How to Build a Mobile-Centric MarTech Stack The Complete Guide *Written and edited by AppsFlyer with collaboration from guest authors on chapter 3 (Braze), chapter 4 (Mixpanel) and chapter 5 (mParticle) October 2019 Table of Contents Chapter 1 Chapter 3 Why Do You Need a Marketing Tech Stack? 5 Category Deep Dive: Marketing Automation 25 • Why Do You Need a Marketing Tech Stack? • Building an Integrated Technology Stack for • Foundations: How to Start Building a Mobile Customer Engagement Marketing Tech Stack • Building Brilliant Customer Engagement • Fundamentals: Mobile MarTech Hierarchy of Needs Experiences • Final Thoughts Chapter 2 Category Deep Dive: Mobile Attribution 16 Chapter 4 • Fitting Mobile Attribution into Your MarTech Stack Category Deep Dive: Product Analytics 33 • Top Attribution Use Cases • The Power of Self-Serve Product Analytics • Leave the Data Plumbing to the Plumber • Example #1: Understanding Users with Behavioral Analytics • Example #2: Optimizing Messages and Flows with Cohort Analysis • Example #3: Predictive Analytics for Data Science 2 Table of Contents Chapter 5 Chapter 7 Category Deep Dive: Customer Data Platform 41 Advanced Considerations: • MarTech is More Specialized Than Ever The MarTech Evaluation & Buy-In Process 64 • Real-Time Data Enables Multithreaded Customer • The Anatomy of a Buying Decision Journeys • Conducting a Capability Assessment • Privacy by Design • Don’t Forget Vendors Are Collections of People • Bringing it All Together • The Security & Privacy Review: What to Expect • The Privacy & Security Review: How to Prepare Chapter 6 • Building a Business Case Designing Your Stack for Growth 47 • Concluding Thoughts • Tech Stack Adoption Trends • Strategic Trade-offs: Best-in-Breed vs. All-in-One Appendix 90 • Strategic Trade-offs: Build vs. Buy • Real Tech Stack Examples About the Authors 94 3 Introduction Introduction As the digital ecosystem continues to expand and evolve, • Marketing technology is extremely competitive, with SaaS technology has become a mission-critical component multiple providers offering similar services in each for effective marketing operations. Marketing and advertising category. While there are clear leaders who carry up technology falls into numerous complex and overlapping to ~80% market share in a given category, there is categories, with literally thousands of partners competing also a constant influx of new players. This drives rapid for your marketing dollars. innovation and price competition, which means the partner evaluation process is never truly put to rest. Whether you’re building your marketing tech stack from a mobile-first or web-first perspective, it can be daunting to • Although there is no standard formula for success, know where to start as well as when and how to expand. the purpose of this guide is to provide a framework And while adding or changing marketing technology for how to build a solid marketing tech stack— requires significant investment in terms of vetting, training, focusing specifically on mobile as the core platform. development, and other resources, adaptability is key to success. We will examine the following topics throughout the course of this guide: According to Ascend2’s March 2019 survey, 67% of marketers are adding new types of MarTech to the stack on a quarterly • MarTech Stack Foundations: establishing strategic goals or monthly basis. and defining key stack solutions to consider across your product life cycle The reasons for building a mobile marketing tech stack are varied but clear: • Category Deep Dives: product analytics, marketing automation, mobile attribution, and customer data • From campaign orchestration to automation, measurement platforms (CDPs) and data enrichment, marketing technology has the ability to significantly increase efficiency, visibility, flexibility, and • Advanced Considerations: evaluation criteria, getting value across marketing operations. internal buy-in, setting timeline expectations, and structural tradeoffs supported by industry trends (e.g. stack design • While some services can be built in-house, doing so frameworks, cost/benefit analysis, building vs. buying requires significant resources and in some cases, it may technology, opting for best-in-breed vs. all-in-one tools, be impossible or unscalable to effectively replicate certain etc.) products (e.g. mobile attribution). 