Last week, we hosted a webinar on digital marketing metrics, and how we see the future of reporting shaking out. In short, we think there’s a problem with the current state of metrics, and offered what we see as some solutions.
Let’s start with the problem(s). Only a quarter of ad spend ever hits real people, according to the Association of National Advertisers. A recent report from GroupM put the costs of ad fraud in the U.S. at about $2.49 billion. In short: a lot of marketers’ ad spend is being wasted on bots, click farms, or other impressions that aren’t real, verified humans who are actually interested in hearing their message.
So a lot of marketers are already playing from behind.
They’re getting reporting and metrics that are counting these fraudulent impressions as real when they’re anything but. One way to combat this is to vet your people-based marketing platform. When choosing a partner, be specific about what people-based actually means, because it’s a term that gets thrown around loosely.
A people-based marketing platform is able to connect a person’s online data (their mobile IDs, cookies, Connected TV data, etc) to their real selves (ethically-sourced PII data). When dealing with a marketing partner, be very specific about this — and ask them to show their work.
Once you’ve squared away your audience and have delivered media to them, getting accurate reporting and metrics is the next step. According to Digiday, a sizable chunk of marketers (38%) don’t feel aligned with their brand and agency partners when it comes to getting consistent and accurate metrics. This is a problem.
Traditional metrics serve a purpose. But they don’t tell the whole story.
Open rates and CTR are valuable metrics. But they’re only pieces of the puzzle. You need to be able to see how many real people were exposed to your message, how many engaged with it, and how many performed the action you wanted them to. How many people converted based on your campaign’s main goal? Did they visit your in-store location (if you have one)?
When you’re able to tie your data back to real people, you can figure all of this out.
We’ve built a set of metrics that are tied to real people and a visual dashboard that displays them in an intuitive way. To learn more, watch our webinar recording.
The webinar was hosted by Ari Saposh, our SVP of data and strategic partnerships, and Greg Anastas, our SVP of account management. If you have questions for our team, you can always reach out. We’d be happy to connect.
