Notes:

Mobile Growth Lab
Doors are open to the third edition of our workshop series The Mobile Growth Lab, designed to help you break the shackles of ATT’s measurement and performance losses and win in a post-IDFA world. The workshop kicks off on the 26th of July, 2022.

We have some exciting sessions planned and also some awesome guest mentors – Matej, Thomas, Claire & Eric.

Register for the workshop here: https://mobilegrowthlab.com/

We have a growing community of mobile marketers!

The Mobile Growth Lab Slack: A community that was a part of our workshop series – The Mobile Growth Lab, is now open to the general public. Join over 200 mobile marketers to discuss challenges and share your expertise. More details are available here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/slack/

If you’re ready to join the growing community, fill this form: https://forms.gle/cRCYM4gT1tdXgg6u5

ABOUT ANNICA: LinkedIn | Sable | The Nuances of the brave ads platform | Decentralized media in the web 3 era 

ABOUT ROCKETSHIP HQ: Website | LinkedIn  | Twitter | YouTube

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🏏 Basic Attention Token (BAT) – What is it?

🎯 Audience targeting in the Brave network

🤿 How Brave ads compare to Google Search or Facebook ads

 🕸 Top line KPIs available on the Brave network

🪐 The “dismiss ad” feature

☂️ How is Brave more privacy friendly?

🧉 How performance is affected on Brave from an advertiser’s perspective

🎤 Can incentivized ads lead to poor metrics?

 ⛳️ Potential for fraud on the Brave network.

 🚧 Comparing the results with other networks

🕳 The potential for privacy risk when compared to IDFA

KEY QUOTES

Defining Basic Attention Token

What the Brave browser does is they think users deserve to get paid for their attention. So if you spend a certain amount of time on an ad, they feel like your attention is worth something. So you will get paid and they call this token the Basic Attention Token.

The possibility of fraud on the Brave network

A lot of Brave browser users are not actually in the United States. They actually found loopholes, they use the VPN to pretend they are in the United States. So I know there is some targeting fraud. It’s just not being targeted to the right people. So I see that and I believe, perhaps Brave knows about the problems. So this is something I think they need to figure out how to resolve.

The first mover advantage

I will say that’s the advantage of advertising with some newer platforms because they offer much cheaper CPMs, or CPCs to advertisers. So for that reason, I say, “Okay, if it doesn’t work at least we tried and it wasn’t so expensive.” I’m just trying to have that first mover advantage. And second is to learn this in a Web 3 technology and then start thinking about how we can adapt this for the future. 

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth  

I’m very excited to welcome Annica Lin to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Annica, welcome to the show.

Annica  

Hi, how are you? It’s been a while. 

Shamanth Rao  

Yes, we’ve crossed paths digitally a long time ago and then in person. Excited to have you here. 

Annica  

 Excited to be here too.

Shamanth  

You’re truly inspiring in terms of what you write and what you share about yourself and your work outside of growth and marketing. I enjoy reading a lot of your stuff, we’ll link to all of that as well. Let’s get into the topic for the day. A good place to start is perhaps to tell us what is the Basic Attention Token. And can you explain how it works?

Annica  

Basic attention token is like a cryptocurrency that’s built on the Ethereum platform and that’s a very unique feature of the Brave browser.

What the Brave browser does is they think users deserve to get paid for their attention. So if you spend a certain amount of time on an ad, they feel like your attention is worth something. So you will get paid and they call this token the Basic Attention Token.

So it happens when you are on the Brave Browser, and you opt in to see up to 10 ads an hour. You will be able to see ads from advertisers like Sable. If the browser sees you fix that interest or the category of targeting and if you see the ads and engage you will get paid. So that’s the meaning of Basic Attention Token.

Shamanth  

So you basically get to monetize your own attention. You are your own ad network in some ways, which is such an interesting twist on advertising as we know it, and you have certainly been diving deep into a lot of this. Help us understand, if you’re basically our own ad network, how does audience targeting work in Brave ads?

Annica  

For Brave ads it’s still very early. I don’t think they’ve released their search product yet. So they will actually invite us to be part of the search beta partner. They have two types of targeting – one is geo targeting, which is on the country level. The second is user targeting where you have about 21 categories like architecture, business, career, very broad categories. However, we can only target one device – iOS, Android, or desktop.

