Ad technology today makes it possible for advertisers to get unprecedented visibility into the ads they run (site, placement, audience, frequency etc) and the action they elicit (pages viewed, form filled in, info requested etc).
Yet, a recent survey we conducted with BSB Media as part of the International Media Image Survey found that, in fact, the majority of CMOs struggle to get the transparency and measurability they want out of digital advertising. It all leads me to wonder, with all the technology available, are advertisers still unintentionally keeping themselves in the dark?
I would say yes, especially when it comes to how many advertisers measure success today. In particular, the industry hang-up on click through rates needs to be challenged. All the evidence shows that there is no correlation between click through rates and business success, especially where businesses have offline sales as part of their offering.
So why on earth do people measure it?
Part of this is data overload: CMOs are also telling us that most of the information they receive provides them with little value at all. The problem is that all the data in the world is useless unless you first understand what success looks like, create your KPIs around them – and then work out what data you will need to measure your performance against them.
As part of this process, you also need to take a view on what measurements you shouldn’t focus on. For many marketers, picking the wrong – but easy – metric is more convenient.
But with metrics so far askew, it becomes nearly impossible to optimise towards success. As it pertains to click-through rates, there is simply not enough depth to the measurement to provide any real meaning behind the click. Moreover, there is also a more pernicious factor in that many clicks today are driven by webbots rather than humans, which means that reports showing high click through rates can be worse than useless.
Getting to better metrics requires both smarter analytical models and more transparency in campaign execution. In fact I challenge advertisers to tell me what websites their ads are appearing on today and get me a screen shot.
Tracking was so much simpler with TV and press advertising. The level of complexity in online advertising, with up to 20 intermediaries and vendors getting involved in the supply chain, actually makes it difficult for brands to know where their money has gone.
As for the analytical model, marketers should start with a hypothesis around what indicators are predictive of engagement and purchase. Then they can put resource into testing these and the correlations between them and offline behaviour to see what makes a real difference over time. There are some excellent advanced attribution and analytical tools available now which can start to add meaning to ad data and identify where advertising is creating incremental revenue.
If brands bring the buying and measurement of their online advertising into one place, this can really help to reduce the complexity in the data and bring marketers out of the darkness when it comes to building transparency around where their budget is actually being spent.
Perhaps most importantly, however, advertisers need to be brave. For many, it can actually be a struggle to make digital marketing look good for the Board. So to then say that you were measuring the wrong thing in the first place takes courage and intellectual honesty.
However, the New Year is a good time to start doing things differently – and surely being good has to be better (and feel better) than looking good.
