendor shows blue in their charts, because they don't measure for humans.
If you show more ads to humans (more dark blue in in-ad measurement) then more humans will click through to your site to get more information. When they are on your site, a larger portion of them will do something, like move the mouse, scroll the page, etc. I won't go into too much detail here since I have already written about "humanness" and "attentiveness" before. See the 2 articles linked below.
Hard gains
If you have done all of the above, you will also start to realize hard gains -- that is, more outcomes, orders, sales, conversions, etc. Makes sense, right? If less of your ads were shown to bots on fraudulent sites, more of your ads were viewable, more of your ads were shown to humans, and the humans that clicked through to your site were more attentive, you will get more business outcomes. Obviously outcomes should have been the key success metric all along, but in some cases, we have to work our way back to these best practices.
When you have done all of the obvious optimizations above (to reduce fraud and waste), you can move on to the more advanced optimizations -- i.e. optimizing for greater attentiveness and more outcomes. Some FouAnalytics clients/practitioners are already doing this. Have a look at the following article to see screen shots and examples from their awesome work.
As a quick reminder, FouAnalytics is not just about reducing the dark red. Many practitioners who are already very strict in their media buying (e.g. using very short inclusion lists) don't have a lot of dark red to reduce. So they have already moved on to the more advanced optimizations, using FouAnalytics as the analytics platform to "see Fou themselves" the impact of their optimizations.
You are welcome to use FouAnalytics too, so you can "see Fou yourself" how much better your digital advertising can be.
Founder View TV
2 周Amazing as usual