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Apr 23, 2020 OTT advertising has been a fast-growing sector of the digital marketing industry. With the rise of COVID-19 and people self-quarantining in their homes, the world looks much different than it did just a couple months ago. New York City is a ghost town, as people try to avoid crowded areas. Workplaces are empty as people try to stay productive from their home offices. Countless restaurants have completely redesigned their dining rooms with nobody allowed to enjoy a good meal without taking it to-go. Students of all ages have been forced to move their classes online. The Coronavirus has had an extreme affect on how people live their everyday lives. Without the ability to go out and socialize, people are trying to find ways to pass the time. One of the most common ways people are counteracting the boredom is binge watching shows on their favorite streaming services. If it’s Netflix, Hulu, Pluto TV, and/or any combination of other services, people are watching video on demand services more than ever! OTT streaming services are set up to actually benefit greatly from these drastic changes, which isn’t surprising at all when you take into consideration how OTT has been growing the past few years. The Evolution of OTT Advertising At Conduit Digital, OTT advertising has been the fastest growing digital product since we launched it in 2017. This has proven to be a trend in the overall OTT industry as well! Starting in 2010, OTT revenue has increased more than tenfold, starting at $6.1 billion in 2010 to $84.76 billion in 2019 worldwide. Most recently, within the U.S., revenue grew by 35% from 2018 to 2019 at $22 billion, and is expected to grow by another 29% in 2020 to $28.5 billion. The majority of the market is held by three of the top video-streaming platforms: Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime video. While OTT has succeeded, television continues to see subscriptions drop year after year as more subscription-based video-streaming platforms pop-up. The way people consume their media is vastly changing and evolving, which should mean the way businesses reach their audience does too. For the years 2018 and 2019 combined, around 10 million US TV subscriptions were dropped (aka the infamous “cord-cutters”), while during that same time, online streaming service subscriptions have only risen. Where OTT Is Going Now we know how much money is being spent on OTT, how much have actual subscriptions grown? In 2014, there were 150 million online streaming services subscriptions. In 2019, this number has grown to over 600 million, a 300% increase! Subscribers are also expected to almost double to 1.1 billion by 2021. Researchers also found that about 70% of US citizens are subscribed to at least one OTT service, while the average user subscribes to 3.4 different services. In addition to the average user being subscribed to multiple OTT services, it’s also been reported that the number of households with two or more OTT subscriptions has increased by over 130% in the past five years. In 2019, 46% of US households subscribe to multiple OTT services, as opposed to 33% in 2017 and 20% in 2014. This proves that once users try one of the big guns like Netflix or Hulu, they are likely to expand on their OTT capabilities and subscribe to other services! It’s getting easier each year to reach a vast number of people using OTT! The Impact of Coronavirus Quarantine On January 23, 2020, Chinese authorities locked-down the city of Wuhan, which was expanded to the entire Hubei province on January 30th affecting over 11 million people. As the virus spread, more countries followed suit by locking down borders and issuing stay-at-home orders. Unfortunately, the virus spread like wildfire throughout the United States, coming to a head when Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy, and others followed New York’s lead and issued a statewide stay-at-home order that all non-essential businesses in the state would be closed indefinitely. Since then, multiple other states have followed the trend and issued stay-at-home orders. According to a recent poll, 75% of U.S. residents are self-isolating in some way, even though there is no countrywide order. This means 200+ million people are stuck at home in America. How Quarantine Has Helped OTT Advertising Skyrocket Since the start of quarantine here in the United States, streaming services have seen some serious uptick in usage. Nielson is predicting upwards of a 60% increase in streaming due to COVID-19 isolation. We have seen instances of rapid streaming growth around the world in places like Italy and Spain who were under quarantine before the United States, as previously mentioned. According to Nielson, first-time installs of Netflix’s app were up 57% (Italy) and 34% (Spain), respectively, according to Sensor Tower data. In addition, live streaming across YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and Mixer grew by more than 66% in Italy between the first week of February and the week of March 17th, according to StreamElements, and viewers were watching nearly double the number of channels (TechCrunch). This increase won’t and is not only being seen in Italy and Spain, here in the United States we have already seen surges in internet usage up nearly 70% since the lockdown. This growth is directly contributed to the increased number of people stuck working from home, but the majority of individuals are just looking to pass their time by consuming content across the web. Early estimates have shown that streaming has jumped by at least 12%. This increase in streaming movies, TV shows, and the plethora of content that spans from free streaming platforms such as Pluto TV to HBO Go means more eyes are looking at the in-home big screen (TV). Why Investing In OTT Is Smart To Do Right Now Experts expect only 2020 to be affected by COVID-19, and that we will continue to see the consistent rise of OTT. As stated previously, subscribers are expected to skyrocket to over 4 billion by 2027, which means there will be a lot less eyes watching traditional television. While streaming services built around broadcasting live sports will see less subscriptions in the coming months due to ongoing pandemic, other streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, will continue to succeed. Almost all streaming services should see a big bump in their user bases due to so many people staying home looking for new things to watch. By 2025, the expected market size for OTT is projected to be around $180 billion. The main drivers of OTT services include more device integration, with a higher focus on mobile, and improved internet speeds and access. With the incoming implementation of 5G which promises lower latency and higher bandwidth, which in turn creates improved Internet speeds, OTT will continue to rise and spread across the globe. When the pandemic is over and life returns to some amount of normalcy, we may see some regression in terms of new-subscription rates. With the help of 5G, and the audience reach OTT has, brands and businesses alike are investing in streaming service advertisements. Conclusion Now is the time, more than ever, to incorporate OTT advertising to your client’s Digital Marketing solution! Prior to 2020, OTT was experiencing exponential growth in its industry and user base. With the outbreak of COVID-19 affecting all aspects of our everyday lives, OTT has been no exception. The main difference is that OTT stands to benefit greatly from the extra time people have on their hands. Businesses that fail to acknowledge the potential this new form of advertising can bring them will only be left behind and struggle to compete against competitors. Our skilled team at Conduit understands the impactful future over-the-top television will have on the industry, which is why we ran over 100,000,000 commercials in order to find what works best.

May 22, 2020 We have all been hearing it a lot lately: “5G is here”. With the arrival of this new type of technology, you may be asking yourself: “What is 5G?”. The world’s cellular network currently runs on 4G, which is the 4th generation of wireless communication technology. When the world made the transition from 3G to 4G, the effect it had on different industries was obvious. Everyone benefited from the faster internet; medical professionals, the entertainment industry and digital marketers. But with 5G coming into the mix, how will this effect digital marketing as we know it? At Conduit, we believe the biggest impact in digital marketing will take place in Over The Top Television, or OTT digital marketing. How? We’ll tell you. What Is 5G? Before we can understand the benefits 5G will provide the OTT digital landscape, we will need to first understand what 5G is and why we need it. In essence, 5G is the fifth generation in the series of technology standards for cellular networks. With this upgrade in our technology, we can expect faster, more stable and a more secure connection. Why Do We Need 5G? The world’s connectivity needs are changing fast. With the increase in population and mobile devices, mobile data traffic is expected to increase by 5x before the end of 2024. The current 4G networks won’t be able to to keep up, especially in highly dense areas. Why Is 5G So Important? 5G is becoming more important as it can improve and transform the lives of everyone in the world. Not only that but it will be able to support millions of devices while also maintaining at high speeds. Upgrading to 5G speeds will revolutionize the way everyone does business, especially digital marketers. 5G And Digital Marketing In the media production world, delivering content is a considerable logistical challenge. For user-generated content, reliable and uncontended bandwidth is key, however more often than not poor network results in low-quality content and a frustrated end-user. 5G is definitely on its way and it has already started rolling out in most major cities. It’s the same as any other cellular networks except it has the ability to use much larger channels than 4G while using the same three different ranges of frequency, low, middle, and high band. All this means is there is a difference in the range of airwaves at each level. What Is The Difference Between 4G & 5G? Currently, 5G is generating speeds up to 2 gigabits per second (Gbps), to put that in perspective 4G can generate speeds up to 300 megabits per second (Mbps), and there are 1,000 megabits in a gigabit, making 5Gs current capabilities roughly 7X faster than 4G. In theory, 5G could reach speeds upwards of 30Gbps, giving people the ability to move tremendous amounts of data at lightning-fast speeds across multiple devices and platforms. This leads to the opening of new doors for what digital advertisers are able to do. With this increase in internet speeds, people will be consuming much more content in a shorter amount of time. So as digital marketers, we have to come up with creative ways to get our client’s messaging and branding in front of consumers. In order to see where we are headed in the future, it’s important to take a step back and see how we got here. What Each Generation Provided Each generation impacted the world with its release. When 1G was released, it gave us the ability to talk virtually anywhere on our cell phones. 2G gave us the ability to text, which changed the way we communicated. 3G gave us the ability to browse the web from our mobile devices and when 4G LTE came along, it took everything good about 3G and made it 10X faster. With the 5th generation of wireless connectivity on the way, there are endless possibilities for tech and the new applications that could arise from its wake. “The first 4G phones in the US appeared in 2010, but the sorts of 4G applications that changed our world didn’t appear until later. Snapchat came in 2012, and Uber became widespread in 2013. Video calls over LTE networks also became widespread in the US around 2013” (PcMag). Now here in 2020 people are streaming full HD movies and shows on their mobile devices, uploading millions of pictures to Instagram daily, and video calling from thousands of miles away. Not only has 4G upgraded how we live our lives, but it has also changed the game for digital marketing. Advertisers are able to put their ads in front of potential customers wherever they are none of which could have been possible without 4G. 5G And Its Effects On OTT We won’t end up seeing the real effects 5G has for a few years after it has been ramped up around the world. Just like we didn’t see the big effects of 4G for about 3 years. But that does not mean we won’t see the immediate impact it will have on platforms we already use today. 5G’s speeds and capabilities open up a whole new world for advertisers we have yet to see. It is expected to cut data latency down to roughly 1 millisecond! To put that in perspective the average human’s reaction time is between 150 to 300 milliseconds. With data being able to move in real-time on 5G, advertisers will be able to put their ads directly in front of potential customers almost instantly. Products like OTT (over-the-top-television) will definitely change in delivery as people take their favorite movies and shows on the road with them! This increase in speed will mean the end of buffering while streaming content. Watching video in full HD or even 4K streaming will be possible everywhere we go which will increase the demand for OTT campaigns. Mainly people watch their favorite shows on applications like Hulu, Sling, Pluto TV, etc. in the comfort of their home. This has mainly contributed to the ability, or lack thereof, to stream high-quality videos consistently over the current wireless network. 