Today, TUNE was acquired by Constellation Software, a $21B market cap Canadian company. They operate vertical software and acquire companies to grow market share in those verticals quickly. You can learn more about the announcement from our press release. In this post, I want to spend some time describing what this new ownership means for TUNE, our customers, and partner marketing. 

A Market Share Play 

TUNE is the second acquisition in performance marketing under the Perseus Operating Group within Constellation. You might recall that the first was CAKE last year, TUNE’s longest-standing rival in affiliate software. We have often considered what a merger or consolidation might look like with CAKE, and now we’ll be joining forces with the backing of a major acquirer behind us. While TUNE and CAKE have different approaches to the market, we have an incredible amount of learnings, opportunities, and efficiencies we can now share. Combining this know-how, our market share, and plans for more acquisitions in performance marketing, I believe we’ll be able to deliver better, more sustainable software for our customers than ever before. Needless to say, TUNE and CAKE playing on the same team is a really big deal to those that know our ecosystem, and I can’t wait to see many more acquisitions on the horizon.    

TUNE’s Vision for an Open Platform

This change in ownership furthers TUNE’s promise to enable both Advertisers AND Networks to flexibly manage their marketing partnerships. If you’ve been following along with our product advancements over the last 18 months, you saw heavy investment in our platform to become a true contender in the partner marketing category —  competing directly with the advertiser oriented incumbents. Today, we find ourselves with a seat at that table as the much more cost-effective, far more flexible partner marketing platform for advertisers, and with a pure SaaS approach. 

Our vision is different from our competition. Instead of saying affiliate marketing is dead or trying to cannibalize margin from affiliate networks, we strive to empower advertisers to work with more networks as part of their partner marketing portfolio, and we do not take a cut of the commissions. TUNE believes that networks are a critical part of the overall mix and require technology that is unbiased and openly integrated so that Advertisers can find the scale they need. With Constellation Software as our new ownership, we are reinforcing that software enablement approach and cementing TUNE’s vision for an open platform.

A Better Long Term Strategy

If you have followed the category recently, you know this is not the only consolidation effort going on in partner marketing today. Private Equity (PE) investors acquired stakes in Impact and Partnerize, with an obvious plan to roll up more companies. The difference between their approach and ours, however, is that PE buyers need to see a return in the next three to five years by selling what they have acquired to a larger strategic buyer. That means their decisions will focus most immediate corporate revenue gains.

Constellation’s strategy is to acquire and hold their investments, with the goal of creating sustainable growth and profitability. This long-term view translates into a customer-focused, reliable, and forward-thinking business. This is exactly what TUNE customers need when their business depends on our uptime, security, privacy, and flexibility, which should never be sacrificed for short-term gains. We must continue expanding the platform to address all customer verticals, which means making measured investments in technology to materially impact the widest number of customers and partners. 

YOUR Partner Marketing Platform

Our mission is to provide the best platform for customers to manage their own marketing partnerships. You’ll notice that even our homepage says “partner the way you want to.” If you read anything into this ownership change today, it should be that TUNE has the time and talent to be fully committed to that mission. 

Thank you to all of our customers, partners, and employees who made this day possible, and a special thank you to our founders, Lucas and Lee Brown, for having the vision to transform marketing partnerships with better software. 

Cheers to the future of an open partner ecosystem! 

You may not know this, but TUNE built our first product on the back of the 2008 financial crisis, now known as the Great Recession. In the two years following, we saw the largest percentage growth we have ever seen as a company. Over the years, entrepreneurs and executives alike asked me why I thought this was the case. Now, the impact of COVID-19 on our culture, unemployment rate, and economy have me reminiscing on that time.

True performance marketing means paying your partners after they bring in sales. That is what makes this the ultimate ROI channel. 

The greatest reason for our growth in a recession is the nature of performance marketing (or as many call it today, partner marketing). Because this channel of marketing and advertising works by compensating publishers and affiliates for the actual sales and conversions they drive, budgets are much more fluid. Some even describe them as evergreen. If you know that you only have to pay that $2 to a partner after you make $10 on a sale, then your risk is extremely low. The more sales that come in, the more budget you can spend, all without the exposure of paying for advertising that didn’t work. 

The challenge in performance partnerships is always scale. In times of economic uncertainty, marketers are willing to put in the sweat.  

For companies that have a clearly defined conversion funnel and the right message and creatives to provide their affiliate partners, this channel should be a no-brainer. However, it does require some management; it cannot compete with the simplicity of today’s Google and Facebook ads. With these ad platforms, you only have to deal with one huge partner — and that partner has a complete interface designed to help you buy ads. This is why marketers flock to these platforms to get rapid scale, especially when said marketers are just starting out. 

At TUNE, we’re in the business of building software to help solve the problem of scale for marketing partnerships. And we’re not the only ones. In order to find scale, marketers need to automate onboarding tasks, protect terms and conditions, access real-time reporting, set automated decisioning, and generate invoices for paying commissions. And that’s just the beginning. There are plenty of tasks required to manage each partner relationship, but there are only so many people to do them. 

In the past, marketing relationships were managed by humans and spreadsheets, the latter of which made it difficult to scale. We now have technology to help marketers easily scale the number and quality of their performance-based partners —  marketers just need to put in the effort to build a program. 

Recessions require everyone to be more flexible. This is especially true for publishers, influencers, and affiliates who make their living from monetizing their audiences. 

When advertisers are spending big, and the demand for traffic is higher than the traffic available, the power of price sits with the supplier. 

In this case, publishers are able to demand higher prices for their audiences, and require payment in flat fee structures. We’ve all seen influencers that demand an upfront fee to publish a single post, regardless of the sales that post may (or may not) drive. Yet in times of economic uncertainty, everyone must consider more flexible ways of doing business. 

Performance-based campaigns are an excellent place to grow. 

Publishers with valuable audiences should be able to easily monetize their traffic for advertisers, based on the return they are able to drive; they should be able to do so regardless of the economic climate. As we see CPM and CPC campaigns dry up, we will see more marketers turn to CPA, and more publishers willing to give it a try. 

I have never seen a scrappier set of marketers than those in the performance space. 

It is times like these that our sweat equity counts the most. 

Looking back, it was the insatiable grit of our founders and our alignment with so many like-minded performance marketers that helped grow TUNE into a major player in the space. Many of the individuals I met during those days are now managing millions of dollars a month in their own marketing budgets, or have gone on to build and sell their own companies. 

These are the times when capital is in low supply, and these are the times that return us to the fundamentals of business and risk. Spend $2; make $10; rinse, and repeat. Do you agree? 

Here’s to the scrappy ones, and I wish you all the best of luck during this historic time. 

This article was originally published on LinkedIn. Read the press release here.

Today, I get to reveal the next transformation of TUNE.

