With the deprecation of third-party cookies, there will be less third-party data available, but first-party data is also getting worse – meaning quality third-party data is more important than ever for the success of data strategies in the future.

Google’s Privacy Sandbox is starting to be tested on 1% of users. Third-party cookies are now destined to disappear, but whether Google can maintain the timelines remains to be seen.

With the deprecation, the importance of first-party data strategies continues to be the most crucial aspect of a measurement strategy. However, the limiting factor has always been effort, meaning the use of vast amounts of third-party data collected by the tech giants was easier to collect than doing it yourself.

Times are changing, third-party cookies are slowly being deprecated across all browsers, and greater privacy and technological restrictions are being enforced, restricting what data can be collected. Furthermore, this final point has a major impact on first-party data – not only is the volume of third-party data greatly reduced, but the quality is also decreasing. To overcome this problem, modelling and aggregated bidding strategies are being used.

This limitation of first-party data is more pronounced on upper funnel activities and sites where logging in and identification are not essential. Third-party data is even more important in these cases as we are looking for contextual data that may have influenced a customer’s purchase decision. For example, knowing the ideal time to sell an umbrella is when it starts to rain. Good first-party data is not needed to optimise bidding in this case, but accurate and timely third-party weather data is.

When it comes to looking for good third-party data sources, it is important to consider what influences the decisions of users in each case – are you a retailer or travel agent influenced by rainy days, or a financial service affected by interest rates and exchange rates? 

There are so many good third-party data sources available that it is worth taking the time to determine which can efficiently and effectively be incorporated into your measurement strategy. To name a few useful third-party data sources:

• Weather data
• Location data (e.g. store locations, proximity to services, etc.)
• Events data (e.g. a concert, a football match, etc.)
• Search data (e.g. Google Search Console or Google Trends)
• Financial data (e.g. interest rates)

Incorporating these data sources into a measurement strategy is only the first step. The second is integrating it into data collection and activation. During upper funnel and display activity, solutions such as BrandMax can optimise your custom bidding algorithms to improve CPM.

In 2024, a blended data strategy will remain crucial for businesses. A company that focuses solely on a first-party data strategy is limiting themselves compared to organisations with a diverse approach are able to activate their first-party data effectively as well as find and use relevant third-party data in data-sparse environments.

As cloud infrastructure and automation continue to evolve, Terraform has emerged as a powerful tool for provisioning and managing resources. With more organisations relying on Terraform to deploy and manage their Infrastructure as Code (IaC), it’s become essential to ensure the security of these configurations. TFSec, a specialised static analysis tool for Terraform configurations, plays a pivotal role in fortifying the security posture of cloud environments.

This article delves into the significance of incorporating TFSec into the Terraform workflow and how it contributes to a robust and secure infrastructure.

Proactive Security Measures

TFSec isn’t just a security tool—it’s a proactive security partner. It aids in identifying and addressing security vulnerabilities in Terraform configurations before deployment. By analysing the code statically, before uploading it to the repository, TFSec can pinpoint potential misconfigurations, insecure settings, and adherence to best practices.

This proactive approach enables development and operations teams to mitigate security risks at an early stage, preventing the deployment of vulnerable infrastructures that could lead to serious consequences such as data breaches, service disruptions, or compliance violations.

Compliance and Governance

In regulated industries, compliance standards are non-negotiable. TFSec is a valuable ally in this regard, offering checks and validations against industry-specific compliance standards and best practices. Whether it’s PCI DSS, HIPAA, or CIS benchmarks, TFSec ensures that Terraform configurations align with the prescribed security guidelines.

Maintaining a secure and compliant infrastructure helps organisations avoid regulatory fines and reputational damage, and TFSec is instrumental in this process.

Customisable Security Policies

One of the standout features of TFSec is its flexibility. Organisations can tailor TFSec to enforce specific security standards and policies that align with their unique requirements. This ensures that the tool becomes an integral part of the organisation’s security and compliance strategy, adapting to the dynamic nature of its infrastructure and evolving security landscape.

Collaboration and DevSecOps Integration
TFSec fosters collaboration between development, operations, and security teams by integrating seamlessly into the DevSecOps pipeline. By incorporating TFSec into the CI/CD process, security checks become an automated and integral part of the development lifecycle.

