Audience Sync Service Live!

One common use of Sonamine predictions is to upload specific user lists, such as likely converters and high predicted revenue users, into user acquisition tools such as Facebook and Snapchat. Conceptually this allows mobile UA managers to find look-a-ilke audiences similar to these users with high predicted value.  As an extension of this capability provided to our Sonamine prediction customers, we are proud to announce the availability of the Sonamine Audience Sync service.   Now you can sync any audience, not just Sonamine predictions, to your Facebook custom audiences and Snapchat match segments.   Here's a link to the details.   Audience Sync Package  Why would you want to do this?  

Custom audience capabilities in marketing vendors

Ever since retargeting and lookalike modeling became fashionable on digital ad platforms, marketers have discovered that these are one of the most ROI positive campaigns.  Basically these systems allow advertisers to show ads only to users who have expressed some interest since they came to your web site, or who are very similar to their best users.  Facebook marketing offers these as "custom audiences".  Snapchat marketing calls them "match segments".  Advertisers can load up a list of encrypted and hashed userids; and then target advertising campaigns to these users, or their lookalikes.

These retargeting campaigns have proven to be very very effective from a ROI and return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) perspective.  Lookalikes were created after the advertisers clamored to reach more users but with the results of re-targeting campaigns.  

Evolution of the Sonamine Audience Sync Service

Customers use Sonamine predictions to improve live ops.  However some customers discovered that loading Sonamine predictions into Facebook and Segment audiences could also improve user acquisition campaigns.  From that step, we learned that managing these marketing user audiences was a big headache.  Surveying the market place, we noticed it was an unsolved problem.   Several marketing vendors such as Adjust provide such a service, but at an additional cost of $5,000 per month, or only to very large customers.  Most tools that offer audience management assume and require that all your data reside in their system, which just is not the true situation in most marketing departments.  

So upon listening to our customers and doing a quick review, we noticed some common problems with the current state of audience management:

Challenges with managing these custom audiences and match segments

Marketing platforms offered a way to upload and delete users from these segments and audiences from their campaign management tools.  There are several challenges with this approach when you are running marketing campaigns at scale:

• Prone to errors.  When advertisers are keeping many different user lists on their computers and updating them manually in Facebook or Snapchat, it's not difficult to accidentally upload the wrong list.  And unfortunately, there are no easy ways to "undo" these mistakes.  As a result, advertisers need to update all the campaigns.
• User list data in different places.  When data is stored in different places, such as Adjust csv data and app analytics database, advertisers take a long time to obtain the user lists that meet their criteria.  
• Time consuming manual steps.  Every step from getting user lists and uploading them is manual and time consuming.  
• Stale lists.  Due to the volume of lists and users, advertisers frequently do not update their lists frequently.  This leads to stale lists and campaigns whose results decline with time.

The hypothesis and test

Sonamine's prediction infrastructure and platform already has the automation, scheduling, error retry, logging, data integration capabilities that are used to generate Sonamine predictions.  So we hypothesized that we would be able to offer a barebones yet functional audience sync service that addresses the major challenges of the status quo.

• Integrate multiple data sources.  We allow advertisers to merge different data sources to generate the Sonamine predictions, why not the audience lists?
• Flexible rules.  Most tools such as Adjust have a "rule" system that allows you to specify what these are.  Of course, by design these rule definitions are limited.  We would allow advertisers to define the rules, even SQL themselves, if they wanted.
• Flexible data locations.  Most CDP want advertisers to send all data to them.  This helps with centralization and re-use; but of course this is not practical in many real world situations.  We would allow different data locations, including in-house databases, cloud databases, third party analytics tools.
• Low cost.  We are data management experts, so we have various techniques and tricks to lower the cost of storage and processing.  We will pass this along to our customers.  
• High touch service.  Since we utilize our own in-house platform that is not manual, our in-house team can offer high touch service without having to do any "coding".  This high touch service allows us to support sophisticated rules and yet have a fast turnaround.

We look forward to your feedback and thoughts.

‍