Making Post-Cookie Measurement Goals No Problem with Viant

The one tool digital marketers have to prove the value of their campaigns is measurement. But in today’s fragmented digital landscape, measurement is complex. 

To share how Viant support can help our clients prove the value of their campaigns, we sat down with Technical Account Manager Shanice Francis. 

Q: Shanice, before we dive in, can you give an overview of Viant’s DSP?

Viant’s DSP (Demand-Side Platform) is our top-tier advertising platform that offers marketers and agencies flexible pricing, omnichannel execution, custom reporting and advanced closed-loop measurement capabilities. 

What sets Viant apart is the constant innovation and emphasis on measurement, because we know how key data insights are to marketers. For example, we recently launched the Bid Optimizer that uses machine learning to enhance bid prices, improving cost efficiency while maintaining media quality, and also ML Segments which leverages pixel fire data from the Viant DSP to create predictive audiences (these segments often outperform retargeting efforts!). 

Let’s also not forget our robust and ever-growing Advanced Reporting suite that marketers can use to gather campaign performance and optimization insights, as well as the Viant Data Platform that provides customized data and automation solutions (in a privacy-focus manner), which are the technical account management team’s areas of focus.

Q: As a technical account manager on our Technical Account Management (TAM) team, can you discuss how you typically interact with Viant clients?

Technical Account Managers, or TAMs, are essentially the Advanced Reporting and Data Platform go-to team for implementation on accounts. We receive all sorts of requests, ranging from generating insights from a report to troubleshooting. 

To answer those requests, we interact with clients via Slack, emails and Zoom meetings. On occasion, I’ll travel to client meetings/events as well. We also provide office hours, quarterly business reviews, etc. Really whatever we can do to best help our clients, we do!

On a personal level, I find that providing timely updates, transparency and even replying “Happy to help!” after a “Thank you” email is important. I’ve definitely seen success with doing the little things. 

Q: Say I’m an advertiser looking to measure performance of a campaign executed across Connected TV, Mobile and Native, can you share how you could help me understand campaign success?

Good question! I recommend utilizing our Conversions report within our Advanced Reporting Suite. Conversions is our most popular report — the UI is easy to understand, you can capture both online and offline conversions to get a full picture, and it refreshes daily so you can use it to optimize your campaign in-flight, which is a big plus. 

In my opinion, the most important metric for marketers is “incremental conversions,” which is the incremental number of conversions your ads drove. It proves the value of serving media served through the Viant DSP. This can be calculated thanks to our control group that’s derived from our ghost-bidding methodology, which gives a better apples-to-apples comparison between our exposed and control group instead of using hold-out groups. Otherwise, you can measure popular KPIs such as ROAS/iROAS and conversion rate as well. 

I also want to make a quick plug for our Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) report because it sounds like you’re utilizing multiple channels and devices! This report takes Conversions a step further and will give you a better understanding of the customer journey to conversion as it breaks down touchpoints by channels and devices (more info in this blog).

Q: What Advanced Reporting capability is less known and why do you think marketers should use it more?

Offline sales/conversions for Conversions and Multi-Touch Attribution reports. To prepare for a “World Without Cookies,” this feature provides closed-loop views of both online (pixel-based) and offline events (ex. brick-and-mortar store purchases, client provided first-party purchase data) within the two reports. The process is much easier now, too. Previously, a Google Cloud Storage or Amazon S3 bucket needed to be created by Viant or provided by the client. Now, clients can upload their offline conversions easily within the Conversion Lift KB page (only accessible to current Vant DSP clients). An example: we’ve seen success with an agency that works with furniture clients; they love being able to visualize how Viant DSP media is driving furniture sales within Conversions reporting, since most of those transactions are done in-store. We were able to attribute over 4000 offline conversions that lead to a more holistic ROAS, which would have been missed if the reporting only tracked pixel activity and speaks to the power of tapping into client’s first-party data!

Q: What, in your opinion, makes Viant’s TAM and support team stand out?

Viant’s Operations department (includes TAM) is top-of-the-line in my opinion. Everyone I’ve collaborated with (which is every team in this org at this point) has a customer-oriented mindset, and is always willing to help even if it’s something outside of their scope. Great cross-functional collaboration is key to maintaining successful accounts, so having a group of support teams that are subject matter experts, empathetic, results-driven and team-oriented is really important. Not to brag, but I think our teams have this locked down!

Q: As we look towards Google deprecating cookies at the end 2024, how do you think our TAM team can help marketers succeed in digital advertising’s evolving cookieless landscape?

Viant has already been preparing for the post-cookie era by taking a people-based approach to identity resolution and building up our Identity Graph around multiple identifiers (online and offline). As the Advanced Reporting and Data Platform SMEs on accounts (along with SEs), it’s important for our team to continue providing education and solutions for each client’s business needs as the landscape and our products/data evolve. Whether it’s providing feedback from the client about AR to our Product teams, or building out custom reporting using client-provided first-party data through the Data Platform, it’s key to stay in-the-know, and be able to showcase how Viant sets itself apart as one of the “most measurable DSPs.”