This not only accelerates the identification and remediation of security issues but also promotes a culture of shared responsibility where security is embedded throughout the development process rather than treated as an afterthought.

Continuous Improvement

TFSec contributes to the ongoing improvement of Terraform configurations by providing actionable insights into security vulnerabilities. The tool not only identifies issues but also offers guidance on remediation, empowering teams to enhance their understanding of security best practices. This continuous feedback loop fosters a culture of learning and improvement, ensuring that security remains a priority as infrastructure evolves over time.

Conclusion

In conclusion, TFSec stands as a crucial component in the arsenal of tools dedicated to ensuring the security of Terraform configurations. Its proactive approach, compliance enforcement, customisable policies, seamless integration into DevSecOps workflows, and contribution to continuous improvement make it an indispensable asset for organisations navigating the complexities of cloud infrastructure security.

As the reliance on Terraform continues to grow, the adoption of TFSec becomes not just a choice but a strategic imperative for organisations committed to building and maintaining secure and resilient cloud environments. At Making Science, we’re committed to helping our clients navigate these complexities and ensure robust security in their cloud infrastructures. Interested to learn more about how Making Science can help enhance your Terraform security with TFSec?

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As we step into 2024, the digital realm continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, shaping the way we connect, consume information, and make decisions. In this blog post, we will dive into five key digital trends that are set to dominate the landscape in 2024, namely Customer Data Platforms (CDP), Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Advertising, TikTok Search, Connected TV (CTV), and Privacy-Centric Marketing.

Customer Data Platforms (CDP)

In the era of data-driven decision-making, Customer Data Platforms (CDP) are becoming the cornerstone of successful marketing strategies. CDPs enable businesses to consolidate customer data from various touchpoints, creating a unified and comprehensive profile. This holistic view of customer behaviour and preferences allows for more personalised and targeted marketing efforts. In 2024, we anticipate a surge in the adoption of CDPs as businesses recognise the importance of understanding their customers on a deeper level.

AI in Advertising

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already revolutionised the advertising landscape, and in 2024, it’s set to become even more integral. AI-powered advertising enables businesses to deliver highly targeted and personalised content to their audiences. From predictive analytics to programmatic advertising, AI optimises ad placements, ensuring that brands reach the right audience at the right time. As technology advances, we can expect more sophisticated AI algorithms to enhance ad relevance and engagement.

Search on TikTok

While TikTok has taken the social media world by storm, 2024 will see a significant shift towards search functionality within the platform. With the introduction of advanced search features, users can discover content more efficiently, opening up new opportunities for brands to be discovered. This evolution in TikTok’s search capabilities will make it an even more powerful platform for marketers looking to connect with their target audience through creative and engaging content.

Connected TV (CTV)

Connected TV (CTV) is redefining how consumers access and interact with content. The rise of streaming services and smart TVs has paved the way for personalised, on-demand viewing experiences. In 2024, CTV is poised to become a dominant force in the advertising space. Marketers can leverage CTV to reach audiences on a larger scale, delivering tailored content directly to viewers’ living rooms. The shift towards CTV highlights the importance of adapting advertising strategies to meet consumers where they spend their screen time.

Privacy-Centric Marketing

With growing concerns about data privacy, consumers are increasingly seeking transparency and control over their personal information. Privacy-centric marketing is not just a trend; it’s a fundamental shift in how businesses approach customer data. In 2024, we expect companies to prioritise privacy in their marketing strategies, building trust with consumers by adopting ethical data practices. This shift will influence everything from targeted advertising to data storage and handling as businesses strive to demonstrate their commitment to protecting user privacy.

As we embrace the digital trends of 2024, it’s evident that the landscape is evolving towards more personalised, transparent, and user-centric experiences. From harnessing the power of CDPs to navigating the realms of AI in advertising, TikTok search, CTV, and privacy-centric marketing, businesses that stay ahead of the curve will find themselves well-positioned in the competitive digital landscape. By understanding and adapting to these trends, marketers can create meaningful connections with their audiences while staying at the forefront of innovation.

