Category: Product Insights

We all know that a well-greased machine is much more than the simple sum of its parts. In the same way, multichannel campaigns are complex machines that work better when treated as one activity instead of multiple single-channel campaigns. 

And planning your multichannel campaigns doesn’t end just with crafting your strategy, it also includes planning how you’re going to run it. Choosing the right platform or team to run your advertising can really make an impact on the overall performance.

The best way to ensure that performance is the best it can be, is to run all or most of your media on the same platform and with the same trading team. Here’s why:

You’ll have a holistic vision of your campaign 

Have all your performance metrics across channels in one dashboard or platform. That way you’ll be able to have a birds-eye view of your campaigns across all channels and at once. With the data always available, you’ll be able to know exactly where your campaign is and make better decisions. 

You get recommendations at the local and big picture level

Whether you’re running the campaign in-house or using an external trading team, using only one platform will allow your teams to work better together, as there are fewer moving pieces. They will be able to put together timely optimization recommendations that work at the local level whilst continuing with your overarching strategy. 

Your team can easily optimize your budget cross-channel

The simplest and most effective way to maximize your multichannel campaign performance is to be flexible with your channel budgets. Make sure you’re taking advantage of the opportunities that each channel brings, but also don’t be afraid to reassign your budget when it’s clear that one or two channels are driving your conversions above all others.

You’ll be comparing like for like

Different platforms can have different definitions for metrics, so using just one platform ensures that when you are talking about visits to your store or visits to your website you don’t count the same one twice (attributed to different channels) and that you are always comparing like for like.

The more you use a platform, the better the optimization algorithms work

Optimization algorithms need some time to understand which type of users responds best to your message. So, the more you use a platform, the easier it is for its AI technology to find exactly who is the most likely person to convert across each channel. 

There are of course other aspects of a platform to evaluate before choosing it, but making sure that it fits your campaign strategy is definitely one to look out for. 

If you want to know more about how Locala can help you make the most of your campaigns, please get in touch.

Locala partnered with zeotap, the global deterministic identity and data platform. This partnership enables Locala to leverage zeotap’s deterministic audience segments and consumer insights on behalf of their clients for their drive-to-store campaigns across Europe, the US, Canada and LATAM.

Zeotap provides data from unique enterprise sources such as security companies and payroll providers. It has access to more than one billion global unique profiles with ID-verified sociodemographic and raw app usage data as well as granular purchase intent data. Thanks to this partnership, Locala can provide a holistic understanding of consumers, allowing marketers to turn them into actionable insights in order to meet their business objectives.

With access to zeotap’s deterministic audience insights mid and post-campaign, Fusio by Locala optimizes strategies in real-time and further provides insights into in-store visitors as well as the engaged audiences within any advertising campaign – through the implementation of a lightweight pixel.

If you’re interested in seeing how deterministic audience targeting can optimize your brand or client’s campaigns, please get in touch.

Locala, the drive-to-store platform, targets the right audience for your drive-to-store campaigns. Our proprietary platform Fusio is the all-in-one tool kit for marketers, providing insights through audience targeting that will help you get the right customers into your brick-and-mortar stores.

This targeting consists of analyzing aggregated online and offline consumer behavior like historical location data to divide anonymized consumers into groups by interests or affinities, such as ‘auto enthusiasts’ or ‘early tech adopters’. Locala’s platform is agnostic, you can access any data provider of your choice to activate the right audience for your brand, plus you can also use first-party data to create your own audiences.

Audience targeting works well for specific user segments or high-value purchases that are less frequent and where customers would not expect to make a decision on the spot. These include consumer electronics, home furnishings, or automotive.

If you’re interested in seeing how audience targeting can optimize your brand or client’s campaigns, please get in touch.

Planning a national drive-to-store campaign should be done with a store-centric strategy in place to increase visits. Although bringing a national campaign with a store-centric strategy together might be a bit more complex, you already have all the knowledge you need from regional or local activities. You’ll just need to apply that perspective to a wider campaign to ensure that you maximize your performance per store, and you’ll be able to see a consistent uplift across all your points of sale. 

These are the four key areas to include in your plan for an effective store-centric strategy:

1. The location of your store

If you use the same strategy for metropolitan stores and the ones in less populated or frequented areas, you’ll find that they don’t respond the same to your advertising efforts. For example, the catchment area – the maximum distance from your store where it’s most likely to find your customers – around metropolitan stores tends to be fairly small, but rural areas attract customers that live or work further away. 

