‘Clicks don’t matter’: Meta, Standard Chartered, On Device Research & Dentsu on future of attribution
Issues with opaque and misrepresented measurement systems have robbed the industry of its most precious resource – trust. How can we get it back?
A panel discusses digital measurement at The Drum APAC Trends Briefing
Billions of dollars annually are spent on digital advertising. As countless studies have demonstrated, a relatively enormous proportion of that spend vanishes into the opaque ecosystem. Of the rest, the success of digital advertising campaigns is predicated on accurate and honest measurement tools – which all too often are neither.
For most marketers, the issue starts with deciding which KPIs to measure. Speaking at The Drum’s APAC Trends Briefing, Abhinay Bhasin, head of product marketing and strategic account relationships at ProfitWheel, explained:
“When you talk about our category, we look at the top of the funnel – the brand recall. Then when it comes to the middle of the funnel, it’s usually about [measuring] returning visitors coming to your website and that’s one of the areas where you can figure out whether there is an interest or not.”
As a result, measurement has to be accurate even from the very beginning of the customer acquisition journey. Misapprehensions about the level of interest from consumers can cost brands dearly in the long run.
The panel argued that the endemic issue of focusing on vanity metrics at the expense of measuring effectiveness leads to trouble and a subsequent lack of trust. Huge traffic numbers look good but ultimately do little for the well-being of the brand. Alistair Hill, chief executive officer at On Device Research, explains:
“We have internal jokes about the amount of time spent on the delivery metrics for the first… forty minutes of an hour of [personal consumer experiences]. So how many people saw it, how many people clicked on it, what was the viewability and so on. These things are really important in certain ways, but they're not linked to effectiveness.”
He cites a study that demonstrated the inverse relationship between click-through rates (CTR) and conversion. While the CTRs look solid, focusing on those measurements alone does not provide a holistic view of the campaign’s level of success.
Holistic strategy
The point was echoed by Gayathri Venkatesan, marketing science partner manager, South East Asia and emerging markets at Meta. She pointed out that a study from Nielsen ultimately demonstrated that “clicks don’t matter”.
She states that while Meta’s measurement priorities change over time, there are still some fundamentals in line with the wider marketing ecosystem: “I think the metrics are basically the same… you look at awareness, you look at installs, you look at sales. People are now going much further down the funnel, looking at the operating margin, looking at lifetime value [LTV], but how you measure these and how you’re attributing back I think is still a big issue.”
Attribution is made more difficult by the opacity with which some platforms and companies hoard their valuable data.
Hiren Desai head of digital marketing, ASEAN and South Asia for Standard Chartered Bank says: “So the idea is how do you then move forward beyond views and clicks, and try to match the marketing data with the business data. That is where we are all… facing challenges because more and more walled gardens are coming into the picture. So the stitching of the data, the business objective, marketing objective and media KPI, it has just become so distant that it’s difficult to attribute.”
The panel was quick to point out that first-party data already provides brands with a tremendous opportunity when it comes to measurement and direct attribution. Desai specifically referred to it as a ‘seed’ that can bear fruit when tied with the marketing opportunities such as those offered by Meta and Google.
The panel was keen to stress that problems with measurement are not insurmountable, however. They are hopeful that ultimately solutions will be found that not only restore trust in the marketing ecosystem but that allows for more powerful measurement capabilities.