5G is here to solve that, with speeds up to 30Gbps there won’t be any issues with streaming quality and the ability of the network to keep up with demand. One of the main attractions digital marketers see in 5G is its ability to cope better with running several high-demand applications concurrently. From VR/AR experiences to simultaneous HD video streaming, 5G can support several high level uses cases at the same time. It is the end of networks slowing down to meet the demands of all users utilizing it. Now the network will be capable of keeping up and even exceeding those needs, opening the door for massive consumption of content wherever a user would like. With the massive consumption of content by users comes a huge opportunity for advertisers to put their message in front of their target audience. But how can advertisers capitalize on the opportunity? With 5G comes mobile edge computing, which gives the ability to store content locally, closer to the cellular user. This ultimately reduces the costs of storing and using data, making it easier for operators and content providers alike to efficiently provide targeted, localized content. Advertisers will ultimately be able to reduce costs while providing highly targeted advertising. We are already seeing the next generation of consumer content on mobile devices when it comes to OTT applications with the emergence of Quibi. Quibi launched on April 6th, 2020 ushering in what could be the new way users consume video content on the go. With short, 6-10 minute episodes it makes it perfect for commuters or users who don’t have the time to consume a full 30 minute episode. Before each episode there will be a short non-skippable ad, opening even more inventory for OTT advertisers. Paired with 5G’s speed and latency capabilities Quibi could become a top OTT application for users and advertisers alike. High-quality content with no interruptions in real-time, what more could a consumer ask for? To Wrap It All Up Constant improvements in technology have led to the amazing wireless communication technology that is 5G. The fifth generation of the world’s global cellular network is roughly seven times faster than what the world is running on with 4G. With each generation, the world takes substantial steps towards a faster and more connected network that will pave the way for some culture-changing technologies. Coupled with already exponential growth patterns, OTT stands to really benefit from the implementation of 5G because of the insane speeds that data will be streamed. The marketing industry has been slowly but surely moving towards stronger digital solutions, which will soon make OTT the hill of digital marketing that everyone will want to be king of.

Jun 17, 2020 The creative ideas you hatch for your social media targeting campaigns no longer need to resonate with every type of customer you desire to reach. The days of trying to be everything to everyone are over. With social platforms like Facebook that offer personalization at scale, you can deliver unique social ads that are tailored to specific subsets of your target audience. To truly understand why social advertising works so well, our social media marketing team has broken down the importance of understanding and comprehending the vast amount of information that is collected. This will not only allow you to tap into delivering personalized advertising experiences but also grow your clients ROI. Using Unique Audiences For Your Social Campaigns Instead of running one video to a wide audience as you would on television, you can deliver a unique message and wildly different creative to a multitude of niche audiences. By tapping into the sophisticated targeting options available, you can narrow the delivery of your personalized social ads to people that “like” sneakers, the ballet, country music, or thousands of other random interests. Before you go all-out trying to plan ads for 100 different segments of your intended market, just remember it’s difficult enough to get clients to invest in a decent budget for a single ad, let alone hundreds. If you play your cards right though, you can absolutely make the case as to why clients should create several different ads that speak to various sectors of the market they wish to connect with. As you brainstorm on the many possibilities for personalization and marinate on the diverse data sets that exist for you to reach, consider a combination of attributes to reach the right customer. You might just find that young moms that love video games and skateboard are ready to buy today. Facebook probably knows more about your next customer than their mother does. Reach Returning Customers (and Exclude Them) When you start an account on one of the major social media platforms, you generally provide your email address and phone number. This is the first of many pieces of data these social services collect, most of which are offered as targeting options for advertisers. With billions of emails and phone numbers collected between Facebook and their family of apps including Instagram, you can import your own data and choose to target (or exclude) people you have contact info for. By matching your first-party data with existing customers and prospective leads, you can deliver ads to just those accounts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and more. If you have a variety of data sets at your disposal, you can create multiple campaigns tailored specifically to unique audiences like people that have ordered online, registered a warranty, joined an email list, filled out a form, or somehow provided a phone number. With fewer people liking and following companies on social media these days, this makes it possible to connect with more customers and drive repeat business with ads that are personalized for that audience. You can also narrow the focus to high-value segments like big spenders, lead you to determine who are most likely to convert, and other attractive areas from your first-party data. By crafting ads for people that have done business with you before, you can roll out the red carpet with personalized offerings to keep them coming back for more. Whether you want to deliver creative to people that joined an email list, but haven’t bought, or you want to deliver specific messages to customers that represent the lion’s share of the revenue for a company, you can justify a fresh ad set dedicated to ringing the cash register again (and again). Targeting Profile Data After they provide their name, email and phone number, most people fill out their profile and provide even more targeting options for advertisers. By adding your birthday or your anniversary, companies can target you, your friends or significant other with ads for relevant gifts. If you “like” or follow a brand, a band, sports team or other topics, those entities and their competitors can pay to reach you with ads tailored to your interests. Beyond adding their age and citing their gender, which are two of the most used filters for social ad targeting, people often list their occupation and where they work on their social profile. For people that are CDL drivers, Registered Nurses or other occupations in high demand by employers, they often receive recruitment ads. Employment ads are one of the few areas where using age and gender is not allowed by law, but you can reach people with specific skill sets to attract qualified workers for priority positions. If you are having trouble running ads, we’ve come up with a few Facebook marketing tips that can help make your ads become more effective. Location, Location, Location Beyond considering age, gender, and the brands that customers follow, location targeting is another key area to consider when planning a hyper-targeted social campaign. With billions of people having installed their apps and most of those people sharing their location, Facebook can tap into these mobile insights to deliver ads to people within a mile of any given address. As an advertiser, you can target a radius around an address or blanket specific zip codes and DMAs. You can even narrow your selected audience down to people that are traveling from out of town (perfect for those looking to reach tourists), people that live in the area (great for everyone from plumbers to direct mailers), and target those that work in the neighborhood (excellent for restaurants looking to reach folks around lunchtime). The net you cast with location-specific ads can be narrowed down to niche audiences, and you can run different creative based on the time of day. Your ads can even include a map with directions if you’re running campaigns for retailers. If you’re looking to reach an affluent audience, you may opt to just target people in the rich part of town that might be more likely to go for that Ferrari. Demographic Details & Behavioral Insights Depending on what you’re selling, there are all kinds of details that platforms like Facebook collect that could figure into your ad planning. You can find out a lot of information about your customers by utilizing a Facebook Pixel in your marketing techniques. If your desired audience is exceedingly upscale, you might narrow your targeting to people with a high level of education and net worth. If you’re a niche business that specializes in hobbies, musical instruments, or random interests, you can direct ads based on a wide cross-section of related topics. With the ability to target people that follow big brands, mom & pop shops can pick off local followers of national chains. If you are logged into Facebook on Chrome or another browser, chances are you are being followed across the web by retargeting pixels that allow companies like Facebook, Twitter, and others target ads based on the websites you visited and the products or services you researched. By tracking which websites people visit, social media companies know which individuals are likely to be looking to buy a new car or make a big purchase. Beyond tracking everywhere people go online and everywhere they physically go (e.g. car dealership), companies like Twitter are also known to tap the microphone within your smartphone to listen for words that could put you in an ad targeting category. By analyzing all of these social signals and understanding what people research and what they do before making a major buying decision, these advanced algorithms and social advertising platforms have gained vast insights on customer behavior by tracking the actions people take throughout the path to purchase. The Opportunities For Personalization Are Endless Although intelligent humans can often predict who will be interested in a product or service based on research and existing data, they will never understand other humans as well as machines are able to. Beyond your own research, you can tap into the insights collected from billions of people in order to unleash personalized ads that deliver results at scale. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others have access to billions of potential customers and offer the opportunity to deliver messages that are tailored to unique segments. By analyzing what you and billions of other people do, these social systems keep getting smarter and their advertising platforms are getting better at predicting human behavior, which includes anticipating whether or not you are going to engage with an ad. With machines that have access to endless information and the ability to make sense of data that no human could possibly crunch in a lifetime, these sophisticated social advertising platforms offer capabilities that defy convention and stretch far beyond the capacity that most people can comprehend. With machines tracking every action that users take on social media. including the links they click and how long they take to read a post or watch a video, these systems can cross-reference that data against similar people to predict behaviors and target ads successfully. With capabilities like Lookalike audiences that deliver ads to people that share similar interests and attributes with existing customers, existing data on customers can be used to expand businesses and scale success. The biggest challenge as you plot the future forward is creating personalized advertising experiences that span the spectrum of your target audience. When you no longer need to appeal to everyone, then you can focus on creating a relevant message for individuals. By doing this, you boost your chances of increasing your social media advertising roi! Whether it makes sense to create 3 or 300 ads will depend on the campaign, but the options are nearly endless. With each unique audience, you build a campaign around, you will want to create a sequence of ads to run throughout the customer journey from awareness through conversion, so each segment will become its own pathway toward a purchase. With truly endless combinations of social media targeting available, you can tailor your creative to deliver a personalized message to the right customer at the right time while they check out what their friends are doing on social media.

