Ads API Profile: Adobe's Omniture Online Marketing Suite Handles Every Step of Facebook Advertising

Facebook’s performance advertising system provides a powerful way for advertisers to target users, but it lacks the control and analytics to efficiently utilize its targeting parameters on a large scale. To allow companies to build better tools for designing and managing ads, Facebook released an Ads API last fall. We've recently been profiling companies building tools for advertisers using this API, and here's our latest in-depth review, of a Facebook ad tool being offered by established web analytics and advertising optimization company Omniture. While competitors currently offer more specialized tools for some campaigns, ad buyers looking to target, purchase, monitor, and optimize ads on Facebook in the context of their other online marketing efforts stand to benefit from its full-featured Online Marketing Suite. The suite is a browser-based tool set including three core products which can assist Facebook marketers: Discover for audience segmentation, the flagship SearchCenter+ for ad campaign management, and SiteCatalyst for measurement and optimization. By using these tools together, marketers can determine who to target, efficiently create and purchase ads, optimize spend for maximum returns, and balance their marketing channels. Though the tools don’t always integrate seamlessly, the knowledge gained from Discover and SiteCatalyst allow for adept use of SearchCenter+. Company Profile: Adobe's Omniture Business Unit Orem, Utah headquartered Omniture was founded in 1996 as an independent web analytics company offering web measurement tools. Its success led Omniture to acquire several companies including behavioral targeting specialist Touch Clarity, and be listed in the NASDAQ in 2006. In 2009, creativity software maker Adobe Systems acquired Omniture in a deal valued at $1.8 billion in stock to expand their business software portfolio. Omniture’s 1,200 employees worldwide, minus 9% cut for administrative redundancy, helped bring Adobe to its current size of 8,355 employees. Omniture’s clients come from industries including retail, travel, media, financial services, and high-tech and pay a percentage of ad spend to license Omniture’s software-as-a-service. Clients use the software to measure 1 trillion interactions per quarter across channels. By integrating the Facebook Ads API into its system, Omniture’s clients can optimize their social media campaigns and search marketing simultaneously. Online Marketing Suite can help measure not only Facebook ads, but also Pages, applications, and Open Graph-enabled sites. Online Marketing Suite Product Information Discover, SearchCenter+, and SiteCatalyst form a creation and feedback loop. By tracking campaigns, learning what works best, then bringing that knowledge back to the audience segmentation and ad creation process, clients continually improve their marketing. The Online Marketing Suite dashboard shows charts and graphs for each demographic characteristic of a company’s Facebook user base. Clicking a graph such as one showing the user friend counts brings up a full report over which additional metrics can be laid to determine correlations between different characteristics and hone in on targets. Discover offers more advanced audience segmentation. Clients can see how Facebook demographic characteristics and other variables like how often a user visits the site affect metrics including page views, time spent on site, revenue, and many more. Segmenting by multiple attributes in sequence leads to data about a very specific audience, such as non-married Facebook users with 200-300 friends from Illinois who like running. SearchCenter+ show clients their Facebook spend and performance in the context of their other paid search campaigns. This helps clients allocate their spend to whichever channel produces the highest returns. Clicking through to a channel brings up the ads manager, where bids, creative, and targeting can be edited. Unfortunately, targets pinpointed in Discover can be used to instantly populate an ad’s targeting parameters in SearchCenter+. Bids can be linked to analytics for dynamic optimization in response to fluctuations in traffic and conversion rate. If an ad’s CTR is slipping, its budget will be automatically reallocated to more successful ads or turned off. Ads display a preview of how they look when hovered over, and can be grouped from across channels to collectively track sets of related ads. SearchCenter+ doesn’t have as strong of a native interface for creating ad variants as Alchemy, or simultaneously editing multiple ads as Marin Software, but it does support editing in Excel and uploading the altered ads in bulk. Once ads are running, clients can use SiteCatalyst to view the traffic and return on investment generated by their ads, as well as their Open Graph sites, Pages, and apps.This helps clients understand where to shift their spend and traffic between their Facebook campaigns to maximize returns. By adding some javascript to their site, clients can see how users who login through Facebook Connect stack up against those not logged in on a variety of metrics. If only small percentage of users are logging in through Connect but they have a high lifetime value, increasing the prominence of of the Connect login button could help increase returns. Overall, the Online Marketing Suite isn’t the best tool available for some specific needs, but its breadth of functionality makes it a complete solution for Facebook marketing. Clients looking to add Facebook to their marketing mix can benefit from the cross channel context, and the ability to track not only ads but Pages, apps, and Open Graph sites. However, those specifically concentrating on Facebook may find better ad creation and editing tools elsewhere. The Online Marketing Suite’s Facebook Ads API tool is adequate, and clients already using the suite will find the Facebook integration convenient. Getting Serious About Facebook Marketing Adobe believes that social media is the fastest growing category of marketing spend, with Compete.com estimating spend will be over $3 billion a year by 2014. As social media is recognized as an essential component of marketing campaigns, tools which look at Facebook marketing in a vacuum won’t be sufficient. Product Manager Jeff Jordan tells us that “a year ago, every executive came in and said ‘We need to a get a Page, get Facebook Connect up.’ Now its not enough to just be on there. They want to know, ‘What’s the return? Are we wasting money and time? Or is it working?’” Adobe’s clout in the advertising industry led to special access to Facebook’s team and the Ads API. Matt Langie, Director Product Marketing explains “Facebook came to Omniture saying about the Ads API, ‘You guys have the money and the advertisers. We’re in our infancy, give us direction.’ We’ve given them feedback on exactly how we’d like to interact with Facebook -- such as having the ability to target things that are in the data but not in ads manager, and dayparting.” Fellow Product Marketing Director Tim Waddell adds that the Omniture Business Unit’s size also gives it an advantage over other marketing tool providers, “Our company has a healthy ecosystem of partners that allows our customers to have Adobe solutions pre-built into partner applications that they rely on heavily, such as email.” In the future, Adobe wants Facebook to include a better way to track downstream conversions initiated by Facebook ads. It also requests a similar Likes and interests generator, like that used in search marketing, which would help advertisers broaden their targeting while remaining accurate by taking an interest and suggesting additional related terms to target. Adobe’s vast resources and software portfolio ensure that as Facebook marketing becomes more established, Omniture Business Unit’s clients will have tools to handle every step of the process.

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Ads API Profile: Adobe's Omniture Online Marketing Suite Handles Every Step of Facebook Advertising

Josh Constine

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