Maximize Relevance With Simpli.fi

Hello and welcome to The Simpli.fi Webinar Series. I’m David McBee. Thanks for joining us each month for industry news, interviews, product rollouts and training on all things related to targeted advertising and connected TV. The Simpl.fi webinar series is available on demand with new episodes posted each month at simpli.fi/webinars along with all of our previously recorded episodes. It's April of 2023 and this month we have a very special webinar that will provide you a with a comprehensive look at all of the ways that Simpli.fi can help agencies, brands, and media companies MAXIMIZE the RELEVANCE of their programmatic display, video, audio and CTV campaigns. This will be an A to Z look at how Simpli.fi builds audiences, targets those audiences, delivers creatives, optimizes campaigns, reports, and measures attribution. We’ll also introduce you to social display, linear household exclusion and campaign audience retargeting. And finally, we’ll touch on our latest software solutions that will make your workflow infinitely more convenient. Let’s get started. THE ADS WE SERVE AND WHERE WE SERVE THEM Throughout this webinar I will be talking about ads and ad delivery. Let’s establish what that means out of the gate. Simpli.fi started out as a display ad company delivering banner ads via the programmatic exchange across thousands of websites on desktop and laptop computers. While that’s still true, we are also now delivering native ads; pre-, mid- and post-roll video ads, audio ads and streaming TV commercials. These ads are delivered across thousands of websites, mobile apps and CTV apps, on desktop and laptop computers, tablets and iPads, smartphones, gaming devices, and internet connected Televisions. We also provide social media management, paid search and YouTube ads, and we’ll discuss those in more detail when we cover our omnichannel capabilities later in this webinar. For now, just know that as we discuss Simpli.fi’s capabilities, we’re mostly talking about display, video and CTV ads delivered on just about any internet-connected device. Okay, now that we’ve established that, let’s… AUDIENCE BUILDING …talk about the various ways that Simpli.fi builds unique and highly targeted audiences by leveraging data. Every audience starts with one of three kinds of data. Online behavioral data comes from a person’s internet activity. Hundreds of thousands of websites are a part of the Simpli.fi Data Network allowing us to see many of the websites that people visit, the keywords they search, and the content they read, link and tag data, and the URL data associated with their online website visits. These digital breadcrumbs tell us a lot about individual users, which allows us to place them into custom, dynamic audiences that are hyper-relevant for advertisers. Next, let’s look at location data. While it can vary depending on the device and operating system, we know that as many as 90% of people keep the location services function on their smartphones switched to “on.” (source eMarketer). Many of these apps are collecting and sharing location data, either through the app’s SDK (that’s software developer kit) or via the bid stream. Simpli.fi has a lot of smartphone location data and can leverage it to create audiences that are perfect for advertisers. The third kind of data is demographic data. It comes from offline purchases, publicly available data, and self-reported data. Demographics include things like age, gender, education, net worth, home value, number of people in the home, age of the home, political affiliation, job titles, “in the market for” audiences and many, many others. Data like this isn’t unique to Simpli.fi, but the way we work with it is. Instead of packaging the data into pre-built audiences, our use of the data in its unstructured format allows us to create dynamic audiences that change daily based on prospects’ behavior. An audience targeted on April 1st will look different from the audience on April 3rd, April 20th and April 30th. Every day as new people enter the audience, others are shifted out of it. Why is this valuable? Because it allows us to deliver over 50% of our ads to prospects within 24 hours of when they exhibit the behavior that warranted their inclusion in the targeted audience. The other half of ads are often delivered within just a few days of that behavior, but can be delivered indefinitely if the prospect continues to act in a way that we want to keep targeting them. These dynamic audiences truly help maximize the relevance of your ad campaigns. And if you’ve had success leveraging 3rd party audience segments via another DSP, Simpli.fi also has segments available from leading data providers, available for your convenience. TARGETING Next let’s talk about the targeting tactics that are available starting with Keyword Search Retargeting. Using the keyword data that we just discussed, advertisers can choose exactly the keywords they want to target, allowing them full keyword level control. If you’re used to the keyword level control that comes with paid search, you can now implement that into your campaigns with Simpli.fi. This tactic has helped thousands of advertisers ensure that they are showing their ads to a relevant audience that has shown through their behavior (usually within 48 hours) that they are shopping for, or interested in what the advertiser is selling. For advertisers who would like to reach a more general audience, usually a little higher in the purchase funnel, our category contextual targeting can place ads on websites that are categorically relevant to the product or service. An example might be to advertise health and fitness items on websites related to health and fitness, introducing a product to the right person, even if they may not be actively searching for said product. Meanwhile, our geo-fencing tactic