Tour of FouAnalytics Dashboard and Campaign Checklist

When an advertiser tags up a programmatic campaign by copying and pasting FouAnalytics tags into DV360, CM360, or whatever platform they are using to buy digital ads, they can immediately see much more data and details than was previously available to them.

Resource: How to Deploy FouAnalytics Tags

If advertisers are buying search ads, YouTube ads, Facebook ads, they must put the FouAnalytics tags on the landing pages, so they can check the quality of the clicks arriving on the landing page from those paid media campaigns.?

What follows is a brief tour of the FouAnalytics dashboard and a checklist of things that I review immediately to get a sense of how well the campaign is running.

The first and simplest thing to check is whether the ads you bought were delivered in the right country. You'd be surprised that even in 2022, we are still finding "leakage" if not outright errors in country targeting. In the following example, the ads are supposed to run in the U.S. The data says it's mostly accurate -- 92% on target. The rest is leakage. If you want to tighten this up, you can add negative targeting to reduce the percentage of ads that leak to other countries that are not relevant to your campaign.

The next thing I check is frequency capping -- i.e. did too many ads serve to the same user/device? In the example below, on the left you can see 701, 613, 249 ads served to the first 3 fingerprints (anonymous representation of a unique device), respectively. That means frequency caps were not set or were not enforced properly for you. The example on the right shows single digits per fingerprint, which is what you should be looking for. For whatever time frame you are looking at, this should roughly correspond to the frequency caps you set.

Then I check to see when ads were served. If you select a shorter time range or you drag and select a timeframe on the time series chart you can zoom in to see hourly details. Each vertical green bar represents the relative volume by hour. In the zoomed-in chart below you will notice the tallest green bars occur right after midnight. In fact, most of the volume is served between midnight and 2am. Then far smaller green bars until just before 12 noon. After 12:00pm there's no more volume; that means few to no ads were served after 12 when humans are awake and online. Without hourly detail like this you won't know that most of your ads were used up between midnight and 2am.

Advertisers have been focused on viewability for years. But the viewability vendors' tech is poor and easily tampered with. So while those vendors regularly report greater than 70% viewable, FouAnalytics' viewability detection shows the reality is 1/10th of that -- about 7% viewable-MRC. In FouAnalytics, "viewable" means 50% of the pixels of the ad in-view; while "viewable-MRC" means "viewable, plus the 1 second requirement." Viewable-MRC should be a subset of the "viewable" naturally. The reason the viewability numbers are so low, especially in mobile, is because humans scroll past the ad before it serves into the ad slot or before the 1 second requirement is met.

If you've noticed, none of the above is about fraud. FouAnalytics is analytics for your digital media. The details allow you to assess how well the campaign was set up and how well it is running. Now, on to the fraud and crapps. In the slide below, peruse the app names. Some of them might make sense; but there are others where you probably don't want your ads to serve. If you don't get detailed placement reports, broken out by site and app, you won't see these. Adding the FouAnalytics tag to your campaigns reveals the strange and hilarious apps that are chomping on your ad impressions, like com.thegoatdelivery

Let me close out this article with some more amusement. In the Domain App tab in FouAnalytics you will see the domains and apps that are eating up the most impressions, by category of fraud. In the data grid below, we see the site "winnerzcircle" being loaded by nonsensical apps. None of these apps exist in Google Play. When apps load webpages to deliver fake traffic, the app names never show up in placement reports, because it's the cheating site that is selling the impressions. When we see this kind of fraud, we check the checkbox next to the domain and then add these types of domains to the block list.

Resource: How to Use the Domain App Report in FouAnalytics

Hopefully this was a useful tour of the FouAnalytics dashboard and a few things you can immediately check about your campaigns. Many advertisers are now using FouAnalytics to monitor campaigns and ensure their media agencies are setting up campaigns properly, not forgetting to set frequency caps or country targeting, etc. Nothing malicious, just basic checks and balances and best practice.

Happy Saturday, y'all!