With Fusio, our drive-to-store platform, you can use a proprietary location targeting tool that takes into account true travel distance and brand affinity, so that you can easily find the dynamic catchment area of each of your stores.

2. Personalizing your ads with DCO

Having a strategy per store also gives you the opportunity to use DCO or Dynamic Creative Optimization to show directions or the address of the closest store for each consumer who sees your ad. Or even specific discounts that are only available at selected stores.

Using our studio service and proprietary creatives, we can work together to ensure your campaign has the right message for each store and helps consumers find their way to you more easily.

3. Setting a budget per store

If you set a budget for your campaign but don’t specify it for individual stores, advertising platforms will optimize to increase your overall visitation uplift, without taking into account that certain stores might need more support to achieve the same results as others. This means stores that don’t register as many incremental visits at the start of the campaign, or that are in less populated areas (and thus cannot generate absolute values for visits as high as others), are left further and further behind by optimizing towards your best performing stores. 

This can be manually corrected, but it’s easily avoided by setting a budget per store that takes into account the store characteristics and priority for your business. That way you can ensure that all your stores are evenly benefiting from your advertising activity.

4. Discover trends and insights at the store level to feedback your strategy

Finally, by thinking about your campaign at the store level, you’ll be able to easily generate insights that are particular to each store and feed them back to your campaign tactics in real time. When you are already thinking about how to increase your visitation across all POS, you’ll be more likely to search for and see trends that could have been missed with a national approach. 

Having a strategy and a budget set per store allows you more ease and flexibility on your optimizations and to increase your performance across the board. If you want to know how that would look for your brand, please get in touch.

Drive-to-store (DTS) is still the new kid in the block and some brands are only now finding out about the benefits of focusing on business outcomes rather than media KPIs to determine the success of a campaign in the real world. 

But if this isn’t your first rodeo, and you have made the shift towards measuring offline results using offline metrics (visits and footfall uplift), it may be time to shift to a long term DTS strategy as opposed to a stop-start approach where you always have to plan and optimize from scratch. 

Now, when we’re talking about a long term strategy, we don’t mean you should have the same level of investment all year round – that could be an unsustainable budget and it may overwhelm your audience. However, a low investment commitment during ‘off-peak’ months can help maintain brand awareness, keep your audience engaged, and allow you to collect data and generate useful insights. 

Running a combination of short seasonal campaigns that provide you with a spike or boost in engagement and visitors and smaller scale off-peak activity can help you generate lasting and recurring engagement with your audience. Here are some of the benefits of ditching a start-stop DTS strategy and thinking about your long-term goals:

Easier optimization & better results across all your channels 

It’s no secret that short campaigns are harder to optimize and can deliver mixed results. That is not only because of the short time-frame that trading teams and AI have to find your audience, but also because short campaigns can be planned and delivered too fast providing an inaccurate snapshot of the reality

Short campaigns are also subpar at evaluating the performance of a channel or a creative. A better use for short bursts with an additional budget would be to use the learnings and recommendations from your off-peak periods to craft a strategy with guaranteed success.

Develop your DTS know-how and AI’s know-how

The more you use a platform or run a type of campaign the better you will be able to recognize signs that something is or isn’t working, and the better that platform’s optimization algorithms will be at optimizing your campaign for you. 

With a low investment always-on approach, you can make sure that you’re tuned in to your audience’s preferences and you’re able to find them and convert them at the right time from the start of your campaign.

Remove all guesswork: test & renew your messaging with confidence

Allowing yourself more time to work on your strategy and your assets also gives you time to test at a smaller scale new messaging, creatives, and audience segments. These tests can be run cheaply at off-peak times for your brand, minimizing the risk of choosing the wrong message during crucial times, and improving your performance. 

You can also spend your off-peak time testing out new channels for drive-to-store, like audio or desktop, and seeing how these might fit in your media mix. To fully understand how your activity or lack of really affects your stores, you could use tracking tools, like our Retail Analytics dashboard, that help you monitor your total footfall across all stores and at the network level.

Really understand your audience

Lastly, it’s not only about finding your audience but also about understanding them better, what their motivations are, and how they want to engage with your brand. By running off-peak campaigns you’ll be able to generate insights that aren’t impacted by seasonality – and be able to improve your performance regardless of the timing of the campaign. 

For example, this could help you understand your cycle to conversion better: how does your audience respond to different messages and at different timings? Does your audience respond better to time bound activity?