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, staying ahead of the competition is imperative, especially in the hotel industry. Google Ads has long been a powerful tool for advertisers, but there’s a game-changer on the horizon – Tripmax. In this article, we will provide an exploration of this innovative Google Ads product to help you understand how Tripmax can revolutionise hotel advertising campaigns; and we will conclude by mentioning some tips and best practices that Making Science has implemented with one of our clients.

Simplifying Hotel Advertising

Tripmax is part of the Performance Max for travel goals campaigns, tailor-made for hotel performance advertisers. It offers a streamlined approach to reaching your target audience across all Google properties, simplifying the process and driving more direct bookings. With a single, user-friendly setup, Tripmax empowers advertisers to create property-specific asset groups, enhancing the overall performance of their Google Ads campaigns.

Getting Started with Tripmax

Before you embark on your journey, there are essential prerequisites to consider. Let’s explore the steps to set the stage for a successful Tripmax campaign:

1. Link to Hotel Center or Google Ads: To initiate the campaign, you must first link your account to either Hotel Center or Google Ads. This link serves as the foundation for your campaign setup, streamlining the process and enhancing efficiency. The choice between Hotel Center and Google Ads largely depends on the number of properties you have. If your account has no more than 100 hotels, linking to Hotel Center is the ideal choice. For those with over 100 properties, creating a hotel properties feed is the recommended path.
2. Creating a Hotel Properties Feed: To maximise the benefits of Tripmax, it’s crucial to establish a hotel properties feed within your Google Ads account. You can achieve this in two ways: using the hotel picker or Google Maps URLs. Each method simplifies the creation of property lists and the management of assets, contributing to a more efficient campaign setup.
3. Creating the campaign & asset groups: Once you have completed these tasks, you can create your Tripmax campaign by creating a new campaign as you would normally do. With “Sales” as the objective, choose “Hotels” under “What are you advertising?” and select your Hotel Property feed source. All other steps are the usual: specify budget, bidding, target, assets, etc; and publish! You can then create Asset Groups and link them to specific hotels. Google will automatically suggest headlines, descriptions, images and other assets, simplifying the process of setting them up – but they are 100% customisable.
4.  Let the ads run! Once everything is ready, it is possible to activate the asset groups and start reaching your potential clients through Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Display, Video & Discover.

Best practices & Other tips

• Tripmax campaigns were originally designed to cover the Upper Funnel, increasing brand awareness. The more images (max 20) and videos (max 5) we include in the asset groups, the more options Google will have to show our ads in different networks. This is the reason why the recommended practice is to exclude the brand (through the creation of a brand list), preventing our ads from showing in searches that include the name of our brand. Apart from this, in settings of the campaign, you should select “Only bid for new customers”.
  • However! Since this is a tool that covers so many placements (even Search!), at Making Science we have started an experiment with one of our clients. For locations where the budget is limited and having different campaigns is not optimal, we have tried leaving only a Tripmax campaign, without excluding the brand. This way, we can cover all levels of the funnel while reducing costs – and it is working great. Even though this is not the ideal option, it is a very good solution for when resources are scarce. 
• The best practice for promotions is to create a new asset group that is not linked to any hotel, and that will work as a normal PMAX asset group. In it, we will include all the headlines, descriptions and creativities of the promotion, and we will activate it only during this period of time (until the next promo!). Given that we cannot decide how the budget is distributed among asset groups, to make sure that the message is reaching our potential customers, with our client we add a couple promo titles and descriptions -as well as images and videos- to the Hotel Asset Groups, to maximise the possibility of Google showing the discount to users.
• Adding audience signals to Asset Groups is recommended, because the platform will learn from these users and look for others that behave similarly. If you have a list of clients for each specific hotel, this will work even better!
• We understand that sometimes, our ads reach users that we never wanted to impress, and it is inconvenient. If you see this happening to your campaign, there is a solution. Even though it is not possible to exclude certain terms or topics from Tripmax, you can always ask Google to create a “negative list” for you, where you include all terms that should be avoided by your ads.

All in all, Tripmax is a great tool for the Hotel industry, especially for investing in the upper funnel level. Google will recognise when users are interested in hotels that are similar to yours, and will impact them with your property – increasing your brand awareness and helping your business grow.