Shamanth 

After having been accustomed to Google search or Facebook ads, that can seem somewhat limiting, right? So what has been your experience as an advertiser, what’s been effective, and what’s not been effective in your experience?

Annica  

I would say almost everything is different, so almost everything is affected. For setting up a campaign – we are so accustomed to log into a platform, put in a bid and launch a campaign in five minutes. With Brave, it’s actually on Asana, like a survey. You have to select your target country, target category and everything in the Asana page, and then submit it. They will set up everything for you. After the campaign has been set up, you will receive a link to access a very high level of your campaign performance. But you cannot make an optimization yourself, you can just look at the very top line KPIs.

Shamanth  

Yeah, and what are the top line KPIs that you can look at?

Annica  

Similar to other platforms they have, impressions, clicks, click through rate, conversions, conversion rate. Something very interesting is that they actually have a “dismiss” feature. A user can choose to dismiss an ad. I can look at the percentage of dismiss ads as well. So that’s something unique from their platform.

Shamanth  

Are you tracking pixel based conversions? How does this work?

Annica  

Yeah, that’s a great question. 

We are an app mobile first company. So a lot of action happens in the app. But luckily, we have very unique web-to-app onboarding funnels, we actually have certain actions happen on the web. So that allows us to be able to advertise with Brave.

If you are an app only company and you can only run app campaigns, that will be a little problematic, because they stopped working with MMPs two years ago. They say MMPs breach their privacy regulations. So if an app uses Brave to monetize, it will just look like everything’s coming from organic. So we do track just top of funnel pixel base conversion.

Shamanth 

And I know one of the value props for Brave is that there’s a lot of emphasis on privacy. So is the pixel very similar to Chrome, or say Firefox, is it much more privacy friendly? Do you know any specifics about this?

Annica  

What I learned from the internet is, they actually block a lot of tracking and also cross site cookies fingerprinting, so I think they only allow first party cookies for now. They don’t allow any third party tracking at all. What’s interesting is, on the browser itself, you can see their protocol shield. So they tell you, what they have been blocking through Brave on this page. A lot of people have told me how much they love that about this browser because first, it’s so much faster and secondly, they feel more secure with their data as well because the data only stays on a local browser, it doesn’t get sent to any server at all.

Shamanth 

Which makes me wonder, in Chrome, there is a lot of sharing of data. You could argue that it’s very beneficial to advertisers and there’s some value to that. So, as an advertiser, do you think there’s a performance sacrifice with something like Brave?

Annica  

So I often think of this question from a lot of different perspectives. Obviously, from the advertiser side, we love data. The more we have the better and, better the targeting capability we have, the better. But I also want us to start thinking from the users’ perspective as well, because that’s where the train is going. So I am now actually preparing myself to start adopting this train. So using Brave now to see, “Okay, now, everything’s so limited. How can we still try to measure some impact on the performance level?” To be honest, I still feel I’m trying to learn and get used to it. I don’t really love it. But this is reality a lot of advertisers have to face and pretty soon in about three years. 

Shamanth 

I think that’s definitely not unlikely. Another aspect of Web 3 advertising that I’m curious about is, when you say, a user’s going to be viewing ads, they’re going to be getting BAT (Basic Attention Token). A lot of that sounds like incentivized ads on digital. Do you think that could result in wrong incentives for customers? Incentivized ads on digital just lead to terrible retention, terrible lifetime value. So do you think there could be similar wrong incentives?

Annica  

I will say yes, and no. A lot of friends told me they enable the ad, they’re actually opting to watch an ad when they use Brave. But what Brave does is, they actually understand what page you’re on to see what you were interested in and then serves the ads to users. It’s still kind of targeted so it’s not like Brave doesn’t know what you want or what you like and just serves different items. 

So let’s say I’m a person who uses some apps. I’m learning French from Duolingo. Even they actually gave me a lot of incentivized opportunities to watch an ad because I need to earn more hearts, or whatever. But those apps are all relevant to me. So I see ads that I need either for work or personal stuff, because Duolingo knows a lot about me so I am still impacted by the product they advertise.

