Adobe Advertising Cloud Partners Drive Measured Success in Cross-Channel Advertising

We’ve come a long way from the early days of advertising when the success of radio and television advertising was measured based solely on the ratings of the show in which they aired.

As a result, online advertising used similar metrics to gauge success when it first began, relying solely on audience size and page views, with limited insight into what customers did next with the information they consumed in ads.

As our understanding of measurement, along with the tools at our disposal to evaluate campaigns have become more sophisticated, so have the challenges associated with collecting and understanding the resulting data as customer journeys become increasingly complex.

The evolution of the customer journey

When audience ratings reigned supreme, entire families would gather around a single radio/TV set to consume programming. Channels for advertisers were limited.

Today there is no one source for anything. Your target customer might click on your ad while watching a video on an app, or search for you on their tablet after catching your spot on live TV. They might find you via a friend’s Instagram or from a voice search on a smart-home device.

If they’re typical consumers, then most likely every website visit, product search, and purchase is actually some combination of these and several other touchpoints. This increase in customer engagement across so many different platforms has the potential to give marketers meaningful audience insights if they have the right solutions to help them connect the dots.

Four common measurement and attribution issues solved

A lot is riding on marketers’ ability to connect data points from across the entire customer journey, including offline touchpoints. Step one is bringing down data silos to gain a deeper understanding of what really drives a customer and basing all future interactions with a person based on what you know about them.

That’s why we’ve built an ecosystem of third-party measurement partners capable of illuminating some prevalent measurement blind spots. Pulling in data from partners such as Nielsen Catalina Solutions and Cuebiq and Dynata, Adobe Advertising Cloud enables access to more than 70 key metrics, helping brands overcome these common challenges:

1. Smart TV integration

Smart TVs have become increasingly ubiquitous over the last few years – fueling improvements in CTV adoption and data access for advertisers. Right now, 46 million U.S. households have at least one smart TV — nearly two in five homes from coast to coast.

Despite increasing numbers of “plugged in” TV households, it’s been difficult for brands to utilize Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) data in their planning and measurement strategies due to both poor education on capabilities and lackluster integrations into tech stacks. This smart TV data represents one of the most powerful tools brands can use to attribute viewership, so the opportunity is notable.

This is one area where Adobe Advertising Cloud truly excels – leading the market in cross-screen measurement anchored by a powerful TV based device graph using ACR and DSP data. Having this data enables customers to “close the loop” by connecting linear TV with digital channels and actions.

By using Smart TV data to gather insights on what content and advertising is being viewed, and whether the viewer is watching linear, OTT, DVR, or VOD, marketers can gain a better understanding of their target audience and their content consumption in the TV space. Combine that with the robust digital data available within Adobe Advertising Cloud — first- and third-party, sales, CRM, website traffic, and mobile IDs, for example — brands can incorporate TV campaigns seamlessly into their marketing mix and measure success on common currencies that they’ve previously only used in digital measurement.

2. Disparate sources of information

It makes sense to distribute your advertising efforts across the different types of media and platforms your target customers like to use. But doing so can add up to a measurement headache, as you must work with each different partner to access and measure your data.

Compiling these disparate data points into a meaningful, holistic picture can be even trickier to do, if not impossible. You can avoid this hassle by consolidating your data and pulling your results from all distinct media buys into a single dashboard.

Measuring the customer journey without knowing where the customer ended up only gets you so far. To truly measure ROI, you ultimately need to know if your efforts resulted in a sale.

This is easier for some types of businesses than others — more specifically, direct-to-consumer brands have an inherent advantage because they own their sales data. But advertisers such as CPG brands, which sell their products through other retailers, have long had trouble matching sales results to their advertising efforts because they were missing that key piece of data. Working closely with verified partners, we’re able to pull in information such as CPG purchase data and purchase data, closing this all-too-common loop.

4. Data when you need it

The startup approach has influenced many business functions, including advertising. It’s commonplace to iterate campaigns mid-flight, launch a series of smaller, more targeted ads tailored to prospective customers’ behavior, or experiment with smaller campaigns before a broader release.

But these flexible, adaptive approaches only make sense if you have the ability to refine them based on what is and isn’t working, and you need the right tools to make that happen.

That means accessing key advanced metrics like offline sales before your campaign ends so that you can actually make decisions — not weeks afterworks like the industry standard. Adobe Advertising Cloud puts rich customer metrics back in the hands of buyers so they can yield better campaign results.

To learn more about Advertising Cloud and Analytics, click here.