Many companies have yet to switch from Universal Analytics to GA4, despite the approaching deadline of June 30, 2024, for enterprise accounts to make this transition. However, for companies aiming to maintain accurate measurement while adhering to privacy regulations, prioritising the move to GA4 is crucial.

GA4 is designed to meet the evolving needs of businesses and users in the digital age. It offers a more flexible and future-proof solution than Universal Analytics.

Additionally, GA4 enhances the precision of tracking user behaviour across various devices and platforms. It also provides businesses with actionable insights through a range of features like predictive analytics, customer segmentation, and path analysis, all designed to transform data into practical strategies for businesses.

GA4 stands out as a superior option compared to Universal Analytics, offering greater power, flexibility, and a stronger focus on privacy. It’s the optimal choice for businesses committed to maintaining accurate measurements while complying with privacy regulations.

GA4 offers several features that assist businesses in adhering to privacy regulations, such as:

1. Consent Mode: This feature enables businesses to gather insights from users who decline cookies, using modeled data to fill the gaps created by regulations and website blockers.
2. Data Expiration: GA4 automatically sets an expiration for user data, which businesses can define. This is particularly useful for compliance with laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which mandates the deletion of user data upon request.
3. IP Elimination: For EU users, GA4 discards IP addresses before logging data through EU domains and servers. It also allows businesses to turn off the collection of Google signals data and detailed location and device data on a regional basis.
4. Data Deletion: GA4 provides the option for businesses to delete user data at any time, supporting compliance with regulations like the CCPA that require the deletion of user data upon request.

Here are some of the benefits of GA4:

• Unified data model and event-based approach
  GA4 presents a unified data model that goes beyond traditional page view tracking and focuses on events. This unified data model eliminates the need for multiple tracking codes, simplifying implementation and enabling businesses to obtain information across different platforms seamlessly.
• Enhanced analysis of the user journey
  Understanding user behaviour and their journey across multiple devices and platforms has become more complex in today’s interconnected world. GA4 tackles this challenge by offering improved multi-platform tracking capabilities. By unifying data from websites and apps, it enables businesses to track users as they move from one device to another, thus developing a complete understanding of the customer journey.
• Machine Learning-based insights
  GA4 leverages the power of machine learning to provide valuable insights that go beyond basic metrics. GA4 enables businesses to discover hidden patterns, identify audience segments, and predict user behaviour by applying advanced analysis techniques, such as predictive modeling and clustering.
• Simplified analysis and reporting
  GA4 simplifies data analysis and report creation thanks to an intuitive interface and user-friendly reporting tools. The platform offers predefined templates and customised reports allowing businesses to visualise data, monitor key indicators, and track performance. The advanced exploration feature allows for in-depth analysis, enabling businesses to discover the information they need quickly. Plus, GA4’s integration with Google BigQuery facilitates the export of raw data for deeper analysis, meeting the needs of data-savvy organisations.
• Powerful audience segmentation
  GA4’s audiences offer more targeted segments for marketing campaigns. In the new version, GA4 allows you to create segments based on events and time. You can thus group your users based on interactions and the time elapsed between events rather than based on arbitrary device or platform categories. By focusing on these more powerful metrics, marketers can create precise audiences.

Adopting GA4 drives businesses towards data-driven success in an increasingly competitive digital landscape… Join the GA4 revolution with us today!

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In 2024, the digital marketing landscape is on the cusp of significant change, shaped by a rapidly evolving ecosystem and a raft of new regulations. Key regulations such as the GDPR will continue to play a pivotal role, alongside new frameworks like the DMA, DSA, and Spain’s updated AEPD cookie guidelines, all of which are set to profoundly impact the sector.

Concurrently, technological advancements are reshaping the field. Next year, Chrome’s departure from third-party cookies—a move soon to be mirrored by all major browsers worldwide—marks a major shift. Additionally, Apple is tightening its grip on cookie and mobile identifier usage through initiatives like ITP and ATT, heralding a new era of digital marketing practices.

But, as an advertiser or publisher, what are the issues to take into account to start the year on the right foot in terms of privacy and digital advertising?

Steps you need to take before March, 2024

In the first steps of your privacy journey, start collecting user consent. We recommend using one of Google’s Partner Consent Management Platforms (CMPs), which can help you make sure you’re respecting existing Google EU User Consent Policy.

