Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

20
Emily Riley, COO, Ghostery 10 East 39th Street, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10016 Ι 917.262.2530 Ι ghosteryenterprise.com [email protected] Ι @ghosteryinc MARKETING CLOUD MANAGEMENT BEST PRACTICES

description

In 2004 you had a website. In 2014, you have a marketing cloud. You interact with your customers across thousands of channels and device types and rely on hundreds of vendor partners to do so. If you are like most enterprises, your marketing cloud is out of control. An out-of-control cloud sends customers to competitors’ stores, dilutes your customer data value, opens security breaches, and slows down your site. Good cloud management ensures that you keep and grow your customer base, secure your data, and improve site performance. In this research series, we will define the marketing cloud and provide benchmark data and best practices for marketing cloud management. This is part two of the three-part series. • Defining the Marketing Cloud • Marketing Cloud Management: Best Practices • Benchmarking Your Marketing Cloud

Transcript of Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

Page 1: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

Emily Riley, COO, Ghostery

10 East 39th Street, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10016 Ι 917.262.2530 Ι ghosteryenterprise.com

[email protected] Ι @ghosteryinc

MARKETING CLOUD MANAGEMENT BEST PRACTICES

Page 2: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

1

YOU NO LONGER HAVE A WEBSITE; YOU HAVE A MARKETING CLOUD.

In 2004 you had a website. In 2014, you have a marketing cloud. You interact with your customers across thousands of channels and device types and rely on hundreds of vendor partners to do so. If you are like most enterprises, your marketing cloud is out of control. An out-of-control cloud sends customers to competitors’ stores, dilutes your customer data value, opens security breaches, and slows down your site. Good cloud management ensures that you keep and grow your customer base, secure your data, and improve site performance.

In this research series, we will define the marketing cloud and provide benchmark data and best practices for marketing cloud management. This is part two of the three-part series.

• Defining the Marketing Cloud• Marketing Cloud Management: Best Practices• Benchmarking Your Marketing Cloud

Page 3: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

2

Marketing departments are in the middle of a spending frenzy. eMarketer predicts worldwide digital ad spending to reach $137.53 billion in 2014, an all-time high.1 Of course, marketers are not just buying ad space with their money. Laura McLellan of Gartner estimates that CMOs will spend more on technology than CIOs by 2017. While digital marketing in particular holds great promise, without proper management, it is risky at best, and hugely

unprofitable at worst. Ghostery finds that a long list of digital marketing vendors have worked their way into a company’s digital assets, often indirectly through relationships with other vendors. The average enterprise site has more than 75 vendors on it, only 20% of which are directly placed by someone at the company. All digital marketing vendors bring real risks and costs to a company’s online business, including data security breaches, poor

website performance, and data leakage to competitors. These problems will only continue to rise in time.

According to a study by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), more than 70 percent of executives are now willing to run their own technology projects, partly due to changes in the ease of data integration and user interface design, further challenging Corporate IT’s monopoly as the internal arbiter of technology.2

MARKETING CLOUD MANAGEMENT IS AN ENTERPRISE DISCIPLINE

1 “Digital Ad Spending Worldwide to Hit $137.53 Billion in 2014,” eMarketer, 4/3/20142 “Executive Guidance, Harness Business-Led IT,” Corporate Executive Board, Q2 2014

“The average enterprise site has more than 75 vendors on it, only 20% of which are directly placed by someone at the company.” - Ghostery

Page 4: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

3

The first person in an enterprise to notice problems caused by vendors is often someone responsible for maximizing online performance for the business. After noticing that his sites were slowing down, Martin Van Der Meij, Head of Revenue Development at De Telegraaf, looked into the matter. His analysis revealed that “ironically, it was an individual campaign that Telegraaf had sold directly that was leading to a larger proliferation of unknown tags — and consequently, slower pages.”

Chad Westfall, Director of Web Delivery for InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), similarly noticed that a marketing technology was causing problems that needed to be addressed. “Being a leader in marketing cloud management became a priority for our business last year as we realized the effort held benefits across IT, marketing, legal and security,” Westfall said. Other early movers like Procter & Gamble are considering ways to decrease the company-wide costs of working with so many marketing technology partners.

