Tech giants Microsoft and Roku have teamed up to elevate the ad buying experience and boost campaign performance.
Through the collaboration, advertisers can leverage cross-channel data insights for better targeting and stronger customer connections, particularly in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
Let’s find out how, but first, what is cross channel marketing?
What Is Cross Channel Marketing?
Cross-channel marketing allows marketers to communicate with customers through various channels, tailoring their messaging based on where they are in the customer journey. This ensures customers receive consistent messaging across channels.
The message for attracting a new customer differs from the one used to retain a loyal customer. Similarly, the approach for welcoming a new customer differs from the one used to encourage an existing customer to stay with a company instead of switching to a competitor.
With cross-channel marketing, messaging and content are tailored to the user’s needs. The Microsoft-Roku partnership, in particular, offers cross-channel insights like user segmentation to provide superior ad targeting and reach.
Benefits of Cross Channel Marketing
Companies can sometimes send mixed messages to their customers. They may promote a buy-one-take-one deal on one platform and not offer it on another.
This causes customer frustration, resulting in lost sales and dissatisfaction. A cross-channel marketing strategy ensures consistency across all channels.
In addition to offering consistent information, companies can track client communications on different platforms. This helps to identify any discrepancies in messaging and areas of the customer journey that need improvement.
Other advantages of cross channel marketing include:
• Improved Customer Segmentation: Segment customers across channels based on their preferences and activity.
• Enhanced Data Collection: Collect valuable insights from multiple sources to comprehensively understand customers.
• Increased Reach: Target potential customers across multiple channels and achieve a greater reach than single-channel strategies.
• Improved Customer Loyalty: Build stronger customer relationships by delivering consistent messaging and experiences in your preferred cross channel marketing platform.
• Boost Ad Performance: Improve ad performance by engaging customers more effectively through targeted ads on Bing, product recommendations and personalized content.
The Power of Microsoft and Roku Advertising
Each of these companies offers powerful advertising opportunities for businesses of all sizes. Microsoft, with its expansive reach across multiple platforms, offers highly effective targeted advertising to reach millions of potential customers across the globe.
Likewise, Roku offers a comprehensive array of advertising products for streaming media companies, allowing businesses to tailor their messages to the right audience.
Here’s what you can expect from these two powerhouses:
Roku Advertising Features
The Roku Ad Manager allows publishers and agencies to buy advertisements on the Roku platform. They can purchase banner ads, screensaver ads and video ads to increase viewership, promote channels and reach users.
Roku’s audience data also enables advertisers to target specific viewers and measure the success of their campaigns in real time. The platform offers in-depth insights on:
• Lifetime Statistics: The number of agency clients, campaigns (active, ready, inactive), channel installs, ad impressions, budget and spend.
• Active Campaign Performance: The total ad impressions or channel installs for campaigns running over the last 3, 7, 14 or 30 days.
• Campaigns Starting Soon: The name, campaign status, flight dates, creative status and budget for each upcoming ad campaign.
• Top Campaigns: The completed campaigns with the most ad impressions or channel installs.
• Top Agency Clients: Client campaigns with the most channel installs and ad impressions.
Microsoft Advertising Features
Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing ads) provides various tools to manage your campaigns. Below is a summary of how it can improve ad performance:
• Import ads from Google Ads to Microsoft Advertising
• Advertise on a local or global scale.
• Target customers in different regions or areas near your business.
• Measure campaign performance and get detailed reports.
• Gain insights for optimizing PPC campaigns.
• Monitor keyword and ad performance.
• Track advertising budget and spend.
• Leverage Bing Ads API for synchronization with external systems.
This combination of powerful advertising tools makes Microsoft and Roku Advertising a desirable choice for advertisers looking to maximize the impact of their campaigns.
Up Next: Find out how to use cross channel marketing when optimizing PPC campaigns.
How Roku + Microsoft Collaboration Boosts PPC Performance
Now, we know what each platform can do – imagine them together.
Previously, Microsoft and Roku ads were tracked separately, limiting the understanding of customer behavior on each platform. With the Roku-Microsoft partnership, PPC advertisers will have a comprehensive overview of customer behavior across both platforms.
They can track ad performance on Roku TV streaming, Microsoft Audience Ads and paid and organic search ads on Bing in one place. These unique cross-channel insights will enable you to better target and connect with customers.
It also streamlines the ad buying process by enabling you to identify and buy advertising space on channels most suitable for the intended audience at the best time and at a low cost.
Here’s what Microsoft has to say about the industry-first collaboration:
“By analyzing insights from both the Microsoft and Roku ad ecosystems—as your customer streams TV, browses online, shops for products and searches online—we can distill down the behavioral insights that will help you build actionable and successful ad campaigns.”
The two companies studied how consumers engage with ads from brands across various verticals in the travel, retail and technology industries. The findings, which they compiled in a whitepaper, offer insights into:
• Ideal exposure frequency for streaming Roku TV ads.
• The average time it takes for a person to search for a product/service after being exposed to a Roku TV streaming ad.
• How Roku TV ad campaigns impact whether or not they’ll search for your brand.
Examples of Using the Microsoft + Roku Cross-Channel Insights
According to Lynne Kjolso, VP of Global Partner and Retail Media at Microsoft Advertising, here’s how you can further enhance PPC performance with the Microsoft and Roku cross channel marketing platform:
• Determine what days and times will yield the most effective results when running Roku TV streaming ads for your travel brand on Microsoft Audience Ads.
• Monitor which search phrases and terms customers use after exposure to your Roku TV streaming ads and Microsoft Audience Ads campaigns.
• Evaluate the impact of the concurrent running of Microsoft Audience Ad and Roku TV streaming campaigns on searches and click-throughs.
• Determine the optimum frequency of Roku TV streaming ads so customers are more likely to respond via Bing searches or result in clicks.
• Inform flighting and keyword bidding strategies by gauging the average time to search for a brand after exposure to a Roku TV streaming ad.
• Analyze how Roku TV streaming ad campaigns impact customer searches for your sneaker brand and how many terms/phrases they search on average.
Improve Ad Performance and Increase Your Bottom Line With Thrive
Microsoft and Roku Advertising provide powerful tools to streamline ad buying, measure PPC performance and track budgets.
With this combination of features – plus access to unique cross-channel insights – brands can create customized experiences that will engage, inform and convert customers — no matter where they are.
Thrive Internet Marketing Agency, a top PPC marketing agency specializes in optimizing PPC campaigns through cross-channel insights. From hands-on campaign management to comprehensive reporting, we can help you get the most out of your Microsoft and Roku Advertising campaigns.
Our PPC specialists can help you reach your desired audience through targeted campaigns on Bing Ads, Microsoft Ads and other popular ad networks.
Beyond pay per click advertising services, we also offer a full suite of digital marketing solutions such as search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, search engine marketing (SEM) and web design.
Contact Thrive’s PPC marketing agency to see how top-notch pay per click advertising services can help your business grow.