maximizes the relevance of that location data we talked about earlier. Advertisers can choose locations where they believe their best prospects may visit, create geo-fences around those locations and then create audiences from the smartphone data captured from those locations. Probably the number one use-case for this tactic is conquesting – targeting prospects who have visited the advertiser’s competitors. Geo-fencing can also be used to target events like concerts, festivals, conventions, sporting events, and more. This is a great way of reaching attendees without paying a huge fee to enter the festival or to have a billboard at the event. It also allows advertisers to keep advertising to those prospects after the event is over. Next, our Addressable Geo-fencing tactic allows advertisers to reach individuals at the household-level. If your advertiser has an address list, perhaps one they purchased, or even their own CRM for example, as small as 50 addresses or as large as a million addresses, Simpli.fi can upload that list into our system and match approximately 90% of those addresses. If you’ve tried to target address lists in the past, you probably know that average clearing house match rates are normally only 40 to 60%. If your advertiser doesn’t already have an address list, that’s where Simpli.fi’s Addressable Audience Curation tool comes in. It can plan, create, and activate custom audiences in real-time with over 3,000+ variables. I’d like to show you an example of how that tool might be used to help a swimming pool dealer target their ideal prospects. As you can see here, we’ve used several demographic variables to target single family homes, with children present. The homes are of a certain value, on a large enough lot for a pool and there is a certain household income. We’ve even used a negative match to exclude homes that already have a swimming pool. In this example the tool has identified nearly 14,000 homes with over 43,000 devices in this advertiser’s DMA. This advertiser can take comfort that their ads will not be delivered to residents of apartments, nursing homes, campus housing or other dwellings that would never buy a pool. As I mentioned earlier, Simpli.fi has access to third party data segments, so if none of these sound like a good fit, there are literally thousands of pre-built audience segments that you can choose from. Audience segments are very popular for a reason, and while Simpli.fi offers our own set of proprietary tactics, there’s no reason advertisers can’t activate the segments they are familiar with on the Simpli.fi platform. REPORTING The next part of our story speaks to the granular and transparent reporting that Simpli.fi makes available to our advertisers An entire webinar could be dedicated to reporting but for our purposes here are several of the reports available for our display, audio, video, and CTV ads: • Keyword level reporting • Domain level reporting • Device-level reporting • Impression reporting • Click through rate and view through rate reports • Quartile reporting • Completion rate reporting • Pause and mute event reporting • Full screen event reporting • Conversion reporting – both online and offline (I’ll go into this in more detail shortly.) • Multi-location conversion reporting • Zip+4 level reporting • iSpot reporting • LIFT reporting • and more. Every one of these reporting features, along with our campaign insights reports help to paint a picture of exactly who is receiving the ads, where they are receiving them and how they are interacting with them, reinforcing the advertiser’s ability to maximize the relevance of their campaigns. CROSS-DEVICE MATCHING Before we can discuss our next topic, attribution, we need to briefly talk about Simpli.fi’s extensive cross-device graph. Using multiple device identifiers from a variety of sources, Simpli.fi can determine which devices belong to the same household. This gives us the power to track behavior on one device and deliver the ad on another device in that household. An example of this would be our CTV retargeting tactic. When a prospect visits an advertiser’s website on their computer or smartphone, we can later deliver the advertiser’s ad to their connected TV. Great for targeting, this is especially valuable when measuring the actions taken by prospects. ATTRIBUTION When it comes to attribution, Simpli.fi can track various online and offline actions. Let’s start with online conversions. After being delivered an ad on any of their devices, should a prospect visit the advertiser’s website, a pixel on that website can track visit from the user. Simpli.fi can track: • Website visits • Specific page visits • Form completions • E-commerce, including transactional value • App downloads • And more. Using geo-fences, we can also track foot-traffic conversions. By placing a geo-fence (which we call a conversion zone) around their own store, advertisers can track visitors who were served an ad and then visited their physical location. These are true conversions, not estimates based on extrapolations from a small user pool. LIFT: Worth mentioning, Simpli.fi can also provide conversion lift reporting. Stated plainly, Simpli.fi measures the conversions from nearly every device in the audience pool - including those that were not served an ad. This provides the advertiser with a natural conversion rate which can be compared to the campaign conversion rate, or the number of devices that converted after having been served an ad. Simpli.fi’s Natural Conversion Rate provides a convenient and intuitive baseline for comparison while avoiding the complexity of a formal controlled experiment and the expense of a holdout set. This means advertisers do not need to dedicate what is traditionally 20% of their spend towards a hold-out set to accomplish a conversion lift metric. OPTIMIZATION Another benefit that comes