Revolutionising cross-media measurement – Marketing Week

When identifying the right media mix, impressions and click-through rates only tell a fraction of the story. Nowadays, ROI is under a microscope with brands constantly looking for new and innovative ways to revolutionise their advertising approach.

For advertisers wondering how to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of campaign performance, cross-media measurement is the answer. Not only are cross-media measurement solutions helping brands effectively measure their campaigns, but they are also reducing programmatic advertising spend in an increasingly competitive landscape.

By leveraging first-party permissioned data, advertisers and agencies now have the opportunity to identify top-performing channels, optimise in-flight campaigns, and reduce programmatic spend. Advertising agency PHD Global Business (PHD) adopted this approach when looking to drive consideration and preference for a large technology brand in the computer segment.

The project ran across multiple European markets and focused on several key metrics including brand awareness, purchase consideration, purchase preference, likelihood to purchase, recently purchased, promoters and online ad awareness. PHD sought to understand the impact of the campaign across each of these brand metrics, how each media channel contributed to the uplift and impact of the campaign, and specifically how each sub-channel within digital performed.

Methodology: defining the optimal media mix

PHD partnered with Dynata, a global leader in first-party data and data services and used its cross-media measurement methodology to measure the impact of this multi-market campaign. Dynata’s methodology incorporated the tagging of all online ad exposures, helping to validate audience reach, determine the viewability of all ads in view, and measure non-human traffic and brand safety; and capturing the offline exposures through opportunity-to-see (OTS) surveys.

This single-source, single-tag, cross-media approach allowed PHD to measure the impact of its campaign at both a total and individual channel level. Dynata recruited a pre-control group of cross-media panellists before the campaign went live and balanced the exposed group based on standard demographics across the course of the campaign.

To place a tracking pixel on all trackable pieces of media, practical dynamic tags were used by PHD’s ad server. For site-served placements, which are common with streaming audio partners, Dynata worked directly with the publisher to tag and test the media and track exposure across the entire panel to verify raw impression numbers against the media server reporting.

When media was displayed, the tracking pixels were triggered, and the display of the media was recorded by a persistent cookie on the panellists. This captured important information such as the media partner, campaign, device and the specific creative displayed. Each panellist ID number recorded this cross-device exposure for further analysis.

Turning our attention to device type, Dynata also measured online media exposure across desktop, mobile and tablet as well as in-app. For non-digital elements of the campaign, such as print and out-of-home (OOH), exposure was captured via opportunity-to-see survey questions, which aligned with the media plan.

In addition to demographics, all brand metrics were captured. Throughout the project PHD and its client received access to this data through a dashboard, which allowed them to evaluate the performance of each media partner and optimise their media plan in-flight.

The results

Not only did this project allow the tech brand to effectively measure the success of the campaign, but Dynata’s cross-media measurement solution allowed PHD and the leading tech brand to analyse the impact of the campaign across each of their brand metrics, and determine how various media channels contributed to the overall uplift and impact of the campaign.

Unlike a traditional ad tracker, Dynata’s approach provided an always-on resource for tracking campaign exposure and audience targeting efficiency, resulting in improved real-time decision making. The in-flight optimisation resulted in significant cost savings and efficiencies in programmatic media spend of 9%.

Bahar Bozdogan, data and media measurement director at PHD Global Business says: “Leveraging Dynata’s cross-measurement solution, we gathered extensive insights into how the cross-media campaign influenced consumers at all levels of the purchase funnel. Through the reporting dashboard we were able to see campaign results from launch onwards and make changes to channel and creative choices to achieve best media efficiency.”

To find out how you can validate your audience and measure the efficiency of your advertising, meet with the Dynata team at DMEXCO, the largest marketing and advertising show from 11–12 September in Cologne. Book a meeting at www.dynata-dmexco.com or visit www.dynata.com for more information.