Moving from a stop-start approach to an always-on strategy means looking at your media planning and buying at a more strategic level that serves your long term plans as well as delivers on your short term objectives. It means brands and media agencies working with drive-to-store platforms directly and closely to understand what is the best approach for every moment in time. It means having enough time and data to analyze true trends and generate useful insights that can be applied across all types of campaigns. 

If you’re interested in seeing what an off-peak strategy could look like for your brand or client, please get in touch. 

As drive-to-store campaigns become more mainstream, it’s important to understand what metrics mean for the provider you are running campaigns with. ‘Visits’ can be measured or calculated in several ways, so to truly compare the impact of campaigns run across different platforms, you need to understand what each metric means for each solution.

What is a visit?

A visit in drive-to-store refers to someone who has been exposed to your advertising campaign and then gone into one of your stores. To determine a visit has happened, an identifier is collected when an ad is served and then collected again in the store. 

Currently, the best solution in the market is the MAID (mobile advertising ID), as people carry their phones with them all the time and it is a very accurate indicator of the true location. Fusio collects this ID from the bid requests it serves and our visit measurement partners also use this identifier.

When advertising has run on mobile devices, this process is fairly easy. When advertising has run on other devices, cookies or IP addresses are matched to MAIDs. 

The only constraint of deterministic measurement of visits, such as using MAIDs, is that it is impossible to measure all visits, as it relies on user consent to share their location and MAID for advertising purposes. Furthermore, with Apple’s announcement of new privacy changes to be introduced in iOS 14, users will have more opportunities to decide to opt-in or out of sharing their data with third-party companies for purposes such as visit measurement. 

We’ll talk about industry trends around measurement in section four.

1 – Self-measured or third-party visit measurement

Your provider can either measure the impact of the campaign on visits on their own or use a third-party data provider. Fusio uses third party data to give clients the impartiality and security of knowing that we don’t mark our own homework. 

Working with third-party providers also gives our clients more flexibility on how to measure the visits by choosing the measurement partner that works best for their campaign. For example, some providers don’t have enough reach in certain locations, so being able to choose gives our clients the chance to run successful campaigns worldwide.

2 – Unique or deduplicated visits

It is important to know if your solution presents you with deduplicated visits. Deduplication is the process of eliminating redundant information, in this case, visits measured more than once. That can happen because measurement providers send as much data as they can regarding visits, which means the same visit might be counted twice or more times.

A process of cleaning and tidying up that data (deduplication) is needed to see a more realistic picture of the impact of your campaign and metrics that reflect the true price of driving people to your store. 

The risk of not deduplicating visits is reporting on inflated and inaccurate metrics that do not match your offline reality.

When choosing a drive-to-store partner, we recommend checking that visits are deduplicated. Our platform Fusio ensures that visits at the order level are deduplicated. 

3 – Visits vs incremental visits and footfall uplift

Incrementality is the measurement of the lift in a certain metric, visits in this case, caused by an advertising campaign. ‘Incremental visits’ is a calculated metric, as opposed to simply measuring all visits. It takes into account the baseline at which visits happen organically, and calculates how many additional visits have occurred.

In Fusio we calculate incremental visits and footfall uplift in real-time with the data that we receive from our visit measurement partners via live API. This means we have live reporting on the impact of your campaign. To ensure these metrics are reliable, we’ve also developed an uplift trust feature that signals when campaigns have collected enough data to be statistically significant. 

Read more about our methodology and how it’s been awarded the Best Attribution Solution by the Drum in 2020. 

To understand the overall impact and the incremental impact of your campaign on in-store footfall, it’s important to have both metrics and to know they are reliable.

4 – Measured visits vs estimated visits

We’ve mentioned earlier that MAID is the most reliable way of measuring store visits as it provides advertisers with an anonymous identifier to match ad exposure to store visits. The industry and regulations are moving towards giving more control over to consumers on whether or not they want to share this identifier for advertising targeting purposes. The latest upcoming change has been Apple’s announcement that with iOS 14 users will be required to opt-in or out of sharing their MAID. 

Giving more choice back to consumers and ensuring all targeting is done with their consent is crucial, yet in this case it poses the question of how we can continue to measure store visits without this identifier.

This move is going to increase the need for creating a robust methodology to estimate total visits based on the sample of visits that can be measured. This is fairly new for the mobile industry, where deterministic measurement has been possible, but it is common practice across other media – for example estimating audience in TV or OOH. 

At Locala we are working on understanding what extrapolation could look like for our campaigns to make sure that if it is needed in the future, we can provide you with a reliable estimated visit metric. 

