Smartly.io Blog

When Smartly.io opened its first overseas office in San Francisco last fall, Miikka was one of the first Smartlies to start working on opening North and Latin American markets for the company. We sat down for lunch and a chat in Hayes Valley, and Miikka shared his story — a story that rather perfectly illustrates how quickly you get responsibility and how fast you can grow at Smartly.io.

Miikka joined the company about a year ago as a 24-year-old Industrial Engineering and Management master's student, with a heart beating for tech and code, and a wish to learn sales and marketing. Before joining Smartly.io, he worked as a developer and Scrum Master for a small company for two years alongside studies. “There I realized that in smaller, agile teams, you have less bureaucracy and overhead, and you get more responsibility. Once I started eyeing other opportunities, I was determined to find a place where I could develop quickly through fast execution and challenging projects.”

» Read More

Facebook launched an advanced matching feature in their conversion pixel (known as the Facebook Pixel) that enables you to send your customer data through the pixel to match more website actions with Facebook users. Why should you, as an advertiser, get excited and implement it right away? I’ll explain this in more detail below, but in a nutshell, it improves your ability to track conversions and can increase advertising reach by 5-25%!

» Read More

 Smartly.io is a global company powered by 90 employees in 5 offices, covering 4 continents: Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia. To better serve our customers in Asia, we opened an office in Singapore early this year. Now, we’re in search of business talents to join our growing team of four in Singapore.

Asia-Pacific is a compelling market for any online advertising company. It’s the world’s leading retail ecommerce market and the number of Facebook Monthly Active Users in the area is increasing quickly. Smartly.io started serving customers in Asia in September last year. First, we handled the customer relations from our HQ in Helsinki, but by the end of the year, the number of our customers in Southeast Asia had grown too big to handle across 5 time zones. As Smartly.io is all about quality customer service, we decided to open an office in Singapore to be able to serve our customers better.

» Read More

Earlier this summer, we celebrated the 3rd anniversary of Smartly.io together with the whole team, our families and close friends. In three years, we’ve grown from just two founders into a team of almost 90 professionals. We owe our healthy growth to three things: our amazing team, our great customers and partners at Facebook, and our ethos of maximizing learning at all times.

» Read More

We hired the first ever Smartly.io Summer Squad during the spring, and now they’re hard at work, building software, closing clients and empowering our recruiting. Meet Anton, Antti, Arash, Siiri and Roope - and hear what it’s like to be a Summer Squader at Smartly.io.

» Read More

Clicks, sessions, likes, engagement, conversions, sales, return on ad spend, lifetime value. Online advertisers today have an overflowing variety of metrics available to measure their campaign performance. Various attribution models add to that complexity, creating a never ending discussion of “how should we measure results?”. My goal in this post is to provide you some guidelines and reasons for moving towards revenue and LTV-based optimization, based on how we at Smartly.io see the most successful advertisers around the world answer the question.

» Read More

At Smartly.io, we strongly believe that recruiting is the third crucial startup skill, right after building a great product with an excellent market fit and scaling customer acquisition through outstanding sales and marketing. This is why we put a lot of time, brainpower and enthusiasm into attracting the brightest talent and building a five-star team.

» Read More

A great creative is relevant and catches the eye. So why use static ads when you can show familiar items to grab attention and ensure accuracy with user-level recommendations of Dynamic Ads?

Facebook is expanding the capabilities of Dynamic Ads to support optimization towards mobile app installs. These campaigns are based on the same product catalogs as other Dynamic Ads, using Facebook’s great retargeting & recommendation engine with proven results.

» Read More

On Facebook, advertisers can bid and pay directly for the final conversion goal, for example, purchases. As such, conversion optimized bidding is one of the most useful and simple features in Facebook marketing. In this blog post, we share our learnings on how to select bid amounts and optimization goals to maximize the results of your Facebook marketing.

» Read More

Sami Kukkonen is a 22-year-old Economics and Computer Science student, who started working with us at Smartly.io as a Software Engineer four months ago. He’s a beginner golfer and an avid foodie. Here’s a look at why we wanted to hire him and why he decided to join the team.

» Read More

Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends Report was just recently released. Since it was first published in 2001, its reputation as a must-read overview of where the tech industry is going has only kept growing. It’s mostly US-focused, but a useful peek into what might be coming in other markets too. If you don’t have time to plough through all 200+ slides, here are the highlights. Check out the full presentation below.

