Five Steps to Maximise Your Media Measurement

By Beth Carl­son & Ryan Trowbridge

It has nev­er been eas­i­er to reach large audi­ences quick­ly, but this dynamism has made it dif­fi­cult for brands to mea­sure the effect of adver­tis­ing spend on their bot­tom line.

The dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing mar­ket­place involves a grow­ing net­work of play­ers, all tar­get­ing cus­tomers in dif­fer­ent ways. Trans­ac­tions are being car­ried out across long, com­plex sup­ply chains, while “walled gar­dens” such as Face­book and YouTube only share and man­age data on their own terms, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to track how these chan­nels are deliv­er­ing val­ue in con­crete terms.

All this com­plex­i­ty can make track­ing your ad spend feel like a wild goose chase and make it dif­fi­cult to demon­strate val­ue for your invest­ment. Here are five tips to help you get the most out of track­ing and mea­sur­ing, while refin­ing your pro­gram­mat­ic approach.

1. Mea­sure your entire buy — To mea­sure the ROI of your adver­tis­ing invest­ment, you need to make sense of it as a whole. That’s why it’s cru­cial to look at your ad spend holis­ti­cal­ly across all chan­nels, from TV to search. This rais­es the ques­tion of how to put togeth­er a stan­dard­ised pic­ture of cross-chan­nel results, which is where demand-side plat­forms (DSPs) like Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud come into play, allow­ing you to con­sol­i­date data and devel­op this inte­grat­ed overview.
2. Align suc­cess met­rics with busi­ness goals – It seems obvi­ous, but many of us are guilty of assign­ing undue weight to sig­nals that are eas­i­ly avail­able at the expense of those that real­ly mat­ter. Con­sid­er what suc­cess will look like for a cam­paign and for your busi­ness before you define your met­rics. For exam­ple, are you look­ing to dri­ve tri­al and pen­e­tra­tion with new audi­ences? Or are you look­ing to dri­ve incre­men­tal spend among exist­ing cus­tomers? It’s impor­tant to engi­neer a mea­sure­ment frame­work that tells you how you’re track­ing against those goals.
3. Do more with your DSP – DSPs are instru­men­tal to bring­ing clar­i­ty to your adver­tis­ing sup­ply chain, but there are many dif­fer­ent approach­es to choose from. While it’s com­mon prac­tice to use sep­a­rate DSPs for dif­fer­ent chan­nels — a dis­play DSP for ban­ner ads, a video DSP for online video, a mobile DSP for mobile ads, and so on – this is still more com­pli­cat­ed than nec­es­sary. Some solu­tions com­bine a few of these chan­nels, but the best ones bring togeth­er every chan­nel, which is the key to con­sol­i­dat­ing all your data and man­ag­ing your cam­paign spend more effectively.
4. Incor­po­rate offline sig­nals – The best dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing influ­ences people’s behav­iour online and off. Cus­tomers often buy prod­ucts in-store after com­ing across them online or on social media, so it only fol­lows that these sig­nals should fac­tor into your analy­sis. Again, DSPs can help, allow­ing brands to plug offline actions into their dig­i­tal cam­paign measurement.
5. Evolve your per­for­mance mea­sure­ment – Dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing is an exer­cise in con­tin­u­ous­ly tweak­ing your approach based on what the data says. That’s why it’s impor­tant to take into account new para­me­ters as they become avail­able, for instance “loca­tion”, “audi­ence” and “device” on paid search. By tak­ing advan­tage of these new datasets, you can make bet­ter-informed adjust­ments to your bid­ding and ulti­mate­ly improve your paid search performance.

Mea­sur­ing the true effect of your adver­tis­ing invest­ment can be a daunt­ing and com­pli­cat­ed prospect, but the process can quick­ly be sim­pli­fied with some thought­ful plan­ning and the aid of ded­i­cat­ed tech­nol­o­gy like a DSP. Learn more about how Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud can help bring clar­i­ty to your media mea­sure­ment approach.