Marketers around the world are furiously executing strategic plans as we approach the busiest and most important season of the year, the holiday shopping period. In a few month’s time, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day, and New Year’s will represent a surge in commerce. It’s the global frenzy that makes or breaks targets, puts business models to the test, and pushes teams to their optimal capacity to drive the growth that was promised to boards and shareholders this time last year! 

It’s the most wonderful time of the year to deliver quality customer interactions and drive sales! One could argue the most important ingredient to realizing success is perhaps the creative, picture-perfect holiday ads. Maybe it’s the deals, and undeniable discounts that consumers can’t resist. Or perhaps it’s the slick customer experience, seamless check-out, or extra thoughtful personal touch to an email.

Whatever the secret sauce, if organizations are late to adopt the latest measurement solutions that protect against cookie deprecation, they will never know the full impact all of their hard work has generated. Let’s talk about business solutions designed to help you!

What is Conversion Marketing?

At Tealium, we promise our customers a best-in-class universal data platform, with flexibility and functionality that can be tailored to overcome unique challenges, while achieving specific goals. A pivotal way we deliver on this promise is through Conversions API (CAPI), our unparalleled integrated products that power the most important advertising, marketing, and data platforms that are mission-critical to our customers’ success. 

The impact of signal deprecation is the through-line that impacts the full Advertising and Marketing Departments’ bow-tie. No matter where you sit in your organization, the common denominator is that departments value measurement. 

We have doubled down on our technical partnerships to provide full media-mix coverage to accurately attribute Conversion Measurement across the most important channels our customers advertise on. Chief amongst those are the tech titans like Meta, Google and Amazon. This year, we also added to our roster of strategic relationships by launching partnerships with Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, LinkedIn, and The Trade Desk (we’ll have more announcements in the next few months!) Our goal is to ensure that no matter what time of year, no matter what channels you’re investing in to reach your customer, you’re leveraging accurate, consented data to deliver the right message at the right time.

Our partnerships prioritize privacy-centric, secure solutions that deliver anywhere from 5-25% average increase in observable conversions – with a simple plug-in. This reduces Cost Per Acquisition, improves Return-on-Ad-Spend (ROAS), and delivers happier customers.

We’ve underpinned our partnerships with three core partner products, including client-side tags/pixels, server-to-server (S2S) CAPI connectors for online and offline data configuration, and full spectrum audience-based segmenting and activation for hyper-accurate targeting. This all culminates into a real-time, single-view of a customer that can be applied to diverse business units across an organization, from marketing to data science, analytics, email, media, and creative teams.

How CAPI Delivers Value

Let’s examine the success story of a customer who implemented CAPI. A leading luxury department store needed a strategy to protect its marketing spend as it prepared to head into the peak holiday season (sound familiar?). 

With the challenges that come with signal loss (including ad blockers and general privacy changes), they needed a solution they could rely on to provide accurate tracking and reporting on their marketing performance. They wanted to ensure that the loss of third-party data wouldn’t impact their conversion measurement, marketing spend, and customer experience. They needed a best-in-class solution that would allow them to allocate budget with confidence while driving an uplift in conversion. Plus, they needed a quick solution to be in place prior to Q4, their busiest time of the year. Their solution was Meta Conversion API and Tealium EventStream, providing an improvement in the performance of their full funnel strategy, leading to an overall lift in ROAS. 

Benefits of these bundled solutions:

• On average, they saw a 229% increase in online ROAS on Meta when comparing six weeks without CAPI versus six weeks across the holiday shopping period with CAPI. 
• They surpassed the recommended minimum Event Match Quality (EMQ) scores, indicating the right event-level data was configured for a strong, healthy signal. 
• Being able to demonstrate the success of their marketing efforts allowed them to justify their spending and effectively allocate future funds.

How Tealium Helps You Win With CAPI

Tealium works to develop and battle-test products in lockstep with our partners… But the truth is, most of them are available directly from most ad platforms. It’s no secret brands can directly implement CAPI, so this begs the question, “Why Tealium CAPI?” 