For the past decade we built a technology platform that some of the greatest ad networks and affiliate programs around the world used to build their businesses. You probably know it as HasOffers. In that time our customer community quietly grew beyond the thousands, measuring more than $8 billion in payouts to affiliate partners per year. By studying our growing segments and listening intently to our customers, we learned that the category of affiliate marketing is now quickly expanding to include new and unique types of partners. It is growing into a larger category we know now as Partner Marketing.   

Yet the technology to support these partnerships is dragging behind in mobile, automation, fraud, payments, and so many of the everyday needs of marketers. Managing partner relationships should be easier. Performance marketers, whether they be direct advertisers or network businesses, need a platform built to support these evolving, next generation forms of partnership. So after shipping a significant number of new product releases these last few quarters, our team is finally ready to publicly announce our commitment to that mission.  

Introducing the TUNE Partner Marketing Platform.

As we reposition under our TUNE company brand, we are retiring the HasOffers product name, which has served our team and customers well for many years. Just as the concepts of affiliate marketing are stretching to new and different types of partners, our platform is growing to help all of our customers handle these diverse relationships better. Tying our TUNE brand directly to the Partner Marketing Platform simplifies our identity, but more importantly, we hope it shows our complete focus and commitment to meet the changing needs of marketing partnerships. From our experience, the most tuned partnerships are built on a foundation of clarity, communication, and trust, and we see every day that the right platform can help with that.

TUNE has two customers.

Over the last three years, more advertisers started building their affiliate and partner programs on our platform. In that time, the number of advertiser customers on our platform actually doubled every year. As we started receiving inbound requests from more and more Fortune 100 brands, the opportunity for the platform became clearer. It turns out, advertisers were searching for affiliate technology that gave them the control and flexibility they needed to forge new partnerships. They were not getting the flexibility they needed from what was available, and they also wanted to expand their reach to more affiliate networks and marketplaces without being confined to a predetermined set of terms or dictated business practices.

Advertisers want a platform that helps them partner the way they want to.

The option for total flexibility, combined with complete off-the-shelf capabilities is just as important to advertisers as it is for the network customers we’ve support for many years. Networks already know we work well with mobile user experiences and measurement partners, have the scale to support incredible volume, and are serious about the compliance and security their businesses require. Advertisers have the same expectations, and we are in the best position to deliver for both.  

With the TUNE Partner Marketing Platform, we are laser-focused on building one technology foundation that serves the needs of both advertisers and networks. Both are vital to the growth of our ecosystem, and by moving fast to bring the best, most flexible technology for each, we believe there is ultimately an opportunity to help them work much better together.

After you’ve finished reading this note, I hope you’ll take a look at our new website.

There you’ll find the core offerings of our platform for each audience. Not surprisingly, the themes are very similar. We are hearing it loud and clear from our customers. Performance marketers want to increase the number of marketing partnerships and do more with their existing partners. They want to eliminate the risk of fraud and compliance issues, and they want to do it their way, with less time and resources required of their people. You will see clearly as the year progresses that these are the areas we’re focused on.

Our Promise Going Forward

We promise to deploy new platform releases at a furious pace. We will prioritize engineering and product investment above everything else, making it our highest goal to ensure the platform your business is depending on is the best it can be. You can expect fast and regular advancements in automation, tech integrations, user experiences, workflows, and of course billing and payments. Our speed-to-market has already increased dramatically over the last few quarters, and we expect for our customers to hold us to this standard and push us further.

At TUNE, we are honored to support this fast-growing, newly defined category. Though it is certainly an exciting “day one” for partner marketing, it doesn’t mean affiliate marketing is dead. No. It is you, the performance marketers who built the affiliate industry that are driving growth into new frontiers. You took the concepts and technologies designed to compensate affiliates, and stretched them to unlock big brand partners, mobile app partners, influencer partners, top publishing partners, ad network partners, and so many more unique partner opportunities that the evolution of the internet exposed. We are here to support your ingenuity, strategy, and imagination for the future of partner marketing. That is what a platform should do.

We are so fortunate to be capitalized, staffed up, well positioned, and ready for this opportunity. I am overwhelmingly grateful to every customer and TUNE team member (both past and present) that brought us to this point. It is because of you we get the shot at a mission I believe our team was made for.

Thank you.

Peter Hamilton, CEO of TUNE

FAQ

How do I learn more about the TUNE Partner Marketing Platform?

Well check out our homepage of course We’re also happy to schedule a call with the right member of our team depending on your location and time zone. Please feel free to reach out to partnermarketing@tune.com and we’ll be happy to share some materials, hop on a demo, or provide some free advice on launching a partner program or migrating from another set of systems.

Does this mean the HasOffers name and branding are going away?

Yes, in fact that is exactly what it means. We are redirecting the HasOffers.com website to TUNE.com, and when you visit our homepage you will see our partner marketing platform offering for both networks and advertisers under one brand, TUNE. It will take us a bit of time, but you will see the HasOffers name replaced in product, documentation, and everywhere else in the coming weeks.

Does this change my existing HasOffers contract or platform setup?

Nothing changes with your existing contract, platform setup, current traffic, or relationship with us. We are the same people and legal entity that we were before, and you can depend on us to keep everything as smooth as possible as the platform grows.

Does TUNE integrate with other MMPs in addition to Branch?

Of course! This is another question we get sometimes. First, we need to be clear that the TUNE Partner Marketing Platform (formerly HasOffers) was not included with the Branch acquisition last year. Only our mobile “Attribution Analytics” business was acquired. Additionally, our partner platform has always been agnostic to working with third-party measurement providers. In fact, because of our experience as an MMP ourselves, we make certain our mobile integrations are the absolute best in the category. We were the first to provide ad measurement for mobile apps, and you better believe we’re carrying that knowledge and expertise forward with your partner platform.

You talk about advertisers and networks a lot in this post. What about agencies and publishers? Is the Partner Marketing Platform for us too?

Good question! Yes, it can be used by everyone in performance marketing. Typically agencies of record for an advertiser’s parter program will be the primary administrator for the advertiser’s TUNE account. We also have the ability to consolidate accounts for agencies to streamline their businesses. For publishers, the TUNE platform is most used for logging into a partner program or affiliate network that is hosted on TUNE. Though publishers are not typically our customers, we do plan to continue making it easier for publishers to work with their network partners.

Is TUNE doing Postback this year?

We get this question ALL the time. We are so proud of Postback, an event that brings the mobile industry together. We thought it important to let you know that we will not be doing Postback this summer. We are a very different company after the acquisition of one of our businesses, and we need some time to settle our identity for the long term before kicking off another industry event. That said, you probably haven’t heard the last of Postback

Peter Hamilton, CEO of TUNE and Alex Austin, CEO of Branch.

