Marketing and advertising used to be entirely about creativeness, focus groups, gut feelings, popular publications and salesmanship. Think of the popular television show on AMC, “Mad Men” (2008-15), and you’ll get the scene we’re setting.
To a great extent, marketing and advertising are still about all those elements. Only now, here in the first quarter of the 21st century, there are a lot more people and analysis behind all of this.
QuanticMind has looked ahead at new-gen tools that marketers want to use to obtain the most efficiencies possible in a campaign and is busy providing them.
The 7-year-old Redwood City, Calif.-based startup has built a platform designed to provide smarter choices for advertising and marketing campaign managers. The package consists of highly optimized predictive management software for digital marketing channels that include both paid search and social.
Machine Learning, Naturally, Is at the Core
The company uses machine learning to engage audiences with what it deems “the right message at precisely the right moment,” according to CEO and founder Chaitanya Chandrasekar, which allows consumers to connect with favorite brands in an organic way.
“It’s the math behind the art that’s starting to show up,” Chandrasekar told eWEEK. “That large transition that’s happened over the last 10 years is about using math for marketers to prove their end results.
“The more successful brands think of themselves as data companies. If they enable that, then they’re bound to see which of their creative and other initiatives are actually effective.”
The news about the company is that on July 17, it extended the bidding optimization capabilities of its platform. It released three additions to its core platform that Chandrasekar said will vastly improve users’ ability to keep up with a rapidly moving Search Engine Marketing (SEM) landscape. They include new optimization for evolving device ecosystem, next-generation bidding policies and real-time audience reporting.
These new features—which include new bid-policy settings such as Spend Targets and Minimum Margins, among others—are designed to give customers even more control when it comes to optimizing for their unique business goals, Chandrasekar said.
“When it comes to goals like performance and growth, most businesses don’t actually have a singular goal they’re focused on. They often have many, some of which may even conflict with one another,” COO Brian Bird said. “Our new settings, which include a monthly spend target and a minimum margin goal, put control back into the hands of marketers where it belongs.”
QuanticMind has also added significant upgrades to both the algorithms and the infrastructure used to automatically calculate location and device bid adjustments for search engines Google and Bing. The enhancements focus on improved accuracy and scalability in a way that drives performance improvements, helps customers adapt their own bidding strategies to changes in location and device trends and more, Chandrasekar said.
As a result of all this, marketers will have the tools to ensure a better performance that’s more predictable for customer acquisition. Marketers can also obtain more precision, control and insight into the performance of their campaigns, Chandrasekar said.
Some detail on the new additions:
Bid Policy Settings: Two new bid policy settings acknowledge the fact that businesses often have multiple goals they must achieve. The Monthly Spend Target uses QuanticMind’s Bid Policies—which are driven by data science and machine learning—to maximize a key performance indicator (KPI) like conversions, profit, or revenue, within the framework of a monthly spend amount.
A second Bid Policy setting that offers another layer of control is an optional minimum margin setting that’s been added to the ProfitMax algorithm. This setting allows marketers to better manage the often conflicting—and complex—KPIs that are a part of most businesses. It does so by adding the ability to specify a minimum margin that has to be met, all while maximizing profit or another revenue-based KPI. This minimum margin is especially useful for businesses in the travel and retail industries, due to their thin profit margins.
Location and Device Bid Adjustments Algorithms: This upgrade to the QuanticMind interface improves the way that QuanticMind automatically calculates both device bid adjustments and location adjustments for Bing and Google. Implementing these adjustments helps marketers stay on top of device trends and location changes within their businesses to improve scalability, accuracy and performance.
Audience Reporting: Audience Reporting provides marketers with the ability to monitor and report on their search audiences’ performance from right within the QuanticMind Platform. This feature streamlines audience performance reports and can be accessed via the Reporting tab.
All new features mentioned are available to all users immediately, Chandrasekar said.