4 Chapter 1: Mobile Marketing Tech Stack Foundations 5 Chapter 1 Mobile Marketing Tech Stack Foundations Why Do You Need a Marketing Tech Stack? A marketing technology stack is a collection of technologies marketers use to conduct and optimize their marketing Most modern marketers don’t dispute the need for a tech activities. These “MarTech” tools support, simplify, and unify stack, but for those that do, or who don’t know what a tech the collection, organization, and utilization of user activity stack is, let’s start by defining the term. data across paid and owned channels. Here’s an example of a well-rounded tech stack, courtesy of Amplitude: Marketing & Growth PM / PO Analyst & Data Science Engineering Marketing Product Analytics Data Warehouse Stack Stack Stack Data Pipeline Tag SDKs Manager 6 Chapter 1 There are varying opinions on the necessity of each stack Indeed, these benefits are clearly reflected in Ascend2’s solution, and whether it is more prudent to build certain March 2019 survey, which ranked efficiency as the solutions internally, choose a free technology service or pay #1 objective for marketing tech utilization: for more advanced solutions. Regardless of the path you choose, the main benefits of MarTech generally boil down to efficiency, efficacy, and scalability. What are the PRIMARY OBJECTIVES for a MarTech utilization strategy to achieve? Some examples of how these benefits play out include: Improving marketing efficiency 61% • Integrating disparate systems (e.g. data storage, Increasing marketing ROI 57% partner integrations, data enrichment for cross-channel analytics, building audiences, postbacks, etc.) Increasing decision making 38% • Activation and campaign orchestration (e.g. audience Gaining competitive advantage 36% and messaging segmentation, link/creative deployment, A/B testing, email, push, etc.) Attributing revenue to marketing 32% • Advanced insights to improve decision making and Improving data security 24% ROI (e.g. data visualization, cohort analysis, mobile attribution, etc.) Integrating disparate systems 20% • User flow optimization (e.g. A/B testing, deep linking, web-to-app banners, etc.) The same survey also found that 63% of marketers plan to moderately increase their total MarTech budget and 24% plan to significantly increase their MarTech budget. This speaks volumes to the value of MarTech. In many cases, the benefits of paying for more advanced solutions outweigh the costs. 7 Chapter 1 Foundations: How to Start Building a Mobile Marketing Tech Stack Consider questions such as: Whether you’re building your mobile marketing tech stack • What are your growth goals (to inform data volume and from the ground up or extending your web-first stack to scalability needs)? accommodate a new mobile app, the first step to building your tech stack is goal mapping. • What does your customer journey look like? ° What are the primary KPIs for each step of the journey? ° What additional events would be helpful to measure in order to measure and optimize the full customer journey? • What channels and functionalities will you need to acquire and retain users? ° What media partners are you working with (or plan to Reach (Impressions, CPM) work with)? AWARENESS Clicks (CTR, CPC) • What infrastructure will you need to store and manage Web/App Search (Keyword Volume) CONSIDERATION Web Visits (Click-to-Visit %, CPV) data? Installs (%Click-to-Install, CPI) ° Who owns your data, and what security protocols should ACQUISITION you consider to ensure your data is safe? Registrations (Install-to-Reg %, CPR) ° How will you visualize marketing and product ONBOARDING performance? % Retention (Day 1, Day 7, Day 30) / Site Engagements In-App Events (Browse, Item View, Add to Cart) RETENTION Purchases (ARPDAU, ROAS) / Advocacy (Referrals) ° Is it necessary for you to have a full-funnel view of marketing/product activity across channels and platforms? 8 Chapter 1 These questions will allow you to not only categorize “must- Customer data platform Segment recently released a have” vs. “nice-to-have” tools, but they’ll also guide your data study that illustrates various ways this strategy can partner evaluation process as you compare factors such play out. For example, some “companies have a steady as feature capabilities, cost, partner integrations, support ‘graduation’ across tools—they start with a handful of use and scalability. Although the first tools you adopt may be cases, and steadily shift those out over time […] These users contingent on budget, you will be better off in the long run add a few tools every month. As they discover new parts if you design your tech stack for scalability. of their business to unlock, and new best-in-breed tools, they migrate their business to use the cutting edge.” So as you go through the exercise of goal mapping, prioritization, and budgeting, you should also think about future implications to help you build the case for new tools and guide your strategy for MarTech testing and expansion. The following graphic illustrates an example of this strategy, in which similar colors correspond to similar categories of tools. 9 Chapter 1 Here’s another example