THE ROAD TO GENUINE MARKETING ATTRIBUTION: A GUIDE TO GETTING IT RIGHT

 

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Marketing attribution is a hot topic, and thousands of leading marketers are working to understand their options as well as “what matters.” If maximising marketing ROI is your leading objective, then finding out precisely how to attribute credit for brand sales is an important challenge.  But here’s the problem: basing your action plan on unverified or simplistic models is a completely unnecessary risk. It’s actually possible to scientifically estimate the precise business impact of all marketing touchpoints, and to use this information to optimise your marketing allocations. This in-plain-English guide explains the various methodologies for marketing attribution, and provides a framework for ensuring that your brand gets marketing attribution right.

 

 

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HOW A DMP CAN JUMP HURDLES: DMP SUPPLIER SERIES – 3RD PARTY BRAND-SIDE

Here’s the last part of my series on DMP suppliers; so far I’ve been through the issues with point solutions, agencies and 3rd party buy-side marketing stacks.  All have the opportunity to benefit a brand’s marketing spend and give an ROI evaluation, but this doesn’t come with issues.  Choosing the right DMP, can either have fully rewarding results or detrimental effects.

The issue with DMPs supplied by 3rd party, brand-side

There are 3rd party suppliers of brand-side data management platforms (DMP).  Depending on where these products evolved from they will have nice integrations with parts of the digital ecosystem – for example a 3rd party data provider’s DMP will have good cookie synching with 3rd party data and an offline DMP provider will have good hooks into typical offline data structures.

Brands are building out their own brand-side data management platforms, consolidating many databases and considering how this data can be accessed for digital activation. This takes a long time and a lot of money – there is clearly a case for interim solutions wherein client first party data is sync’d with a 3rd party data management platform that is native to the tools that execute digital media campaigns. In the fullness of time perhaps these 3rd party marketing stacks will be more intimately connected to brand DMPs rather than just maintaining partially mirrored data.

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HOW A DMP CAN JUMP HURDLES: DMP SUPPLIER SERIES – AGENCIES & 3RD PARTY BUY-SIDE

Following on from the #TraderTalk I did with Exchange Wire and the recent blog post series, here’s the second part to DMP suppliers.  There are many things to consider when choosing a DMP as a brand’s data is so valuable and important to their stance in the market. Here’s the issues with two other options you could take…

The issue with DMPs supplied by agencies

Some agencies have spent the last 5 years testing the many point solutions there are available, and then built an agency infrastructure to cope with the ever changing environment and provide a stable appearance and reporting system.

However, by building this ad tech agencies have incurred such high costs and it has become a somewhat closed system, this then doesn’t sit well with many advertisers’ agnostic/interoperability.

The issue with DMPs supplied by 3rd party buy-side marketing stacks

3rd party technology providers that offer a point solution for every digital channel, built on the one technology platform have enjoyed great success recently. It is easy to see the benefits of a complete buy-side marketing stack; one throat to throttle, all data in one place and accessible to the media delivery systems.  A virtuous circle. But you’d do well to ensure the chosen buy-side stack is:

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HOW A DMP CAN JUMP HURDLES: DMP SUPPLIER SERIES – POINT SOLUTIONS

So we’ve discussed the benefits of a DMP and detailed how integrating all data can help to build a clear picture of a brand’s audience.  But there’s more still; the biggest challenge, and one that’s pertinent in today’s changing market, is where should the data management platform sit?

Should responsibility sit with your agency, with a 3rd party ad technology provider, brand-side or partially mirrored as some kind of combination of these?  Each of these entities have reasons to want to supply a DMP and their rationale is best understood and evaluated in the context of how each has added value to brands during the evolution of the ad tech space.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be publishing a series discussing the issues with DMPs from various suppliers; so make sure you stay tuned for each post

The issue with DMPs supplied by point solutions

There has been so much investment in ad tech over the last five years and this has driven a lot of innovation. Some of the winners have been the intermediaries and the aggregators that re-consolidate the fragmented supplier base. However, the fragmentation of suppliers has also resulted in the fragmentation of advertiser data; attribution cannot be meaningful in silos, it can only be meaningful at the budget level which is across all paid/earned media.

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HOW A DMP CAN JUMP HURDLES (PART ONE)

Last week I was invited to take part in a Trader Talk with Exchange Wire, discussing the features of the data management platform (DMP) and how it can help brands better allocate their marketing spend. If you missed it, be sure to take a look here.

The DMP is a really neat solve for so many of our digital advertising challenges. When brands get it right, the rewards are huge.

Challenge 1: How do you pay the right price to reach the right user?

Reaching the right user is essential for brand development, but how do you do this effectively so it won’t break the bank?