Jul 26, 2020 Programmatic advertising allows your clients to serve their branded display and native ads across 99% of the internet’s ad servable inventory. With highly customizable targeting capabilities, programmatic has the ability to reach your clients target audience at the right place and the right time as they browse the web on their desktop, tablet, or mobile device. This article will highlight the basics of Programmatic, its capabilities, as well as why programmatic display and native should be a staple in your agency’s digital marketing product suite. What is Programmatic Advertising? Programmatic Advertising is a phrase that is commonly heard throughout the marketing world, but what is it exactly? According to the Digiday Programmatic Bible Programmatic advertising is the use of software to purchase digital advertising space across the internet. Programmatic ad buying has evolved drastically from the previous purchasing methods which involved a much more labor intensive and less efficient process, relying on the manual sale of ad space by salespeople to specific advertisers. The advancements in technology are what have made programmatic advertising so popular today. The reliance on machines allows advertisers to obtain digital ad space in a much more efficient and cost effective way. How Does Programmatic Advertising Work? Programmatic Advertising relies on the use of software to help advertisers get their ads in front of the right people at the right time. But how? The most common way that advertisers purchase ad space programmatically is through a process called “Real Time Bidding” – RTB for short. This process starts when a user loads onto a specific webpage on the internet. While this page is loading, specific information about the user and the page are sent to an Ad Exchange. We can think of these Ad Exchanges as the marketplace where advertisers can purchase ad space from publishers. In real time, the Ad Exchange auctions off the ad space to the advertiser who has the highest bid. This whole process happens in milliseconds, right before the page loads on the users screen. Finally the winning bidders ad is shown on one of the multiple available ad slots on that specific domain. How Do Advertisers Choose What To Bid On? When an agency partner comes to Conduit to begin running a Programmatic campaign with us, we ask for very basic information to help shape the strategy of the campaign. This strategy includes: Targeting Geography Marketing tactics We implement this strategy into what is called a Demand Side Platform, which allows us to access dozens of different Ad Exchanges and bid on ad placements across thousands of different publishers domains. Depending on the strategy, we can implement various tactics and targeting parameters to ensure your ads are reaching the right audience at the right time! Programmatic Display vs. Native While the targeting options for both Display and Native are the same, the difference between these two types of display ads are in the way that they are presented to the user on a specific domain. Generic display ads are the most common across the web, and have the highest volume of available inventory. We see these ads everyday, most commonly across the header of a domain homepage, along the side of a page, or within a break of the text in an online article. These ads are generally static images, or HTML5 files that contain visuals, a strong call to action, as well as significant branding to generate awareness to users as they browse the web. Display ads like Conduit’s “White Label With Color” below are easy to spot as they do not blend in naturally with the surrounding text. Native, however, is much different. A native display ad will take the look and shape of the webpage that it is being served on. This type of ad is less intrusive, and makes the user experience feel more natural in comparison to a display ad. For example, Conduit’s display ad appears alongside one of the multiple ad slots on the page, and it is fairly obvious that it is an advertisement. The native ad would take the shape and theme of other article links on the site, and would be less conspicuous in terms of users actually feeling like they clicked on an ad. For instance, below is an image of a native ad organically mixed in to match the formatting of the articles. A user online would not know its an ad based off of how well it blends in with the rest of the content around it. This is one of the benefits to using native ads in your marketing plan. Generally native ads will promote specific content that is relevant to the client, so for example a car dealership might utilize native to promote their blog post about the Top 10 Vehicle Models of 2020, in which their vehicle is ranked very highly. Native helps generate brand awareness and brand credibility through various forms of relevant long tail content. Programmatic Targeting Capabilities We talked briefly about how programmatic advertising helps you reach your ideal audience, at the right place at the right time. But how? At Conduit we utilize a blend of tactics based on the overall strategy of the campaign to help get your brand message out to users who have shown interest through various targeting channels. These tactics include: Site Retargeting: Site Retargeting allows us to serve ads to your clients most relevant audience, users who have previously visited their website! It’s said that 96% of users who visit a webpage will leave without ever converting to a lead or sale. Site Retargeting allows us to recapture this audience and serve them your ads as they browse other sites online, and help drive them back to take a specific conversion action on your website! Purchase Receipt: Have an idea of what your ideal audience may be interested in purchasing? Through Purchase Receipt targeting we are able to hone in your targeting efforts to users who have received purchase receipts sent to their email inbox from specific types of businesses that may show they are in market for your good or service. For example, a user who receives a purchase receipt from GNC for workout supplements could be categorized in a broader “fitness” audience. Email Retargeting: Similarly to Purchase Receipt targeting. Email Retargeting groups users based on the various subscription emails they receive. For clients who may be looking to reach users who are new home-owners, we can retarget any user who subscribes to Zillow emails for notifications about new homes on the market, and target them with your clients’ ads! Email Retargeting is another great way to hone in on users who are interested in your clients specific industry. Behavioral Keyword: With Keyword targeting, we can create a custom list of specific terms that your clients ideal audience may be searching when conducting their research online. When a user searches for a keyword that we have on our list, or reads content that contains these keywords they are then eligible to be retargeted with your clients ads. Point of Interest: Does your client want to drive relevant users away from their local competition, and into their store? With Point of Interest targeting, we can utilize geo-fencing targeting technology to create virtual fences around your clients competitors. When a user is tracked via GPS on their mobile device within the fence, they are then eligible to be served your clients ads. Furthermore, we can track when this user then converts to your clients physical location with what we call geo-conversions. Demographic & Interest Targeting: Through both first and third party data segments, we’re able to reach your ideal user via demographic and psychographic audiences. Demographic targeting allows us to reach users based on their age, gender, or income while psychographic targeting can get more granular with targeting users who have shown a specific interest in things like, sports, cooking, fitness, etc.! Why Should You Use Programmatic Display and Native? According to eMarketer last year alone in the U.S., advertisers spent upwards of $60B on programmatic display. They predict that by 2021, 88% or $81B of all display dollars will be spent programmatically. This data alludes to the popularity of Programmatic Advertising across the U.S. as it is one of the only marketing channels that give you complete targeting control, and allows you to hone in on your specific target audience. Programmatic Display and Native are branding tools that help generate top of the funnel brand awareness and visibility from a specific desired group of users. Display ads offer advertisers the ability to use relevant and eye-catching visuals to help increase brand recall, while also capitalizing on ad remarketing efforts to drive home more bottom of the funnel actions from users. Native on the other hand is a newer and more innovative way to promote your clients brand, in a non-invasive yet highly targeted way. With this form of programmatic advertising, you can link users to your clients content that is relevant to content your ideal audience is already seeing! If your client has an extensive library of blogs, or other informative articles that can help promote themselves as a competitive option for a good or service, we would highly recommend utilizing native to drive further engagement to their website, without the worry of “ad fatigue”. The Conduit Programmatic Difference At Conduit, our team of expert analysts are truly dedicated to developing campaign strategies to help produce the results you are looking for. We are hands on with your campaigns to ensure that they are performing above and beyond your expectations, and that your client ultimately sees a positive return on their marketing investment. Display and Native are such integral pieces of the marketing funnel, and should be a staple for any agency who is looking to provide a full service digital offering and growing their agency!

