The top challenge marketers face this year is increasing or proving marketing ROI. Part of the problem is 50% of advertisers aren’t confident in their own media mix. A surprising 55% of advertisers aren’t confident they know and understand how to effectively reach and influence people along the customer journey. One of the root causes of this dilemma is they’ve been unable to measure campaign results across isolated media channels and big data silos.
So, what can be done about this problem?
The obvious answer is to improve campaign measurements so ROI and media effectiveness will reveal themselves, but I suspect most sophisticated marketers are already pushing the limits of tracking reports.
What if there was a way we could measure the impact of channels that are currently limited in their own tracking capabilities?
What if we could also increase wholesale lift across the board at the same time?
Let’s take an example of a campaign running across channels, using the audience targeting features each network or site has available. Just because we instruct Facebook and AdWords, for example, to target the same profile of person doesn’t mean those same people will be served our ads in both places. If we’re doing a good job there has to be some overlap, but there’s no reliable or measurable way of seeing that.
Compare a different approach where we force an overlap of most of the people targeted in the campaign. These isolated channels and platforms on their own, or using a management tool like AdRoll, don’t have the ability to force this audience overlap. Fortunately, there are marketing data firms that provide the one-to-one targeting data to ensure the same people see ads in a truly omni-channel experience for each person.
Anytime an impression, click, page visit, or site conversion comes from an ad unit served to the overlapped audience, you will automatically know that person was also influenced by all the other channels in the mix. If you weren’t serving ads to the same people in all channels you wouldn’t know the total impact each channel has on the customer journey. By forcing the overlap of audience targeting you have the ability to aggregate the total impact and ROI of this mix-within-the-mix. This approach has resulted in campaign performance increases of up to 66%.
Going back to our original problem of increasing and proving ROI, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Reaching hyper-targeted audiences one-to-one across channels has been proven to boost campaign performance. This approach gives marketers the ability to measurably prove the ROI, boosts confidence in the media mix, and increases performance all at the same time.
Based on Getting Digital Right by Millward Brown Digital