TECHNOLOGY

Adtech Platform Comparison: What You Need to Know

By Ascend Marketing

September 22, 2021 | TECHNOLOGY

Despite the tumult and chaos of 2020, digital advertising revenues continued to grow last year according to this IAB ad revenue report. This may be because ad agencies have greater freedom than ever before to quickly create responsive, engaging campaigns through advances in advertising technology, or adtech.

Adtech, put simply, is the software and technology platforms that allow advertisers to execute digital advertisements, target specific audience segments, obtain market information, and gain valuable insights on ROI. The foundation of adtech is the campaign, which includes digital advertisements as well as the data surrounding ad interactions, such as user information and number of ad impressions. Adtech platforms were designed to give advertisers the platform and capabilities necessary to create, execute, track, and manage digital advertising campaigns. These platforms have evolved over time to facilitate the creation of content that maximizes revenue and enhances user experience by analyzing and responding to consumer behaviors. Consequently, in the past decade, ad content has become more integrated, multimedia-rich, and shareable than ever before (read here for a more detailed report). Today there are countless adtech platforms available to marketers and advertisers alike, and integration of various analysis tools allows for a dizzying amount of customization options to suit any campaign.

Present day, there are countless adtech platforms used by marketers and advertisers alike. Adtech offers advertisers the capabilities or buying and selling advertisements, retargeting tools to show advertisements to users based on their recent web actions, etc. These platforms allow advertisers the single-handed capability of collecting data, classifying data, and integrating different advertisement options.

Ascend's Take on Adtech

As more organizations continue to dedicate extensive resources towards adtech, it pays to evaluate the key features and benefits of various platforms before choosing the right product. Organizations need to align their decision with their campaign goals in mind. With countless options to invest in adtech, organizations should ensure they are choosing a platform with the right balance of flexibility and ease of use that will allow them to successfully achieve their marketing goals and optimize their campaigns.

Deciding on which adtech platform to use can be a big undertaking, and there are crucial components your organization should consider about each before making your decision. Depending on your business needs, for example, you may want a platform with a product experience feature, which allows businesses to see how users are interacting with their applications. In any case, when determining which platform is right for your company, pay attention to integration capabilities; some adtech platforms will allow you to integrate with other sales and marketing tools, such as Salesforce, while others do not have such a capability and require you to build your own integration. It also helps to be mindful of analytics features that allow for a broad range of targeting tactics. As the internet moves toward an uncertain future without cookies (read here for more about that), adtech platforms are scrambling to provide a broad suite of new tools to generate data-driven consumer insights. Organizations need to evaluate these features and decide which are crucial to have in their platforms to pick the one that best meets their business and campaign goals.

To help make the decision easier, we have listed some of the top adtech platforms as well as the features they offer, the experience level needed to work in the technology, and other qualifications.

Campaign Manager 360

Campaign Manager 360, formerly known as Google Campaign Manager, is Google’s adtech platform for ad management and measurement. This platform provides cross-channel ad management to maximize insights and optimize media and creative performance across all of your digital advertising campaigns. This solution provides advertisers with ad serving, audience creation and management, and advanced measurement and reporting tools. The flexibility of this platform offers countless integrations to manage and measure your campaigns.

Key Features:

Ad Trafficking: Trafficking advertisements to align campaigns with larger goals, objectives, and timing.
Tracking: Tracking user interactions—including conversions, transactions, and landing pages—so your organization can assign attributions across the customer journey.
Reporting: Performing data analysis to report on insights such as cross-channel attribution and verification.

Adobe Advertising Cloud

Adobe Advertising Cloud is an all-in-one technology platform that allows organizations to personalize, manage, and measure digital campaigns and customer experiences for optimized performance. The Adobe Advertising Cloud is a part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, which offers a wide range of solutions and interfaces that sync content, insights, and data across multiple channels. Adobe Advertising Cloud automates the targeting process to increase conversions and connect digital channels seamlessly. The platform offers customer journey orchestration and delivers personalized experiences.

Key Features:

Marketing Automation: Implementing marketing automation to increase campaign productivity and deliver engaging customer experiences.
A/B Testing: Conducting A/B tests to discover which creative assets lead to an increase in conversion rates.
Real-Time Digital Analytics: Understanding customers on a deeper level with experiential data collected from multi-channel campaigns.
Social Insights: Monitoring social media conversations, publishing and promoting content, and analyzing conversion and engagement data.

Adform FLOW

Adform FLOW is enterprise technology built for today’s ever-changing digital marketing landscape. The platform provides advanced opportunities for organizations to leverage data about their customers within their campaigns. The platform also focuses on providing a superior user experience to enable seamless management of the whole campaign lifecycle. Adform FLOW is an advanced adtech solution for modern marketing that brings technology into close alignment with your organization’s ideas and activation. It was created to realize three key principles: operating simplicity, seamless and full identity management, and returning control to advertisers and marketers.

Key Features:

Seamless Management: Adform Flow’s advanced integrations enable seamless management of the whole campaign life cycle.
Adform Ad Server: Take control of and centralize all user interactions across your organization’s most valued channels.
Adform Data Management Platform: A data management platform that provides full ownership of data and the opportunity to leverage that data seamlessly across the platform.
Adform Demand Side Platform: An advanced user experience for the activation of campaigns, across channels, in real-time, backed by real data.

Keep Reading: Emerging Trends and Challenges in Adtech

Interested in more content related to this topic? Dive deeper into adtech trends and challenges with a deeper discussion on recent trends and methods for utilizing adtech for campaign optimization.