Marketers are often expected to be wizards, conjuring results from ethereal & evaporating resource pools. To thrive, they must not only captivate & retain users, in order to justify marketing spend.
According to a recent survey by Integral Ad Science, marketers are facing numerous threats with regards to their budgets. Specifically:
- 75% of brands struggle to connect campaign exposure to ROI
- 60% of brands struggle with media quality transparency
- 53% of brands struggle with fraudulent impressions
- 47% of brands struggle with brand safety concerns
- 42% of brands struggle with viewability
Fortunately, there are solutions for each of these struggles, though admittedly some are more accessible than others.
Measuring ROI
The customer journey spans devices and channels. As a result, your brand will likely reach a customer across a myriad of messages & platforms before they convert. Unfortunately, each platform is incentivized to use an attribution model that paints them in the best light.
To get beyond this, marketers need to turn to solutions & partners that can ingest as many data sources as possible. Only a third party platform or partner can provide reliable insights here, deduplicating conversions across search, social, display, and other channels.
Fortunately, these solutions are becoming more accessible & affordable than ever.
Addressing Quality
It’s no surprise that four of the five top threats to advertising budgets center around quality: media quality, impression quality, brand safety quality, and placement quality (which affects viewability). Fortunately, alleviating these concerns is as simple as layering in pre-bid safety measures.
To address fraud and quality concerns, marketers should seek solutions that provide clearly understandable page quality measurement parameters. While they likely won’t share exactly what their AI looks for — as such a list would help fraudulent actors scheme to circumvent — they should be able to provide a robust list of examples of the types of things they measure. Ideally, this list should include:
- Page load times
- Presence of user generated content
- Number of ads on the page
- Hidden content on the page, ads or otherwise
- Malware indicators
- Semantic analysis of page content
With respect to viewability, marketers should look for providers that utilize both first and third party viewability reporting. While third party viewability measurement provides a higher level of reassurance, restricting delivery to inventory measured by these partners could limit avails while raising CPMs. In either scenario, marketers should never have any doubts as to the viewability of their ads.
Shielding Resources
While performance marketing may always feel like an exercise in conjuration wizardry, the real magic is actually quite simple. It all boils down to selecting tech that can provide clarity, help create cohesion, ensure quality, and give control where it matters most.
When marketers have this, they won’t just preserve their marketing resources. They’ll be able to prove & improve ROI and continue to amplify both their budgets and their growth.