When looking at visits, make sure you know whether the metric is measured visits or extrapolated. They can both be useful, but should be reported separately.

5 – How to compare DTS results across solutions

To ensure you are comfortable understanding the results of your drive-to-store campaign and you are able to compare between providers, here’s a handy question list that you can ask your provider:

• How are visits measured? Do they use MAID or other identifiers?
• Do they measure their own results or do they use third party measurement?
• Do they deduplicate visits? How do they ensure metrics aren’t inflated?
• Do they measure lift in visits or only absolute visits? How do they calculate incrementality?
• Do they extrapolate results? Do you have access to both measured visits and the extrapolated metric?

If you have any other questions regarding drive-to-store or about our solution, please get in touch.

Maintaining a brand’s image whilst making sure your advertising is reaching real people is a challenge, but using the right technology can make it easy.

According to IAS, ad fraud losses have decreased by 10% since 2017, but they still account for approximately $5.8 billion on digital display advertising alone. It’s no wonder that advertisers want to have more control over the brand safety and ad fraud measures of their campaigns.

We have implemented many brand-safety and anti-fraud measures into our technology, including several curated blacklists and whitelists updated regularly, as well as premium publisher deals ensuring campaigns are run on quality inventory, so advertisers can be confident that their brand is associated with the right content. We have also developed a proprietary algorithm, called GeoAccuracy, that filters out suspicious location data used for targeting to ensure your bids reach real people around your stores. 

But it’s even easier to ensure brand safety and viewability and to prevent ad fraud using our drive-to-store platform Fusio. Thanks to our partnership with IAS, we are able to offer pre-defined publisher segments that can cater to any brand safety requirement, so that advertising dollars can be put to good use throughout the campaign. 

When you run a campaign using Fusio, you’ll be able to choose specific publisher segments you’d like to bid on in the supply section. They’re divided into three categories:

Viewability

Bid only on placements that meet or exceed your viewability goals, to ensure your campaigns are seen by real people. Viewability targets are really important for all types of brands to make sure they are paying for valuable impressions.

Brand safety

Brand safety is measured by the potential risk a publisher or placement poses to the brand image. High-risk content could be alcohol content, whereas low-risk content can be weather updates. You can now use customizable brand-risk thresholds that work for your brand image. 

Ad fraud

You make the most of your budget when your bids aren’t wasted on suspicious placements. Fusio will help to prevent your tactics from bidding on suppliers that are associated with illegal or deceptive activities such as click fraud or invalid traffic.

With a few simple clicks, you will be able to ensure your brand and your money are protected. This is a great addition to the other brand safety and anti-fraud tools you can use in Fusio, such as black or whitelisting, or accessing premium private deals directly in the platform.

Do you have any questions about how to protect your brand when running drive-to-store campaigns? Get in touch to have a chat with our team.

Crafting a great drive-to-store creative is not rocket science, but it’s something that can make or break a campaign. At Locala we have a creative studio team with over 10 years of experience, and we have crafted many exclusive formats using our proprietary ad builder tool that are optimized for drive-to-store. Here’s what we’ve found works best:

Lean away from heavily interactive formats

Interactive formats are great for branding campaigns because they keep customers engaged and increase brand recall. However, that means we’re already asking customers to do something (interact with the ad), so clicking through or visiting the store on top of that is too big of an ask.

Say yes to a simple path to the store

A well crafted, simple creative, containing only the essential information will keep the user focused on the follow-up action: visiting your store. It’s easy to want to add a lot of movement and text to make sure customers understand everything about your business, but a simple and clear proposition with a direct line to your closest store will do best. Let’s see how we do that in our top 3 formats.

Top three drive-to-store formats

Multi-store DCO
Is your product available in multiple stores or do you have several stores around the area? The multi-store DCO (dynamic creative optimization) helps your customers identify the closest range of stores and how to get there. The store locations are displayed in order of proximity, giving them the option of choosing the nearest one or the one that fits their destination. With a direct format that focuses on location, you can ensure that users recall what’s important: where your stores are located.

[vc_video link=”https://vimeo.com/333319646″ align=”center”]

Pass-to-Store
With a simple creative format that directs users to download a pass in their mobile wallet, this format works great if you’re hosting an event or want to give your customers a voucher to redeem in-store. The best part? When a user has downloaded your voucher or event ticket, you can send an extra notification at a chosen date and time to remind them to use their pass.

