New York, USA – Social media advertising software Smartly.io has announced that it is expanding its campaign management solutions to also include Google’s Performance Marketing Ads Suite.

As a certified Google Ads Partner, Smartly.io helps marketers streamline their processes and assets effectively with tools that build cohesive creative and deliver content that fits the experience of the formats your audiences are engaging with.

Some of those features include creative scale and automation from developing custom templates to scaling your social creative on new Google ads formats, to campaign management and automation as well as single management interface.

Moreover, its automated tools are designed to help ease the challenges with successfully addressing that scale, across the wide span of creative formats, which include Gmail, Youtube, Search, Display, Maps, and the Play Store.

“Today, Google supports a range of ad experiences that perfectly lend themselves to social creative, known for driving better engagement and performance. AI has taken center stage, with creative and writing tools pushing boundaries and shifting paradigms in many industries, and digital advertising is no different. Platforms like Google understand that there is opportunity to leverage new technologies to empower marketers to connect with audiences,” Smartly.io said in a press statement.

Sydney, Australia – HypeAuditor, an AI analytics platform for measuring effective influencer marketing, has today released a new competitor analysis tool called Competitor Grid, which allows brands to check the reach of influencer marketing campaigns of their competitors.

Through the new tool, Competitor Grid gives marketers the ability to easily analyze the performance of competitors’ influencer marketing campaigns. Arming them with important information, such as the full list of influencers they work with, analysis of the creatives used, and amount spent per post on a campaign. HypeAuditor’s aim is to help marketers make more strategic decisions for their brand’s influencer marketing activity. 

Furthermore, the tool gives users full access to analytics on how competitor brand’s influencer marketing campaigns are performing, including a close analysis of the following criteria namely engagement rate, audience quality, influencer quality, cost per engagement, and reach.

Competitor Grid’s development comes in response to the demand from marketers, as highlighted in research conducted in January 2021 by HypeAuditor, which found that 1 in 3 marketers (31%) are unaware of the influencers their competitors are working with, whilst almost half (45%) do not know the audiences their competitors are targeting through influencer marketing and with 87% finding it helpful to get a list of Instagram posts with competitors’ mentions.

“As influencer marketing matures, brands are reevaluating how they work with influencers. Instead of one-off deals with hundreds of influencers, all using the same copy, marketers, and agencies are now looking for more long-term, authentic partnerships that give influencers more creative control.” said Alex Frolov, CEO of HypeAuditor

Following the release of Competitor Grid, HypeAuditor conducted a research analysis of Australia-based brands and measured them against each other based on Instagram influencer marketing.

In the study, HypeAuditor noted that Australian home-grown brand Chemist Warehouse is the highest performer in influencer marketing in Australia, in terms of beauty brands. HypeAuditor notes such strong performance due to the brand achieving 1.51% average engagement rate for the quarter, an average cost of $0.32 per engagement, and 89 sponsored and likely sponsored posts from 61 Instagram influencers such as Sophie Monk, Christina Sikalias, and Jules Robinson.

The research also noted that global beauty brand Sephora failed to compete against its Australian local counterparts, with home-grown brands like Bondi Sands and Priceline Australia still taking the lead in influencer marketing reach.

“To do this effectively, they need data that they can rely on when developing influencer marketing campaigns. Our new Competitor Grid answers these new needs and helps marketers make the right decisions when looking at implementing an influencer marketing strategy, based on valuable information gathered about competitors’ strategies,” Frolov added.

Singapore – Global SaaS analytics platform AppsFlyer has announced the launch of its new predictive analytics feature, PredictSK, a new solution that will be a part of its SKAdNetwork suite, SK360

SKAdNetwork is about to become a major part of campaign measurement and optimization on iOS, following Apple’s latest privacy changes. This deterministic attribution framework provides advertisers with some data on their iOS campaigns, and while Apple has been continuously making updates to improve its offering to advertisers and app developers, it also introduces critical limitations.

Through the new solutions suite, brands are able to configure and optimize their conversion value, validate their data and keep it fraud-free. They will also be able to integrate with their choice of partners, all through a dedicated, centralized analytics dashboard. 

PredictSK is made in response to the current limitation of SKAdNetwork where advertisers rely on short window time in measuring campaign performance. With only 24 hours of user activity to work with, optimization is nearly impossible. With PredictSK, advertisers will be able to leverage early signals of engagement, which is usually in the first 24-72 hours, to predict long-term campaign performance. 

Furthermore, PredictSK puts mobile attribution in SKAdNetwork on ‘auto-pilot’, removing the measurement and timing barriers and allowing advertisers to maintain and strengthen their competitive edge in this new reality.

According to Barak Witowski, vice president for core product at AppsFlyer, the company’s developed solutions have always been at best for the benefit of advertisers, adding that PredictSK will help brands be empowered against limited data availability.

“AppsFlyer’s SK360 suite will empower brands to eliminate the uncertainty brought on by limited data availability and limited measurement capabilities, while maintaining end user privacy, by combining multiple solutions for maximum coverage,” Witowski stated.