When individual issues from digital vendors start to add up, it is a sign that the problem is systemic. IT-oriented leaders who support these marketing technologies are the logical leaders of marketing cloud management, but departments must work together to weigh the costs against the benefits of working with various partners. As Accenture’s annual CMO Insights survey illustrates, smart CMO’s are leveraging their IT counterparts’ technical expertise to improve the overall value of their digital spend.3

“Being a leader in marketing cloud management became a priority for our business last year as we realized the effort held benefits across IT, marketing, legal and security.” - Chad Westfall, Director of Web Delivery, InterContinental Hotels Group

3 “CMO’s Time for Digital Transformation,” Accenture, 2014

Page 5: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

4

The first step a company should take to evaluate the costs and benefits of its marketing cloud is to audit digital vendors and see how those vendors gained access to the cloud. As Chad Westfall of IHG explains, an audit of all third parties across the company’s sites determined “who owned each and how

they got to our properties. This very much helped us to police which digital vendors should be on our sites, who they are allowed to bring with them, and, most importantly, how each vendor fits into our overall website strategy.  The auditing also helped us identify any slow tags and benchmark how they perform

across the rest of the web.”The best way to start an audit is with a map of all of the vendors in your marketing cloud. From there, you can determine who owns the relationship with each vendor as well as the reason for working with the vendor.

STEP 1: MARKETING CLOUD MANAGEMENT STARTS WITH AN AUDIT

Step 1: Determine who works with each vendor and why

Marketing

Web Ops

IT

Legal

Your Site

Page 6: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

5

STEP 2: MARKETING AND IT WORKING TOGETHER

The first thing most companies notice when they perform an audit is that the relationships with vendors in their marketing cloud are dispersed across many groups, both within and outside the company. Most of these relationships ultimately fall under the management of the CMO, so it’s no surprise the CEB estimates that three times as much money is spent on technology innovation outside the IT budget as within.4

Still, data management, targeting, advertising and social media vendors will be dispersed across the media team, agencies, and even

multiple brand groups. Just as likely, analytics, video and content vendors might fall to the eCommerce teams or website operations.

There are often several vendors that:• Provide overlapping services• Have no direct relationship with the company• Still access the marketing cloud

despite expired contracts• Have expired contracts• Create data leakage risks

Marketing

Web Ops

Non-SecureExpiredContract

Slow

Redundant

Expired Contract

Works withcompetitor

Too many indirect calls

IT

Legal

Your Site

4 “Executive Guidance, Harness Business-Led IT,” Corporate Executive Board, Q2 2014

Step 2: Assess the value of each vendor

Page 7: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

6

The audit should not be used as an opportunity to blame departments for poor vendor management. Rather, the audit is a chance to create a fresh start and improve communication across groups. It is a great opportunity for marketing to include the eCommerce and IT teams in the marketing technology decision-making process, and for all three departments to share their general philosophies and determine a way to meet in the middle. Some company cultures deliberately exclude IT from marketing technology decisions, considering the department too risk averse and slow to keep up with marketing progress. A recent

Accenture study reflects this hesitation: “Notably, CMOs expect much quicker turnaround and higher quality from IT, with a greater degree of flexibility in responding to market requirements. CMOs view the CIO organization as an execution and delivery arm at a time when they should consider IT as a strategic partner and involve CIOs when planning new marketing investments.”5

Good marketing cloud management makes the marketing/IT collaboration a reality. The cosmetics retailer Sephora has a single executive who serves as both Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Digital Officer, because merging the two teams allows

the brand to make the most of its investments across all channels while moving quickly and efficiently.6

The point of collaboration is not to simply increase speed and efficiency. Inter-department cooperation must inspire goals that benefit the bottom line as well. One big box retailer included members from IT in the approval process of all marketing vendors after it estimated that the cost of customer data leakage was higher than the revenue provided by many of their partners. By enforcing a more thorough evaluation process early in the vendor relationship, that retailer’s online business became more secure and more profitable.

6 “ How Sephora Reorganized to Become a More Digital Brand,” Dan McGinn, Harvard Business Review Blog, 6/26/ 20145 “ CMO’S Time for Digital Transformation,” Accenture, 2014

“CMOs view the CIO organization as an execution and delivery arm at a time when they should consider IT as a strategic partner and involve CIOs when planning new marketing investments.” - Accenture

Page 8: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

7

Companies ready for a more rigorous vendor selection process would do well to follow the best practices of Equifax. Equifax uses a vendor questionnaire to rate vendors on data management practices, compliance with online advertising governance and relationships with Equifax’s competitors, among other things.