• For traffic from the European Economic Area (EEA) [ONLINE DATA], implement Consent Mode by March 6, 2024 to automatically communicate consent signals for online data to Google’s advertising platforms. This will also allow you to preserve online audience functionalities with Google. An important detail: Consent Mode effectively restores about 65% of the ad-click-to-conversion pathways for users who have not given consent.
• [GLOBAL] Adopt Enhanced Conversions to ensure continued access to accurate and timely conversion data. Enhanced Conversions provides advertisers with a more precise and complete view of the customer journey, and it helps them to measure the impact of their campaigns more effectively.
• [OFFLINE DATA] Upgrade Google APIs and SDKs by March 6th to pass consent signals for offline data to Google’s advertising platforms and to prevent data degradation. It’s available now for Customer Match, Call Conversions, EC for Leads & Store Sales, and soon will be available for OCI (Offline Conversion Import) and DV360.

Why is adopting Consent Mode and Enhanced Conversions crucial for advertisers and publishers?

Consent Mode: Accurately Measure Conversions While Respecting User Privacy

Consent Mode is a feature that helps advertisers to recover lost conversions due to consent choices from users who do not give consent, thanks to modeled conversions. It also allows you to better optimise advertising campaigns by recovering lost conversions. Additionally, it enables you to modify the behaviour of your Google Tags according to the consent status of your users regarding cookies for Analytics and advertising purposes.

How does it work?

Activating Consent Mode ensures that Google’s measurement tools maintain the consent mode status of a visitor consistently across various pages. If consent is declined, tags that trigger actions will refrain from storing cookies. Instead, they transmit only essential information regarding user activity. The consent status and user activity are conveyed by sending specific cookieless pings or signals to Google’s server.

Benefits of using Consent Mode

There are several benefits to using Consent Mode, including:

• Enhancing User Privacy: It empowers advertisers to honor user privacy by giving users the choice to manage their data collection and usage.
• Accurate Conversion Measurement: Advertisers can accurately track conversions, even for non-consenting users, through the use of modeled conversions.
• Better Reporting and Optimisation: This mode aids advertisers in refining their reporting and optimisation strategies by supplying more precise data.

Enhanced Conversions: Measure Conversions More Accurately and Future-Proof Your Measurement

Enhanced Conversions is a Google feature designed to more precisely track web conversions, including those from ads that are viewed but not directly interacted with. It securely encrypts customer data, such as email and phone numbers, to both protect privacy and enhance bid optimisation. This is achieved by capturing hashed customer data from the conversion page (like email addresses) and matching it with Google’s hashed user data. As a result, Enhanced Conversions allows for effective tracking of conversions, even for users who opt out of third-party cookies.

How it works: (example with a YouTube ad)

• A Google signed-in user sees your YouTube ad.
• The user clicks on the ad and visits your website.
• The conversion tag on your website captures a field you’ve specified (e.g., email address) and hashes it.
• The hashed data is securely sent to Google.
• Google matches the hashed data against its hashed user data.
• If there’s a match, a conversion is reported in your Google Ads account.

Benefits of using Enhanced Conversions

Enhanced Conversions can help you measure conversions more accurately, future-proof your measurement strategy, and improve the accuracy of your incrementality measurement, even when users opt out of third-party cookies.

Enhanced Conversions can help you get a more complete and accurate picture of how your ads are performing, even in a cookieless world.

Conclusion

Enhanced Conversions and Consent Mode are two powerful features that can help advertisers measure conversions more accurately and future-proof their measurement strategy while respecting user privacy. Advertisers operating globally, especially in the EEA+UK, are encouraged to implement Enhanced Conversions and Consent Mode as soon as possible to ensure accurate conversion measurement and respect user privacy.

Making Science is your trusted partner for staying privacy-ready.

We recommend a digital partner who has mastered the art of privacy for many of the world’s most known brands. Making Science teams across the globe can help you in this journey, adapting your company and structure to the new privacy standards and accompany you in this tech transition to become fully compliant with the new privacy regulations.

