In our new series of articles titled INsider Questions, we have sought out some of the industry’s top figureheads to see what they think advertisers should be asking performance marketers to eke more out of their campaigns.
Each feature will cover a different topic and for today’s piece Darren Goldie, managing partner at Havas has provided the most important questions that he feels advertisers should be asking when it comes to the art of media measurement.
1. How do you decide what to measure?
Measurement is often the starting point for the majority of media strategy, planning & activation. Within the digital domain, this measurement needs to be considered carefully around the audience, conversion measure, environment, context and temporal aspects of the campaign.
Audience measurement through engagement, for example, might be a key indicator of future conversion both online and offline, but a poor indicator for brand affinity and longer term brand equity development. When deciding what to measure, it helps to think campaign objectives first, cross campaign measures (such as media value and audience insights) and then short and long brand and sales objectives.
We can then include measures from across media, audience, business & market to develop a more holistic view of the brand proposition in the market.
2. Why look to achieve a single view on consumers?
Consumers are rapidly changing the channels they use to interact with brands. Each channel, both online and offline have different measures and different ways of allocating consumer IDs. From social login, cookies, device IDs & transaction IDs etc there are a bewildering array of data available to marketers. If we add all this data together we get varying strengths of personally identifiable data which can be used by clients.
We suggest uniting these data points together to create a single view of your customers that will not only inform your media buying but drastically improve the role of retention and loyalty schemes through CRM and post sale marketing.
3. How do you understand media value across channels?
Attribution is beginning to take hold across the industry as clients begin to question the value of media. This is moving away from a last click view, which is in affect a ‘fully weighted’ last click attribution model, to a more representative view on which media channels drove which sales.
There are a number of technologies available in the market and it is important to make a choice based on the underlying suitability of the technology and the media channels you are looking to explore. It is possible to take offline data into a measurement platform so you can include DR data.
4. Why use measurement from the very beginning?
Measurement relies on data and data relies on the collection of discrete events. It is therefore important to use this data to inform planning and thereby increase the role of measurement in determining success.
I would recommend taking econometric and digital audience data from suppliers such as Mosaic from Experian into the planning framework to identify target audiences without ignoring existing brand awareness, affinity and purchase history.
The more ‘owned’ client data that can be squeezed into this model the more tactical your paid marketing will be. I suggest designing a planning tool to visualise this.
5. Why use a single tag management system?
Most clients find that after a while. they are using multiple tags to record on site behaviour. This is expensive, draining on resources and inefficient since a number of these tags are competing against themselves for data. Each tag is replicating the other and passing data back up the buying funnel which will cause different buying platforms to compete with one another. This creates an artificial market which will in some cases push up initial pricing of inventory.
I would recommend a quick audit and then seek input from a data planner to optimise the implementation alongside a site side data analytics expert.