Once a vendor is selected, it is monitored regularly to ensure continued compliance.

In a recent webinar, Nicole Keiter, Director of Media Strategy and Optimization within Marketing at Equifax, noted, “We monitor vendor redirects and data collection closely. Our vendor questionnaire, which must be

completed before a company can be added to our website, asks a vendor to outline any tag redirects or data collection that may occur. We then make sure this aligns with our privacy policy. If they are outside of our guidelines, then we may flag and say this will or will not work.”

STEP 3: FORMALIZE VENDOR SELECTION PROCESS

Page 9: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

8

SAMPLE DIGITAL VENDOR QUESTIONNAIRE:

Vendor Name:Date:Parent CompanySecure Tax/Pixel Code:In the box below, please list all code that will need to be placed on (Company) properties, breaking out each section of code with an appropriate designation as necessary (ex: <!-- retargeting--> <img src=…>, <!-- conversion--> <img src=…>, etc.).Purpose of Pixel: __________________________________________________

Pixel Code:

PRIVACY & DATA SECURITY: 1. Is your company a member of the NAI? (Network Advertising Initiative)

(Y/N): _____2. Is your company a member of the DAA? (Digital Advertising Alliance)

(Y/N): ______3. Is your company a member of the IAB? (Interactive Advertising Bureau)

(Y/N): _______4. (Company) does not allow PII collection of its website and web properties. Please

confirm that no PII information will be collected on (Company) web properties: 5. Does the proposed media buy incorporate OBA? (Online Behavioral

Advertising/Behavioral Targeting) (Y/N): _______If yes, please answer the following questions:a. If media buy incorporates OBA, do you provide an opt-out option for consumers? (Y/N): _______b. Do you apply the Advertising Option Icon (Ad Choices) to all of your OBA-targeted ads? (Y/N): _______

6. Does the proposed media buy incorporate retargeting and/or data collection off of any (Company) web property? (Y/N): _______

7. Can you provide secure image pixels? (Y/N):8. Do you have SSL Certification? (Y/N):

Can you confirm that your SSL Certificates will be active throughout the (Company) campaign? (Y/N): ______

Page 10: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

9

9. Does your pixel redirect or make any additional calls? (Y/N): ______If yes, please answer the following questions:a. How many additional calls will your pixel(s) make? _______________b. Please provide the following information for all additional calls:

HTTP Call Purpose

All redirects or additional calls must be secure.Vendors will have to notify (Company) about any update that it might make to its pixel. If the pixel has been altered after it has been placed and (Company) has not been notified of this change and if (Company) deems it unfit, we will remove this pixel.

10. Does your technology employ the use of any technologies (including but not limited to Flash local storage objects/“Flash cookies”, Indexed Database API, Web SQL Database, Google Gears, Web storage or DOM storage) to persist user data after a user has cleared the HTTP cookies from their web browser? (Y/N): ______

PERFORMANCE AND TECHNOLOGY: 11. Will your pixel work with all browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox; Chrome, Opera,

Safari etc.)? (Y/N): ______ Yes and No are acceptable answers. If no, list the browsers on which your pixel doesn’t fire: ___________________________________________________________

12. Are there server redundancies in place for your pixels? (Y/N): ______ Please explain how this is handled: ____________________________________

13. What is the expected load and response time for your pixels?14. In the event the pixel does not load or respond, please describe what we can expect

to see: _______________________________________________________15. Please provide contact information and hours available (please

include name, phone, e-mail address and time zone):a. Do you have a 24/7 support (contact) for problems relating to pixels? (Y/N): ______

16. What best practices, if any, does each script use (i.e.: deferral, asyn loading, etc)?17. What is your average monthly downtime?18. Do you use a CDN? If so, where are your caches located?19. Please provide a list of all the pages on which you will place scripts. ___________

________________________________________________________________

Page 11: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

10

STEP 4: CREATE A CENTER OF EXCELLENCE LED BY A TECHNICAL EXPERT

Several early adopters of marketing cloud management, including Equifax and IHG, have designated an individual stakeholder to lead and manage the process. The best candidate is part of the IT organization, or the Marketing IT organization. This digital technologist should be in charge of a cross-functional committee, or official center of excellence, with direct communication to both

digital marketing leaders and IT leaders. As one home improvement retailer put it, “We made sure our MCM leader answered to the IT team and had technical chops, but was business savvy enough to act as a true mediator across departments.”