It is our mission to invent the future of marketing technology.

From the days of our founders Lucas and Lee Brown bootstrapping our performance marketing product, to the first app download we tied to advertising, to the present of working with the top digital companies in the world, this has been the most exciting ride I could imagine. What began as a small industry of performance tracking, became an industry of attribution and measurement that is now vital to nearly every marketing team and the businesses they support.

At TUNE, we were fortunate to take part in inventing that industry as the first to bring measurement to mobile app marketing, and it has been our great pleasure to serve the needs of marketers as they discovered new paths to growth through the birth of mobile marketing. Today marks the beginning of a new era for marketers. One where the consumer experience, privacy, measurement, and advertising are all coming together, representing a major step forward for our industry.

Which is why I am excited to announce that Branch is acquiring TUNE’s Attribution Analytics, in what I believe to be a monumental move for both our customers and our company.

It is no secret that our team building and supporting attribution has fought with one hand tied behind their back for years. Our lack of Facebook partner status made it incredibly difficult to win the total market. In spite of it, what our teams at TUNE were able to accomplish these last seven years in mobile measurement is nothing short of amazing. I am beyond proud of our teams’ Herculean efforts, with a die-hard focus on customer success, privacy, and unmatched flexibility.

Today, we begin the road to combining the grit and expertise of our team with a company that I have come to genuinely admire. As I’ve had the opportunity to get to know Alex, the CEO of Branch, I began to see a vision that is the most logical next step for TUNE attribution, and a partner that shares our values of innovation, transparency, and excellence to each other.

Branch has an incredible path forward. Not only are they capitalized beyond belief, but they are laser-focused on solving the problem of consumer experience across apps and how those environments connect to web and across devices. We fundamentally agree with Branch that the consumer experience must be the foundation of measurement, not a bolt-on addition as we and other attribution providers have attempted in the past. Branch deep links have already been adopted by thousands of companies across the Internet, which means Branch is able to connect users to content across platforms at a scale that no new player can hope to match.

Yet, Branch was still missing one key component of this future — the deep connections and expertise in the advertising and attribution space that we built over the past seven years. Though Branch took a clear plunge into attribution and measurement over a year ago, on their own it would simply take too long to build the nuanced technology marketers need, and the team DNA it takes to fully support those needs.

That is where TUNE comes in. Our Attribution Analytics product and team are like a booster shot of martech/adtech advantage, a combined approach that I believe will be absolutely unstoppable.

I expect this news to be frightening to competition in the space, with sellers trying to spread uncertainty and panic (apologies in advance for marketers’ inboxes). The reality is that the combined engineering efforts of Branch and TUNE over this next year will exceed the market’s expectations, while maintaining every current use of both products. We take our commitments to customers extremely seriously.

Over time we will build our capabilities together on one central stack, with the Branch platform as the foundation, but in a matter of weeks, TUNE customers will gain access to more features, products, opportunities, and human resources than they have ever had before. Both teams spent the time working through every scenario to make sure customer experiences are seamless and access to new capabilities are expedient.

What does this mean for TUNE going forward?

This acquisition means that TUNE has two successful futures. One where our team and tech join forces with Branch to create the future of measurement and consumer experience and one where we take our vision for our flagship product, HasOffers, to the next level. We will continue to operate HasOffers as a separate entity, directing even more time and resources toward its success.

With the major cash infusion from this acquisition, we will pursue the performance marketing industry in a new way, evolving how marketing relationships are managed. As we pursue that vision, we plan to partner heavily with measurement providers such as Branch to connect performance marketing to outcomes, across platforms and devices.

Marketing partnerships are evolving faster than ever before. Marketing teams build their own unique partnerships today in order to find scale beyond typical ad platforms and networks. The same is true for networks themselves as they search the corners of the earth for new publishers and traffic sources. Everyone managing a large number of marketing partners needs a better, more automated platform to manage everything. What’s more enticing is the category of partner management itself growing beyond traditional affiliate and referral relationships to incorporate influencers, resellers, BD partners and more. It is a space we have the perfect experience and technology foundation through HasOffers to win.  

Through this acquisition by Branch and our future partnership together, our teams now have the ability to achieve both visions, something we could not easily do before. For all those at TUNE who are joining Branch and for all those staying on to pursue HasOffers partner management, you can expect us to keep that original mission to invent the future of marketing technology.

I commit to you that the people of TUNE will stay grounded and thoughtful throughout this time. We will listen to your real needs and invest in your success. We will be your biggest cheerleaders and your most trusted partners regardless of the T-shirt we wear.

Thank you! Thank you to our customers who made all of this history and future possible. Your support has meant more than you will probably ever know.

Onward,

Peter Hamilton

CEO, TUNE

With new advancements in data management and industry hype for people-centric solutions, advertisers are creating deeper customer relationships and becoming more thoughtful about the combined user journey. But with great knowledge comes great responsibility.

Marketing — and the marketing ecosystem — simply works better when advertisers and their customers have a direct, transparent relationship that respects the customer’s privacy rights and wishes. Just as good advertisers know not to bombard a cat person with dog videos or use Carolina blue when advertising to Duke fans, they also know to leave customers alone when they’re unresponsive to repetitive ads or opt out of certain marketing channels.

The need to embrace consumer privacy preferences is clear table stakes — and immediate.

Cue the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which goes into enforcement on May 25, 2018, expanding individual rights and elevating expectations for companies that do business online. A quick web search for “GDPR” yields more than 5 million results, including anxiety-inducing headlines ranging from a “welcome revolution” to apocalyptic Y2K paranoia. The GDPR has also accelerated the emergence of a privacy-industrial complex of new (mostly unproven) tools capitalizing off of this frenzy and fear.

So what’s at the crux of this data privacy movement? We’ve talked about the increased importance of transparency, accountability, and security in the past. With GDPR, it’s time to add permission to that list. Specifically, clear and conspicuous consent, or a documented legitimate interest to use a customer’s information in the way that you have explicitly stated you are going to use it, and for no other purpose.

This regulation is unprecedented in impact and scope in the digital advertising world, and will serve as a differentiator for organizations ready to embrace the new normal for data privacy and security. Not only does it place the compliance burden on the “data controller” — those that decide who, what, and where — it also spreads the responsibility to corresponding “data processors.” This shared responsibility will be key to understanding compliance in the digital advertising life cycle, which is already muddled by the interplay of advertisers, publishers, ad platforms, networks, agencies, and affiliates.

In short, these changes show it’s more important than ever to know and trust your business partners.

At TUNE, we’ve been preparing a number of ways, including:

1. working to update our products for data management flexibility in order to facilitate compliance for our clients as data controllers;
2. engaging an EU-based third party to review and guide our products and practices to abide by GDPR principles; and
3. updating our privacy guidance, client educational pages, and even creating a GDPR-dedicated page, which is now live on tune.com.