[vc_video link=”https://vimeo.com/321750035″ align=”center”]

Video to store
This format combines video as high-impact media with the address of the user’s closest store using DCO technology. Remain top of mind thanks to stunning video visuals whilst keeping your drive-to-store focus. When the user clicks through, they’ll be directed to a map with directions to the nearest store, making the path to store as simple as it can be.

What these three formats have in common is a focus on leading consumers to their nearest store, rather than engaging and interacting heavily with them at the ad level. Keeping a simple path for consumers to go into your store is our number one recommendation when crafting your creative strategy. 

Our studio team, using our proprietary ad builder, has worked in over 10,000 campaigns across many years. With their support and skills, your drive-to-store creative strategy will be perfectly crafted.

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It’s hard to give up control over every campaign detail and trust your chosen platform to perform. It’s very tempting to action every piece of targeting that digital channels offer us to pinpoint a very specific audience. It also may seem reasonable to optimize many different KPIs on each campaign to make sure your advertising spend is used effectively. 

However, data from over 10,000 campaigns shows that the most successful ones have a simple and clean setup that works towards one clear objective from the start. Here’s why a simple campaign structure delivers better results.

When the targeting is too complex it limits the number of people you can reach

Layering targeting options might seem like the way to go to achieve this one-to-one conversation that digital advertising promises. However, it’s also important to consider available reach and whether or not a set up can deliver results at scale. 

For example, you might want to reach a specific audience segment or reach people who use certain apps. But if you layer both you’ll find there aren’t enough customers that match that criteria and your campaign won’t be able to achieve your objective.

Complexity means the bulk of your efforts is on the wrong part of the campaign (settings vs results)

Trying to keep such tight control over your settings, that you sacrifice the results in the process. It’s similar to the issue above: if you want a guarantee on the audience (your settings) you are limiting your outcomes (your results). 

It’s a fine balance that can be achieved through experience. If you ever need advice on your campaigns our dedicated account management team can help make sure you reach the right audience without compromising your results.

Understanding what you are trying to achieve gives you just one objective

This one is especially true for drive-to-store advertising, where you are asking people to move from their online activities to performing an action offline. The objective of drive-to-store campaigns is to increase store traffic (footfall uplift). That’s what you should focus on improving. And to do that you need to make sure your strategy makes sense, your reach is high, and you trust the machine learning algorithms of the platform to find the people who will go to your store. 

Focusing on achieving outstanding results on other online metrics takes your optimization efforts away from your main goal and it can mean sacrificing your bottom line for proxy metrics. 

When you look at two campaigns, make sure you’re comparing like for like

Benchmarking performance is essential to keep track of your ROAS, but this analysis must be aligned by campaign objective to make sure you’re comparing like for like. 

For example, the CTR of a web traffic campaign cannot be compared with the CTR of a drive-to-store campaign. If you do so, you’ll have a distorted view of these campaigns’ performance, because traffic campaigns will have a higher CTR and it’s not an indicator of how well the drive-to-store campaign did.

A clear message drives direct action

It’s also important to keep your creatives and messaging simple. In drive-to-store, we are asking customers to take a big jump to the offline world, which is full of distractions and added complexity. Your message should be a clear guiding force to your store, rather than something complicated to understand.

Over time we have developed a set of ad formats specific for drive-to-store that can help you get your message across and drive action. They can be fully developed by our studio team and added to any campaign you run with us.

It may seem hard to strike this balance between simplicity and reaching the right audience, especially for those who are new to drive-to-store advertising. If you want to get started with drive-to-store and understand the variables and basics contact us to see how we can help you. 

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With ever-changing mobility patterns in 2020, rediscovering the catchment area of your store is more important now than ever. The composition of the high-street has changed and understanding where these customers come from and how they move will help you identify your new catchment area.

Our drive-to-store platform Fusio has a built-in targeting tool called DCA (Dynamic Catchment Area). It allows you to define your location targeting criteria based on real-world mobility patterns that measure affinity with your store and true walking or driving distance.

Thanks to this innovative targeting you can set up specific strategies for each of your stores, adapting your approach using your business know-how to anything from the most densely populated urban areas to rural areas with a regional audience.

Here are some strategies you can craft using our DCA tool:

• Effective targeting around your store

Use our brand affinity targeting to identify areas around your store with strong sympathy towards your store and either reinforce existing trends or generate brand interest in areas with lower brand awareness. Combine this knowledge with the ideal travel distance and transport to your store to find your most effective targeting locations.