Jul 21, 2022 For more than a decade, over the top (OTT) television has transformed the way that audiences consume their favorite content. Ever since Netflix first launched direct streaming, many passionate viewers have abandoned their traditional cable subscriptions in favor of on-demand digital programming. However, Netflix has always required a subscription fee for access to its content until its rather recent announcement to offer ad-supported tiers. Soon after the company started drawing a sizable audience, other competitors like Hulu began offering free-to-stream programming in exchange for the audience viewing advertisements at various intervals throughout the duration of the movie or show they were watching. Today, OTT advertising is one of the most sought-after, yet difficult-to-find digital marketing services. For many agencies that live in or serve suburban and rural areas, finding and hiring someone with advanced programmatic knowledge and expertise can prove a trying experience. At Conduit Digital, we became one of the original adopters of OTT advertising in the white label space in 2017. We identified a clear and massive need for agencies to offer this product to their clients and have invested countless hours in testing every possible platform to create a curated suite of platforms for you to advertise on. If you are considering launching an OTT advertising campaign for your client, you may be wondering what are some of the best platforms for doing so? We will break them all down in exhaustive detail for you here. Do you need help with OTT right now? Skip the read and book a call with us instead: So Why is Everyone Rushing to Advertise on OTT? At the end of last year, we predicted that OTT advertising will explode in 2022. As it turns out, our crystal ball did not lie to us. This past May, AdWeek projected OTT ad spend to surpass $21 billion this year, with many media buyers calling it a “must buy” product. With more consumers examining their monthly expenses under a microscope than ever before, OTT has become a desirable alternative to traditional cable television due to its superior personalization and the wealth of free-to-stream options available. For those looking to cut monthly expenses, watch on-demand at all times, and enjoy more tailored ad experiences, cutting the cord for digital programming is nothing short of a no-brainer. The OTT explosion resulted in an entirely new digital avenue for collecting audience data that advertisers can leverage to generate new conversions and drive return on ad spend (ROAS) for their clients. However, many agencies have approached this new tactic slowly and cautiously due to the sheer volume of platforms to choose from. If you’re looking to start advertising via OTT, you’ve found the right list. Here are 7 of our Programmatic Team’s favorite platforms that we consistently run campaigns on for our clients. 1. Hulu Co-owned by Comcast and Disney, Hulu benefits from the support of the largest global media titans. It offers an extensive library of shows, movies, and original content that you can stream at multiple pricing tiers. With an audience size of 35 million viewers in the United States alone, Hulu ranks among the top 10 streaming services in terms of pure subscribership. Statistically, approximately 1 in every 10 Americans consumes content on the platform. This creates an expansive pool of potential viewers that will view your client’s advertisements on the biggest screen in the house! Thanks to the platform’s immense support from its parent companies, Hulu offers an extensive menu of ad formats and targeting capabilities. For example, you can target viewers by factors such as: Age Interest Gender Location Show genre Depending on your preferences and your client’s desired budget, you can also select from multiple formats. Situational ads can play non-disruptively during programming and integrate your campaign into the overall viewing experience for a more seamless impression. Conversely, traditional more disruptive formats are also available at specific time slots during the show or movie being streamed. 2. Fire TV Advertising on Fire TV provides a highly scalable solution for your client. Sold via a cost-per-completed view format, your client can continue increasing or decreasing their budget as their campaign generates key performance actions (KPAs). Like Hulu, Fire TV benefits from an extensive backbone provided by its parent company, Amazon. Already compiling a massive pool of data from its flagship eCommerce website, Amazon can also equip your client’s campaign with other targeting options based on viewer interest, demographic data, keywords, viewing preferences, and more. Fire TV also allows your client to integrate their other programmatic tactics into one unified campaign. For example, you can also include banner and text ads to complement your video creatives. 3. Pluto TV Pluto TV offers viewers free content to stream in exchange for watching ads throughout the programming. Its advertising capabilities have generated immense momentum this year, and the service’s ad revenue is expected to surpass $1 billion in the U.S. alone in 2022. As a subsidiary of Viacom, Pluto TV also benefits from a considerable content library and technical infrastructure supported by its parent company. This enables advertisers to target viewers on multiple levels with a higher frequency of ads served due to the company operating exclusively on an ad-supported-video-on-demand model (AVOD). At its core, AVOD means that the platform does not offer a commercial-free subscription model. 4. Roku Roku is another popular streaming service that benefits heavily from its ad-supported model. The platform also offers a wide range of targeting options that primarily leverage its first-party data to reach your client’s desired viewers. Roku acts as a hub for many different channels that can be streamed free of charge in exchange for ads. This allows the platform to gather data based on multiple touchpoints. Depending on the goal of the campaign, the ads are billed on a cost-per-thousand impression (CPM) or cost-per-install (CPI) basis. For example, Roku categorizes viewership based on 5 primary signals: 1. General behaviors – Inferences gathered by the audience member’s content consumption habits 2. Linear TV viewership – Inferences based on viewing linear television content 3. Channel usage – How often specific content is engaged with 4. Content affinity – How often an audience member watches certain types of content or genres 5. Geography – Where the viewer is located Roku advertisers can also choose to exclude any of the signals above to further narrow down on their ideal audience. 5. Sling Sling markets itself primarily to young adult-aged, cord-cutting viewers. This audience segment is often comprised of individuals in the 18-34 age range and have a notable amount of disposable income. Advertising campaigns through Sling are facilitated by its parent, Dish Media. Campaigns can be launched through one of three general tiers and further refined through your own targeting. These include: Video The “Video” tier operates similar to traditional television commercials and is intended for advertisers seeking to reach a broad, general audience. After determining your target viewers, you can leverage core subscriber data to serve ads to these viewers. You can also daypart your content and send it to desired networks to ensure that you’re reaching the ideal viewers when they are engaged with the platform. Data-Driven Video The Data-Driven Video tier takes the Video tier one step further. Instead of reaching a large general audience, advertisers can drill down further and leverage deeper insights from generated by specific viewers for more sophisticated targeting. Addressable Dishs’ Addressable ads offer a uniquely powerful way to target at the household level. After defining and segmenting your audience, you can deliver your creatives directly to ideal households when they are actually watching content on the platform. Advertisers can use the Addressable 1:1 targeting to gather more advanced insights into a campaign’s performance. These include, but are not limited to: Sales matchbacks Traffic to your client’s website Visits to physical locations A/B testing insights Conversions at the time of tuning in 6. Tubi Tubi is another AVOD-driven OTT platform but with a unique focus on integrating advertising with the viewer experience for optimum results. Their ad formats are built on the following core principles: 100% full-screen, non-skippable displays Quality over quantity: ads only take up 4-6 minutes for every hour of programming for higher engagement and recognition Engaging formats that range from 0:6 billboards to 90-second full videos Advertisers can decide whether to run a standard video or interactive video ad on Tubi. The interactive videos allow audiences to click through to specific landing pages that you can use to further drive conversions for your client’s campaign. 7. Xumo Another ad-supported free streaming service, Xumo is owned and operated by telecom titan Comast. Like the other platforms listed above, it benefits from a robust infrastructure similar to that of Comast’s other property mentioned in this article, Hulu. Xumo emphasizes offering customized programmatic packages to advertisers. This enables your agency to exercise a great deal of control over budget, strategy, and measuring the performance metrics that matter most to your client’s business goals. Like its half-sibling Hulu, Xumo enjoys access to the wealth of first-party data that Comcast can provide. Coupled with highly customized package options, you can ensure that your message is reaching the right audiences that engage with the platform. OTT is Only Part of the Programmatic Story, Though! As a programmatic channel, OTT advertising integrates seamlessly into a holistic programmatic strategy that could also include other tactics like audio, display, and text-based advertising. Some of the platforms above also allow for you to extend your campaign with these formats to maximize your complete reach potential. When we discuss programmatic opportunities with our partners, we often recommend a strategy that incorporates at least two or more tactics. This enables your client to capitalize on the full potential of their campaign and target audiences at multiple touchpoints throughout their content consumption experience. Quick-Start an Elite OTT Advertising Campaign with a White Label Partner Now that you know some of the best OTT advertising platforms, you might be wondering how to get started? Should you focus on just one platform, a combination, or start serving to the full list we mentioned above? This is where your agency’s white label ad operations partner comes in. At Conduit Digital, we partner with successful and established agencies throughout North America to deliver elite results for your clients. Our 100% U.S.-based, expert-certified Programmatic Team leverages custom domain and application whitelists developed in-house through countless hours of testing and vetting each one’s capabilities to ensure impressions of the utmost quality. To learn more about how we can help you integrate OTT advertising into your agency’s product offering, schedule a 20-minute call with us today.

