Monday, July 07, 2014

Digital marketing measurement toward analogue style

Nowadays, everything goes digital. According to The Guardian, around 50% of music sales by value are now sold digitally, and there is no question that the ad market has followed this consumer trend. 

To advertisers, digital meant certainty. Every time a consumer clicked, watched or listened, hat behavior could be recorded in exquisite detail. You could know what works, what stinks and everything in between. Unfortunately, there are always good reasons to falsify, fix or fudge findings. With ROI so tightly measured, the use of bots or warehouses of clickers somewhere in the developing world can make the difference between apparent success or failure.

However, there are many challenges to solve in this digital world. For example, Comscore estimates 54% of display ads are simply not seen at all. To combat this issue, traditional media have upped their game and made their numbers copper-bottomed. 

Route takes into account how quickly a person passes an out-of-home position, and prices it accordingly, while Thinkbox has tightened up its measures to include digital views (which are a surprisingly small proportion), and Newsworks make the case for print. 

New ways to measure digital ads are on the way, known as Viewable Impressions (VIs), which take snapshots of the screen to see whether at least half the ad can be seen for 1 second. Some 67% of publishers surveyed by Admonsters said it was "too early to say" whether they would sell on VIs, but those that were using it were already tweaking the placement of their display. This makes digital now directly comparable to old media and according to Steve Chester, director of data and programmes at the IAB UK, this is exactly the point.

"People have very high expectations. Viewability gives measures comparable to TV, which is on a level people understand," he says, but acknowledges getting consistent scores has been "challenging", with discrepancies still found between the different accredited providers of VIs.
"The 13 of most prominent providers had 60 days to bring their metrics into line by the end of May. They are still working on this. But much progress has been made, with discrepancies down to 5%-10%, down from 50% before," he says.
Once these problems are ironed out, then digital advertising can at last be compared directly with its analogue cousins, ironically by making the criteria the same as for out-of-home ads – can it be seen? OK then. This is not the only area either, with Facebook's digital video products sold using Gross Rating Points (GRPs) familiar to TV buyers the world over.

Source)http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2014/jul/02/successful-digital-analogue-marketing-tv-print/print

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