• Influence competitor store visitors

Persuade your competitors’ store visitors to come to your store by targeting their store locations or areas with high affinity with their stores. This is a great way to increase brand recall and store visits in heavy shopping areas.

• Simplify the shopper experience with complementary purchases

Promote your product to users who are visiting related stores. Catch them when they are in the right mindset, provide them with a useful service, and drive additional visits.

• Combine with other audience data, like demographics

No one knows your customers better than you. Do they drive or walk to your stores? Do they come from work or from home? Do you cater to families? Create custom areas based on your own data or third-party data and target the best locations for your business.

Locala is here to help brands succeed and we value your input on Fusio, our drive-to-store platform. We used to rely on you reaching out to our account management team to give us feedback – which wasn’t great for you or us. 

Fusio Feedback is an aspect of our drive-to-store self-service platform which will enable you to quickly leave us feedback on what works well and what you would like to see improved. 

Key features:

Upvoting: You will be able to see the feedback requests submitted by other users – if there’s an improvement you think is more important, you can vote for it to be addressed first by our engineering team.

Commenting: If you are interested in another user’s request, or have further suggestions, you can comment directly on the issue.

Notifications: You’ll receive a notification when your request, or a request you voted on, is being worked on and released. You’ll be one of the first to use our new tool.

To leave us feedback, log in to Fusio to access our resource center pop up from any page (the bottom-right corner question mark) – and use the ‘Fusio Feedback’ request form.

Requests can be anything from small tweaks to integrations, or ideas you’ve had that would make Fusio work better for your advertising campaigns.

Watch this space to learn more about Fusio.

FUSIO by Locala is a powerful drive-to-store platform that can attribute digital media investments with real-world results, such as shopper visits into stores. Our product vision is to help our clients, marketers, brands and media agencies to close the digital and physical advertising divide.

In a previous article, we explained how our product team built the components that make up FUSIO’s conceptual model based on the insights gathered from user research.

This article deep-dives into two design strategies used to convey the information necessary for FUSIO users to quickly internalize how the platform works.

User Interface Architecture

Before a user clicks anything on a webpage, they usually browse its visual assets and content to absorb the information it communicates. Our product team leveraged this dwell time to help our target user understand what functions the FUSIO platform could perform.

We began by defining FUSIO’s user interface (UI) architecture, which are the principles governing the platform’s interface – including its global page structure, its information flow between pages and its user navigation.

UI-conceptual model mirroring

Key to FUSIO’s redesign was ensuring that the platform’s architecture matched the user-led conceptual model that Locala’s designers had built for the technology. For this reason, each page within the platform reflects how various ad components interact with the final insertion order (IO).

Take for example this image of the FUSIO platform. A child entity such as media buying, which could not exist in the absence of an IO, can only be accessed from the IO’s card. While secondary components like creative assets are accessed via a different tab.

Positive user feedback during FUSIO’s testing helped validate and confirm this approach. A route to successful interaction is to design based on the user’s understanding of the tasks to be performed, and establishing UI design principles that are synonymous with this.

Meaningful UI Layout and Interaction Consistency

Another important consideration for FUSIO’s product team was how the UI layout of the platform could attach meaning to the components within it.

The placement of a feature on a webpage can speak volumes about what that feature can do and how it influences other components on the page. For this reason, Locala’s designers leveraged well established User Experience (UX) standards to achieve an intuitive UI layout within the platform.

Top-down information flow

A common UX standard applied to pages within FUSIO was a top-down approach to information flow. So as platform users descend from the beginning of a page to the end they go from top-level items – such as the IO dashboard – to more detailed information – like the performance of individual media tactics.

A designer would be breaking the top-down standard if, for example, a filter had an “upwards” effect. So by using FUSIO, advertisers can filter the performance of their drive-to-store campaign via individual store locations (see image below). This action would not, however, impact the delivery of the campaign or its reporting as these features sit above the filter.

As most user behaviour is unconscious, a repetitive pattern like top-bottom scope of action can be learnt and applied automatically. By applying familiar UX standards, product designers can save much valued time.

The key to fruitful interaction is taking advantage of the patterns that a user has already internalised, and mirroring a user insight-based conceptual model. This resulted in establishing FUSIO as an intuitive efficiency-enhancing tool for media buying traders.

In the next article, we will learn how the FUSIO platform communicates with the user through feedback and signalling.

FUSIO by Locala is a powerful drive-to-store platform that can attribute digital media investments with real-world results, such as shopper visits into stores. Our product vision is to help our clients, marketers, brands and media agencies, to close the digital and physical advertising divide.