Jul 13, 2020 With the help of smartphones and the ability to scroll through social media apps at any given time, time spent on social media across the world is on the rise and shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, the average person spends 2 hours and 33 minutes a day on social media. Social Media Advertising has become an extremely effective way to spend your digital advertising dollars now more than ever. Choosing the best social media platforms to advertise your business is on a key ingredient in your recipe for success! With so many platforms available, Social Media Advertising is not a one size fits all approach since each platform has a unique audience and their own set of targeting options to reach them. Between Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, your business can reach the most ideal audience on social media to help accomplish virtually any business goal you may have! With the help of our guide, you will be able to decide which platform or combinations of platforms will best suit your business! Read on to learn more about each social media platform or just skip ahead to the section you’re most interested in! Facebook & Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Facebook & Instagram According to Facebook Insights, there are approximately 7 million active advertisers on and your business could be the next to benefit from advertising on this powerhouse of a social media platform. With Facebook and Instagram being connected, there are more opportunities to reach the most desirable audience to produce impressive results. Whether that be generating brand awareness for your products or services or generating leads to increase your sales, advertising on these platforms is the way to go. The diverse nature of both Facebook and Instagram allow for advertisers to use the platforms as a standalone product or part of their complete digital marketing solution! Know Your Goals The reach across Facebook and Instagram is broad, but they possess robust advertising objectives and unique targeting capabilities, so you can show your ad to a personalized audience! In terms of objectives, advertisers have the ability to choose the desired outcome of their Facebook and Instagram campaign. It’s important to know what the goals are of the campaign so you can choose the appropriate objective. This is ultimately the action you want users to take when they see your ad. Awareness – based objectives work to spark interest in your business. These objectives help increase awareness of your brand and help get your ads seen in front of as many users possible within your target audience. Brand Awareness and Reach are great for businesses who want to acquire new customers by showcasing their value, change brand perception, or warm up potential customers to what you have to offer. Overtime, as your business goals shift, consideration and conversion-oriented objectives are available when you are ready to focus your efforts on engagement and encouraging users to take action! Consideration and conversion– based objectives work to get users to seek more information and take action off the platform. Consideration objectives like Traffic, Engagement, or Lead Generation are valuable for businesses with goals that require actions to be taken. If you are interested in sending people to websites so they can learn more, obtaining information from people via a Lead Ad, or even engagement on your ads, consideration objectives are the way to go. A step further, conversion objectives are geared towards getting people to take a valuable action like making a purchase or submitting their information on a website. In order to be able to optimize your ads towards users likely to take those actions, the Facebook Pixel is required. Using a Facebook Pixel allows the system to track the activity taking place on your website and show your ads to users likely to take those same actions, like making a purchase! Know Your Targeting Options While it is important to choose a platform that offers capabilities that will help you achieve your client’s goals, knowing the targeting options on each platform is equally important.This ensures your ads are delivered to the best audience in the most effective way possible. To pinpoint your target audience, Facebook and Instagram allow you to define your audience with the basics: age, gender, and location. With the abundance of detailed targeting options like demographics, interests, and behaviors you can really hone in on a relevant audience. Custom Audiences are used to reach people already familiar with your business, so you can use this tactic to target users based off of website traffic or a customer list you may have. Lookalike audiences help you reach new users who have key similarities to those relevant users in your custom audiences. The targeting options on Facebook and Instagram are endless! Last but not least, ad format and creative options on each platform are also an important element to consider. You want to ensure that the platforms you choose have the format and creative that not only aligns with what you are trying to promote, but will resonate with who you are trying to reach! Facebook and Instagram offer a wide variety of creative and format combinations so you can create the most engaging ads possible. Facebook and Instagram ads can first be structured with a single video, static image, or a slideshow. With those creative types, businesses have the option to utilize different formats to reach their target audience. To highlight a few strong formats offered on Facebook and Instagram, there are Lead Generation ads. These ads help collect information about people interested in your business upon clicking the call to action button, which takes users to a customized form without ever leaving Facebook or Instagram. The carousel format is also available, which is a single ad that can showcase a combination of up to ten images or videos. This method is powerful when trying to show different products or tell a visual story across multiple cards. LinkedIn If your business goals are B2B Marketing or Lead Generation, LinkedIn could be the platform for you! Advertising on LinkedIn is effective when trying to reach a professional audience. A user’s LinkedIn profile is a first impression to many as you can showcase your skills and expertise. Users have an incentive to keep their profiles accurate & up to date so rest assured that you are going to reach key decision makers! LinkedIn is the largest business-oriented network and with the combination of their objectives, powerful targeting, and unique ad formats this platform is a one stop shop for reaching the professional audience that matters to your business. Like any other social advertising platform, the objective you choose is the goal you want to accomplish. The objectives on LinkedIn are also bucketed into the categories of: Awareness Consideration Conversion If your business goal is to reach a professional audience and introduce them to your brand, Brand Awareness campaigns are there to help you maximize the exposure of your business on Linkedin. LinkedIn Objectives Consideration Objectives are great if you are interested in users engaging with your business. Whether that be through engagement or video views on your LinkedIn ads or sending them to your website to learn more information. If your goals are more focused on conversions, selecting the website conversions objectives will be much more beneficial for your campaign. With this, you will have the ability to track and optimize your campaign towards the actions users take after they reach your website. LinkedIn also offers a unique conversion objective, Job Applicants. If generating applicants is your goal, this is the objective for you! This objective was created so businesses can promote their open job positions to recruit top talent on Linkedin. Once you settle on a marketing method and an objective that can accomplish your goals, read on to find out how to reach those users! When it comes to the reaching key decision makers in a business or viable candidates, LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities are unmatched. LinkedIn prides itself on the accuracy of their professional targeting. In addition to targeting users by gender, age, and location the strongest targeting options are focused on a user’s company, job title, industry, and education. You can even filter down to professional interests and skills! LinkedIn data is known to stand out since their users have a professional incentive to keep their profiles accurate and up to date! In addition to in-platform targeting, you can also use lookalike audiences to reach new professionals with similar traits to your ideal target. This level of targeting provides the highest accuracy and ensures you are narrowing your audience to those key people that matter. The unique ad formats on LinkedIn also offer advantages when helping you achieve your business goals. There are formats like sponsored content, also known as ads seen directly in feeds, are great to generate awareness, leads, and engagement. Text Ads displayed on the side rail, encourage users to drive qualified traffic to your website. LinkedIn offers the ability to personalize In-Mail for a user’s inbox in the form of Message Ads or Conversation Ads known as Sponsored In-mail. Sponsored InMail Ads These ads are powerful because it allows you to send a message to your prospects and engage with them in real-time. Conversation Ads create more structure to your messages as the recipient will have to choose from a list of actions you created. For Instance, if your Conversation Ad CTA’s can prompt users to select “Request A Demo”, “Tell Me More”, and even “Sign Up For Webinar”. With Sponsored InMail, LinkedIn will only send messages to users who are active, so you don’t waste your advertising dollars on users who won’t answer or messages that will bounce back. With Sponsored Content and Mail as well as Text and Dynamic Ads, LinkedIn ad formats can compliment many business goals and objectives. Twitter Twitter is the best platform for your business if you are interested in engaging with users in real time conversation. Twitter is formulated for engagement and fast responses and is the best platform to keep it short and sweet. Your business has the opportunity to convey a message while finding new ways to capture your audience’s attention! Still not sure if Twitter is the right platform to add into your Social Advertising mix? If your audience is present on this platform, Twitter has strong objectives, targeting, and ad formats that can help you stand out! Twitter Objectives to Know Each of the objectives Twitter offers serves a specific purpose. If your goal is increasing awareness, choosing “Reach” will maximize how many users see your Twitter ads. Twitter’s consideration objectives are among the most robust offered since this is a social platform that is designed for engagement. Do you want to drive engagement on your Tweets or drive clicks to your website? The next group of consideration objectives help your business optimize towards goals of video views, app installs, website clicks, engagement, & Twitter followers. If your business has an app, the App Re-engagement objective helps get users to take action on your app. Twitter is a compatible platform for your business if you are looking to promote your app for installs and re-engagements like in app purchases. Twitter is all about businesses and users connecting with each other. People join Twitter to see what is happening with the world, join in on trends, and to find something new. With such a unique audience, Twitter’s targeting options help you reach the right users. Twitter Targeting Options Twitter offers traditional targeting (by location, demographics, interests, and keywords) but a feature unique to Twitter is your ability to tap into conversation topics, event targeting, and movie and tv show targeting. Conversation topics help you reach users based on the types of conversations they are actively engaging with in real time. Event calendars house different events all over the world, so users can share if they are interested in attending, which allows advertisers to utilize event targeting in their strategy. Movie and TV show targeting is an option to be used if your business closely aligns with people who are engaging with interests related to specific TV shows and movies. Business can also benefit from Twitter targeting by device, carrier, and new mobile user targeting as well as tailored and lookalike audiences based on customer lists, your website, or engagement on twitter. When a platform is designed for conversation, engagement, and fast responses, businesses need to stand out in order to capture user’s attention. Promoted Tweets Twitter ads will be featured in a timeline and with the use of ad formats like promoted text, images, videos and GIFs, businesses can reach users as they scroll in their timelines. It is essential to be creative while developing your ads so they can stand out in a feed! Unique to Twitter, your ad can be formatted as a promoted poll, where users can answer questions in an interactive poll helping you gain insights and receive feedback instantly! Conclusion Social Media Advertising is not a one size fits all approach since each platform has a unique audience and their own set of targeting options to reach them. With the help of this guide, it is our hope that you can now choose the best social media platforms to advertise on!