» Read More

We often get asked about how we do bid optimization with Facebook ads. For advertisers used to Google Adwords bidding, Facebook’s bidding options may seem complicated at first. Our approach begins with using a bid that represents the true value of a conversion to the advertiser and refraining from frequent bid manipulations, which may differ from other approaches you have seen. Read on to find out why.

» Read More

One out of every five minutes we spend on our phones is on either Facebook or Instagram.

» Read More

All visitors to your website are not equal. Some visitors have a stronger buying intent than others and recognising who those customers are is not such an easy task. You may want to bid differently or even craft different creatives for these different types of visitors. Facebook’s new Website Custom Audience rules make this easier than ever before.

» Read More

Python and R are some of the best open source tools for data science. They can be easily used for scripting and custom analysis but running them automatically as part of an online software requires more consideration. At Smartly.io, we’ve been using them both extensively. In this blog post, I’ll share some of our experiences of integrating them in production.

» Read More

Starting today, Dynamic Products Ads (DPA) are finally available on Instagram, meaning it’s now time to retarget potential customers on Instagram as well as Facebook. Have they seen one of your products but not yet added it to their cart? Have they added your product to their cart but not yet purchased it? Follow their intent and move them up the funnel, by showing them the right creative in the right placement – which now includes Instagram.

» Read More

For a year now, advertisers have been able to achieve unparalleled performance with Facebook’s Dynamic Ads for Products, the retargeting solution built especially for eCommerce. To better serve the specific needs of the travel industry, Facebook is launching a new product – Dynamic Ads for Travel (DAT). We are thrilled to be offering DAT for Facebook and Instagram through Smartly.io right from the launch.

» Read More

Advertising campaigns have many steps, but creating content and distributing it to the right audiences are always there, no matter whether you’re prospecting for new customers or growing the value of existing ones. Making these two steps less work-intensive leaves you with more time to concentrate on and refine other parts of your marketing strategy to drive greater value.

» Read More

One of the great things about Facebook advertising is how effectively the platform optimises for your objectives right out of the box. But to get further ahead, Facebook advertisers need to understand their key success metrics, and this is much easier when you’re able to make statistically valid comparisons between various tactics and strategies. The Ad Studies feature is designed to make such comparisons easy by sorting members of your audience randomly into different study groups. In this post we’ll take a closer look at this feature and why it matters, before discussing best practices and some examples.

» Read More

Finding the best way to allocate a campaign’s budget between multiple ad sets can be difficult and time-consuming. Our Predictive Budget Allocation, which was initially released last summer, uses machine learning to automate this work for you. In this blog post we'll look at recent improvements that make it even better. Using Predictive Budget Allocation remains as easy as it's always been: you only have to choose the goal that Predictive Budget Allocation should optimize towards.

» Read More

Facebook launched cross-sell and upsell campaigns for dynamic product ads a few months ago. They’re great ways to increase your customer lifetime value by leveraging Facebook’s behavioral data. We’ll cover some innovative and advanced ways of using this feature and optimizing performance. Let’s check out a few examples first:

» Read More

Does it really matter how I structure my Facebook campaigns? Yes. And it matters a lot when you want to increase your marketing volumes without skyrocketing costs.

» Read More

Every company with an online presence will face the question of whether to build an in-house online marketing team or to outsource to a specialised agency. The question first pops up when starting online marketing operations, but may become relevant later on, as marketing needs and goals change over time.

» Read More

With the newly launched Facebook Engagement Audiences, you can create custom audiences based on people who’ve watched or completed certain videos. In addition to being a powerful remarketing technique, this also means that telling stories with sequenced videos is no longer exclusive to just reach and frequency buying, but can also be achieved with the flexible budgets and bids of normal campaigns.

» Read More

Promoting well-performing page posts is a great way to build on your organic reach and bring new prospective customers to your site. We wanted to make it a easier with a bit of automation.

» Read More

Facebook Pixels build Custom Audiences from your website traffic. But, what does the Facebook Pixel enable? What is it really? And how do I set it up in Google Tag Manager?

» Read More

Editor’s note: The original blog post was published in June 2015. We’ve since opened an office in Singapore, which made it possible for us to launch 24/5 customer service.

» Read More

The first ever Summer Squad is on a search for its members! We’ve collected a few questions and answers on Summer Squad that you might have been pondering. Hope you find these useful and they provide an extra pinch of motivation to apply.

» Read More

» Read More

Since oCPM, CPC and CPA bidding merged into Facebook’s new optimized bidding setup, people have been shell-shocked of where they went. In reality, nothing but their names changed and more optimization options were introduced.

» Read More