An empowered center of excellence operates under the mandate that it will “control the marketing

cloud.” This group should consist of marketers who need technology on the site, as well as, analysts, data governance professionals, and IT managers who handle website performance and security. The group should have incentives objectively tied to overall business success, and not the special interests of individual departments.

“We made sure our MCM leader answered to the IT team and had technical chops, but was business savvy enough to act as a true mediator across departments.” - Head of Digital Marketing and Data Management Platforms, Fortune 100 Retailer

Page 12: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

11

GHOSTERY HAS FOUND THAT A GOOD MCM CENTER OF EXCELLENCE:

• Is headed by an IT leader who supports digital marketing• Evaluates and approves all vendors• Owns vendor contracts • Monitors all active vendors • Enforces security and performance best practices with all vendors• Performs initial and ongoing cost-benefit calculations• Owns the removal of vendors• Leads a group of cross-departmental stakeholders

Marketing Cloud Management Leader

Analytics

Data Governance

Legal

ITWeb Ops

Marketing

eCommerce

Page 13: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

12

STEP 5: THE FOUR PILLARS OF A GOOD DIGITAL VENDOR MANAGEMENT PROCESS

While a rigorous vendor management process is common in IT organizations, the discipline hasn’t yet found its way to digital marketing. Most vendors are compared and evaluated by the marketing team, or the media agency, simply for their benefits. Very rarely are vendors penalized for the hidden costs to the business – costs that often outweigh the benefits. Once implemented, vendors are only monitored for top-line

marketing performance—not against SLAs common on the IT team, or against revenue and order size metrics common to the commerce team.

Good digital vendor management will have material impacts to the marketing department, but it should increase overall ROI for the company. Martin Van Der Meij shared that his team at De Telegraaf has “removed the presence of

detrimental tags by 76 percent and improved tag speed by 62 percent, which has created a better user experience and more value for advertisers.”

In your vendor management process you’ll want to focus on four pillars to keep everyone aligned for:• Security• Performance• Governance• Competitive Intelligence

De Telegraaf has “removed the presence of detrimental tags by 76% and improved tag speed by 62%.” - Martin Van Der Meij, Head of Revenue Development, De Telegraaf

Page 14: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

13

SECURITY

Non-secure third party scripts placed on Hertz.com

7 “Into the Breach: Identity Theft Protection,” Annamaria Andriotis, The Wall Street Journal, 1/24/20148 “Content Widget Maker Taboola Is Hacked On Reuters,” Tim Wilson, Dark Reading, 6/24/2014

Your terms and conditions, as well as most vendor contracts, contain legal obligations to keep user data secure. Keeping your own assets secure is a business imperative. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, the number of data breaches is on the rise. More than 600 known breaches occurred in the U.S. in 2013.7 There are several security indicators to monitor within the marketing

cloud including tracking non-secure connections occurring between your vendors and your secure pages. The average secure web page deploys over 35 vendor tags. If this code were to make unencrypted calls or otherwise become compromised, all of the data transmitted by the page would be put at risk. It is also imperative to monitor any code or script changes that happen by your

vendors. The recent hack into Taboola’s widget on Reuters.com demonstrated that “websites need to think long and hard, not only about the security of their own servers, but whether the companies who are providing widgets and plugins that power the websites are taking security as seriously themselves,” according to Graham Cluley, a computer security expert.8

Page 15: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

14

PERFORMANCE

Place cost/benefit assessments front and center. Quantifying risks and costs up front goes a long way toward establishing better vendor management. Mandate that the team requesting a new vendor relationship present a description of the service the vendor will provide, as well as a revenue or benefit estimate. Once a vendor is approved, ask the marketing team to monitor the revenue created by that vendor quarterly.

A good process continually quantifies the following:

1. Does the vendor slow down the website?

2. Is the vendor breaching its SLAs?

3. Is the vendor’s technology working properly (for example, does it always load fully)?

4. Is the vendor limiting the functionality of your website (for example, is it breaking your video player)?

Determine the path dependency and load times for each of the digital vendors

Page 16: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

15

GOVERNANCE

The most important reason for creating a vendor management process is that your enterprise should own the contract relationship. If a third party controls the contract, you have signed away the rights to communicate with your own customers. By implementing a vendor management process, you are also setting the guidelines for vendor monitoring and removal, further empowering your center of excellence to maintain marketing cloud standards.