Sep 9, 2020 Programmatic Display Advertising has revolutionized the way that marketers buy & sell advertising space across the internet. As a marketer, what are the best ways to ensure that you are tapping into the full potential of programmatic, and how do you sell this potential to clients who may not be fully bought into digital? When it comes down to it, your programmatic solution can only be as good as the tech stack you’re utilizing. Within these tools and platforms lies the true benefits of introducing a programmatic digital strategy to your clients marketing efforts. What Is Programmatic Display Advertising? Programmatic advertising is the use of software to purchase digital advertising space across the internet. The advancements in technology are what have made programmatic advertising so popular today. The reliance on machines allows advertisers to obtain digital ad space in a much more efficient and cost effective way. To learn more about Programmatic Display & Native Advertising, check out our Ultimate Guide here. One of the most robust marketing platforms out there is offered by Google known as The Google Marketing Platform. It consists of several tools that enable you to strategize, optimize, and report on the performance of your programmatic campaigns. Not to mention, using these tools will help your agency make money selling programmatic display. One of the biggest benefits of the Google Marketing platform is the ability to see campaign performance from various angles with tools to slice data in a seemingly unlimited number of ways to ensure you’re gathering desired insights. What Is Google Display & Video 360? Google Display & Video 360 is the Google Demand Side Platform or DSP.  This platform not only gives marketers access to purchasing ad space programmatically, but also provides an abundance of tools to help focus your campaigns targeting to reach the right audience at the right time, and provide users with a meaningful message and clean user experience. Within this platform Marketers have the ability to run several types of campaign ads. DV360 has the option of Display, Video, Native, Audio, YouTube, and Email. This variety allows for all campaigns to be housed under one platform and budgets can easily be managed and adjusted. Another added bonus of DV360 is the variety of targeting options available to you when building out a campaign. These range from inventory targeting, to geography, all the way down to the ability to serve based on specific weather conditions. DV360 has all of your bases covered and is fully equipped with the tools to help make sure your clients ads are reaching the right users, at the right time. Google Analytics: What Is It? Google Analytics is another product offered within the Google Marketing Platform that is an essential piece to not only marketers, but to anyone who is curious about how people navigate their website or application. Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google that provides data, reports and website tracking. Google Analytics Tips Put simply Google Analytics highlights three important pieces of information about your website. The first being Audience, which digs deep into who the people on your website are. What demographic are they in, what interest groups do they fall into, even insights into device usage. The second is Acquisition, which shows the channels they took to get to your website. Where are a majority of your visitors coming from? Are they searching for your brand name directly, or are they being sent via a referral from a specific social media platform? Finally it highlights user Behavior, which dives into what users are doing once they are on your site. Which pages have content that is showing to be the most engaging, how much time are people spending on specific pages on my site? Which sites are not receiving as much traffic as you thought? All of these insights play a huge role in the optimizations of a marketing campaign, and can further ensure that your ads are reaching the right people who engage with your site. Now having the ability to set up campaigns, and analyze the performance is all a very important piece of digital marketing. But how do we tie both of those together in a way that our clients can easily understand? That is where Google Data Studio, the reporting and visualization tool of Google Marketing Platform comes in. What is Google Data Studio? Google Data Studio is a completely free reporting tool that allows you to produce fully customizable dashboards to present the most important data to your clients. You have the ability to port over data and include a wide variety of widgets to create a clean and easily digestible report to tie the bow on the efforts put into a successful marketing campaign. Data sources can be linked effortlessly to include metrics and statistics directly from Google Analytics and DV360, which again helps create a seamless connection between the tools offered within the Google Platform. While each of these products can be used successfully as a stand-alone, the real benefit comes when they are used together. Being able to create a targeted marketing campaign through DV360, optimize that campaign based on insights gathered from Google Analytics, and report on those insights through Google Data studio is an easy and effective way to not only run a marketing campaign, but to share the success of it as well. At Conduit we utilize the Google Marketing Platform everyday to ensure we are not only set up for success, but also to know we are offering the best digital solution available anywhere in our space.

Mar 25, 2021 Google Local Service Ads allow businesses to reach their local markets and communicate their unique value to potential customers. With the economic strain of COVID-19 still persisting in many parts of the world, creating effective advertising campaigns that reach nearby audiences can help businesses survive and thrive in a challenging environment. In this Complete Guide, we’ll be covering everything you need to know about Google Local Service Ads, such as: What are Google Local Service Ads? What is Google Guaranteed? A Brief History On Local Service Ads What do Local Service Ads Look Like? How Much Do They Cost? What Locations Can You Run Local Service Campaigns In? What Categories are Google Local Service ads Available For? Next, we will be publishing a part-two of this guide that will show you how to get started with Local Service Ads the right way to drive maximum impact for your campaigns! An Introduction to Google Local Service Ads What Are Google Local Service Ads? Local Service Ads is Google’s lead generation platform targeted at helping home service contractors reach customers in their local market. These ads appear at the top of a Google search when a user enters a relevant search term for a particular industry. For example, if you search “plumber New York,” the Local Service Ad unit will display on the search engine results page (SERP). From there, searchers can contact the business directly and the business will be charged for that call. However, before businesses can begin generating leads through Local Service Ads, they must establish themselves as Google Guaranteed entities. What is Google Guaranteed? Google Guaranteed is a badge awarded by Google verifying that a business has completed the evident background check process and has had their insurance and license verified. We will dive deeper into this later. If a business is guaranteed by Google, the customers of the business can receive a refund of up to $2,000 for any work they are not satisfied with. This Google assures ad quality and maintains its sterling lead generation reputation. What Does a Local Service Ad Look Like? Google Local Service Ads have a simple display that quickly shows the following features: Business name Business photo Average user review Google Guaranteed/Screened verification Business hours Business location Call button to call the business directly A Brief History on Local Service Ads Google first launched its Local Service Ad program in 2015 in San Francisco for select businesses serving home service verticals. The program was designed to directly compete against Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor. The program’s launch allowed users to contact verified local contractors directly from Google Search. This resulted in an enhanced user experience and quicker results for searchers. Once the program proved successful, it was launched in other metropolitan areas such as New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, and many more. How Much Do Local Service Ads Cost? Google only charges businesses for valid leads received through the Local Service Ads program. If a business believes a lead was fraudulent, they can request a refund and it will be issued if Google also deems the lead as fraudulent. The cost of a lead through the program will vary between location and service area. In our experience across several locations and service areas, the general cost of a lead ranges from $10 to $30. Benefits of Local Service Ads According to our friends at Google themselves, Local Service Ads offer the following benefits: Have your business appear at the top of Google SERPs Connect with potential customers actively searching for your services Simple interface for getting started quickly with a personalized profile Mobile app allows you to communicate with customers wherever, whenever Google Guarantee establishes credibility Only pay for leads related to your business and its services Customers choose you Google Guaranteed businesses may also be listed as a local provider on the Assistant. You don’t pay for this service. What Countries are Eligible to Run Local Service Ads? The following countries are eligible for the program: United States Canada Austria Belgium France Germany Ireland Italy Spain Switzerland United Kingdom Google is constantly identifying opportunities to expand this program. We can anticipate that, as it gains more popularity, it will open opportunities for businesses in more countries to run Local Service Ads. Eligible Local Service Ads Categories Local Service Ads are only available for select categories at this time. These categories mostly involve home services targeted at consumers. Categories in the United States include: 1. Appliance repair 15. Law 2. Carpentry 16. Lawn care 3. Carpet Cleaning 17. Locksmiths 4. Countertop services 18. Moving 5. Electrical 19. Pest control 6. Fencing 20. Plumbing 7. Financial planning 21. Real estate 8. Flooring 22. Roofing 9. Foundations 23. Siding 10. Garage doors 24. Tax services 11. House Cleaning 25. Tree services 12. HVAC 26. Water damage services 13. Junk removal 27. Window cleaning 14. Landscaping 28. Window services Are you unsure if your business is eligible to run Local Service Ads? Finding out is easy. Just use the Google Eligibility Checker. Stay Tuned for Part 2: Setting Up Your Own Campaign Next week, we will be returning with an ultimate guide for actually setting up and running a Local Service Ads campaign. Stay tuned as we dive deeper into the mechanics of building a successful, conversion-driving strategy!

