No longer is a simple understanding of what you're bidding on programmatically enough in today’s mobile marketplace. For marketers, understanding not just what you're bidding on but how, is critical to staying competitive. This is where working advanced demand side platforms (DSPs) that not only provides advertisers with full visibility on performance outcomes but also bidding decisions is critical.
Below, we discuss the importance of bidding transparency and how it’s key to making your ad dollars work harder in today’s economy.
Advertising in an economic slowdown
There’s no question the economy is facing a shift. In the first quarter of 2022, economic headwinds began swirling as the Russia-Ukraine war escalated. Inflation and interest rates also spiked, pushing consumers to adjust their spending habits. Many brands and advertisers have responded to these trends with layoffs, tightening margins and reduced ad budgets.
A survey conducted last year by Statista found that 75% of brands would factor in slowing economic growth into their 2023 media budget planning. Furthermore, 30% of multinational companies planned to cut their ad budgets in 2023 to respond to economic shifts.
Share of brands who agree and disagree that the recession will impact their 2023 media budget worldwide as of October 2022
Source: Statista
While cutting ad spend in the face of slowing consumer spending might seem tempting, studies have shown this approach to be inefficient in the long term. According to Statista, in previous economic recessions in the 1980s and 2000s, brands that raised their ad spending saw higher increases in market share after the slowdown was over. In contrast, brands that slashed their marketing budgets in the face of economic shifts saw less growth in market share overall
The takeaway? Sustaining ad spend expenditure levels when the economy slows down will help brands win in the long-term.
However, the reality is that not all marketers will have the luxury of getting to determine how much marketing budget they’ll get as the economy fluctuates. For marketers for whom tightening ad budgets and margins are an unavoidable reality, bidding transparency can be a way to stretch your ad dollars further.
How transparency can save ad dollars
Want to spend your marketing budget wisely? Then, understand how it's being spent.
For advertisers to have full control of their ad spend, they must have an understanding of the bidding strategies that drive their campaigns. Working with DSPs that provide this visibility enables advertisers to identify the factors that drive performance in their campaigns — and double down on them to scale.
At YouAppi, we’re passionate about using incremental lift testing to give our advertising partners a transparent understanding of the levers they can turn to enhance the performance of their mobile programmatic campaigns. With incrementality testing, you can test for uplift on specific segments of a campaign. This, in turn, can help your brand understand the bidding details that successfully re-engage your audience.
An example of how transparency saves ad dollars
Your brand decides to launch a mobile retargeting campaign with a DSP. After sharing consumer profile and behavior data with them, they design a starting bid strategy. Two months after launching, they let you know your campaign is underperforming on the weekends. They launch an incrementality test to understand the relative uplift of different segments in your campaign. This, in turn, will inform their identification of the bid changes they should make to tackle your campaign’s underperformance on the weekends.
They find that users who have never been re-engaged show a 40% uplift in revenue compared to users that have. As a result, they recommend bidding higher on users who have not been re-engaged on the weekends and serving them customized creatives that encourage a first purchase. This change results in a 17% increase in ROAS.
In this example, the DSP’s incrementality testing provided a transparent understanding of the elements of the campaign that could be optimized. In this case, that optimization was the need to engage users a second time to encourage a purchase. This not only provides the brand with a better understanding of their audience but also helps save money. Rather than wasting ad spend on the weekends, the DSP was able to increase ROAS so that dollar-for-dollar of the brand’s ad budget was earned back in revenue and then some.
How we provide transparency at YouAppi
In 2019, we launched ReAppi, a programmatic app retargeting solution that powers full-funnel app retention for marketers, app developers, and agencies. ReAppi reactivates recent installs and other upper funnel intents such as app engagements, tutorials, and registrations and converts down the funnel. This re-engages existing users to increase gameplay, orders, and purchases; reactivating and upselling valuable users to become long-term returning users.
While ReAppi is a fully managed service, it provides marketers access to a real-time dashboard with campaign performance insights including KPIs, ad units, devices, audience segments, and other data points. Furthermore, with ReAppi, marketers can continuously monitor their campaign’s incremental lift testing to monitor the revenue, conversion rate, and user LTV of a test group (users exposed to the app retargeting campaign) versus the control group (users not exposed to any ads).
These insights give advertisers full visibility and control of their campaign’s bidding decisions so that they can make their ad dollars work harder and smarter.
Takeaways
No longer is a simple understanding of what you're bidding on programmatically enough in today’s mobile marketplace. For marketers understanding not just what you're bidding on but how, is critical in today's market.
- Advertisers are facing an economic slowdown. There’s no question the economy is facing a shift. Last year, 75% of brands would factor in slowing economic growth into their 2023 media budget planning.
- Sustaining your ad spend expenditure when the economy slows down can help your brand maintain market share in the long-term.
- How transparency can save ad dollars. Working with DSPs that provide advertisers full visibility of bid strategies that drive their campaigns enables advertisers to identify successful factors — and double down on them to scale.
- How we provide transparency at YouAppi. At YouAppi, we’re passionate about using incremental lift testing to give our advertising partners a transparent understanding of the levers they can turn to enhance the performance of their mobile programmatic campaigns.
Looking to spend your ad dollars more efficiently?
At YouAppi, we’re passionate about providing a transparent understanding of advertisers’ campaigns so they can double down on the strategies that work. Reach out to our team to launch cost-effective mobile programmatic campaigns today.