With a particularly skewed customer value curves – a broad industry benchmark is that the top 5% of users will deliver roughly 95% of revenue – iGaming brands stand to gain a significant improvement in ROI from adopting a value-based bidding strategy. However, the vertical also faces more challenges than most in doing so.

Here are the top 4 challenges limiting Gaming brands to inefficient CPA bidding strategies (and their solutions).

1. Long LTV Curves

LTV matures over time as players deposit and play on-site, fluctuating based on wins, losses and subsequent deposits. Most operators don’t see a positive return on players until months after acquisition, while typical pixel-based attribution windows are around 7 days. This disconnect means many advertisers rely on optimisation towards a first deposit or deposit value, which holds a limited correlation with customer LTV.

In this case, prediction is the solution, because it allows the modeler to accurately predict future value in accordance with early journey indicators.

2. LTV Customers are Tricky to Predict

Prediction itself is challenging when the business’ revenue model is built on outcomes of games of chance. Additionally, players rarely monetise in a linear fashion, they follow Eric Bradlow’s model of ‘clumpiness’. It can be hard for marketers and data analysts to spot causations between customer behaviours and LTV. Machine learning models will allow causation to be found and exploited.

3. Customer Value Distribution

Bidding algorithms work best when fed with high volumes of high-quality data at a consistent rate. Unfortunately, iGaming customer value patterns rarely follow this model. For example, the very highest-value customers are few in number, but these make up a high share of total revenue. A bidding algorithm with insufficient learning data inevitably ends up over and under-valuing customers at the extreme ends of the value distribution.

Modelling against large, historical datasets provides the volumes needed for reliability. Bidding against early journey proxy events provides the volumes needed for effective algorithmic bidding.

4. Slow Signals

The most effective VBB occurs when activated against real-time signals. Most LTV prediction takes weeks or months, and even immediately available predictions are not typically accessible as real-time bidding signals. These predictions need to be accurate, fast, and easily available for bidding activation in marketing platforms – and that requires technology. Real-time prediction and passback of a value signal are crucial to an optimised data and media strategy. In VBB, fast prediction trumps absolute precision.

VBB can have its challenges, but it’s a hugely valuable tool for performance marketers looking to optimise their bottom line. Making Science’s Gauss Smart Advertising solution is an AI-driven, predictive value modelling tool. It allows advertisers to bid in real time on predicted LTV value. It’s channel and vertical-agnostic and proven to drive 10-30% stronger ROI in activation.

To reach better bidding, reach out to our team of experts to learn more about effective bidding strategies or to kick-off your campaign!

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The partnership will cover digital media buying, including Paid Social, Search, Amazon, and Affiliate Marketing, across the EMEA region for the Tommee Tippee brand.

London, 13 November 2023 – Making Science has today announced a significant client win as Mayborn Group, owner of the Tommee Tippee brand, selects the digital acceleration company to manage its media planning and buying. The partnership will see Making Science deliver Paid Social, Search, Amazon ads, affiliate marketing and SEO across the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain. The brand previously partnered with performance marketing agency Reprise Digital.

Established for nearly 60 years, Mayborn strongly focuses on digital transformation and the partnership with Making Science further solidifies this. As a fast-growing, tech-driven digital company with a global presence, Making Science will deliver end-to-end digital performance and measurement across Mayborn’s media buying. 

Nicola Wallace, Head of Marketing at Mayborn Group, commented, “At Mayborn, we’re on a mission to become the world’s most-loved baby company; we’re driven to make a difference in the lives of our consumers, customers and employees. Our digital capabilities play a key part in how we deliver the experiences and services that ensure our innovative products reach families across the globe. Our new media buying partnership with Making Science reflects our journey in digital innovation, and we’re excited to be working with a fast-growing company, which has proven experience in key platforms such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon.”

Xavier Klein, Marketing Services Director UK, at Making Science, said of the partnership, “Making Science is proud to be working with Mayborn Group as it continues its unwavering support for parents and carers through the Tommee Tippee products that it sells and the community initiatives it supports. The move comes at a time when brands are seeking greater value from their advertising partnerships. We’re seeing larger industry players consider moves to independent marketing and technology companies, like Making Science, who are delivering cost-effective measurement methods and optimised ROI for their clients, alongside digital acceleration through  cutting-edge tech solutions.”