As Q4 approaches, has your agency prepared to close out the current year in preparation for what’s on the horizon? We know Q4 comes with its own challenges, but it is also a great time to discover new ways to add value for your clients and maintain the high level of performance they have come to expect from your team. During Q4, many clients are often reassessing their budgets and determining their needs for the upcoming year. Depending on their satisfaction with the results your agency has produced for them, they may decide to: Increase their investment in your agency’s services Maintain their current budget with your agency Decrease their marketing budget Cancel their work agreement with your agency Out of these possible outcomes, the last two are likely the ones any agency leader would want to avoid. The first one, of course, is the most desirable. As you continue demonstrating how the fruits of your labor benefit your client, would you not be positioned to pitch them on investing further? How do you inspire and motivate your clients to continue investing or increase their investment with your agency? You prove the performance you have delivered for your accounts has led to tangible results! That leads to you arriving here. How do you prepare for Q4 and also continue to perform for your clients during a demanding time of year for your business? Need to Scale Your Agency Now? How to Prove the Past Year’s Performance for Your Clients When you want to demonstrate the value your services provide, nothing compares to a live report. This deliverable becomes a living digital entity that can outline exactly what your team has accomplished for your client and the tangible results these efforts produced. Whether your client requests a record of what you have done for them or not, keeping an internal track record of these successes can benefit your agency in more than one way. For example, if you are not sending these documents to clients so that they can see what you have accomplished for them, you can still use the report to create a case study or whitepaper to promote your own business. However you plan to use your live reports, make sure that they remain housed in an easily accessible folder on your cloud drive. If the client does request that you do provide them with this information, you can retrieve it with little time and effort. Along with the raw data, ensure that these figures also include insights from your team to put them into their proper context. For example, if your client now ranks '#1' on Google for 50 new desirable keywords, did they displace any of their competitors as a result? Did their organic traffic increase by a certain percentage once they began climbing the SERPs for these terms? You can use the information within your SEO reports to construct the proper narrative that pairs seamlessly with the data. This not only highlights your achievements but it also illustrates how you delivered these results for your clients and demonstrates the tangible value they produced for your client’s business. How to Continue Adding Value to Your Clients’ Accounts During Q4 Q4 is often a hectic time of year and between the end of year rush and the holidays your clients may not be engaging with your team as frequently, so how do you continue to add value? Rather than keeping your head down in the work, look for ways that you can better prepare them for the new year. As an example, you could invest time into researching and identifying keywords for their SEO and/or Paid Search campaigns for the new year. When they are ready to hit the pavement in Q1, you will have fresh ideas and new opportunities prepared, which can also help cut down on crunch time in the future. 5 Ways to Use Q4 to Strengthen Your Own Business 1. Set Your Own Goals for the Next Year At Conduit, we abide by the mantra of beginning with the end in mind. When you have an end goal envisioned, you can create a roadmap that leads you to your desired outcome. Try to find a moment during Q4 to outline both abstract and concrete goals for next year. For example, you may have a goal that is less definable but equally important such as “improve the client experience at my agency”. Conversely, you could also have one that is more tangible in nature like “increase the client roster size by 30%”. If you already have 30 clients currently onboard with your agency, you would then need to acquire another 9 during the next year to meet this objective. No matter the goal you set, it should follow the S.M.A.R.T. framework: Specific – What are you trying to achieve in particular? Measurable – How can you track your progress towards achieving the goal? Achievable – Can the goal be realistically accomplished? Relevant – Does the goal directly benefit your agency as a business? Time-bound – Can you set a realistic timeline or deadline for accomplishing it? With the S.M.A.R.T. framework in place, you can define exactly how you will achieve your goals without any ambiguity. You can track progress along the roadmap and make sure that all of your necessary benchmarks are met to reach your desired outcome. 2. Take Inventory of Your Current Capacity and Bandwidth Has your team spent the past year working at or over capacity? Does it feel like “extra bandwidth” is a mythical, unobtainable state of being? If your team is already maxed-out with your current client roster, this could affect your ability to scale. Should a new, large account onboard in the new year, you may not have the capability to continue delivering elite performance across all of your accounts if they are all competing for your team’s work hours. Do you feel like you have reached a brick wall in terms of capacity? It may be time to hire one or more new team members or explore the possibilities of a partnership with a white label provider to stabilize the bandwidth crisis. However, if you find that you have plenty of bandwidth, this may also present a new opportunity. You could use the available time to invest in other aspects of your agency such as any of the following: 3. Strengthen Your In-House Team What are some ways that you can build up your current in-house team? From free Google Skillshop certifications to trainings and industry seminars, you can discover opportunities to expand their own knowledge and expertise to provide a more excellent service for your clients. You can also use any available bandwidth to have a “listening tour” with your team. Ask them where they think the agency’s operations can improve further. For example, they may have ideas for a new tool or service that can help streamline processes or automate recurring tasks so that they can spend more time on higher-level objectives. Want to start somewhere simple? Listen to podcasts by other agency leaders, such as AgencyTalk or PredictiveROI's Sell With Authority Podcast . You can easily drop links into a Slack thread or email and send them to your team. 4. Invest in More Internal Marketing During a busy year you may unintentionally neglect one of your most important clients: your agency! While prioritizing client work always comes first, you should also ensure that you dedicate any available bandwidth and resources to promote your own business to potential clients that you want to reach. Align your own internal marketing strategies with your business goals for the upcoming year. If you want to land more clients in the medical industry, you can create a paid media strategy designed to target these business leaders within your desired niche and geographic locations. You can also spend more time researching your competitors that are targeting the same niche to see where they are creating success and how you can compete more effectively against them. Lastly, as an agency leader, one of the best forms of internal marketing is testimonials from your existing clients. Ask your client’s point-of-contact, such as their CEO or CMO, if they can provide you with a quote in either written or video form that you can use to promote your services on your own website. 5. Look for New Ways to Land and Expand Accounts Are there any services that clients have been requesting that your agency does not have the resources or expertise to deliver on? If you cannot eventually meet these needs, your client may decide to explore opportunities with a competing agency that can and will rise to the occasion. Keep a close ear to the ground on what your clients have requested over the past year. Are there opportunities that you can pursue to expand your ability to deliver across these desired channels? A white label partnership can enable your agency to integrate these capabilities into your offering at an expert level immediately. You can then confidently say “yes” when asked if you can provide TikTok advertising or OTT advertising services. Not only will your agency appeal to more desirable prospects, but you can also explore more opportunities to expand your accounts with current clients! Say “Yes” to Better Opportunities in Q4 and Beyond with a White Label Partner At Conduit Digital, our team partners with successful agencies across North America to deliver elite, scalable white label digital marketing products and performance for their clients. We equip your agency with a 100% U.S.-based suite of services, resources, and reports that you can use to enable better opportunities for your business. To learn more about how you can say “yes” to these opportunities in the new year, schedule a 20-minute discovery call with us today.

Sep 24, 2020 Over the Top Television has become a powerful tool in the hands of digital marketers and business owners alike . OTT has many different targeting capabilities that can be utilized to reach the optimal target audience for almost every campaign! The perfect extension of traditional tv ads, OTT in the right hands can help bring amazing results to any campaign. From targeting a specific geographic location to targeting users based on their recent purchase history OTT has a wide range of targeting capabilities. Below we will go into detail regarding the different targeting capabilities for OTT across various DSPs. With nearly 60% of Americans ‘cutting the cord’ and replacing traditional TV with OTT, finding ways to take advantage of all of these capabilities is becoming more important every day! Geographic Targeting Geographic targeting is one of the most advanced location-based advertising techniques for targeting users based on a specific and sought after geographic area. This offers you the ability to accurately geo-target potential customers across connected and streaming platforms. This enables you to capture your audience’s location within a country, media market, city, state, zip code, and/or radius requested. Geographic targeting helps ensure you are not wasting resources by serving Ads to individuals who live hundreds of miles outside of your physical market. Instead, it allows you to get as granular with your targeting as a radius around a specified address. Streaming Service & TV Application Whitelists Quality of engagement and traffic is of the utmost importance when running an OTT campaign. Client’s do not want their Ads served to the dog sitting on the couch watching TV while their owner is at work. At Conduit Digital, our OTT team has spent countless hours vetting and creating the right Streaming Services and TV Applications whitelists to serve your client’s ads on. No serving on Apps that are only meant to be on as background noise or screensaver. The team has identified over 1,000 domains to only serve where relevant audiences will see your clients’ ads while also driving great performance. These whitelists can be layered with other targeting tactics to combine for some really advanced targeting. Site Retargeting Is there a more ideal user to target than someone that has previously shown interest in your client by visiting their website? Did you know that 96% of users who visit a webpage will leave without ever converting to a lead or sale? This is where site retargeting can be one of your best friends while running an OTT campaign. There are many different approaches to using site retargeting, and choosing the right approach is dependent on your campaign goals. Site retargeting can be utilized to retarget users who have visited your site or a specific page on your site. If you only wanted to retarget users who have visited your “Contact Us” page after they left, site retargeting gives you that capability. Or if you wanted to target individuals who have left something in their shopping cart with Ads reminding them to complete their purchase you can do that! If your goal is to capture every user who visits your site and retarget them to help keep your brand top of mind, site retargeting allows you to do just that. Email Retargeting Email Retargeting is a powerful way to reach an audience that is interested in your client’s industry! Email retargeting is a fairly new targeting capability for OTT. Allowing for the ability to create custom audience lists based on users current subscriptions and newsletter emails they receive. With email retargeting you are tapping into a whole new area not seen before in OTT campaigns. Purchase Receipt Retargeting Just like Email Retargeting, Purchase Receipt targeting uses emails that users receive to build a custom audience. The difference, however, is these users have received receipts after purchasing something online. For example, if someone just received an email receipt for a dog collar, they could be categorized within a ‘dog owners’ audience. Purchase receipt retargeting helps give you peace of mind that your Ads are being served to audiences that are within your specified demographic. Search Behavioral Search Behavioral targeting allows for custom audience creation based on a list of keywords that are relevant to your client’s campaign. Behavioral targeting enables advertisers to combine the effectiveness of search with the brand impact and reach of OTT targeting. Search is an amazing capability when used in an OTT campaign. You are able to create custom keyword lists that can be as granular or as broad as you want them to be. This helps ensure your Ads are being seen by the users in your target audience. Point of Interest (Geo-Fencing) Point of Interest (POI) targeting, sometimes called Geo-Fencing, utilizes multiple data sources to pinpoint a user’s exact whereabouts, allowing clients to target competitors’ locations and other relevant physical locations where their target audience may frequently visit. POI can also be utilized to target a specific event or events your client’s target demographic attend. Have a rare car dealership? With POI you would have the ability to gather user pools from events such as a Baret Jackson car auction and serve them Ads for the rare car dealership. POI targeting can also be coupled with foot traffic attribution, so your clients will know how many times someone visits their business after viewing an ad! At Conduit Digital, we found that users who were served one of our clients’ ads after visiting a brick and mortar location were about 3 times more likely to convert than those who visited the same targeted locations but were not served an ad! Demographic & Interest/Affinity OTT campaigns are able to reach users based on their demographic and psychographic affiliations utilizing first and third party data. In terms of demographics, your clients’ ads can be targeted towards people based on things like their age, gender, income, education, and marital status. This can be paired with the ability to target user’s interests, like coffee drinkers, fitness enthusiasts, and musical instrument buyers to really put the ads in front of the most relevant audiences! In-Market or Intent Intent targeting can be utilized to target users who have shown behaviors putting to them in-the-market to buy a specific product. This is a great opportunity to target users who may be searching on competitors’ websites or doing research on which specific brand they should spend their money on. Dayparting While it is important to always try to reach the right audience, it is just as important to reach that audience at the right time. With dayparting, your OTT campaign will have the capability to serve your clients’ ads during the time of day users are at their most engaged. No serving Ads to sleepy eyes at 3am or the pet friendly channel that is made for users to put on when they leave their house to comfort their pal. We serve to engaged users and dayparting makes that possible. OTT Targeting In a Nutshell Knowing your audience and knowing what tactics to use for your campaign are immense. To learn more about OTT and the benefits it wll bring to your client, check out our Ultimate OTT Guide. We hope we can help with pain points that come with setting up an optimal OTT campaign. Let us know in the comments below!

