To be considered offline, or how we chose the contextual advertising automation service

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    It so happened that we (the team of the telecom company UIS ) literally just went through the process of choosing for ourselves a contractor for the automation of contextual advertising. There were many correspondence, reflection, questions and additional questions. Now that everything is behind us, and so far we have chosen one company for working testing for ourselves - I want to share the experience I have gathered. It will be great if it is useful to someone else and will save time.

    The task of choosing a service was placed on the fragile shoulders of our marketer Olya Glazunova:

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    “Probably worth telling how it all began. I selected applicants who were already known to me at that time or were easily found in the search, thought what I want from them, and sent everyone a support letter with questions. In general, that's all. Oh, one more thing. If one of the services does not see himself in the review as he himself imagines, then let them not be offended. I included features in their arsenal in the final standings based on the information that was sent to me in response to the letter. This I clarify just in case. And someone else will be upset, and we may be testing them next :) "

    So, everything in order.

    Disposition: why do we need it and our main "Wishlist"


    Cursed Mines


    Of course, one of the main insights that happened to us at the very beginning of the journey was the realization that we simply could not cope on our own. It takes an unreasonably large amount of time to set up the growing com of our advertising campaigns “pens”, something else useful could be spent on oneself.

    Mercantile interest


    The next thought came up that the use of automated strategies is not only pleasant, but also useful. They will allow us to more effectively manage advertising, optimize costs and improve quality indicators, we decided.

    CoMagic must stay


    At that time, we already used CoMagic to collect data and analyze conversion for all referral sources . Therefore, it was necessary to automate the work with contextual advertising so that the automation service could integrate with CoMagic by API. In order to make it clear why this condition was necessary, we will briefly explain how CoMagic tamed us so.

    This is a service of end-to-end advertising analytics, which automatically collects statistics on any possible communication channels together (both online and offline - which, as you already understood, is extremely important for us). At the same time, it combines purely analytical tools and communication tools with site visitors. We use all this in order not to lose sales and keep their records in the context of all advertising campaigns and channels of the site’s calls. If in numbers, then in the first year of using the service, the number of monthly high-quality calls through our website grew by 80 - about one and a half times compared to what happened before.

    Offline is not forgotten


    This item is rather a logical extension and addition of the previous one. Thanks to CoMagic, we knew that the main conversion sources on the site for UIS are the so-called offline channels (mainly phone calls). Therefore, we needed a solution that, when setting up automated rules, can take into account all requests from the site - both online and offline.

    “On a pencil”: rates and stability of special placements


    If we shift responsibility, then with manic perfectionism. It was important for us to automate the control of rates and be 100% sure that certain key requests will never fly out of the special placement.

    They stood silently in a row, there were seven


    Through the prism of these basic requests with the addition of some other wishes, we approached the selection process. We chose the seven services that offer their professional help in case of interest to us the context of the automation: MediaGuru.Professional , Origami on , Direct Manager , C50 , Garpun , Elam and Alytics .
    And here is what information we managed to collect for each of them after a certain time of communication with the support departments. Once again we make a reservation that we credited each of the parameters to the pros or cons based on our picture of the world.

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    And the Oscar goes to ...


    It turned out that only four of the services considered could implement integration with CoMagic for us (and, accordingly, would learn to take into account data on offline conversion). Among them, Origami became the clear leader in the total number of pluses. However, providence intervened: the guys from Origami initially abandoned the potential partnership because of the need to further configure integration with CoMagic ( note: now, at the time of publication, they are ready for this).

    Therefore, while our Olya chose K50 for working testing and “wrote” Alytics into fallback options. Now we are introducing all our tools to each other and stocking up with popcorn, preparing to evaluate the potential synergies from the pool of capacities.

    That's how it was. Perhaps we talked about something without going too deep, so if you still have any questions - welcome to comment! And if you yourself use some kind of advertising automation service, please share your experience.

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