We’re committed to doing right by our clients and the end users who trust them with their information. We look forward to working with you to improve transparency, making marketing better, and bringing power to the people.

I’d like to say that 2017 was a wild year where ground breaking marketing technology powered life-altering marketing campaigns, but I can’t.

There continues to be a shortage of real innovation across the mobile acquisition and engagement space as providers battle it out on a feature-to-feature basis. The result? An industry content with the status quo as marketers focus more on iterative advances and existing technologies than new solutions that push boundaries.

Despite this general stagnation, I’m hopeful that 2018 will be a breakout year for the industry, as we work to execute on three important strategies: 1. The creation of a unified, enterprise-ready mobile marketing stack that goes well beyond basic attribution; 2. Expansion of people-based marketing by further linking devices with real people so marketers can actually provide their target audiences with customized campaigns (and not just talk about doing it); and 3. A laser focus on the creation of new technologies and solutions that will enable marketers to reach new audiences at scale.

That’s what we’re up to. Here are my six predictions for 2018.

1. Acquisition and Engagement Unite!

We often talk about the all-important sales and marketing bucket here at TUNE, and how we can help our customers plug the various leaks that develop over time.

When marketers turn on the faucet of user acquisition to drive downloads, registrations, and initial engagements, a massive 80% of customers leak within the first three days, never to return. Of those who remain, another 8% are lost to fraud, meaning marketers end up with very few customers as a result of a leaky bucket.

We want to build tools to help marketers plug the leaks. But before we do it’s really important to understand what creates the leaks in the first place: an overinvestment in acquisition without a corresponding focus on retention via engagement.

In 2018, marketers will take a more holistic approach to balancing new customer acquisition with engagement and as a result improve retention. As they do, they’ll design higher-performance campaigns that are more focused, engaging, and context-relevant. In short, they will become MobileBest marketers.  

2. Marketing Not Held Accountable Will Dwindle

I mention this every year, and I’ll continue doing so well into the future, but it’s time the mobile industry *finally* delivers more for consumers and enterprises.

To get there, we need certain patterns of media buying to officially die off. Slinging display ads with no performance measurement will become a small game, dependent purely on sales tactics and relationships. Companies are already demanding that their marketing teams measure performance in order to demonstrate fiscal accountability, and that trend will fully take root in 2018. This will become especially notable once enterprise companies unlock the revenue predictability and scale that performance provides.

This means we’ll see a transformation in programmatic and large scale media buying as a result of solid measurement. We have the technology to track results at scale, so there’s no reason why marketers can’t deliver great results to consumers and enterprises alike.

3. The Year Mobile Breaks Through in Enterprise

Enterprises realize that mobile is mainstream, and we’ve done the research to prove that focusing on mobile increases company value. They’ve also discovered that their teams may not have the deep expertise or tools to win because yesterday’s digital campaigns don’t translate to today’s mobile demands. This is a massive opportunity for vendors who can deliver enterprise-level capabilities across marketing touchpoints.

I see it in our own customer growth and it is a consistent theme across mobile marketing vendors and companies I talk to. Enterprise companies are diving into mobile, signing up for new tools and software, and preparing to compete with mobile-first companies in 2018. They’re committing to big software contracts and showing incredible plans for their mobile marketing budgets. Many are moving from tiny investments in mobile to what will be the largest in their marketing mix. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve seen Fortune 100 companies involved in mobile for years now, but the amount of commitment and investment is going up dramatically.

The hidden challenge for enterprise companies is marketing talent. They’re working from a cast of digital marketers that don’t speak the language of mobile, and it’s slowing down their journey. In short, if you’re a mobile user acquisition specialist, your career in enterprise is about to blossom.

There’s also a disconnect when it comes to the maturity of big-box marketing cloud vendors, who designed and built great web marketing offerings but are scrambling to bolt on mobile offerings in order to compete with mobile-first startups. Enterprise marketers will adopt technology that unites the best of big box marketing cloud tech with innovative startup tech into one package. This space will be won by the company that provides top notch service, support, up-time, and security (things you get from a big-box cloud) with new super useful products and new features delivered at a rapid pace.

4. Walled Gardens Begin to Erode

In some categories such as elimination of fraud and the erosion of walled gardens, 2018 will be a year of addition by subtraction; in others like OTT (over the top) and voice, it will be a year of reaching audiences across more channels than ever before. In all cases, a catalyst will be technology that consolidates perspectives and enables more informed action.     

Today, “walled gardens” like Google and Facebook generate an incredible volume of data on individuals through search, display, social connections and likes. Today these worlds are separate, making it increasingly difficult for marketers to reconcile performance across multiple platforms.

Within the next five years, Google and Facebook will begin sharing data and showing marketers a more complete picture of measurable results. They will do this through siloed, protected analytics environments, measured by third parties capable of ensuring unbiased accuracy.

In 2018, we’ll also see more experiments and “frenemy” partnerships, the first of which was recently announced when Salesforce and Google agreed to partner to help marketers get a more complete and accurate assessment of the impact of their spend. This is a clear indication of what’s to come.

The world is more open and collaborative and as a result value will migrate to solutions that connect and unify rather than those that remain divided (and create unnecessary work for their customers).

5. Streaming Video (OTT) and Voice Technology Show Their Potential

As mentioned above, OTT and voice are helping marketers reach target audiences in new and innovative ways. It’s early for OTT and voice platforms like FireTV, AppleTV, Chromecast, Roku, Amazon Echo and Google Home but they will unlock a broader set of audiences and channels for marketers to test and explore. In 2018, streaming video and voice technology will explode in marketing popularity as more native advertising opportunities are made available.  

Voice will move a bit slower in 2018 because its economic potential has not yet fully materialized the way it has for OTT within the ecommerce sector, for example. However, marketers must make more investments in understanding the consumer experience on Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Siri, and I expect there will be some shining examples as a result. This is going to be fun.

6. Marketers Get a Handle on Fraud and Realize They Need Quality Supply

A major topic for marketers in 2017 was ad fraud, and every attribution technology provider worth their salt scrambled to carve out their own story. At TUNE, our customers helped us innovate massively on our fraud solutions. We needed a new level of publisher granularity as well as the tools to make it simple to cut out everything suspicious. I’m really proud of the collaboration and think the results speak for themselves. On top of all that, the platforms are becoming more active. For example, Android launched a new API that we jumped on to eradicate fraudulent click injection.  

For technology providers, the focal point will be improving the experience for marketers in dealing with fraud and arbitrating with partners (think more automated actions and identified rules).

Because fraud is easier to identify and manage, marketers will be willing to pay more for quality supply. Enter Amazon, Apple, Snap, etc.

