Enabling Next-Best-Action Offers on Paid Channels 1

Enabling Next-Best-Action Offers on Paid Channels

Pega Marketing 7.22.1 with Paid Media Manager

May 2017

Integrating Paid and Owned Marketing Strategies Paid Media Manager (PMM) for Pega Marketing enables organizations to leverage the 1:1 strategies that drive offers on owned channels on paid channels. Doing so results in a coordinated and personalized experience across both owned and paid customer interactions.

PMM is included with Pega Marketing 7.22.1 installations and can be enabled with the appropriate license.

NBA Paid Audiences PMM creates targetable audiences within ad serving platforms based on offers selected by your Next-Best-Action (NBA) strategy. With each NBA strategy execution, each customer is moved to the NBA Paid Audiences that corresponds to the offer or offers that the strategy selects for them.

Each offer can have multiple NBA Paid Audiences that align the cost of media with the expected value of each paid interaction for each customer.

The value of a high CLV customer to accept a retention offer is greater than for a low CLV customer to do so. By placing high and low CLV customers in separate NBA audiences, we are able to set the optimal target cost per acquisition (CPA) for each.

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The value of an impression of a retention offer for a high CLV customer that also has a high propensity for it is greater than for a customer with the same CLV but lower propensity. By placing customers in separate NBA audiences based on the value of their propensity multiplied by their CLV, we can set the target price per impressions to align with the expected business value.

Syncing NBA Paid Audiences NBA Audiences are synced with media platforms via server-to-server (S2S) and pixel-based mechanisms. S2S integrations with media buying platforms enable NBA audience updates to paid platforms in response to NBA updates outside of web sessions. This includes NBA updates triggered by customer interactions across owned channels, paid channels, and scheduled outbound runs.

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S2S integrations

S2S integrations are currently available for Facebook and Google. Audiences are updated on these platforms in near real-time.

More information on both Facebook’s and Google’s audience integration services can be found here:

Facebook Custom Audiences: https://www.facebook.com/business/a/custom-audiences

Google Customer Match: https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/guides/remarketing

Information on their S2S APIs is available here:

Facebook Customer Audience API: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/audiences-api

Google Customer Match API: https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/guides/remarketing

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Pixel-based integrations

Many advertising technology integrations can only be called within a web session via a pixel or JavaScript tag. This may provide the opportunity to read and update a 3rd party cookie. Many demand side platforms (DSPs), data management platforms (DMPs), and advertising networks require this.

PMM provides a low latency web service that returns the latest NBA Paid Audiences for a customer. These values can then be passed to 3rd party services via client-side JavaScript. A tag management solution such as Google Tag Manager or Adobe Dynamic Tag Management can be used rather than directly manipulating JavaScript.

Updates via pixel-based mechanisms are only possible during a customer’s web session. Also, many modern browsers limit access to 3rd party cookies. The use of ad blockers is also on the rise, which work by blocking these client-side calls. For this reason, S2S integrations are preferred to sync NBA paid audiences.

Ad campaign setup The resulting audiences are synced with ad serving platforms through direct S2S integrations as well as pixel-based mechanisms. The audiences can then be targeted with appropriately configured advertising campaigns with the treatments for the associated offer and with the appropriate media pricing.

NBA campaign configuration

The exact configuration of advertising campaigns may vary based on the advertising operations team responsible for executing the campaign. In general, each campaign will be associated with a specific offer. Within each campaign there will be sub-group (Ad Group on Google AdWords, Ad Set on Facebook) that contains specific targeting and target media pricing.

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As customers are moved from one NBA audience to another, they will receive ads for the offers they have been selected for. A customer with a higher CLV could be placed in a higher CPA configured campaign. An increase in a customer’s propensity for a retention offer could result in the customer being moved to an audience with a higher target CPM. For S2S integrations with an expanding number of media partners, a customer’s NBA can be pushed to the leading source of digital ad inventory across the digital advertising ecosystem.

More information on Facebook’s and Google AdWords’ campaign structure can be found here:

https://www.facebook.com/business/a/campaign-structure

https://support.google.com/adwords/topic/3119116?hl=en&ref_topic=3119071

Campaign strategy alignment

Increasing the number of NBA audiences for each paid offer increases the alignment of media spend with business value. Doing so maximizes the return on ad spend (ROAS). However, the number of audiences needs to be balanced with the operational overhead to manage more refined campaigns, the size of associated audiences, and media spend allocated for the associated offer.

It is important to coordinate with the advertising campaign strategy and operations teams to determine which offers to activate on the paid channel, the number of audiences, and the types

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of pricing (e.g. CPA, CPM, CPC, CPI, etc.). These decisions will determine how you configure Pega Marketing and your NBA strategy.

