The IAB Measurement Toolkit consolidates current best practices and provides guidance on measuring digital advertising campaigns in the context of other media channels. It sets out the main models and techniques that can be used to measure various metrics, such as econometrics and attribution modelling, showing how they fit together and how to use them accordingly. The guide concludes with a set of practical templates and checklists for creating your own measurement strategy.
‘Clickheads’
Announcing the occasion in a tongue-in-cheek manner, the organisation has sent a “Dear John”-style open letter to hundreds of advertisers and marketers accusing them of becoming “clickheads”, an amusing castigation of the industry’s reliance on vanity metrics to measure the effectiveness of online media. The lighthearted day of action also aims to raise awareness of failings in measuring the effectiveness of digital advertising campaigns and advertisers’ over-reliance on click-through rates to justify marketing spend through multiple channels.
“Advertisers increasingly rely on click-through-rates to justify their marketing spend to the chief financial officer but it’s not a reliable metric for effectiveness and only tells half the story. That’s why our message to the industry today is simple: don’t be a clickhead,” said IAB UK’s CMO James Chandler.
“Advertisers are faced with growing complexity and an increasing number of methodologies for ad measurement. This has created silos of expertise in organisations based around specific objectives and tools rather than supporting one unified, balanced approach,” commented IAB UK chief digital officer, Tim Elkington.
“Our IAB 2018 survey of brands found that 83% of brands view cross-media measurement as their single biggest measurement challenge. Our guide seeks to address this by focusing on how to measure advertising effectiveness and business outcomes across different media channels,” concluded Elkington.