AdLink

Marketers struggle with creating highly targeted landing experiences for paid media campaigns at scale. Using Monetate's Experience feature, marketers can create multiple landing destinations in an agile way to provide the visitors a continuous experience from when they see and click an ad to when they land on their site.

This would be easy if the same team was doing all the work in one interface. Teams responsible for creating the experiences are organizationally different from the ones creating paid media, however. This creates a silo where the marketing team has no idea which paid media campaigns are running and for which ones to optimize the landing experience.

Monetate's AdLink feature allows marketers to pull paid media campaigns from whatever platform they are on (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) into Monetate, thereby giving marketers a clear view within a single interface. This ability helps them better understand the matching experiences they need to create.

Account Setup

1. Monetate files a ticket with the #it-help Slack channel (or in Samanage) to create the AdLink alias management account. This covers steps 1 and 2 explained at https://github.com/monetate/monetate-server/tree/master/webui/monetate/adbridge/google.
2. Monetate requests the client's Google AdWords customer ID(s), which can be found by clicking the question mark in the top-right corner of the AdWords interface.
3. Monetate invites a client account to be managed.

   Ensure that the request is for read-only access.

   1. Sign in to the Google Ads manager account you just created.
   2. From the page menu on the left, click Accounts, and then click Management at the top of the page.
   3. Click the plus (+) icon.
   4. Click Link existing account.
   5. Enter the Google Ads account's customer ID number.
   6. Click Send invitation.
4. The client opens the invitation email from Google AdWords and then clicks Accept Request.
5. To complete the linking process, the client clicks Accept on the resulting page.
6. Once the link is made, file a ticket with Support for steps 3 through 7 in the AdLink readme at https://github.com/monetate/monetate-server/tree/master/webui/monetate/adbridge/google.

Future versions will automate the process of creating management accounts and inserting and updating account credentials by exposing push-button management of this in the UI.

Campaign Setup

For each account you want to link, the account must have a static urlSuffix parameter defined (for example, mnt_campaign=12345). This can be any parameter or parameter combination, but it must be a unique string for each experience you want to match uniquely to a given AdWords campaign.

Once you set up this information, you can then see the same campaign on the AdLink Campaigns page in the Monetate platform.

Clicking CREATE EXPERIENCE on the AdLink Campaigns page allows you to configure a new experience that has the WHO target automatically set up to pull visitors from the ad campaign. Click SAVE to confirm the target.

Configure the WHAT settings and the rest of the experience, and then click ACTIVATE.

Data Privacy

Monetate populates AdLink with the campaign names, click-through URLs, and statuses pulled from the client's ad delivery platforms (Google Ads in this example). It does not pull user-specific data to do so.

Monetate understands the sensitive nature of personal identifiable information (PII). It's one of many reasons that Monetate designed the AdLink click-through in this way. To trigger the correct experience when clicking through from a creative, only a string unique to the experience needs to be appended to the URL. It should not be unique to the user. The campaign setup in the example in this documentation suggests using a string containing only the campaign ID, but the identifier could be as simple as the given search term or the name of the experience itself. No additional identifying information is necessary.