MasterCard runs paid social in multiple regions around the world. The credit card company used to spend weeks after campaigns ended aggregating data from each region, normalizing currencies to the U.S. dollar, then analyzing the data to understand which campaigns worked in which regions, what creative was optimal and how to improve their ad spend.
Now they can do all that in near-real time because Sysomos built them an engine to do so. Now MasterCard can optimize on the fly, pulling best performing creative and targeting audiences from one region to apply it another. It gives them better performance, more efficient spent and better ROI for their paid social campaigns.
The product, Sysomos Paid Social Analytics, is another output of the company’s acquisition of Expion, a tool I often described as a content management platform for franchise and multiple-location businesses. And you can really see the influence of the Expion DNA in this product, but more on that in a moment. Let me get to the good stuff.
Sysomos Paid Social Analytics allows media planners and buyers or social ad teams to see social ad performance in near-real time (10 minute update windows) across regions, agency partners, campaigns and more. It pulls in data from Facebook and Instagram’s ad platforms (with YouTube and Twitter coming soon) and gives you the ability to see how specific ad efforts are performing. You can:
- See post-level data, even on dark posts, along side sponsored posts available in your feed
- Look at individual campaigns, regions or other divisions individually or in comparison to one another
- Aggregate the total spend to see how the entire social ad buy is performing for the company, then drill down to regions, departments, etc.
- Set regional managers or agencies to be able to view high performing posts from other regions so they can pull already proven creative into their ad manager for deployment
- Even jump into comments on dark posts from a community management perspective, bringing true community management and engagement to the full array of ad placement
Yeah, the visualizations don’t suck. Neither do the data views (click for larger):
The only bad thing about seeing this thing in action for me was that the possibilities are overwhelming. It’s an incredibly sophisticated data aggregation and analysis product that is certain to save social ad managers more than enough time and produce more than enough optimization in campaigns to justify the around $3,000 monthly cost of entry. (Prices go up based on number of ad accounts, campaigns, complexity, etc.)
To be clear, this is not for companies that spend $25K a year on social ad buys. This is for the $100K+ crowd and certainly one best suited for brands that buy ads across multiple verticals, regions or even countries. But the efficiency and optimization possibilities it produces are incredible.
The ability for regional or agency partners to see the best performing creative and automatically pull it into their own ad manager is the magic wand for me and most certainly an ancestor of the content management brilliance found in the old Expion platform.
If you are a brand or agency with a big ad spend and multiple campaigns, regions or countries that you need to pull together and analyze, you should just go ask for a sales rep to reach out to you now. If you’re unsure how this product might help you, Sysomos is doing a webinar on Aug. 17 to help guide you through the product demo a bit and help you understand where it might do you some good. I’d recommend signing up for that at a minimum.
While I’ve always considered Sysomos a social listening/conversation research option, it’s clear their moves in acquiring Expion and building out solutions for clients beyond the listening space make them a social technology platform to be reckoned with. They may well be leaving the SMB behind in a lot of ways, but it’s nice to know that Salesforce, Oracle and Adobe have some players nipping at their heels for the big stuff, too.