It so happened that we (the team of the telecom company UIS ) literally just went through the process of choosing a contractor for the automation of contextual advertising. There was a lot of correspondence, reflection, questions and additional questions. Now that everything is over, and so far we have chosen one company for ourselves for working testing - I want to share the experience gathered. It will be great if it is useful to someone else and saves time.

The task of choosing a service was set up on the fragile shoulders of our marketer, Oli Glazunova:


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“Probably worth telling how it all began. I selected applicants who were already known to me at that time or were easily found in the search, thought I wanted them, and sent everyone a support letter with questions. In general, that's all. And one more thing. If someone from the services sees himself in the review differently than he himself imagines, then let him not be offended. I included the features in their arsenal into the final test based on the information that was sent to me in response to the letter. This I specify just in case. And then someone else will be upset, and we may be testing them next :) ”

So, everything is in order.

Disposition: why do we need it and our main "Wishlist"

Cursed Mines

Of course, one of the main insights that happened to us at the very beginning of the journey was the realization that we simply could not cope on our own. It takes an unjustifiably large amount of time that you could spend on your loved ones something else that helps to set up a growing group of our ad campaigns.

Mercantile interest

The next thought was that using automated strategies was not only pleasant, but also useful. They will allow us to more effectively manage advertising, optimize costs and improve quality performance, we decided.

CoMagic should stay

At that time, we already used CoMagic to collect data and analyze conversion for all sources of requests. Therefore, it was necessary to automate the work with contextual advertising so that the automation service could integrate with CoMagic via API. In order to make it clear why this condition was necessary, we will briefly explain how CoMagic tamed us so.

This is an end-to-end advertising analytics service that automatically collects statistics on any possible communication channels together (both online and offline - which, as you already understood, is extremely important for us). At the same time, it combines purely analytical tools and means of communication with site visitors. We use all of these in order not to lose sales and keep a record of them in the context of all advertising campaigns and channels of website downloads. If in figures, then for the first year of using the service, the number of monthly quality calls through our site has grown by 80 — about one and a half times compared to what happened before.

Offline not forgotten

This item - rather a logical extension and the addition of the previous one. Thanks to CoMagic, we knew that the main conversion sources on the site for UIS are the so-called offline channels (mostly phone calls). Therefore, we needed a solution that, when setting up automated rules, is able to take into account all references from the site, both online and offline.

"On a pencil": rates and stability of special placements

If we are to shift the responsibility, then with manic perfectionism. It was important for us to automate the control of rates and to be 100% sure that certain key requests will never fly out of the special placement.

They stood silently in a row, there were seven

Through the prism of these basic requests with the addition of some other wishes, we approached the selection process. We chose from seven services offering our professional assistance in the context automation business that we are interested in: MediaGuru.Professional , Origami , Direct Manager , K50 , Garpun , eLama , and Alytics .
And what information we were able to collect for each of them after a certain time of communication with support departments. Once again we will make a reservation that we enrolled each of the parameters in the pros or cons based on our picture of the world.

And the Oscar goes to ...

It turned out that only four of the services considered could be able to implement integration with CoMagic for us (and, accordingly, would learn to take into account data on offline conversion). Among them, Origami has become the definitive leader in terms of the total number of advantages. However, Providence intervened here: the guys from Origami initially abandoned the potential partnership because of the need to further customize integration with CoMagic (for example : now, at the time of publication of the material, they are ready for this).

Therefore, so far, our Olya has chosen K50 for working testing and “recorded” Alytics in the backup versions. Now we are familiarizing all our tools with each other and stocking up on popcorn are preparing to evaluate the potential synergies from combining capacities.

That's how it was. Perhaps, we have told about something, not going too deeply, so if you still have any questions - welcome in the comments! And if you yourself use some kind of advertising automation service, please share your experience.