To learn more about the partnership and our services, get in touch with info@makingscience.com.

In an increasingly competitive and complex digital marketing landscape, it’s now more important than ever to ensure optimisation of both data and media to achieve marketing ROI. The best decisions are the ones informed by data and AI.

Across the two performance marketing behemoths, there are over 4 billion monthly active users worldwide on Google, and over 3 billion on Meta. Of course, not all users are created equal, far from it. Value-based bidding (VBB) gives advertisers the ability to adjust their marketing bids for their most and least valuable users. It combines the power of an advertising platform’s rich user data and AI smart bidding algorithms with a brand’s first-party conversion value data. In short, VBB drives stronger efficiencies and increased revenue for businesses by aligning the bidding goal with business outcomes.

It’s a powerful tool; Google’s study on its internal data in 2021 showed a 14% uplift in conversion value moving from tCPA to tROAS, Meta has quoted up to 35% improvement in ROI from their value bidding strategy and Making Science’s proprietary predictive VBB solution – Gauss Smart Advertising – drives 10-30% uplift in lifetime value ROI.

So why would an advertiser not harness the power of VBB? Well, it’s not always easy.

To start, advertisers need to understand clearly what value means to them – revenue, lead quality, customer lifetime value, new vs returning customer ratio, conversion propensity (and countless more) are all applicable value metrics, requiring distinct optimisation strategies.

Below the surface, advertisers need robust measurement solutions in place to track customer value in online and offline environments. This data needs to be accurate and accessible. Bidding experts are required to steer VBB algorithms through a volume, efficiency and efficacy balancing act. The necessity for predictive modelling arises when advertisers want to make quick decisions on bidding and investment.

All of this is to say that effective VBB is far from a flick of a switch. Durable VBB is best viewed as a journey to maturity, on which accuracy, speed and actionability are the guiding stars.

If you’re interested in understanding how better bidding can deliver you more ROI, please reach out.

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The constant evolution of the digital ecosystem is causing organisations to have increasingly more points of contact with users and greater access to more data. It is for this reason that one of the main challenges for companies is to have the sufficient capability to collect this increasing volume, frequency, and type of data in an organised and efficient manner, breaking down information silos and being able to leverage them from the cloud (an environment where data remains under the company’s governance and in a secure environment) appropriately, and then activating them to offer a better user experience and maximise their business value for the companies.

How can we achieve this? 

While different technologies are available in the market, at Making Science, each company needs a customised solution explicitly created and tailored to its business needs and organisation. Therefore, we are currently addressing this challenge with our clients in a precise way: by developing Composable Customer Data Platforms (CCDPs) and Customer Data Architecture (CDAs) on the Google Cloud.

• Customer Data Architectures (CDAs) aggregate information from different domains of a company, making it accessible and facilitating subsequent activation. It is also a long-term solution that allows it to build future business use cases, enabling organisations to own their data.
• On the other hand, Composable Customer Data Platforms (CCDPs) are market tools designed to activate use cases in a ‘simple’ way, without dependencies on technology teams.

So, which one should you choose? Composable CDP or CDA? 

Composable CDPs are changing the game, as until recently, customer data was managed using other tools like CRM DMPs, among others. CDP is an ‘open platform’ that allows us to achieve specific objectives for each business by combining different data sources and breaking down existing information silos.

With all this, we must consider that the key to fully harnessing a CDP is defining a data architecture (CDA) that enables real-time data activation.

Its main advantages, such as profile matching and advanced segmentation, activation of predictive models and Generative AI solutions, improving customer understanding, unifying and optimising multichannel marketing resources, and eliminating data silos, make this solution the key to the success of any 360-degree marketing strategy.

How do we measure the success of a Composable CDP/CDA? 

Every investment should have a ROI, a return for the business, and in the case of CDP/CDAs, there are three aspects to consider and measure: sales, speed, and cost savings.

Undoubtedly, incredible challenges are arising in data, cloud, and AI for companies, which will change how they make decisions, conduct marketing, and manage their organisations. Is your company ready to extract the maximum value from its data?

Do you want to learn more about Customer Data Platforms for your business? At Making Science, we have a specialised team of experts who can help you define your CDP/CDA strategy for your specific case. Contact us!