from Simpli.fi’s transparent reporting is the ability to optimize campaigns. Because the data is used in its unstructured format, advertisers can see nearly every aspect of their campaign in action, from audience to delivery to attribution. Believe it or not, advertisers can optimize campaigns all the way down to the individual keyword level, to specific geo-fences, and/or unique demographic audiences. They can optimize frequency and reach metrics, choose websites and apps where their ads are delivered by leveraging allow lists and block lists. They can even choose exactly which devices they want to serve their ads to. Every single report (which can be run as often as needed) has the potential to reveal ways to improve the campaign. SOCIAL DISPLAY For advertisers who have had success with social media, Simpli.fi has a Social Display offering that gives them a great way to extend the reach of their proven social media campaigns. Simpli.fi can automatically transform social media posts into display creatives to promptly activate programmatic campaigns on Simpli.fi’s platform. Through our partnership with Spaceback, social media posts from any major social platform can be transformed into the most popular banner ad sizes—including in-banner video when applicable—giving the appearance of native social posts and very often increasing conversion rates. The ads even retain the reactions from the original social media post, such as likes and comments, updating in real-time. These unique creatives help advertisers maximize the relevance of their social media posts by extending their reach beyond the confines of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other social platforms to literally thousands of websites and apps. CAMPAIGN AUDIENCE RETARGETING Our next strategy, campaign audience retargeting, gives advertisers the ability to retarget users who were previously exposed to one of their ads and deliver additional messaging across different creative types. Often used to decrease overall campaign costs, campaign audience retargeting easily blends creative types, increases unique touchpoints, reinforces messaging and guides users through the sales funnel from awareness to action. As an example, advertisers can deliver an ad on CTV and then follow up with display or video ads delivered on computers and mobile devices. Not only does this provide additional impressions at a lower cost, it gives the prospect the opportunity to easily click and convert. LINEAR TV SUBSCRIBER EXCLUSION Linear television advertisers, concerned about duplicating their efforts on CTV can leverage Simpli.fi’s Linear TV Subscriber Exclusion, achieving incremental reach to a streaming-only audience. Linear exclusion leverages probably the most definitive list of households who have a pay TV cable or satellite subscription, and we use our proprietary household-level addressable solution to map that at the household level. This gives our advertisers the ability to opt out households who are receiving any kind of linear ad exposure through pay cable or satellite, and to restrict their ad impressions specifically to households that are cord cutters or cord-nevers. Linear household exclusion allows advertisers to achieve INCREMENTAL REACH by targeting streaming-only households that can’t be reached via linear TV campaigns. This means that the advertisers can maximize their budgets while avoiding duplication of linear and CTV ads to the same households. And it also means that advertisers can maximize relevance by eliminating the need for planning for or reporting duplication across CTV and linear campaigns. GOOGLE ADS (SEM) AND YOUTUBE Advertisers looking to utilize the power of Google’s SEM and YouTube advertising capabilities alongside Simpli.fi’s programmatic and social offerings can maximize efficiencies across digital advertising channels. Simpli.fi’s managed service team provides all of the benefits of YouTube and SEM campaigns with Simpli.fi’s excellent standard of service from dedicated experts. Advertisers can deploy more of their digital marketing from a single provider to drive cross-channel efficiencies while gaining a comprehensive view of campaign performance and optimizing budget allocation to the highest-performing channels. SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS Working closely with so many agencies, brands and media companies, Simpli.fi saw an opportunity to maximize our own relevance by providing more than just targeted advertising strategies to our partners. Through our acquisitions, we’re excited to offer software solutions for advertising, marketing, and creative agencies. Our cloud-based business management software helps agencies manage their projects and finances more efficiently Our platform includes a wide range of features that include project management, financial and accounting, and time tracking and reporting features as well as a client portal that allows agencies to collaborate with their clients and share project information, files, and communication in real-time. We’re integrated with a variety of media buying and planning tools, such as Nielsen, Kantar, and ComScore, as well as ad servers and other third-party systems. This enables agencies to manage their media buying and planning processes in a centralized location, while also reducing the time and effort required to reconcile media buys across multiple systems. Agencies can streamline their business processes, improve communication and collaboration, and gain insights into their performance and profitability. And that, friends, is a comprehensive look at all of the ways that Simpli.fi can help agencies, brands and media companies MAXIMIZE RELEVANCE. We look forward to seeing you next month. If you have questions about Simpli.fi’s offerings, please reach out to your Simpli.fi account manager or send an email to hi@simpli.fi.