Identifying the right users and their profiles relies on using cookies; however this is challenged as today a user’s internet activity is spread across a number of devices, and cookies are unique to each browser. Here at Mediaplex, we work with brands to encourage their consumers to give their consent to join their cookie IDs to a common client ID, in order to achieve a Single Customer View in which you can communicate and identify that consumer as one person. The same technique can be applied to media and actions in-app, where device identifiers are used as a proxy for cookies – the Single Customer View can join multiple cookie IDs and device identifiers.

A Single Customer View allows brands to attribute conversions to media correctly; deliver intentional and considered messages to targeted users; and most importantly have a confident ROI evaluation enabling them to bid intentional prices on display across any of their customers’ devices.

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MEDIAPLEX’S VIEW ON WHAT’S TO COME

We’ve been reading a lot of digital marketing predictions for 2013, so we thought we’d sit down and have a look at the future growth of our industry.

Social: 2012 not only saw the Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic Games come to our capital, but it was also the year Facebook reached one billion worldwide users. Social media seemed to be the big player last year, especially with the increase of dual screening making TV a more conversational event.

The Facebook Exchange is evolving and certainly looks promising as advertisers will be able to utilise their first party data to message prospects across the vast reach of Facebook.

Attribution: Many companies seemed to invest in alternative attribution models to ‘last click’ in 2012, a big step in the world of online advertising.  Now we’d like to see advertisers using their data more effectively and seeking more genuine marketing analytics solutions.

Rules based attribution is cheap and easy to understand but it’s not terribly meaningful; there is an alternative that draws on the rigors of statistical analysis but it requires significant investment – which will hopefully be made by some of the big players in 2013.

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THE FUTURE IS RICH

It seems that rich media is the future for digital advertising; Forrester predicts almost 150% growth over the next four years.  We’ve been speaking to iMedia Connection about the impact of rich media and what that means for brands.

Firstly it’s about aesthetics; brands are trying to find creative ways to cut through the noise online and deliver memorable experiences for consumers.

Secondly, it’s about using data to deliver bespoke experiences to consumers.  Combining cross channel data to ascertain user insights, integrate them together and implement learnings into rich media advertising.  This means providers can craft executions that leverage all aspects of a user’s profile.

Finally, it’s about collecting data from rich media.  Building more of a picture about how a brand’s advertising strategy is working and what audience is responding.

The future of advertising will be about learning more about consumers and engaging with them creatively and building a better advertising strategy from this.   Here’s the iMedia Connection article so you can read even more about how rich data is going to transform the display industry.

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WHAT IS BIG DATA?

Big Data is certainly a buzz word in the marketing sphere at the moment, but what does it actually mean and do marketers understand it?  Big data isn’t just a huge amount of data that’s going to crash Excel; it’s not the size that makes it big, this is a misconception in the market at the moment.

There’s an outdoor advert on the Hammersmith flyover at the moment which reads ‘big data – are you missing out?’  I’ll save my rant on action based outdoor advertising for another day, but this made me think, how many people can actually pass this advert and have access to big data?  It’s not all brands that have ‘big data’ and it’s not a full service solution.

In a nutshell and in oversimplified terms, it’s vertically aligned data sets for all elements of a brand’s strategy; whether that’s in site analytics, call centre data, postal surveys or customer journey marketing data, all this aligned and integrated together.  The point of this is to analyse the data to yield actionable insights that help your marketing teams make timely and informed decisions. .  To analyse big data it can help to look for specific answers, the data itself cannot be visualised in a meaningful way and insights will not synthesis themselves.  This is where most marketers and businesses go wrong.

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WHAT’S GOING WRONG WITH YOUR DATA?

Data is a top priority for most marketers in the current climate, just look to what Obama’s campaign team credits much of its success; unsurprisingly it’s the use of data.  But implementing this into a marketing strategy is not simple and there are many barriers for marketers as they make analysis more central to their decision making. Our US colleagues have identified some of the mistakes marketers are making; you can read the full article here on iConnection, but we’ve summarised some

below as well.

  1. Investment: investing in a technology and skills to analyse your data can provide substantial ROI but it is a significant cost which is often a bitter pill to swallow.  However Excel isn’t going to cut it and nor will Joe from accounts.
  2. Messy data: integrating multiple data sets is what everyone’s driving for, but these all come in different formats with different errors.  A few sets of quality data can provide better and more tangible insight than vast swathes of data that can’t be read or compared.  Think about your platforms that capture this data
  3. Analytics is hard: you need to look at all your data, and you need to understand it.  Over simplifying a complex process isn’t going to deliver the results you want; marketers needmaths to understand these data sets.
  4. Act now:Act on as many of these insights as your organisation can manage.
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