He added, “Moreover, PredictSK will enable measurement across all user events to quickly and accurately predict user loan-to-value (LTV), helping advertisers save precious time and money. With SK360, Advertisers can stay in the driver’s seat while complying with the strictest privacy requirements,”

Meanwhile, Liwei Chen, staff product manager at Twitter, stated that they were working closely with AppsFlyer in delivering a fully operational plug-and-play SKAdNetwork solution.

“The solution was designed together to validate all advertisers’ needs from SKAdNetwork are met: data trust, granularity, optimization, and measurement. This is another exciting step for advertisers, delivering upon our promise of helping drive business success while maximizing end-user privacy,” said Chen.

The new product will be available after Apple starts enforcing its AppTrackingTransparency framework in early spring. The SK360 suite will continue to support the ecosystem throughout Apple’s upcoming privacy updates.

Singapore – The digital experience platform of Magnolia, a global content management systems provider, has recently been recognized at the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant by Gartner.

The Magic Quadrant are market reports published by consulting firm Gartner based on qualitative data analysis in demonstrating market trends, such as direction and business nature. The report is conducted every one or two years to several technology industries.

Magnolia is the newest entry to this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant, and recognition is afforded to its digital experience platform (DXP), the Magnolia DX Core. 

The said DXP, categorized under the ‘Niche Players in the Magic Quadrant’, carry capabilities that include content management, personalization, search, campaign management and digital asset management (DAM). It is often deployed by organizations in banking, manufacturing, communications, and travel and hospitality verticals for business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-employee (B2E) use cases.

“We believe that Magnolia provides the powerful capabilities that marketing teams need to quickly launch customer experiences without having to involve IT. Through its Visual SPA (Single-page app) Editor, Magnolia offers best-in-class authoring experience for omnichannel publishing by enabling marketers to fully design, control and preview experiences for any channel,” Magnolia said in a press statement.

For Magnolia CEO Tim Brown, the recognition from Gartner is a testament of a greater shift in “market demand from single-vendor DXP suites to ecosystems of integrated best-of-breed platforms.”

“Our vision of a composable DXP, built of deeply integrated best-of-breed solutions, enables brands to incrementally build out a high performance DXP that leverage existing proven components and services. Our advanced experience authoring and content management features coupled with a modern tech stack empowers all stakeholders. This combination enables the launch of new digital products and differentiated experiences at unprecedented speed,” Brown explained.

Meanwhile, Rasmus Skjoldan, CMO at Magnolia, commented that last year has seen enterprises moving towards the direction of forward-thinking business movement by “bringing high-quality digital experiences to their customers considerably faster than their competition.”

“We’re essentially seeing the sun rise for composable platforms that give enterprises a much faster way to launch digital experiences – and the first but clear glimpses of the sun setting for the suite platforms as they eventually become too slow for the modern enterprise. It’s a natural evolution for this market in which overly complex suites are replaced by a new approach,” Skjoldan stated.

In a statement provided for MARKETECH APAC, Magnolia Singapore’s general manager Don Lee stated that Magnolia’s recognition is a ‘big win’ for the future of flexible DXPs.

“We are incredibly proud to be featured in this quadrant for the very first time, and on top of that, leading the quadrant in vision. This is testament to the affirmation by our clients of our project success promise along with the flexibility of our composable DXP, allowing brands to build their digital experience platforms in any way they desire, either on premise or as a service,” Lee stated.

Hong Kong – iClick Interactive Asia Group (iClick), an independent online marketing and enterprise data solutions provider in China, has launched its flagship marketing analysis tool iNsights, which gives brands in-depth and actionable consumer behavior insights to drive more effective marketing campaigns.

In the past months, iClick announced upgrades to iAudience and iActivate, its market intelligence and ad campaign management platforms. With the new tool launch, the iSuite solution of the company now completes the full campaign cycle including its audience targeting solution iAccess.

iNsights is a one-stop tracking solution that tracks and analyzes cross-channel campaigns covering China and overseas markets, eliminating the use of multiple marketing tracking systems.

Utilizing full-data analytics to produce reliable and accurate insights, iNsights provides for brands a better understanding of marketing-driven traffic as well as on-site audiences’ behaviors to facilitate more effective re-targeting. The tool is also said to carry a user-friendly dashboard that renders complicated data into visualized interactive graphics.

“iNsights effectively addresses the difficulties presented to marketers by the shallow insights provided by raw data and selective sampling data analysis, as well as the inconvenience and incomparability of multiple tracking systems for different regions,” said Frankie Ho, president of international business at iClick.

“Our recent update of iAudience and the launch of iActivate and iNsights are part of iClick’s commitment to continually build up and develop the best full-stack solutions for global marketers. iClick has always devoted itself to helping brands gain a better and deeper understanding of markets in real-time and to creating the best marketing strategies driven by data and advanced algorithms,” added Ho.