There’s a huge buzz around media measurement and marketing effectiveness in the industry right now, and for good reason. The phase-out of the third-party cookie presents advertisers with attribution challenges that not only make it more difficult to make strategic decisions but also to achieve stakeholder buy-in for marketing investment.
To help you improve your knowledge of the modern measurement landscape and understand the best solutions to embrace user privacy without hindering marketing performance, Impression has launched a series of short videos.
Watch the full series here and gain insights into:
- The current technology and privacy headwinds challenging digital attribution
- How to respect user privacy online and implement compliant solutions
- How to more accurately measure the impact of your efforts through different solutions e.g. multi-touch attribution, incrementality testing and media mix modelling
- How to communicate the value of marketing measurement to key stakeholders
In part five, Head of Paid Media Performance, Nick Handley and Paid Media Consultant, Sam Cooper explore:
- Why it’s difficult to achieve stakeholder buy-in for measurement projects
- Actionable tips to help engage key stakeholders
- Solutions for those working with a smaller budget
See the transcript of the video below the recording.
Sam Cooper: Achieving stakeholder buy-in can be quite complicated for measurement projects and media effectiveness in general, and I think the big reason for that is that marketing looks very complicated, especially when you’re not inside the day-to-day operations. If you log in to a Google Ads account and look at the sheer amount of metrics there, there’s just so much going on, it can be hard to know what’s important. That’s why I want to chat a bit about how we can get stakeholder’s buy-in and communicate some of those more complex details to people in a simple manner.
Nick Handley: How do we get other people involved in businesses to care about measurement and look past just attribution?
Sam Cooper: Yeah, I think this is increasingly important, right? Because with the changing landscape, businesses need to think very differently about this stuff and they might not know
what they need to think differently about. We can talk about conversion APIs, MMM, modelling and all this stuff, but what actually means for a business, and what they need to do with that information isn’t always clear. I think that marketers probably need to act as a bit of a conduit for that.
Nick Handley: Yeah, I completely agree. I think quite often we look at the metric that’s in-platform as that’s the thing that a lot of stakeholders want to look at but with the changes in marketing with the idea of the “death of the cookie” and other quite salient things happening in 2024, we need to think about this slightly differently and go beyond just platform metrics and think about how we show more value out of our media and essentially the effectiveness of that media within the wider landscape. Hence why measurement is quite important.
Sam Cooper: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the platform metrics, they’re not wrong in any way, obviously, but they just tell a very specific story and I think it’s easy to take them at face value. And that’s not necessarily the best choice when you’re looking at an overarching business or an overarching strategy. So, marketers need to be the ones to make that translation, I think, because, at this point, no one else really stands in the way. There’s just a lot of disconnected things that we need to bring together, and we’re probably best placed to do that as marketers.
Nick Handley: What are the key factors we should look for when we’re looking at getting people bought into new ways of measuring media? Because it is quite new and daunting for a lot of people.
Sam Cooper: We need to make it simple, when we’re communicating with stakeholders, the sheer amount of metrics that we look at day to day in marketing can be really overwhelming,
I think maybe that is sometimes misleading too, because there’s just so much going on.
You share all that information with somebody, they don’t necessarily know what to do with it. We need to take a very simple idea, and then link it up with the business KPIs. So whatever a business actually needs, we need to look at that ourselves and then we need to make that translation from the marketing metrics to the business itself.
So say we did an MMM, that can give a whole range of results. As marketers, we need to interpret those results, share them with the client and say because of all of this, we actually think you need to invest more in channel X and take some budget out of channel Y because they aren’t necessarily going to get that if they just look at the MMM stats themselves.
Nick Handley: Not everyone can implement an MMM, it’s quite an expensive test and it takes a lot of data neatness and a lot of data hygiene to be able to get to that point. If we were going to speak to a client, say, that has a lower budget, what would we want to really hammer home to them that they could do to show their value from their media with the smaller scale?
Sam Cooper: Incrementally Testing is the answer to the question in a lot of ways. You can do those on any budget, it’s just a question of gearing up exactly the approach that you want to take. I do think that the difficult part is that this is all about analysis and the marketers need to be the ones that do the analysis and they need to then provide the results in a way that’s tangible to a business. What we need is just to get people bought into that process itself, because I think it’s pretty unlikely that a client is going to ask you to do that because that’s not their day-to-day. They don’t know that they need to optimise these things because if we look at the metrics in-channel and trust them, there’s no question there, we have to kind of put the question to the business.
I think that we have to push people a lot of the time. To start asking these questions about what channel is effective, to what extent is it effective, and in what way is it effective to you, because we’re talking about brand, so we’re talking about long-term and short-term, thinking about how these intertwine with each other and over a longer period, what happens to performance marketing? Because I actually think there is no hard and fast break between these two things. They’re very much integrated and it’s very difficult to get a clear understanding of one or the other. We need to start looking more at the holistic model.
Nick Handley: With Incrementality Testing, it’s a really good place to start for a lot of businesses because it can show a lot of value very quickly and it also leads them up to be able to potentially implement an MMM further down the line once people are bought in. I think the easiest way to look at this is probably to bring it into takeaways – I think keeping it simple for stakeholders, they don’t need to know the nuts and bolts of it, the intricacies of how these things work, and I think that helps to get people bought in because making the complex simple is quite a difficult thing, especially in marketing. Secondly, I think it’s putting the right metrics in front of people and showing the value that can be provided if you use an MMM or Incrementality Test. And then outside of that as well, I think it’s showing how this works in the wider marketing mix. This isn’t just a “we do it now and then we forget about it”, it completely changes the way that we look at marketing in 2024 and onwards. Early adopters now are going to be massively ahead of the curve and they’re going to be able to get ahead of competitors while doing it.
Sam Cooper: I think that we always need to bring this back to revenue and all of the complexity that goes into media effectiveness. Even if you’re just doing Incrementally Testing on a lower budget, it needs to come back to revenue and it needs to be clear and concise – ‘ultimately, we think if you do this change, you will get more revenue in the end’, even if it’s over a longer period of time, and then you can prove the value of that. You test against it, if it works, it works, and if it doesn’t work, that’s still a positive and it’s still a learning that you take forward because it informs the next test.