In a previous article about our target users we explained how tool-independent workflows laid the foundation for FUSIO’s conceptual model.

Ahead of bringing a product to market, a designer must first develop a conceptual model of the product that is easily understood by the target user – a core challenge for the FUSIO product team.

In broad terms, a conceptual model is a simplified explanation of how something works. Informed by this explanation, each user proceeds to build their own mental model about the way that item functions and the qualities it has.

The same logic applies for more sophisticated products like platforms, where users adjust their mental model as they interact with the technology.

In order to achieve an intuitive product, our product team wanted users to build the same mental model of FUSIO as the one that Locala’s designers had in mind.

A rule of thumb, however, for designing a universal conceptual model is to begin from the user’s understanding of the tasks your product will perform.

From Insights to Interface

Our product team’s central focus for FUSIO’s conceptual model was shaping the platform to embody how components used within DSP’s naturally interact with each other – in effect making the platform feel predictive.

Underpinning this objective was user research showing us that the activities carried out by traders gravitate around the insertion order (IO), which is the final commitment to run a campaign on behalf of an advertiser.

In practice the IO is connected to several other components related to the design and delivery of mobile display campaigns. For example, a child entity such as a media buying tactic belongs to the insertion order, as it could not exist in the IO’s absence. This means that by controlling the parent you could also control child entities.

In this rhythm, Locala set about providing traders with a new level of control from an insertion order dashboard, and across various primary and secondary components.

Design outputs:

• Managed media buying tactics: With FUSIO users can, for example, change and pause media buying tactics directly from the IO dashboard.
• Create once – use multiple times: Assets like creatives, which are part of the configuration of media buying tactics, can be designed within the platform and made easily accessible for multiple campaigns.
• Dynamic adjustment of campaign parameters: For those campaigns utilizing specific assets, such as publisher deals, the platform can automatically apply changes made to these assets to live campaigns.

By keeping in view only the platform components that are relevant to a campaign’s status, FUSIO can anticipate the needs of a user.

Campaign Navigation and Optimization

A second phase in the development of FUSIO’s conceptual model was to look at areas where our product team could upgrade the traditional mental model users created about ad platforms.

Our primary research revealed that traders were losing valuable time modifying campaign parameters due to complex navigation; from top-line overview dashboards; to deep dive performance analytics; and access to specific components.

By its very nature FUSIO bolsters efficiency through providing marketers an all-in-one platform, comprising of an Ad Server, DSP, Ad Builder and DMP.

Pushing the boundaries further, our product team made it their mission to deliver a fluid user experience that focused on easy navigation and quick optimization within the platform.

Design outputs:

• Hybrid mode: With FUSIO the most crucial campaign parameters – such as budget and goal price – can be modified directly from the overview dashboard, giving invaluable time back to traders.
• Quick navigation: Switching between the dashboard view – both overview and detailed – and the configuration panel of the campaign is designed to be just one-click away.

Design builds such as these are driven by patterns in how our core user thinks, works and behaves – all of which are excellent sources for deriving the conceptual model that will govern a product’s design.

The relationship held between various components and the final insertion order laid the foundation of our work, which ultimately helps make the platform work harder on behalf of our users.

Next in the series we will look closely at FUSIO’s interface architecture and information hierarchy, alongside the feedback process employed during its development.

FUSIO by Locala is a powerful drive-to-store platform that can attribute digital media investments with real-world results, such as shopper visits into stores. Our product vision is to help our clients, marketers, brands and media agencies, to close the digital and physical advertising divide.

FUSIO’s platform users are programmatic media traders who buy ad spaces at auctions in the ad exchange (automated ad space buying and selling to the highest bidder).

Our product team has the primary mission to deliver a B2B product with functions and features that appeal to both primary employees using the product, “users”, as well as business decision makers in the buying process, “choosers”*. FUSIO’s product design has to win over both of these stakeholders. For “choosers”, FUSIO offers more distinct features than the competition. For the “user”, FUSIO addresses specific daily challenges and provides an easy-to-adopt solution.  

Let’s not forget that B2B users have different goals than B2C users. So first, we tried to understand the employee mindset and identify the challenges of our target users in their career contexts. These challenges are related to each user’s personal motivations and to the various advertising-related tasks.

The first key finding is that our target users want a product to help them become better at their jobs. Thus, the primary goal was to provide a tool that can facilitate exactly that. Ultimately our target users want to progress in their career, do their jobs better and more efficiently to eventually spend time on what really matters.