Marketers will continue to maximize monthly performance with Facebook and Google and will look to increase spend on other channels, from ad networks to exchanges. They’ll be hungry for more native advertising from sources such as Apple Search and Snapchat. This will cause inventory prices to climb and will open the door for new contenders. One of those contenders will be Amazon.

Wrap Up

The mobile marketing industry is primed for change and I’m confident we’ll see it in 2018. Too many forces are at work for significant advances not to reach critical mass and begin truly transforming how marketers identify and engage their audiences. In summary, I’ll be shocked if 2018 is a repeat performance of the past year.  

The TUNE team and I will be doing our part to introduce new technology and shape the future of our industry. We know it will be challenging and invite you to join us for the ride.  

Have a prediction? Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think will happen in 2018.

Change of plans.

As you may be aware, TUNE was working hard to perfect our Facebook measurement solution using a combination of deep links, the Marketing API, and the Graph API. Over 400 marketers implemented this solution over the last year, and we believed that measurement using deep links was safely protected as an open protocol, established by Android and iOS.

This changed last week with a new Facebook policy, found in the mobile app ads interface, that states: “You cannot use deep links for measurement or tracking purposes.”

To make absolutely certain that TUNE adheres to the terms and policies required by Facebook, and to remove any potential liability for our customers, we are removing this portion of our Facebook measurement that relies on deep links, both through access in our platform as well as through Facebook’s API endpoint for deep links. Any campaign previously set up with deep link measurement will no longer return device-level attribution.

This is a tough situation. There is no question that this Facebook policy change will complicate things for our customers, and I want you to know that we are here to help in any way possible. That said, it is very important for us to make sure we approach policies and terms with extreme compliance in these situations, both to the spirit and the letter of those terms.

What does this mean about your Facebook measurement today?

TUNE will no longer provide device-level data typically provided by a Facebook Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP), removing the ability to de-duplicate installs for Facebook against other ad partners or calculate LTV of users that came from Facebook, outside of Facebook’s own reporting. If you need device-level data for these reasons, we are happy to work with you, and an MMP, to ensure you get the device-level insights you need.

You will still see aggregate-level measurement of Facebook through the Ad Partner ROAS report in Multiverse; showing you install, click, and impression counts along with the cost and ROAS associated with your Facebook app campaigns. These reports will also be available in your Attribution Analytics account very soon.

Finally, if you are already sharing your app installs and events with Facebook through TUNE, this change will not disrupt the optimization or performance of any current campaigns, and you will continue to see aggregate-level measurement through Facebook Reporting or through Multiverse.

We will turn off the deep link measurement feature for Facebook at 10:00 AM PST on Thursday.

Onward.

If you know anything about TUNE, you know that we’re building the future marketing tech stack, which goes far beyond app attribution. You can bet that we’ll be doubling down on our vision to make all marketing measurable, judged on performance, location aware, and people centered across platforms and devices. If you missed our Postback conference in Seattle, I talked about where we are heading as an industry in this opening keynote. I’m encouraged by the conversations marketers and partners are having, and I believe there is so much left to build to create a better marketing stack. That’s where we are focused.

What can you do?

We do not recommend attempting to advocate that Facebook reverse or change their policy on deep link measurement. We believe it is important to respect their terms. However, if you would like to advocate for a path toward TUNE as a future Facebook partner, please reach out to your most appropriate Facebook contacts. Don’t forget to include why you trust TUNE with your business and why this would be important to you as a marketer or partner.

I and/or my staff are happy to attend any meetings or calls that you would like to schedule both with your teams, as well as Facebook staff, as it is relevant. We are here to be helpful in any way we can. *Feel free to cc support@tune.com if you would like us to see your note, or feel free to copy myself or others into the conversation as you see fit.  

Above all, TUNE is YOUR platform for YOUR marketing data. We are here to serve your needs in every way that we can, so please keep your support and feedback coming. Through that support, you have created really incredible products and the best company I have ever seen. Thank you.

Be excellent to each other,

Peter

I don’t know about you, but clicking through Mary Meeker’s 2017 Internet Trends got me really excited yesterday. First of all this:

In the report she goes on to show the incredible shift in advertising dollars to mobile, and the major shifts in platforms, technologies, and mediums that are finally disrupting the old models of marketing.

I thought I would take a few minutes to pull out some highlights and relate them to how TUNE is answering these trends. I could not have produced better validation for our mission and vision.

1. Not a “shift to mobile” but “the addition of mobile”

The last three years were a race to be mobile first. Most of the innovation and disruption came from business models that were able to shift the user experience to mobile, simplifying the path to purchase, book a ride or hotel, and of course, play a game. Over the last year, we watched a major awakening in the Fortune 1000 with a new goal to become mobile best. These are companies that might not have a clear path to disrupting as a mobile first company, but mobile is equally critical to their success. In fact, our Unicorn Dinosaurs report features Fortune 1000 companies that are dominating their categories because they have what? Mobile users. That goes for companies you would never suspect like Caterpillar or Home Depot whose market cap shows growth from their commitment to mobile. Ever wonder why Amazon has grown so powerful? Just take a look at their mobile user base of 750 million across their apps. Is Amazon a mobile first company? Not exactly, but the way their mobile experience ties across their overall experience is critical to their customer engagement and growth.

Everything we’re building right now is focused on bringing together web and app, bringing together the marketing tech stack so that marketers don’t need to use siloed solutions for each medium. The mobile strategy and the desktop strategy and TV and out-of-home strategies are all one, because they all influence one customer.

2. Games leading in innovation, paving the way for everything else

This has been true for the entire existence of the TUNE Marketing Console. Marketers from major game companies transformed our offering, putting our scale and usability to the test. They paved the way for a real operational path to scale mobile advertising campaigns, and they’re still innovating faster than anyone today. Meeker even goes so far as to say that Gaming is responsible for the foundation of nearly every internet service, from graphics and computation to messaging and downloadable content. Games continue to lead the way, and she points to a next evolution to come from VR and AR.

(This is looking at just one of TUNE’s customers who was showcased in her report, that is growing their franchises at massive scale.)

Launching new products to analyze fraud (with more on the way) and giving gaming companies now the most granular ROAS reporting in the industry is going a long way toward supporting that innovation. Making these things simple and commonplace lets marketers reach further forward rather than spending days in spreadsheets and reconciliation reports. If you haven’t checked out the most recent innovations on Multiverse… you should.

3. Internet ads will exceed TV in a matter of months

With the help of mobile, Internet Advertising is not only the fastest growing, but in the next six months it will become the largest advertising channel.

But why? It is all a factor of “time spent.” I like to make the analogy to the real estate market in Seattle right now. Our average home price is still $750k while our neighbors in San Francisco and Vancouver see an average of over $1.5M. That means we’ve got A LOT of room to grow in Seattle because of how quickly our population is growing along with tech company investments coming into the region. Now we have Amazon, Google, Facebook, Snap, Strip, Uber, and Starbucks all continuing to grow massively.