Jul 21, 2020 When you think of search in general, you think of a group of listings that take you to websites. At least, that is the way search has worked. Now though, users have as many (if not more) opportunities to learn and convert before ever even getting to a website. So, what does this mean for the SEO and search community in general? It means, treating the SERP page like the landing page, rather than the portal to get to a landing page. What Does ‘SERP’ Mean? Before we can jump into the specifics as to why and how you should be treating the SERP as a landing page, we should first discuss what ‘SERP’ even means. For any novice digital marketers, you have probably been reading and hearing the term a lot. SERP stands for “Search Engine Results Page”, which are the web pages that populate every time someone online enters a keyword or search query using search engines like Bing or Google. Every SERP is unique, even for search queries performed on the same search engine using the same keywords or search queries. This is because virtually all search engines customize the experience for their users by presenting results based on a wide range of factors beyond their search terms, such as the user’s physical location, browsing history, and social settings. The SERP can be made up of, Google Ads, Organic Results, Google My Business listings, Google Maps, Images, Videos, etc. Based on the query and Google’s interpretation of what your search intent may be will determine the layout of what your SERP will look like. Two SERPs may appear identical, and contain many of the same results, but will often feature subtle differences. Why Is the SERP so Important? The SERP is unique for each different search query based upon the keywords and phrases used when a consumer is searching for their results. These results can vary from person to person based on Google’s algorithm. This ensures that the consumer is being served up relevant results that match the intent behind their query. SERP is important because the higher a company’s website ranks, the more searchers will click on the website. It’s believed that nearly 75% of online users do not go past the first page of search engines, so it’s important to develop a strong SEO strategy in order to rank higher on the SERP and capture leads. If your website is stuck on page 2 for a few keywords, you may need to reestablish a strategy in order to bump them up to the first page. With the SERP being the new landing page for many websites and businesses, how will you get yours to stand out amongst the other ads and organic listings? Read on to find out. Be Consistent Running a PPC, SEO, and local search campaign separately just doesn’t get it done any longer. All of these campaigns need to be working together, creating consistency on the SERP that will make a business recognizable and in turn increase your CTR. This includes making sure the business name being used is the exact same across all search campaigns. For example, if your business name is Jake’s Roofing Associates, be sure to use the exact business name is PPC ads, title tags, and Google My Business. Far too often, you will see variations (Jake’s Roofing, Jakes Roofing & Associates, etc.) which can be confusing and lead to a lower CTR on search. Consistency also means using similar phrasing in the listings. If you have a CTA in your PPC ad, mirror it in your SEO title and create a GMB post about the offer you’re promoting. Again, having this consistency will lead to a higher CTR of the overall campaign. Be Strategic Knowing that many users may not ever actually end up on the website, understand the intent behind the searches that are being conducted every month. For education searches, make sure you are drafting content that specifically answers the question and don’t be subtle about crafting the content to answer the question directly. With more and more searches displaying rich snippet content, this can lead to expanded visibility right at the top of the search. For more conversion-focused keywords, be sure to bid on them in your PPC campaign. You will also want to make sure you have ad extensions and have linked the GMB listing with your PPC campaign, especially for those bottom of the funnel keywords, as these users generally are looking to convert and giving them that opportunity right on the SERP will boost overall ROI. In today’s marketing climate, it’s not only important to use a top notch strategy when developing your SEM campaigns but it’s also crucial to stay up to date on any changes. Google is constantly changing its algorithm, layout, even bidding pricing. To stay ahead of your competitors, you need to make sure that you’re feeding your brain with the latest industry news and trends. Be Innovative While a lot has changed on the Google SERP, there are even more changes that are still to come. We’ve seen Local Service Ads, Shopping Ads, GMB Offers, Video and Image results, Direct Booking apps and so much more. You need to be taking advantage of as many of these as possible. Not only because they offer opportunity, but also because that will allow you to take advantage of what’s next. The farther you fall behind with what Google is offering, the more difficult it will be to catch up. Our PPC team has crafted an extensive list of Google Ads Tips and Tricks for you to try out on your next PPC campaign so you can stay ahead of competition. This is especially true since there are now more businesses taking advantage of these opportunities than ever before. With competition growing more fierce for SERP visibility, and with users relying more on the SERP than ever before, not being there can make a business invisible. The good news is it’s not too late. With a strategic SEM campaign from a full-service digital marketing agency, you can take full advantage of these opportunities. Implementing a search engine marketing solution is more than adding a credit card to Google Ads. Having the right digital marketing agency is the difference between a true marketing campaign and putting money into a product.

Jul 1, 2020 An integral part of a successful Social Advertising Campaign is Facebook Pixel. The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that should be placed on a website prior to launching any campaign. It is an analytics tool that helps us understand the actions that users are taking on a website and tool to evaluate the effectiveness of our advertising. What is The Facebook Pixel? The Facebook Pixel unlocks a multitude of targeting capabilities that can take your Social Advertising Campaign to the next level. It enhances your targeting and makes sure that your ads are being seen by those who are most likely to take action and convert. Facebook’s core targeting options are based on data collected directly on the platform, what users share on their profiles, and the behaviors they exhibit on the platform. How Do Facebook Pixels Work? Imagine someone clicks on your ad and is brought to your website where they buy one of your products. When you have a Facebook pixel placed, this action will cause it to trigger a report for this purchase. By using this pixel, you’ll know how effective your ads are and how many people are converting based on the ads. The users information is then saved so you can use it to create custom audiences to retarget. Facebook pixels can be used to not only target previous customers, but you can also use it to target users who have similar interests that of your current customer base. You can also use the pixel to target user who may have interacted with your ads previously, but never converted. Since this pixel will monitor everything happening on your website, you can see which products attract the most users. By collecting all this information, it’ll make your retargeting campaign much more effective. How Does Retargeting Work? Retargeting is a highly effective process of targeting your Facebook ads to an audience who has previously shown interest in your products/services. This allows you to put your ad in front of people who are already in-market to remind them how awesome your product is. Re-targeting website visitors through custom audiences is unlocked with the Facebook Pixel installation. This is a targeting option that serves your ads to people who know your business because they have engaged in some level of interaction whether it be your website, app, Facebook page, or in-store activity in the past. These audiences are highly relevant because you use your own business sources that matter the most: website traffic, customer files, app activity, and offline activity. Serve Specialized Ads A major strong suit of the Facebook Pixel installed is the ability to re-target ads to website visitors who visited your website up to the last 180 days. These ads can be designed specifically for the custom audience you want to target. Using social media targeting it a great way to save ad dollars and ensure your message is only being shown to people who have interest. The Facebook Pixel gives us the ability to serve specific ads for things they have shown an interest in on your website, so if a user didn’t convert, it is likely that a re-targeting ad can give them that extra push needed! You are also able to exclude people out of your audience as a result of the Pixel collecting data, so this means you don’t have to waste your ad dollars on people who converted or took specific actions already! Custom Audience Data Using custom audience data collected through the Pixel, we then can take it a step further and now have the ability to use that data to build lookalike audiences. Lookalike audiences are a way to reach new people with key similarities to those who have already known interest in your business. Lookalike audiences are a great way to reach new people and this audience will constantly update over time, so you are always reaching a new relevant segment of your target audience! How To Create A Facebook Tracking Pixel If you want to set up a Facebook pixel, you will need to first make sure you have: A website for your business Access to update the code on the site. Create a Facebook Pixel Navigate to Events Manager Click Connect Data Sources and select Web. Click Get Started. Select Facebook Pixel and click Connect. Read how the pixel works, then click Continue. Add your Pixel Name. Enter your website URL to check for easy setup options. Click Continue. Add The Facebook Pixel To Your Site Once the code is created, you’re then ready to add it to the backend of your site. If you want to install the code manually, you will need to navigate to the header template section on your CMS platform. Go to Events Manager. Select the pixel you want to set up. Click Continue Pixel Setup. Select Install code manually. Copy the pixel base code. Paste the base code at the bottom of the header section, just above the closing head tag. Click Continue. Optional: Toggle on Automatic Advanced Matching and verify the customer information you want to send. Click Continue. Add events using the Event Setup Tool or by manually adding code to your website. You can use one pixel across your whole website, including multiple pages of your website. However, there may be a need to use two pixels on one website. For example, if two different agencies run ads for your business, they may each need to set up a separate pixel on your website. By placing this pixel, you will have a better idea of which ads are performing the best. Utilizing this information will help you develop similar strategies for future campaigns and ultimately deliver your client’s a higher social media ROI. Conclusion Bottom line is that if you want to accurately monitor your campaigns and reach a highly relevant audience, the Facebook Pixel is your answer! The Facebook Pixel is a must-use tool for all Social Advertising Campaigns!