This translates into two important product objectives:

1. Speed of execution: being able to get things done quickly
   
2. Feedback and constraints: avoid time consuming  mistakes
   

In order to get a holistic understanding of our target user’s daily advertising-related operational tasks, we conducted “contextual interviews” during our user research period of several months. This helped our team to understand their pain points and learn more about their current solutions – what really works and areas that can be improved.

Our primary research revealed ways in which media traders understood and worked with different elements of a programmatic advertising campaign. These included specific tasks, good and bad habits, preferences and dislikes, as well as features they wish they had to improve their job scope.

These “contextual interviews” provided valuable data for our product team to analyse and recognise patterns in order to build the conceptual model for how media traders reasoned, worked and behaved.

User-centric findings and design examples

1. Spreadsheet Functionality: We learned that very often, after the media trader downloads a report, they would need to export these data into a spreadsheet tool in order to apply a filtered-view and group the data. Knowing this, we integrated a function into FUSIO to allow table manipulations within the interface to help the user avoid the additional action of exporting the downloaded data into another spreadsheet tool. With this added functionality, the user spends less time transitioning between work tools and achieves their final goal faster.
   
2. Quick Edit: We also realised that traders need a shortcut directly in the campaign dashboard to make configuration adjustments while they are monitoring their campaign performances. So in our design thinking, we created a bridge to group  the two visualisation options (edit and monitoring) so the user can alternate between the two modes easily.
   

These tool-independent workflows that we identified came together to form the FUSIO conceptual model, shaping the entire design of the platform. This way, users can navigate intuitively in FUSIO and carry on their tasks with a seamless transition.

Next in the series, our product team will deep dive into FUSIO’s conceptual model and design.

*Nielsen Norman Group Report

Locala is an ad tech company in the digital advertising ecosystem specializing in programmatic buying to help advertisers bridge online results with offline impacts. FUSIO is Locala’s mobile advertising technology with a suite of products to address digital advertising challenges.

Today, FUSIO by Locala is a powerful drive-to-store platform that can attribute digital media investments with real-world results, such as shopper visits into stores. Advertisers can optimize their digital advertising investments with FUSIO by Locala to define custom audience clusters, define geo-location targeting, and track their campaign performances from mobile impressions until consumers arrive into stores.

Our technology did not start as a fullstack product suite. It was created in 2011, at the time FUSIO started only as an ad server, to serve and track mobile campaigns. Overtime, we added different modules to improve campaign performance and data insights. Today we are unifying the different existing modules such as Ad Server, DSP, Ad Builder and the DMP. The DSP lets users, such as programmatic traders, set up a campaign and buy media via real-time bidding from the supply side from app and web publishers. In our product roadmap, by summer 2018, we will unify all the different technology modules into the full stack product suite.

For the product team, we took this opportunity to unity all the different technology modules under the same interface and a single sign-on (SSO) system. Furthermore, unifying all the modules gave us the opportunity to redesign the conceptual model of the DSP (demand side platform). Stay tuned for another upcoming article about FUSIO by Locala’s target users and a deep-dive into the design process.

Locala is an ad tech company in the digital advertising ecosystem specializing in programmatic buying to help advertisers bridge online results with offline impacts. FUSIO is Locala’s mobile advertising technology with a suite of products to address digital advertising challenges.

Today, FUSIO by Locala is a powerful drive-to-store platform that can attribute digital media investments with real-world results, such as shopper visits into stores. Advertisers can optimize their digital advertising investments with FUSIO by Locala to define custom audience clusters, define geo-location targeting, and track their campaign performances from mobile impressions until consumers arrive into stores.

Our technology did not start as a fullstack product suite. It was created in 2011, at the time FUSIO started only as an ad server, to serve and track mobile campaigns. Overtime, we added different modules to improve campaign performance and data insights. Today we are unifying the different existing modules such as Ad Server, DSP, Ad Builder and the DMP. The DSP lets users, such as programmatic traders, set up a campaign and buy media via real-time bidding from the supply side from app and web publishers. In our product roadmap, by summer 2018, we will unify all the different technology modules into the full stack product suite.

For the product team, we took this opportunity to unify all the different technology modules under the same interface and a single sign-on (SSO) system. Furthermore, unifying all the modules gave us the opportunity to redesign the conceptual model of the DSP (demand side platform). Stay tuned for another upcoming article about FUSIO by Locala’s target users and a deep-dive into the design process.