The same is true when we look at time spent on media and the proportion of ad dollars going toward that time spent. Even though time spent on mobile has risen to 28%, we’re still only seeing 21% of ad dollars going toward mobile. That leaves an opportunity of $16B!

4. Measurement is a triple-edged sword

This is something we’ve always known at TUNE, down to our core. In fact, it is the balance beam on which Facebook balances every single day. The most valuable thing Facebook has is the ability to target their users for ads. At the same time, users are very concerned with information anyone uses to target them. It is a catch-22 of sorts, but riding that balance effectively can be extremely lucrative, as we’ve seen in Facebook’s earnings.

The same goes for measurement generally. Marketers need to measure their effectiveness to prove the value of advertising, while consumers don’t want their behaviors known by all. With the power of measurement comes the responsibility to uphold privacy policies and respect the consumer at every turn. This is a core tenet to all of our technologies at TUNE, acting as a leader in policy and practice when it comes to privacy.

Interestingly, there was no mention of third-party measurement in Meeker’s report. Strange. How many marketers do you know that don’t use a measurement platform, that either they’ve built or they license from a SaaS company?

Of course every major platform must provide basic tools to demonstrate performance, but this image strikes a chord directly on the biggest problem for marketers. Those are three different dashboards with isolated/walled data. How do marketers reconcile them together?  Customers move effortlessly across platforms and throughout the web, yet our analytics systems continue to struggle to bring those into one record of the customers. What good is attribution if you can’t see the rest of the customer journey? It is like taking a snapshot in time at the Olympics before the finish of the race. Yes, every part of the race is important, but the whole picture is what gives you insight into how to run that race better the next time.

Marketing technology must be people-centric, and that means bringing together channels, platforms, and yes, even devices into one record. This is actually part of our mission statement as the future of marketing technology must be people-centric in order to make sure targeting is natural, data is kept private, and the full picture of a consumer journey can still be mapped.

You’ll see us make huge strides in this over the coming year.

5. HUGE opportunities for retail

I can absolutely confirm that retail is by far our fastest growing vertical of marketers rushing to mobile. It isn’t just because it took retailers some time to get their heads around the opportunity of mobile, though for some companies that was a greater struggle than others. The reason retail is about to explode is really because of so many advancements in technology and platforms. Meeker points to many different shifts, including things like ads serving as complete store fronts. A consumer can literally flip through an entire product catalogue while in the middle of a Facebook ad, or see a wall of inventory in an email campaign. Consumers are invited to stop on by, browse our selection. When you really think about it, the feeling is no different than wandering down your farmer’s market road on a Sunday. Take in the sights and see what’s going on in town, and while you’re there, stop into the shops.

Transactions are always a major key to unlocking a new space, and that has been revolutionized over the last couple of years. Now, making a purchase from a social feed, inside a different app, or even more easily on web is so much simpler. Any retailer can take advantage of these transactional opportunities.

How many times have you made an immediate purchase right from your Facebook feed? Have you made a purchase with Apple Pay or Google Wallet in a web browser? It’s getting incredibly simple. This leads to a much better ROI model for mobile advertising.

Summing up

What really comes through in the first quarter of this report is the fact that mobile is at the center of the growth story for nearly every company right now.

That said, it is part of a complete strategy across desktop, TV, out-of-home, and more, which is true for both the way the products are consumed or bought, as well as the way they are marketed. The amazing thing about the mobile revolution of the last decade, is that mobile is there while you are watching TV. It’s there with you out of your home. It’s in your pocket wherever you go, and in your hand whatever you’re doing. But people still buy on their desktop. They buy from their smart TVs. They buy from their wearable devices.

And all of that needs to be connected for marketers to really understand and serve their customers.

That’s why the marketing stack of tomorrow needs to have people at the center, rather than specific channels or devices. They need to act more like massively scalable CRMs that keep record of millions, even billions of customer relationships… while adding attribution, measurement, actionability, and fraud protection. They need to do so while respecting the wishes of the consumers while also delivering the insights needed to determine ROI.

That is the future that we are building at TUNE, and what an exciting time it is.

{Images via Strands and Mary Meeker’s 2017 Internet Trends Report}

2016 was a year of building for the future of marketing technology. TUNE climbed to more than 350 people, launched new products, integrated several more, and designed a future database, leading us further down the path of providing the first complete marketing stack — with mobile squarely at the center. We started the year by laying out a new mission statement that guides our strategic decisions and keeps us focused on our long-term vision, with the chief goal of making marketing better for everyone. As the year comes to a close, I want to share some of the major decisions, learning moments, and accomplishments we’ve made toward that vision.

TUNE’s mission and purpose in 2016

So what are we building at TUNE? This is the most important question to answer to make the most strategic decisions with the best long term impact on marketers and the industry. For that, we look to our mission. Our mission statement might be a little different than you typically see, such as “we’re going to save the world through marketing technology,” ha. The below is our mission because we have every faith that we will accomplish it and we believe it would be the best thing for marketers.  

Our mission:

Overcoming the chaos of point solutions

The rise of mobile marketing gave birth to an explosion of new needs from marketers and an even faster emergence of new marketing technologies. There is another attribution product in the news every quarter and a marketing automation company announcing funding every time you blink, but the cross-platform, cross-function solution has not become any easier for marketers. Marketers have the complicated task of piecing together their marketing tech stack, but they’re being forced to do so with systems that don’t talk to each other, and data that is in conflict with other sets of data.

In the mobile world, marketers are met with the additional challenge of needing to implement a new SDK for advertising, messaging, analytics, and more. This proves to not only put a tax on engineering teams, but also impacts performance for customers.

These are some of the reasons why we set out to build a marketing console that brings together attribution, analytics, segmentation, automation, in-app messaging, a/b testing, deep query reports, and more. Marketers need technology that connects the top of the funnel to the bottom. We need more systems in our industry that work toward completing the marketing tech stack. To do that, these systems must be both flexible and wall-less to make integration painless for the marketer.

Integrating powerful new products with TUNE Marketing Console

Acquiring three companies and integrating them with our original mobile platform was no easy task. We felt the direct pain marketers feel as they try to glue together point solutions, with the added onus of wanting to combine teams and technologies in a way that would enable future innovation in our company and industry. At times our progress was slow and frustrating; at others we made huge leaps together. Each step in our journey to connect the TUNE Marketing Console was a lesson on how marketers really want their tech stack to look and work. I am extremely proud of the state of the console today, which now consolidates attribution, audiences, messaging, testing, and deep query reporting. We can now provide technology from the top to the bottom of the funnel for mobile marketers.