Shamanth  

That’s very interesting, because, at least in digital, I’ve seen contextual ads to not always be effective. It sounds like you’re seeing contextual ads. I wonder if it could also just be because you’re also able to vote on the ads by basically saying, dismiss. So the system’s actually learning your preferences and refining it over time. And I think that could be a factor as well.

Annica  

Yeah. I believe that’s also been factored in when they decide what to show and what not to show.

Shamanth  

Like we’ve discussed, there’s a monetary incentive for people. When there are monetary incentives, there’s usually potential for fraud. Do you see that having started? Do you see that possible in the future? How do you see that play out?

Annica  

I actually did a lot of research on this as well. Most of the advertisers in the United States want to target people in the United States. And,

a lot of Brave browser users are not actually in the United States. They actually found loopholes, they use the VPN to pretend they are in the United States. So I know there is some targeting fraud. It’s just not being targeted to the right people. So I see that and I believe, perhaps Brave knows about the problems. So this is something I think they need to figure out how to resolve.

I myself tell them that this is something I have found out and ask them to perhaps start working on fixing that.

Shamanth  

The ubiquity of VPN, that can certainly be a challenge that people try to game the system with the highest CPMs in the US. I think that would make sense. I’m also curious, I know you said you explored this as an advertiser as well. To the extent you’re comfortable sharing, can you share what kinds of results you’ve gotten and how it compares to your other channels?

Annica  

Obviously, the upfront engagement looks really good. We know a lot of people actually engage with the ads and then, they click through, they come to the page. But the thing is, that conversion rate that we are looking for, hasn’t been there yet. So we want to know if this is some tracking issue? Because I know that they also have some problems with the GA tracking as well. So we want to kind of make sure it’s not a data problem but is a real performance problem. I’m seeing a lower conversion rate, but I don’t know what’s the problem right now because we’re still trying to talk to them and see what happened. 

Shamanth Rao  

As with most new platforms, are you also seeing very low CPMs and perhaps CPCs?

Annica  

I will say that’s the advantage of advertising with some newer platforms because they offer much cheaper CPMs, or CPCs to advertisers. So for that reason I say, “Okay, if it doesn’t work at least we tried and it wasn’t so expensive.” I’m just trying to have that first mover advantage. And second is to learn this in a Web 3 technology and then start thinking about how we can adapt this for the future. 

Shamanth Rao  

Absolutely, it’s got to be early in the game. 

It’s good to join a wave to optimize for learning, because that’s going to pay off in the future. 

Annica in one of your articles you wrote, with the decentralized web, each real user will have their own non fungible ID, and that will let platforms eliminate fake or non-human traffic. Obviously, that’s an advantage that addresses some of the fraud. But if a user has a non-fungible ID, do you think that could also result In a privacy risk, like IDFA.

Annica  

It’s a very different concept. When we talk about IDFA, IDFA is an ID that’s created by a centralized platform, the user has no control over that. It’s the unit number attached to use this device, right? And then the difference with the non-fungible token is, I actually own that NFT and I get to decide as a user, if I wanted to share my data with an advertiser or not. So this is like giving power back to the user, instead of the big platform that’s controlling everything and then monetizing other users’ identity, or privacy. So Web 2 and Web 3 are very different. 

Shamanth Rao  

I think it’s good for you to spell it out and explain. That’s very helpful to understand. 

Annica, I think this has been very instructive. This in many ways still blows my mind, just because it’s a very different way to think about advertising and marketing. It takes a while to wrap your head around the how. So thank you for demystifying a lot of this. This is perhaps a good place for us to start to wrap. But before we do that, can you tell folks how they can find out more about you?

Annica  

LinkedIn will be the best place to find me if they want to follow me professionally. And then if they want to follow my social welcome, they can also follow me @runannicarun on my Instagram for workout content. I always encourage people to be more active. More movement is medicine for us.

Shamanth Rao  

100%. And you’ve spoken about and written about this quite a bit. You write quite a lot and if people follow you on LinkedIn, they can check out your writing as well. But yeah, we’ll link to all of that. But for now, this is a good place for us to wrap. Thank you so much, Annica for being a guest in the Mobile UA Show.

Annica  

Thank you.

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify, Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

Constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement are welcome, whether on podcasting platforms – or by email to shamanth at rocketshiphq.com. We read all reviews & I want to make this podcast better.

Thank you – and I look forward to seeing you with the next episode!