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Getting numbers right beats getting them bigger

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May 25, 2016 | 5 min read

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Few entities love big numbers more than the digital ad industry, particularly when it comes to how many impressions campaigns delivered. However, this obsession with big numbers can lead to wasted spend and a misleading understanding of how campaigns perform.

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As authored by Martin Bromfield, VP Advertising EMEA

To illustrate these points, we’ll use the concept of validated impressions and the impact this has on return on investment. Validated impressions are those which were viewable, by human eyes, in a brand-safe environment. These validated impressions are compared to the total impressions served (which include non-viewable ads and those served to bots) in terms of the impact on brand awareness, favourability and purchase intent.

In simple terms we’re combining measurement of ad delivery with the brand/sales effect to ascertain ROI and answer a key question faced by marketers in the digital age – what is the relationship between validated impressions and ROI?

As background context, to get a sense of the scale of the problem, a rough rule of thumb to consider is that about one third of ad traffic is bogus and about half of ads aren’t viewable.

The relationship between validated impressions and ROI

Let’s start with a simple illustration. Imagine a campaign delivers 10 million impressions and delivers £10,000 in sales, the perceived ROI would be £1 per thousand impressions. However, if only half of these impressions were valid (viewable by human eyes), the actual ROI would be £2 per thousand impressions. In other words, once invalid impressions were removed the campaign was twice as effective as perceived.

This shows the impact on ROI if advertisers can better identify valid impressions and optimise delivery to them, minimising wasted spend. If done so in the above case, sales could double for the same amount of spend.

Our research has proved that the effectiveness of a campaign does have a linear relationship with validated impressions – as the latter goes up so does the former. For example, a series of campaigns we analysed in which a user was exposed 5 times to an ad showed that at 20% valid impressions, brand lift metrics increased 2.6 points. At 60% valid impressions, lift increased 7.9 points whilst at 100% valid impressions, lift increased 13.1 points.

Our relationship with Millward Brown

As pointed out at the beginning, the best way to understand the ROI of a campaign involves measuring ad delivery and the effect on brand perceptions. As leaders in measuring the former, we partnered globally with a leader who measures the latter – Millward Brown.

Our validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) solution, which verifies if ads were viewable, fraud-free, in-geography, brand safe and delivered to the right target audience, can be combined with Millward Brown’s Brand Lift Insights to see how attitudes to the brand have changed after exposure to digital advertising.

As their Global Brand Director, Digital, Duncan Southgate succinctly puts it: “Advertisers need a comprehensive view of digital effectiveness from delivery through to impact and this partnership enables us to provide that.”

Understanding where and to whom your ads were delivered is certainly valuable in its own right as is understanding how your target audience responds to your brand. But in combination, the two become exponentially more powerful. Combined, these two separate pieces of information become insight. In this instance it’s about allowing brands to increase the effectiveness of campaigns by determining the full value of a validated impression across all digital platforms. In short, it delivers an unprecedented understanding of how your digital advertising is performing.

It’s also worth pointing out that this combined “delivery and impact” partnership doesn’t just benefit the buy side but it also benefits publishers looking to demonstrate the power and value of their platforms to advertisers.

Why the problem goes beyond wasted budgets

As illustrated, invalid impressions contaminate pretty much every performance and effectiveness metric you use to assess campaigns. They infect the results, giving you misleading findings, which crucially causes you to make potentially bad decisions going forward – and you get locked into a cycle of doing so.

Essentially, they feed artificially inflated numbers into your actual calculations, pulling down ad campaign ROI calculations and making campaign performance appear lower. The great news is, once you fix it, you’ll see campaign lift increase and this genuine feedback enables the creation of a virtuous ad measurement cycle and, thus, getting better insights for future campaigns.

Essentially focusing on validated impressions signposts how to maximise effectiveness going forward. What is clear is the impressions that are actually doing the work for you are delivering a hell of a lot better than you think.

Martin Bromfield, VP Advertising EMEA

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