Designing a database around the concept of a user

Perhaps the most core piece of every marketer’s tech stack is the database that shows the entire journey of an individual customer — from the ads they experience, to their first engagement, and every behavior from their first purchase to their last. That customer experience occurs through various devices and platforms across the web and/or native apps, and there must be a way to pull it all together. Every major marketing organization we spoke to over the last two years is chasing that Holy Grail of CRM zen, where every engagement point of a customer is collected in one place for marketers to easily glean actionable insights. This year for TUNE was a journey to reach that lofty place. As I write this we are testing mountains of data on a new database, built on the single concept of a user. I can’t spill all the news just yet, but this is the only technology stack of its kind that is mobile first, connects every marketing event from attribution to engagement, and fully integrates marketing with advertising channels.

Offering a better alternative to the confusion of fraud

In 2016, we saw a growing frustration from marketers on the issue of fraud, and we saw equal frustration from partners who have no way to defend their claims or who have frustration watching other partners running fraud and still getting advertising budgets. This is not our first experience with fraud in digital advertising, but things are different with mobile, and especially for apps. We saw point-solution competitors offer half-baked solutions that scrub conversions and installs from partners, but offer little — if any — transparency into the reasons why. These kinds of workarounds create massive confusion and discrepancy in our industry, and TUNE chose to take a different path that supports transparency first. You will see TUNE’s technologies emerge as the most complete and powerful solution in dealing with fraud. Our Marketing Intelligence product already offers the most granular and comprehensive reporting on fraud and traffic quality than any other solution, but there is so much more to do. In the coming year you will see advancements in new fraud insights, increased controls on postbacks and flagging, as well as an increase in our already deterministic methods for blocking fraud.  What you will not see from TUNE is a black box that scrubs or oversimplifies the issue. To this, we commit a high level of integrity.

Unveiling Multiverse as the paid acquisition cockpit

One of the most exciting new product announcements of this year was the release of Multiverse. Designed to import aggregated data from advertising channels and combine attribution and analytics data, this fresh new product is built for the user acquisition specialist. As the TUNE Marketing Console takes on a broader and more central role for marketers, we wanted to create a place that paid acquisition experts can make the quick and powerful decisions they need to make to improve the effectiveness of their advertising spend. Multiverse does that, and these last six months of improvements now bring us to the point of broad release. I’m so excited to see the ways that paid acquisition marketers use Multiverse this year.

Connecting supply and demand

Something that many people don’t realize about TUNE is that we also build platform technologies for ad networks and partners to build their businesses. This puts TUNE in a unique position to understand how partners need to improve and operate to better serve marketers, and also provides a path to help streamline the workflow between marketers and their partners. Over the past year we launched a certified partner program with an increased level of scrutiny, and we’ve provided tools to ad networks that help bring transparency and reduce discrepancy. In the coming year you’ll see even more innovation on the way we help connect our industry’s supply partners with the demand of marketers. If you manage your own publishers and supply partners today, you will also see an enormous upgrade and change to our HasOffers and TUNE Partner Center products. These will continue to be unrivaled in the industry, but the advancements we will provide will help our entire ecosystem evolve to new levels.

One of the greatest challenges for supply and demand in 2017 will be the saturation of smartphones and the limited number of apps per user. This means there is increased consolidation of ad partners for marketers to choose from. As a result, there will be a rise of mobile web advertising in the coming year, require a marketing tech stack that supports both open web and native platforms, combining the analytics and attribution to one view and central database.

Bringing the best in the industry together through Postback

If you attended Postback — TUNE’s annual mobile marketing conference in Seattle — you saw something incredible happen this year. You saw the breadth of companies involved in the mobile conversation dramatically increase. You saw relationships that were only born a few years ago forge into powerful partnerships. You even saw us set the stage in our own dorky way with a Hamilton production, ha. Most importantly, you saw an industry of people that love to work with each other, exploring new ways to reach audiences and make marketing so much better. Marketers have made this their conference, and we feel very lucky to help host. The memories we’re creating together will long outlast everything that happens over the next five years, which is why I really can’t wait to see what happen at Postback this year!

Becoming the solution for the future of marketing technology

As we cross over into 2017, it is time to start making these solutions known. Some of you reading this don’t even know that TUNE has a product that supports audiences and segmentation or push and messaging. Perhaps you only know TUNE as the first trusted mobile attribution provider, and if that’s the extent of it, I invite you to explore the deep and thoughtful advancements we’re making to invent the future of marketing technology. I can’t wait to wow you with our progress and ultimately make a real impact on the day to day success and satisfaction of marketers. As you explore these new developments, keep your expressive feedback coming. We’re going to need all the voices of this industry if we’re going to progress together, and I couldn’t be happier than to be going through this evolution with such a fine group of people. Thank you to all of you that have contributed to, and helped write this vision.

As I sign off every staff email at TUNE,

Be excellent to each other,

Peter

In case you missed it, Facebook just announced new features for users to manage their ad experience… and new technology that will render desktop ad blockers “useless,” as the NY Times puts it.

I will admit that I’m biased. I’ve been a performance marketer or the CEO of a company that helps marketers measure performance for more than a decade. At TUNE, we have always said we help make the Internet free. In fact, the best part about performance marketing is that the publisher does not get paid unless the advertisement actually works. That means a consumer actually chooses to download the app, register for the service, or make a purchase. As a result, this whole ad blocking craze has not impacted our business at all.

While we’ve seen mobile ad blocking app installs skyrocket, we also see that people immensely value a free, ad-supported ecosystem.

A consumer who is likely to click on an ad is also unlikely to download and use an ad blocker. So millions of impressions are being blocked, but those impressions were probably wasted anyway on consumers that hate advertising and will do anything they can to avoid it, much less click or tap on it.

Interestingly, our data at TUNE shows that people are using Apple and Google’s limit ad tracking settings less and less, indicating that they are OK with advertisers using aggregated data about them to make the advertising they do see more relevant, more interesting, and more timely… while also preserving privacy.

We’ve seen this play out in an incredibly sophisticated way in the mobile games industry. Games make incredible revenue from in-app purchases (all those gems and coins), but for many games, ad revenue picks up where in-app purchases leave off. Game companies have designed sophisticated data models that help determine if a consumer is more likely to make purchases or if they should begin monetizing that consumer’s use of the game through advertising. If a user is already not willing to spend any money in the game, and then they are too annoyed by the ads they begin to receive, they will leave the game. But what is the loss to the game publisher? Nothing.

Consumers that never monetize are a cost, and unless their influence is massive, bringing on thousands of new consumers who will monetize, their value is zero.

