{"id":1,"date":"2015-06-22T16:30:09","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T16:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.malharvyas.com\/?p=1"},"modified":"2025-04-21T14:18:32","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T14:18:32","slug":"digital-advertising-measurement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.malharvyas.com\/index.php\/2015\/06\/22\/digital-advertising-measurement\/","title":{"rendered":"Why is digital advertising measurement so complex?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"informationoverload\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

In a utopian world there would be one data source that would contain all the information that marketers and agencies would need to track the performance of their digital media. Unfortunately, the reality is far from that utopian idea. \u00a0As many frustrated analysts and digital marketers know, tracking the performance of digital media can be very time consuming and mind numbing. \u00a0Why is this the issue? \u00a0Data collection and sharing has accelerated at an unprecedented pace, nearly everything is trackable for digital media, and analysts have powerful open source tools at their disposal to make sense of the data faster. \u00a0In this post I will highlight four reasons for why measurement has become overly complex for digital media and offer some suggestions on how to improve measurement plans.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Aggregation vs Integration<\/b><\/p>\n

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Most of the time spent by analysts at agencies is around reporting. \u00a0Most of these analysts have mastered the use of excel and powerpoint. \u00a0Some might even know more advanced analytics related to testing and optimization, databases, and predictive analytics. \u00a0Still they are limited by the disjointed data-sets that they work with. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Agencies and marketers focus way too much on aggregating their data so they can present the information rather than investing in resources that can help them integrate the data. \u00a0A typical analyst might have to work with agency partners to gather the data in excel files, ad-server data, DMP data, data provided by research vendors, data provided by other agency partners across different Geo\u2019s. \u00a0All these data-sets only tell a part of that story and very few analysts can spot trends easily. \u00a0Furthermore this issue is amplified when marketers look at various channels such as search, website analytics, and display advertising in silos.<\/span><\/p>\n

The focus for marketers and agencies should be around creating a unified data source. \u00a0For media that is served through digital channels (and some offline channels), everything should be tracked in a Data Management Platform or a proprietary solution that focuses on reporting and analysis as much as creating audience segments.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Industry Challenges<\/b><\/p>\n

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Even if an agency evangelizes integrating their data, there are way too many players in the digital advertising space that work in a silo. \u00a0For example, Facebook and Twitter place a lot of constraints on placing external tracking of the media they serve. \u00a0All reporting is done through their interface or and data extracted from their APIs cannot fully be joined with the information inside a DMP. \u00a0This limits the ability to get an accurate picture of reach, frequency, and in building models that can help evaluate the performance of these channels.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mobile advertising spend is also increasing very fast and this channel is also measured in a silo. \u00a0Recent advances by Facebook Atlas in knowing the same user across mobile and web will definitely help mobile breakout of this silo. <\/span><\/p>\n

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Questionable business objectives<\/b><\/p>\n

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This challenge is the hardest to overcome as some agendas are pushed from the top-down. \u00a0For marketers that are not judged on the ultimate outcome metric (sales, leads, more sales!) digital advertising could be a total waste of money. \u00a0Earlier in my career I worked for a startup where we wanted to become very effective at collecting leads and converting them later through email. \u00a0Our goal was to increase the lead conversion rate, a top of the funnel goal. \u00a0I primarily utilized adwords search channel but I couldn\u2019t get more volume to our website. \u00a0I decided to try out Adwords similar audience feature to build a display campaign that would give us more traffic and in theory a similar audience that would sign up for our service at a similar rate. \u00a0After running the campaign for two months I analyzed both cohorts all the way through conversion and saw that the similar audience group had a 20% lead conversion rate and an overall paid conversion rate of 0.2%, while the control group had a lead conversion of 18% and an overall conversion rate of 3.5%. \u00a0This lesson really stuck with me for two obvious reasons. \u00a0One was always measure the most significant conversion event for your business and seldom create a measurement plan that tracks top of the funnel goals. \u00a0The second was more data integration. \u00a0If I had access to understand the audience make-up of both of these groups I might have identified the issue and could have tweaked my campaign for targeting the right audience.<\/span><\/p>\n

For some businesses measuring sales goals can be hard and they need to rely on top of the funnel goals for optimization purposes. \u00a0For them I recommend having a talented in-house team that can validate these top of the funnel goals and integrate data-sets that provide the analytical horsepower.<\/span><\/p>\n

At this point some agencies might make the case that digital advertising is important for shifting brand perception or attitudes, but few marketers or strategist know how shifting brand perception can increase\/decrease sales. \u00a0In my professional experience working with major brands, very few of them tied sales to shifts in attitudes and for those that did, almost all of them gave digital advertising the least credit (think 4p\u2019s!). \u00a0It is very easy to track impressions, clicks, visits, and maybe even top of the funnel conversions, but it is extremely difficult to tie shifts in attitudes to real sales. \u00a0Even if the agency or the client has the expertise to build models that can tie attitudes to sales oftentimes these models are rarely actionable and almost always don\u2019t influence any optimizations for on-going campaigns. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Explosion of data providers<\/b><\/p>\n

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Companies that provide viewability, fraud detection, and brand safety solutions are the new kids on the block for 2015. \u00a0Many of them have created a fear and hysteria that half of the display ads are viewable. \u00a0While this is true, marketers and agencies need to understand how they can use these new data-sets. \u00a0Will they provide any actionable results? \u00a0Right now that answer is not clear. \u00a0While advertisers armed with this new data might have more negotiating power when planning media with publishers, the methods to track viewability and fraud are far from ideal. \u00a0The current IAB standards state that an ad impression is viewable if it is in view within the browser for one second. \u00a0Even if this standard is agreed upon by many advertisers, there are lots of different formats that are not supported, and the measurement protocols across browsers is not standardized. \u00a0Even worse, many of these new vendors are not integrated with ad-servers or with the conversion touchpoints for an advertiser. \u00a0This means data is merely aggregated at a publisher level without any knowledge of whether a viewable impression improves the chances of a conversion occurring for the marketer.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Fight for more data and transparency<\/b><\/p>\n

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Agencies and marketers that build agile data solutions which integrate these various data sets at an impression level are best positioned to deliver highly actionable analyses. \u00a0Agencies need to re-think their hiring process and ensure that there are talented analysts who can work with massive amounts of integrated data and build predictive models, engineers that can help build, maintain, and improve these data solutions, strategists that are analytical and experienced to ask the right questions, and project managers that ensure that the changing requirements and technology help keep the data reliable. \u00a0The feasibility to integrate various data sources needs to be the guiding principle for creating a measurement plan. \u00a0CMOs should also adjust their expectations and re-think the agency-client relationship to one that involves data-sharing, trusting agencies to prescribe solutions for the strategy, and truly understanding the measurement plan and how it impacts their bottom line.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a utopian world there would be one data source that would contain all the information that marketers and agencies would need to track the performance of their digital media. Unfortunately, the reality is far from that utopian idea. \u00a0As many frustrated analysts and digital marketers know, tracking the performance of digital media can be … Continue reading Why is digital advertising measurement so complex?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malharvyas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malharvyas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malharvyas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malharvyas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malharvyas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.malharvyas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.malharvyas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/9"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malharvyas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malharvyas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malharvyas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}