Sizmek Ad Suite for Creative Building, Distribution & Optimization

Introduction to Ad Servers

Ad servers such as Sizmek Ad Suite has been gaining ground quickly in the world of digital advertising. They are essentially defined as a platform or service that can be used across many media channels that allow advertisers or publishers to manage, optimise, and measure the efficiency of their campaigns based on ad server technology. 

Let’s say, you searched for ‘running shoes’ on your browser or looked for trending podcasts on streaming platforms, the ad server will show you the most suited ad as per your requests in a matter of seconds. But what goes on behind the scenes is that when a user searches for a query, the web browser sends a request to the publisher’s web server for the page’s content (HTML). The publisher’s web server renders the page’s content and finally, the request is sent to the ad server to show the relevant advertisements based on user preferences. 

Ad servers are mainly of two types-

First-party: Publishers can use these ad servers to run advertisements on their own websites. These ad servers can be used for direct and programmatic advertising because they provide a wide range of functions and performance metrics.

Third-party: These ad servers are provided by third parties and give advertisers limited customization and campaign design options. Third-party ad servers can be used to interact with multiple publishers at once and also run A/B tests on different creatives. Sizmek (Pronounced: Size-mik) is one good example of a third-party ad server.

What is Sizmek Ad Suite?

Sizmek Ad Suite is a third-party ad server used by advertisers for creating, managing, and delivering digital advertising campaigns across multiple channels. It integrates with a number of ad networks and platforms (Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Amazon, etc) and offers capabilities including ad creation, optimization, management, and analytics. The suite is made to assist advertisers and marketers in producing digital ad campaigns that are both more effective and efficient.

Benefits of Sizmek Ad Suite

The Sizmek Ad Suite serves advertisers in a number of ways, including:

1. Targeting and campaign optimization: The suite enables you to target particular audiences and make real-time campaign optimization decisions in light of performance data.
2. Campaign Analytics and Reporting: The package offers thorough performance measurements and analytics, giving you knowledge of how your campaigns are doing and suggestions for how to make them more effective.
3. Creativity: Sizmek Ad Suite offers creative services that may be used to create engaging, cutting-edge advertisements for your audience.
4. Personalization: By combining Sizmek with other systems, businesses can use information from other systems to tailor their advertisements to various audiences and devices, enhancing the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

Sizmek ad suite, and Amazon Demand-side platform (DSP), are both elements of programmatic advertising that enable advertisers to automatically, buy, sell and place digital ads on third-party websites, Amazon, and publisher sites. As the Sizmek ad suite integrates with both Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) & Amazon DSP, giving advertisers more freedom to plan comprehensive creative strategies and get data on how audiences interact with their campaigns both on and off Amazon.

Read our detailed discussions on Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) & Amazon DSP to learn all about them.

Sizmek Ad Suite: Why Use it?

Some of the best use cases of the Sizmek Ad suite, that advertisers can bet on are:

Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO): Advertisers can produce dynamic creatives using their own unique data and repository of creative assets thanks to the power of DCO. They can use it to distribute and optimise a variety of tailored ads across a number of platforms.

Customized Reporting: The ad suite's full-funnel reporting feature enables advertisers to gather detailed information about the number of touchpoints and the customer's journey to conversion.

Data-driven Campaign Management: Advertisers can manage their advertising-related data and use Media Rating Council (MRC) Accredited metrics through the ad suite to gain insights into campaign performance.

Integrations: The ad suite also integrates with Amazon Attribution in addition to Amazon DSP and AMC. It is a tool for measuring the effectiveness of Non-Amazon marketing channels on Amazon. Utilizing this interface, advertisers can obtain compiled information on conversion rates and sales both on and off Amazon.

Why the need for Sizmek Ad Suite integration?

Sizmek’s ad server technology enables you to target specific audiences at different points in the sales funnel. Advertisers can also leverage their own custom data as managing and configuring event data from third parties is also possible within the ad suite. The Sizmek ad builder (Product Documentation) is available to advertisers so they may fine-tune their creatives, and the prices are based on a number of factors, including the format of the creatives, the channel used, Viewability metrics, and advertisements clicked prior to the purchase. A strong attribution mechanism that is part of the Sizmek ad suite assigns credit for various conversion events along the customers' selected conversion route. Some of the attribution models supported by the ad suite are:

• Last event (impression/ click).

{Advertisers can filter out non-viewable impressions or prefer to choose viewable impressions over non-viewable ones}

• Last Click 

{Advertisers can filter out impressions}

Going one step further, the no. of days (≥90 days) between the last impression and purchase can also be adjusted using the attribution model. The length of the path to conversion can also be changed using this functionality. However, a maximum of 100 events can be covered for any individual customer’s conversion path. Advertisers need to stay on top of their audience data to manage the relevancy of their campaigns and also to ensure the alignment between campaigns performance and goals. 

Manually integrating with the Sizmek ad suite's API is one way to achieve it. Writing lengthy, error-free code scripts is an essential step in the process in order to carry out the required analytics and reporting. However, as business needs grow and API requirements change frequently, it becomes highly tedious & complicated.

ETL tools like DataChannel, which essentially handles all the heavy work for you, come into play in this situation. With DataChannel, you get access to a user-friendly interface that not only makes integration straightforward but also requires lesser technical knowledge, keeps up with the changing API needs, and encourages crucial cross-functional synergy across teams by eliminating over-reliance on data engineering teams.

DataChannel- An integrated ETL & Reverse ETL solution

• Perform long-term attribution: With the Sizmek ad suite, you can only adjust the length of the path to conversion to up to 90 days. But with your historical data in DataChannel’s managed data warehouse, you can gather long-term insights on the customer journey and map the performance of your campaigns based on these insights.
• Flexibility & Scalability: You may manage your data by using DataChannel's managed data warehouse. By simply scheduling and setting data pipelines within the platform, you can automate the process of data extraction and construct schemas as and when necessary. When it comes to manually uploading data without compromising its quality and reliability, this offers significant flexibility in data management.
• Real-time Updates: Since the data transfer process is automated, all potential errors and inconsistencies associated with manual data transfer are also completely eliminated. Additionally, since the process takes place in real time, you can quickly and easily access the most recent updates and information from the ad suite.
• Improve campaign efficiency: By automating many tasks associated with running a digital advertising campaign, such as ad creation, targeting, and optimization. This can save time and resources, and improve the efficiency of the overall advertising process.
• Connect your advertising campaigns across different channels and platforms: To create a more seamless and effective cross-channel marketing strategy. Additionally, you can better target specific audiences using data from other systems such as customer relationship management (CRM) or e-commerce platforms. 
• Activate your data with Reverse ETL: By using DataChannel’s reverse ETL offering to send data to the tools your business teams use every day. Set up alerts & notifications on top of your data warehouse and sync customer data across all platforms converting your data warehouse into a powerful CDP (Customer Data Platform). You can even preview the data without ever leaving the platform.

Need more clarity on Sizmek’s Ad server Technology? Don’t worry, we got you covered. Reach out to us here for more.