Combine this with the important fact that content is not free. It is expensive to create good content, whether that expense is time and creativity or $10M an episode for Game of Thrones. Great publishers spend their careers passionately striving to make their content even better. One option is to always charge for content. Like a fine work of art, it can always have a price tag. But in the information age, why limit that content to those who have disposable income? Isn’t there another way to give more people the opportunity to experience great content, to be up to date on world events, and be challenged by new expression, information, or ideas?

In fact, even if everyone who wanted to pay for content actually did, and we designed the perfect global system to enable it, the total amount would be vastly insufficient. We know — we calculated it, and advertising is returning far more to publishers than any of the tip jar or pay-for-content schemes.

How Facebook operates their ad business

This is why I support Facebook’s position to prevent the use of ad blockers while browsing their service. If you think Facebook is a free service to operate, you might wanna take a look at their 13,000 number of employees worldwide. What they are able to provide has changed the world and the way it connects, and they have done it all for free to the end user. The only thing that makes this possible is ads.

But with this power comes great responsibility. To prevent a mass exodus of those who love their ad blockers they must provide some alternative to improve the experience. They need to give their users some choices, and for them that comes in the form of blocking the targeting of ads from specific advertisers. This does two wonderful things:

1. Builds trust with users because they feel they have some control over the experience.
2. Puts pressure on advertisers not to annoy consumers or they won’t be able to target them anymore!

The best part is that any publisher can be doing the same things Facebook is doing here, but it requires some real investigation into the user experience and a deep, data driven understanding of your audience. A great place to start is just making it easy for consumers to give their feedback on the advertising you already provide. From there you can test new formats and get more feedback. Even taking the time to creatively explain to your audience that the content you create is special and you need to be able to support that content financially. In order to do that, you provide relevant advertising for marketers.

Consumers must have a voice

The more feedback you consume, the better your advertising experience can become and the more differentiated your content will be. As a publisher in an age where the opportunities for creativity are almost limitless, it is your duty to do your part in helping to keep the Internet free. That means helping your audience understand how it is possible while giving them the best experience they’ve ever had.

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Today I’m excited to announce the opening of the first Japanese office for TUNE in Tokyo!

This office will provide direct, human service to marketers in Japan. Not only is it important to respond in the local language, but we want to build rich relationships with our customers and partners in Japan. In order to do that, we’ve hired some amazing people with deep knowledge of both the market in Japan as well as the challenges of mobile measurement. With backgrounds like Yahoo Japan, Cyber Agent, and Doubleclick, TUNE’s employees in Japan bring the experience they need to quickly solve issues and fully support our customers. I believe that experience, combined with TUNE’s signature human touch, will be a huge help to marketers in the region who are working hard to drive success on mobile.

Before making a move, we wanted to learn as much as we could about the market in Japan. In Japan in particular it is important to get it right and build a team with experience and integrity. We took our time looking for the best initial hires and worked closely with our partners to understand the most important gaps we need to fill for marketers in Japan. I believe taking a measured approach is extremely important in Japan.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about the Japanese market is the average purchase behavior per consumer. Japan is not the largest country by square kilometer, but both the influence and engagement of consumers in the Japanese market are perhaps the most advanced. From mobile commerce to gaming, Japanese people are highly engaged and extremely active. Measuring that engagement and determining the return on marketing campaigns is what TUNE is all about. We look forward to both the unique challenges we’ll find in helping service marketers in this fast paced environment as well as experiencing the growth of that engagement over time. Investing in the Japanese market today means building long-term relationships. This is something we’re committed to doing at TUNE.

“Japan is full of mobile marketers that appreciate the need to measure their campaigns and optimize their performance based on data-driven metrics. With an office in Tokyo, I’m looking forward to closely working with marketers and agencies to help them drive the best results on mobile with the TUNE Marketing Console.” Naoki Sassa, Japan Sales Director, TUNE.

If you’re a mobile marketer in Tokyo, we welcome you to register to attend our city tour where we are bringing together marketers for a half day of actionable insights and networking. Register now.

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2019 Update: HasOffers has rebranded to TUNE! See platform features or read the rebrand announcement here. 

Google Analytics is NOT performance marketing measurement software. Just having Google Analytics won’t work for tracking performance marketing campaigns. Sure, it’ll reconcile sales, but it won’t be able to reconcile conversions with publishers.

It’s an analytics software, not a measurement platform. There’s a huge difference. Performance marketing software has many tools to allow you to manage and work with publishers. Web analytics tools (like GA) don’t provide tools to manage them, and only reports performance.

What happens when you try to use web analytics software when you should be using a measurement platform:

• Lack of system to display publisher pixels or postback URLs
• Placing pixels or postback URLs directly on the Web page causes duplicate conversions
• You cannot set and manage publisher payouts
• No way to generate and manage invoices
• … and much more that we already outlined here

That’s a lot of stuff. But can you use Google Analytics and TUNE (formerly HasOffers) together? Yes you can.

To show publisher activity in Google Analytics (GA) click stream data, you will need to map over the variables in your publisher tracking software (e.g., TUNE) to GA’s referral variables. This can be done by using Google’s URL Builder.

3 Steps to Showing Publisher Activity in Google Analytics

Step 1. In Google Analytics URL Builder, enter in the destination URL as the website URL. This is the URL that would be used as the default offer URL in TUNE.

Step 2. Fill in the fields (see image). Campaign Source, Campaign Medium and Campaign Name should always be used.

Step 3. Click the Generate URL button. It will generate a URL similar to the one below:

http://www.product.com/?utm_source=aff%7Baffiliate_id %7D&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_term=%7Bsource%7D&utm_content=%7Baff_sub %7D&utm_campaign=%7Boffer_id%7D

However, Google’s URL builder encodes the { and } characters and replaces them with %7B and %7D. You will need to replace them with the original characters. These characters need to be non-encoded so that the TUNE servers can identify the placeholder variables and replace them with their corresponding value. So the correct link should appear like this:

http://www.product.com/?utm_source=aff{affiliate_id} &utm_medium=affiliate&utm_term={source}&utm_content={aff_sub} &utm_campaign={offer_id}

TUNE’s Offer URL configuration simply places the URL above as the default offer URL for the offer in your affiliate network.

When publishers generate a measurement URL, this will be the destination (or the place users will land after clicking an affiliate’s link). TUNE’s servers load the offer URL above and replaces the placeholder variables with the correct values, redirecting the users to the URL.

Affiliate ID 10 promoting offer 5 with a source of “email01″ and aff_sub of “50505050” redirects users to this page:

http://www.product.com/? utm_source=aff10&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_term=email01&utm_content=50505050&utm _campaign=5

Congratulations! TUNE tracking data is now mapped over to Google Analytics. You can now use Google Analytics dashboards to gain further insight into each publisher’s performance.

Get Started

Ready to try it yourself? Request a demo or trial of TUNE to see what you can do with the leading performance marketing software. Questions? Email us at sales@tune.com.