Commentary
How to Solve the Franchise PPC Cannibalization Problem
Working with dozens of franchise brands, it’s been interesting to see how digital teams have structured their national pay-per-click (PPC) programs. Actually, maybe “interesting” isn’t the right word. It’s more so concerning. Many are so narrowly focused only on their national campaigns, they’re aloof when it comes to the local campaigns their franchisees are running. If corporate marketing teams are running digital campaigns on behalf of local franchises, they’re likely not set up and optimized in such a way where they’re being given enough TLC to drive meaningful results at the local level. While some brands get it right, many others have failed miserably.
The ideal scenario is executing local store PPC correctly alongside and in cooperation with national programs and gleaning insights from the data on one program to benefit the other in a symbiotic fashion.
App-ads.txt is an Anti-Fraud Tool, but for Publishers, it’s Really About Revenue
The IAB hasn’t mandated the adoption of app-ads.txt. In other words, it’s still the Wild West out there when it comes to fraud. But even the publishers that have done the right thing by adopting app-ads.txt have gotten the wrong message about the tool because it’s been presented entirely as a compliance matter. As a result, many mobile publishers treat app-ads.txt as a perfunctory anti-fraud measure that they can “set and forget.”
How Restaurants Can Capture More Customer Demand With Email
Email is often the primary channel for restaurants to stay in touch with customers and let them know about changes. When email is done right, there are many small ways restaurants can use it to personalize messaging, drive more engagement, and make their lives easier with scalable best practices.
Latest Posts
June Focus: Pursuing Privacy
The privacy movement will have ripple effects throughout the media and advertising worlds that Street Fight covers. In fact, you could argue that privacy issues are most sensitive whenever we’re talking about content or ads that are targeted based on the user’s location. So how is the location-based media world dealing with these shifts? This is the question we’ll strive to answer throughout the month.
Foursquare Acquires Placed, Announces $150M in Funding
Foursquare and Placed are location tech’s new power couple.
The location intelligence firm is acquiring Placed, which had previously been bought by Snap for its top-rate online-to-offline attribution solution, and the two will offer one of the most powerful attribution solutions in the location industry, to be called Placed powered by Foursquare.
As ad tech faces tougher times and a privacy-driven crackdown on data collection and ad targeting practices, more mergers and acquisitions are likely to transform the industry’s terrain. Teaming up and stockpiling as much first-party data as possible, thereby eliminating the need for less compliant modes of data harvesting, will boost the longevity of some firms while others flounder.
To Share or Not to Share: How Gamification is Swaying the Modern Consumer’s Loyalty
Although 94% of C-suite leaders consider customers’ data to be of paramount importance, privacy continues to be a hot-button issue. Data privacy practices have come under increased scrutiny with the passing of regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation, aimed at protecting individuals from the misuse and exploitation of personal information. Even as consumers continue to debate the tradeoff between convenience and control, one thing is clear—they are craving a more intuitive and personalized experience. How, then, can companies reconcile the differences and walk the tightrope as they acquire a 360-degree view of their audience?
Gamification is one path forward.
SMBs Warm Up to New Tech But Are Skeptical of Impersonal Interactions
A freshly released report from SMB software firm Broadly uses data from a survey of 300 SMB leaders to paint a picture of the American SMB in 2019: gradually embracing mobile-first communication, skeptical of innovation that undercuts human connection, and ambivalent toward large digital marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy.
Why Marketers Still Struggle With One-to-One Personalization
Personalization has long been touted as the future-proof way for businesses to connect with and retain customers. With Gartner predicting enterprises will win or lose due to customer experience in 2019 and beyond, offering customers meaningful, personalized experiences takes on even greater importance.
To uncover the truth about how personalization efforts are affecting the bottom line of the Global 2000 and just how much one-to-one personalization is taking place, we conducted a survey with Forbes that asked 200 marketing leaders just that.
Visual Search Moves Beyond Experimentation and Into Prime Time
After years of experimentation and broad discussions about how visual search would someday take hold, it’s clear that the future has arrived. Visual search has moved into the mainstream, and companies like Pinterest, Instagram, and even Google are paving the way for consumers to engage more deeply with the products they find online.
As visual search moves into the mainstream, questions are intensifying over what impact the medium will have on SEO and traditional search metrics.
Good Data vs Bad: How to Decide What to Keep and What to Discard
Unfortunately, there’s no “silver bullet” for separating good data from bad. Instead, organizations should think of data quality as a habit, with “good” data clearly defined and concrete processes in place to harvest what’s valuable and discard what isn’t.
With that in mind, here are three steps to taking unfiltered data and deciding what to keep — and what to throw out — to achieve optimal data accuracy.
Who’s Winning the Reviews Race? How Do We Define Winning?
In their latest Street Fight conversation, Mike Blumenthal and David Mihm examine the state of the local reviews space and assess the reasons for Google’s dominance. “For me, the question of the future is whether Google’s behaviors will impact the remaining vertical sites over the next 10 years,” Mike writes.
To Understand the Tech Industry’s Responsibilities, We Must Think Differently About Humanity
These questions would be preludes to less abstract ones that will seem more familiar to the creatures of Silicon Valley. Is Facebook responsible if people use WhatsApp and Messenger to spread false news and incite genocide? Is that just the fault of (heinous) people being (heinous) people or should the platforms be held accountable? As for privacy and data collection, what rights do people have to safeguard their information from the communications platforms they use? What does data scraped from Google search or Amazon’s facial recognition technology have to do with our identities? Can data be human?
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