Pega Marketing configuration Because Paid Media Manager builds on your existing NBA strategies, the added setup and configuration to enable your NBA offers on paid is minimal.

Paid account configuration You can configure paid accounts under Configuration > Settings > Channel > Paid Media.

Facebook accounts

Configuring an account requires choosing a name and optionally setting a description. You must also obtain and set your Facebook Account ID and App Token.

Customer attributes can then be mapped to the Facebook user attributes. E-mail or phone number is required. Both are highly recommended.

Obtain a Facebook account ID

Adding a Facebook account requires the associated account ID. Follow these instructions to find your Facebook Ads Account ID: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1492627900875762.

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Obtain a Facebook app token

PMM requires an app token linked to your Facebook Ad accounts to access the Facebook Marketing API. You can find instructions on creating/finding this app token as well as requesting Standard Level API access here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/access.

Facebook attribute mappings

The following attributes can be utilized to establish a match when formatted as below:

Email addresses - Use key EMAIL. Trimming leading and trailing whitespace and convert all characters to lowercase.

Phone numbers - Remove symbols, letters, and any leading zeroes.

Gender - Use key GEN. Use “m” for male and “f” for female.

Birth Year - Use key DOBY. YYYY from 1900 to current year.

Birth Month - Key DOBM. MM format: 01 to 12.

Birthday - Key DOBD, DD format: 01 to 31.

Last and first names - Keys LN and FN. a-z only. Lower case only, no punctuation. Special characters in UTF8 format.

First Initial - FI, first character of normalized first name.

US States - ST in 2-character ANSI abbreviation code, lower case. Normalize states outside the U.S. in lower case, no punctuations, no special characters, and no white space.

City - CT as a-z only. Lower case, no punctuations, no special characters, no white space.

Zip code - ZIP. In lower case, no white spaces. Use only the first 5 digits for U.S. Use Area/District/Sector format for UK.

Country code - COUNTRY. 2-letter country codes in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2.

Mobile advertiser id - MADID, all lower case. Keep hyphens.

App scoped user id - APPUID, only digits.

PMM utilizes multi-key matching to maximize match rates.

It is important to ensure that fields are formatted exactly as indicated above.

Any change in mapped attributes will result in a force resync of the customer data to S2S destinations including Facebook.

All values are SHA256 hashed prior to being sent to Facebook. Facebook compares the matches and establishes a link when possible. After the link is established the hashed information is discarded.

External ID

The optional External ID field enables you to send a unique customer ID that can be used in place of hashed customer data for subsequent updates for a given customer. This feature is on by default and configured to utilize CustomerID.

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This can be changed to a different attribute or disabled. Disabling external_ID results in slower syncs with Facebook. As with all mappings a change will result in a forced resync.

All customer audience

Once customers are placed in an NBA audience they will also be placed in an audience called the “All Customers Audience.” To ensure customers placed in NBA Paid Audiences only receive ads based on the associated campaigns, all other campaigns should exclude this “All Customer Audience.”

You can find directions to exclude this audience for non-NBA campaigns here: https://www.facebook.com/business/a/custom-audience-exclusions.

Instructions for Google AdWords can be found here: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2549058.

A customer will stay in the “All Customer Audience” as long an NBA strategy execution has resulted in an NBA Audience update within the past 24 hours. After 24 hours the customer will be removed from the “All Customer Audience” and will be eligible for ads from non-NBA campaigns.

The “All Customer Audiences” is on by default. The name can be updated. This can also be disabled. In both cases, previously generated versions of this audience must be manually removed within Facebook.

Offline event sets

Offline event sets are in experimental capability that enable syncing customer who have accepted offers with an existing event set pre-configured on Facebook. Contact your account manager for more informaiton on this capability.

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Google accounts

PMM enables pushing NBA Paid Audiences to Google to be used primarily in Google AdWords. However, these audiences can also be used to drive certain YouTube video ad campaigns enabled on DoubleClick Bid Manger.

A Client ID, Client Secret, Developer Token, Refresh Token, and Client Customer ID is required to configure the AdWords API. You can find instructions on accessing these credentials here: https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/guides/authentication.

You can find instructions on finding the customer ID for your AdWords account here: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1704344.

Google attribute mapping

Google currently matches only on email addresses. This includes Gmail, Google Apps, and any email addresses associated with a Google account.

Pixel-based Advertising Technology Integrations PMM enables pushing audiences to 3rd party cookie-based platforms such as DMPs, DSPs, and Web-based ad networks.