The answer harkens back to our roots in Tag Management. We’re born out of a need for a centralized solution that could effectively manage the insurmountable volume of time and resources required to manage tags, track campaigns, inform analytics, and stay organized. The shift to server-side represents a paralleled challenge, only now do we know what the future of advertising looks like. It is a world that incorporates consented, first-party data that is deterministic and can be used for advanced analytics as well as performance marketing. Similarly, launching and maintaining these S2S connections at scale can be extremely labor-intensive, costly, and inefficient for enterprise organizations or SMBs looking to scale. Beyond that, use cases that require complex data sources to be securely captured, unified, and cleansed for optimal collaboration in data clean rooms, or spun up quickly and efficiently to launch turnkey retail media networks and generate new revenue streams. These are increasingly becoming more accessible even to the more nascent-stage organizations. 

All of these scenarios require a centralized Customer Data Platform (CDP) to manage data sources, including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) cloud environments for collaboration – to capture, unify, and activate real-time, first-party data across online and offline touchpoints.

While these may be seemingly heavy concepts, there have been advancements in AI and the impact it will have on machine learning respective to audience creation, media buying/planning, and overall data orchestration. What were once nebulous concepts are becoming near-term possibilities (and not just for the digital natives or Fortune 500s).

Here are five tactical reasons why Tealium is the best partner to bring first-party data strategies to life:

1. We’re really good at it: Over 35% of our customers have been activated on CAPIs, leveraging our dedicated team of in-house experts for white glove, end-to-end services.
2. We’re affordable: Our white-glove service is often available at no cost.
3. We’re often first to market: At the time of publishing, we are the only Google partner in the market who has an API compatible with Google’s Enhanced Conversions API for Search Ads 360. 
4. We’re thorough: We are constantly working with our partners on the next solution that puts our customers’ goals front and center. From configuring offline and point-of-sale for omnichannel visibility, to cross-device activation for Connected TV (CTV), our connector marketplace and services teams are ready to build with you.
5. We’re here to help: There is little we won’t do to make our customers’ and agency partners’ dreams come true. We work with customers to proactively enrich their data layers and set them up for success.

How to Get Started 

Getting started is simple, and the path is well-paved. Gaining an understanding of your starting point and where you are on your first-party data maturity curve is key. At Tealium, we set this up in a “Crawl-Walk-Run Framework”. As improvements happen over this curve, increases will start to appear in ad performance and customer experience. 

Crawl: Marketers at this stage might have low awareness of a first-party data strategy or the business cases that would benefit from this type of solution. We’ll work with you to map out the business cases that will ensure durable signals are captured across the customer journey that aligns with your KPIs and goals. Tealium products that are useful for this are Tealium iQ Tag Manager and EventStream API Hub, combined referred to as the EventData Framework (EDF).

Walk: Teams in the walk phase will have use cases mapped out to support their business goals, and the products in place to start collecting consented first-party data. This allows the brand to build richer data layers, data assets for the organization, and deliver on business objectives and KPIs. At this stage, we would expect to see multiple data sources connected to the EDF. This includes CRM, point-of-sale data points, online and offline data. This means that data can be pushed and pulled from any touchpoint important to the use case.

Run: At this stage, we expect secure, consented, and consistent data coming in. This enables collaboration across departments and agencies, strengthens data governance, and facilitates insights for cohesive, scaled solutions across channels. At this stage, first-party data is leveraged for Audience Segment creation using AudienceStream, Tealium’s CDP. Our off-the-shelf audience connectors enable robust profiles and precise targeting to activate desired outcomes like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) or look-a-like targeting. The benefit of using an agnostic CDP is that data is unified from outside of the ad network, incorporating user behavior from owned and operated channels as well as paid media. These holistic, real-time audiences can automatically be applied to ad targeting, creating a more effective conversion feedback loop and delivering immediate value for customers.

What comes after the “run phase”?

The implications on people, processes, and products are evolving daily. What we do know is that two months from now, marketers everywhere will be bracing for their holiday campaigns. In Q1 2024, Google will shut off third-party tracking for 1% of Chrome users and the impacted user base will only increase.

We’re here to walk you through what comes next! Tealium is ready to guide you through how to stand up a future-proof first-party data strategy, orchestrate omnichannel personalized customer experience, and get you caught up with unsurpassed speed to market. To get started or request a demo, please email channel@tealium.com.