The future of advertising is moving towards integrated alliances and collaboration. Agencies and in-house marketing teams will look to forge partnerships with adtech providers to fill knowledge and tool gaps, and help guide them through this time of rapid change in the industry.
So what should you prioritize when choosing the right adtech partner? In a recent Quantcast survey, we asked leading brands and agencies what is most important to them, and based on their results, we’ve compiled a list of the top questions to ask a potential partner in each area.
Source: Quantcast State-of-the-Industry Report, North America
Campaign performance
With goals to drive revenue and more pressure to demonstrate marketing return on investment (ROI) across different channels, marketers want advertising partners that can produce great results. To measure campaign performance and identify opportunities to improve ROI, all adtech platforms offer basic optimization and measurement out of the box. However, since the customer journey is no longer a straight line–see an ad and then take action–advertisers and their partners must be able to not only reach consumers but also optimize based on the user’s activity and device, here and now, with and without cookies.
To understand how your adtech partner assesses campaign performance, ask these questions:
- Can you see performance in real time using your solution, and can we adjust our media strategy accordingly?
- How will your team work with us to help optimize performance on our campaigns? What happens if we don’t like the results we get?
- How do you optimize and measure against specific key performance indicators (KPIs)? How do I hit (or exceed) my KPIs: cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS), lifetime value (LTV), customer acquisition cost (CAC), and volume of conversions?
Source: Quantcast State-of-the-Industry Report, North America
Cookieless solution
The demise of third-party cookies will remain a key obstacle for brands, agencies, and publishers in 2022, with a majority of survey respondents naming ‘preparing for a cookieless future’ as a top priority. Finding new audiences, measurement, and attribution will be primary concerns in cookieless environments.
To find out if your adtech partner is fully prepared for the cookieless world, ask these questions:
- How are you currently reaching and engaging the sizable and valuable audiences whose browsers don’t support third-party cookies?
- Do you have a cookieless solution that we can use or test today?
- How does your solution help to future-proof my business/ad strategies from the deprecation of third-party cookies?
- Will I be able to reach the same and/or new customers in cookieless environments? Will I get the same–or better–results? What kind of reach can I expect in a cookieless environment? Does this vary by audience segment?
- How are you currently measuring advertising effectiveness for conversions coming from browsers that don’t support third-party cookies? How will I measure results/cookieless activation?
- How much incremental scale are you able to achieve with cookieless approaches? How do I scale?
- What are some results you’ve seen with your cookieless solution?
- How will I evaluate my audience strategy for cookieless?
- How much does it cost you to acquire new customers in cookieless environments compared to those with cookies?
- What kind of performance (specify a metric based on your objective) do you think I will get when I shift to cookieless?
Audience insights
As consumer purchase behavior shifts more and more online, advertisers are seeking deeper insights to better understand their audiences and meet their needs with relevant messaging. Moving into a future without third-party cookies, they will be looking for partners and solutions that can help them navigate and thrive in this new cookieless environment. Marketers and media agencies need insights that will challenge and improve their advertising strategies.
To get interactive, in-depth, real-time audience insights from an ad tech partner, ask these questions:
- How does your solution differ from other ones when it comes to helping me understand my audience and find new ones? What data powers your audience insights and how accurate is it?
- How do your insights differ from what I can get from other platforms such as Google or Facebook?
- What data sources do you use to build audience segments? How does your solution define the audience segments I am trying to reach?
- What effect is your brand advertising actually having on your prospecting? Which audience segments are visiting your site, but never converting?
- Do you offer AI-driven audience modeling?
First-party data access
The real work with first-party data begins now, as advertisers and publishers recognize its value in future-proofing themselves for a third-party cookieless world. Look for an adtech provider with access to first-party, real-time, trustworthy data, shared by publishers and collected into a live data set. Validated audiences and access to contextual insights will drive accurate results in your programmatic strategies.
To gain access to an adtech partner with consented first-party data, ask these questions:
- Do you have access to first-party data that can be used for our campaigns and insights? What comprises this data? Is it unique? Is it real-time?
- How do you collect this data and is it compliant with privacy laws? How does the data you use comply with changing privacy laws?
Ease of Use
Marketers want to bring their media strategy to life with ease and precision. The ideal adtech partner should empower brands and agencies to seamlessly plan, activate, measure, and innovate in a single, unified platform. When a platform is intuitive and simple to use, advertisers can focus their energies on exploring audiences and creative messaging.
To find an easy-to-use adtech platform, ask these questions:
- How long does it take to set up an average advertising campaign with your self-service platform?
- How quickly can I get interactive granular insights?
- How much time can I save on planning, activation, campaign management, and reporting tasks?
- How long will it take to produce a detailed report on my campaigns?
- Do you provide management services to plan, activate, and measure campaigns for me?
- Do you provide training that will help get my staff to get up to speed quickly?
Ask for what you want
By asking these questions, advertisers can get what they want most: campaign performance, cookieless solutions, audience insights, first-party data access, and ease of use. An adtech partner should provide access to the right tools, resources, and capabilities to drive the success of advertising campaigns. Ideally, a partner should feel like an extension of your own team, sharing their expertise and collaborating on strategies, addressing specific needs and delivering results, so you can focus on marketing innovation.
Learn more
To take a deeper dive into the results of the customer survey, access the 2022 North American Quantcast State-of-the-Industry Report here or start with this preview. You can also check out the 2022 APAC Advertising State-of Play Report here or start with this preview. To learn more about successful adtech partnerships, find out the benefits of partnering with Quantcast from m/SIX and PMG and Havas and Kia.