Introducing Publisher ROI Analytics

Imagine a world in which you had perfect visibility into your media sources.

You could easily expose a breakdown of every ad network’s inventory and determine the individual publishers driving the best performance. You could actually see where your money is being spent and how well each app or site performs for you. You could analyze “performance” not merely by raw install count or revenue, but rather by the actual quality of those users, as measured by ROI.

Optimization decisions would be obvious and, in some cases, automated. You could increase spend for high-performing publishers and decrease spend for under-performing publishers, or shut them off entirely. You could set rules so your publisher-level spending reacts in real-time when performance metrics rise above or dip below a certain level.

With the right tools in place, marketers would be able to easily measure and optimize ROI data at the publisher level to improve the overall performance of each marketing channel.

Publisher-Level ROI Analytics: A Giant Leap Forward

Today, Singular is taking a giant step closer to unlocking this level of transparency with our latest beta release, Publisher ROI Analytics. Singular customers will now have the ability to drill deeper into spend and performance data from their media sources and expose user-level business value by publisher — including ROI, CPA, ARPU, and CVR data — in order to quickly identify and optimize their most valuable pockets of traffic.

Historically, exposing publisher-level ROI data has been an arduous and error-prone process. In some cases, marketers have sought to rely on publisher cost and campaign data collected from tracking links — which is frequently unavailable or inaccurate. In other cases, marketers have been forced to manually collect and combine publisher data from their ad networks in unwieldy Excel files that require constant updating due to ever-changing bids and dynamic cost structures.

Singular now makes the process painless and precise. Our robust integrations with ad networks as well as our advanced data enrichment and combining technologies give marketers a single source of truth for fast and flexible performance data on a publisher level.

Currently, more than 70 of Singular’s integrated ad networks report publisher-level cost and campaign data. Singular collects, cleans and combines this data with revenue and events retrieved from tracking links in order to expose ROI and other full-funnel metrics on a publisher level. Ad partners supporting Singular’s Publisher ROI Analytics include Google AdWords, AdColony, Chartboost, Vungle and 70+ other partners.

In addition, Singular will soon launch a fallback mechanism to handle when a Publisher ID streamed from a tracking link cannot be matched to ad network cost data. In these instances, when a matching Publisher ID is not found, Singular will automatically interpolate data based on the total channel cost (as reported by the ad network) and the paid engagements per publisher (as reported by your tracking links) to provide an estimate of your Publisher-Level ROI. This maximizes the amount of traffic for which marketers receive Publisher-Level ROI data, increasing the accuracy of such data.

Already, in a closed beta test of this feature, multiple Singular customers have leveraged publisher-level analytics to better analyze and optimize the sources within their sources, leading to large efficiency gains and increases in the ROI of their channels.

Enabled By Huge Advances in Processing Power

As most marketing data engineers know, the sheer amount of memory required to process publisher-level data is enormous. On average, we found that collecting publisher-level granularity multiplies the amount of rows by 50–100X compared to collecting campaign-level granularity.

This means that queries are required to process vastly more data, which can dramatically slow database query times, creating bottlenecks for marketers and preventing them from optimizing as quickly and as often as they’d like to.

This is precisely why Singular invested heavily in building a new data pipeline and data store that enables ad-hoc queries on a billion rows with sub-second performance. In doing so, we increased the speed of our customers’ queries — in some cases by a factor of 150X — with a horizontally scalable architecture optimized for advanced analytics.

Now, publisher-level queries that once took 60 seconds in Singular take 1–2 seconds, while queries that once took 30 seconds are now less than a second. With these performance upgrades in place, we’re now able to give customers the ability to process the most granular marketing data — including Publisher, Keyword and Creative-level analytics — at lightning fast speeds.

As ad networks share more and more data with advertisers about where their marketing dollars are being spent, we’re thrilled to help marketers adapt to the data explosion and arm them with the analytics they need to make Publisher Optimization easier than ever.