Several elements to mandate in your contract are:1. Business ownership: Basic governance can only occur if problems can be solved. The MCM

leader in your organization should know precisely whom to call — both inside and outside the company — when a vendor issue arrises. For example, if your Website Operations Manager and its agency counterpart both have responsibility for your Tag Manager, you should have contact information for both of them, as well as for the vendor account manager.

2. White lists and black lists: One of the easiest ways to know if you’re working with a new vendor is to create a living white list of approved vendors that is shared across the company. Similarly, if a vendor has been rejected from your site, placing them on a black list ensures they stay away. Implementing a real-time alert mechanism that is shared across the company and with partners — such as the tag manager and ad agency — is essential.

Page 17: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

16

GOVERNANCE

PointRoll

PointRoll

DoubleVerify

InsightExpress

Turn

Global Adsense

Experian Marketing Services

Sizmek

Voice Five

Double Click

ScoreCard Research Beacon

Ghostery Privacy Notice

3. Child tag limits: Several companies put strict limits on the number of additional vendors a tag can call from their website. This restricts the flow of customer data away from the website, reducing latency and security issues.

4. Data collection and resale restrictions: Many vendors, especially advertising agency trading desks and retargeters, use standard contract language that gives the vendor, not their clients, ownership over customers. In a vacuum, vendors will assume control, to the point that they own your customer — not you. Unless it is in your contract that they cannot resell your data, assume that they are doing just that.

This illustrates the child tag relationship across digital vendors, and how they were brought on to a site

Page 18: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

17

COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE

Marketing cloud management starts with an audit, but it doesn’t end with one. Vendors change; they bring in new partners, stop working, work more slowly after a code change, or change their data management practices overnight. You must be

monitoring their performance against competitors’ sites to understand the scope of these changes. For example, if they are causing site latency on your website, is it isolated or web-wide? Additionally, if you start working with a vendor who has few retail customers,

competitive data leakage is not a large risk. But over time, the vendor might add new retail customers, increasing the risk considerably, and putting the overall cost-benefit into question.

Company A

Page

Lat

ency

Company B Company C Company D

900 ms

800 ms

700 ms

600 ms

500 ms

400 ms

300 ms

200 ms

100 ms

0 msAug 10 Aug 11 Aug 12 Aug 13 Aug 14 Aug 15 Aug 16

Benchmark your company’s website performance against others in the industry

Page 19: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

18

CONCLUSION

Marketing cloud management is a growing discipline. If you are like the MCM champion at most enterprises, you are just beginning to understand the costs associated with the vendors in the marketing cloud. Whether you work with Ghostery Enterprise, with another provider, or develop the process in-house, the key to success is considering the costs and benefits to the whole business before allowing any marketing vendor access to your website or customer data. The only way to achieve this kind of balanced analysis is to work across departments. The sooner teams can objectively work together to better manage their marketing cloud, the sooner revenues, market share and profits will grow.

Page 20: Ghostery Enterprise - Best Practices White Paper

19

Ghostery is a technology company that empowers consumers and businesses expose and eliminate the digital blindspots in the Marketing Cloud - the collection of digital technologies that power, measure, socialize, and optimize performance. Over 40 million people globally rely on the free Ghostery browser extension to see and control the tracking technologies that follow them across the web. Businesses rely on Ghostery Marketing Cloud Management to drive ROI by maximizing the security, performance, and profitability of their digital assets. Key clients like Equifax, Intercontinental Hotels Group and Procter & Gamble depend on Ghostery to take their digital business from chaos to control. Ghostery also is the leading global provider of privacy governance services, powering compliance for more than $2 billion of advertising and e-commerce transactions annually. Founded in 2009, Ghostery is headquartered in New York City with a technology office in Salt Lake City and sales offices in London and San Francisco. The company is backed by Warburg Pincus LLC, the global private equity fund.

ghosteryenterprise.com

[email protected]

/ghosteryinc

@ghosteryinc

/ghosteryinc

10 East 39th Street, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10016 Ι 917.262.2530

ABOUT GHOSTERY ENTERPRISE