The “PaidAudiencesContainer” RESTService should be called with the CustomerID as the query string parameter: {"CustomerID":"57485"}.

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The response will contain all NBA Paid Audiences for the customer in the following form: {"PaidAudiences": [{"OfferId":"-1436106762344408197","AudienceId":"6284"}],"CustomerID":"57485"}.

If the CustomerID is unavailable or not passed, you will get the following response: {"PaidAudiences": [],"CustomerID":"INVALIDCUSTOMERID"}.

The NBA audiences are encoded to obfuscate audience names. The following report provides the Tracker ID for each NBA Audience as well as the number of customers in each NBA Audience:

The total customers are the number pushed to each platform. Each platform will be able to match some percentage of these.

The report can be accessed by clicking Reports > Report Browser (All Reports).

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Adobe Audience DMP example

Instructions to push NBA Audiences to Adobe Audience via a pixel can be found here: https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/aam/c_rt_inbound_pixel_transfers.html. S2S syncing with Adobe Audience will be included in the next release.

NBA Designer configuration After you configure your paid channels you can be placed into NBA Audiences within these channels.

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Paid can be enabled at any level in the NBA hierarchy by configuring the Paid media section below Triggers.

One or more Facebook or Google account can be selected here.

NBA Paid Audience Name

By default, the audience name is in the form of Business Issue – Group – Offer. This can be overridden by setting the property “PaidAudienceName.”

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The audience name can consider values such as propensity and CLV. If the NBA Paid audience does not exist, it will be created.

Paid Outbound Schedule Triggered Runs

After you configure paid audience, each outbound run results in a data flow that determines to which offer-based audiences each customer should belong. Each paid audience is maintained in Pega so a customer can be moved in and out of audiences based on the results of the NBA strategy.

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If paid is configured at multiple levels, the NBA Paid audiences selected would be based on the latest decision time for each customer. It is recommended that only a single paid outbound schedule is configured at the highest level that encompasses all offers relevant for paid.

You can monitor the progress of each Outbound Run by clicking Configuration > Decision Management > Data Flows.

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The outbound dataflow below is not intended to be modified:

Paid real-time containers

If paid accounts and a real-time container (RTC) are configured at any level of the hierarchy then RTC calls will result in an NBA update. A secondary call is made with direction as outbound and channel as paid.

In many cases you may want the Paid update for a real-time container to consider a broader range of offers than what is required for the current page. The real-time container can be configured to have the paid update executed from the highest level where a Paid RTC has been configured by checking the following box:

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Real-time processing can be monitored by selecting the 2nd tab on the Data Flows landing page.

The paid real-time container data flow is similar to the paid outbound data flow and also should not be modified.

Paid Clicks to Interaction History

The new REST service, CapturePaidResponse, can be used to push paid clicks into interaction history. The following is an example of the JSON to post:

{ "CustomerID":"TestID31265", "externalaudienceid":"90a6", "AccountId" : "facebook_test_ac", "ReferredUrl": "facebook.com", "Source": "facebook", "Utm_medium":"Banner Ad" , "AudienceID":"23842593604320755"}

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The record will be inserted only if the externalaudience id resolves to a proper pyissue, pygroup, and pyname internally. The outcome will be “PaidClick” and the behavior will be “Positive.”

Implementation details The following implementation details highlight the steps required for certain functionality.

Tuning performance of S2S calls The performance S2S NBA Audience updates in response to real-time containers can be tuned by modifying the following event strategies:

RTPaidMediaCustomersForAPeriod: This event strategy accumulates events for a given customer for a given period of time (default is 5 minutes), based on the number of container hits per customer, this can be tuned.

RTPaidMediaCustomersBatch: This event strategy accumulates a given number of events (Default 1000); more event accumulated = less API calls, but at the cost of memory.

Tuning performance of Batch Calls We have 2 dynamic system settings:

dataflow/paidmedia/customerBatchSize (Default value is 2000): This setting defines the number of customer records processed by the paid media shape while doing outbound batch run. Use this setting to tune the number of records accumulated by the paid media shape before it prepares an API call to Google/Facebook. Higher the number lesser number of API calls, but at the cost of number of in memory pages (objects).

paidmedia/allNBAAudience/TimeToLive (Default value is 1 day): This setting defines the time to live for a customer record in the All NBA Targeted Audience in days. This setting is used by the agent that removes the customers who are not targeted for more than the specified number of days.

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Pega Marketing

Document: Enabling Next-Best-Action Offers on Paid Channels

Software Version: 7.22.1

Updated: May 2017