Programmatic’s Secret Weapon to Boost Brand Engagement
In 2022, “brand strategy” landed as the second-highest priority for over 400 CEOs and CMOs across multiple industries, according to a recent report from Gartner1. As a result of increasing privacy restrictions and macroeconomic challenges, marketers are wary of spending in an uncertain economy and cannot access data for many of the metrics traditionally used to measure in-app performance. This has led to a decline in performance marketing spend and a shift in budgets to brand advertising. By focusing on upper-funnel metrics and building brand engagement and awareness, brand marketing campaigns help retain and widen the funnel to increase the likelihood of down-funnel conversions.
Currently, the number one destination for brand marketers is Facebook, followed closely by other social media platforms. To make the most of your brand campaigns, though, you must expand far beyond social media. Thankfully, programmatic app-to-web provides brand-safe, privacy-friendly access to users in the 7+ million other apps worldwide.
Walled Gardens Don’t Always Bear Good Fruit
Although social media platforms provide a low-cost way to reach billions of users, they have many pitfalls.
First, social media platforms can be tricky to navigate around brand safety and fraud concerns, according to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission2. This is largely because they are not wholly responsible for the content on their apps, according to numerous laws3. As a result, social media apps are not entirely able (or willing, at times) to moderate the content on their platforms and make them brand-safe for your business.
Second, social media platforms operate in walled gardens that can only take your brand so far. Facebook has an estimated 2.96 billion monthly active users – by far the largest among any social media app. However, with more than 6 billion app users worldwide, that still leaves more than 3 billion users on the table.
Thankfully, programmatic advertising accesses these users across 7+ million apps around the world, and is at much lower risk of fraud and brand violations (gaming apps are especially safe for brands). Programmatic also offers a wide range of marketing solutions. For brand marketers, this is where app-to-web comes into play.
App-to-Web Opens the Door to Better Brand Marketing
Programmatic advertising exploded in the early 2010s as demand-side platforms (DSPs), like Liftoff Accelerate, discovered new ways to automate advertising across millions of apps. Today, Liftoff Accelerate draws on over a decade of in-app industry experience and platform development to serve over 3 billion ad impressions in over 190 countries daily. With app-to-web, Liftoff Accelerate now also drives conversions on mobile websites, in addition to in-app.
App-to-web drives in-app users to mobile web pages in browsers like Safari or Chrome. Unlike an app install page, mobile webpages are curated and controlled from top to bottom by you. This means you can craft a highly engaging user experience, complete with videos, demos, and personalized content for your user. Mobile web pages also increase the opportunity for discovery, since users can explore other parts of your website if they leave the landing page.
Importantly, app-to-web is extremely privacy-centric. Liftoff Accelerate uses a first-party tracking pixel to remain both ITP 2.3- and SKAN-compliant. The pixel doesn’t track users across websites, but it does provide first-party insights into both upper- and lower-funnel conversion metrics. Because it is a first-party pixel rather than a third-party cookie, app-to-web also safeguards your branding campaigns against the depreciation of third-party cookies on Google Chrome.
Combined with an expansive reach and proprietary machine learning models from Liftoff Accelerate, app-to-web is a knock-out solution for brand marketers trying to level up their strategy.
Though walled gardens have their own impressive reach, they don’t have it all. If you want to expand your reach in a way that’s safer for your brand, stickier for your users, and tailor-made to target highly-engaged in-app users, consider app-to-web. To make the most of your app-to-web campaigns, partner with a DSP conceived in the in-app advertising space with the programmatic expertise you need. Sign up for Liftoff Accelerate app-to-web campaigns today.
Notes:
- See https://www.gartner.com/en/marketing/research/annual-cmo-spend-survey-research
- See https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/data-visualizations/data-spotlight/2022/01/social-media-gold-mine-scammers-2021#footnote2
- For example, Section 230 in the U.S. See https://www.thehartford.com/insights/technology/section-230
