Measure To Grow

Measure to grow yours or your clients business. Too often, brands and agencies measure something for the sake of having something to present in a meeting. Or even worse, measurement is siloed to a point where all the stats look good but too much duplication occurs which invalidates everything. But then regardless of the duplication, business decisions are made which further negatively impacts the business.

I recall an agency meeting I was in many years ago with several teams that represented an auto-maker. My teammate was presenting so I was looking around the room to see if everyone was understanding what he was putting down. The gist of his presentation was how we measured incremental sales so the impact of our solution could me measured and justified. The faces in the room said to me that they didn’t see how this was relevant to them so I paused the presentation and asked the group what they cared about. One person said, “I work on social so I just care about likes.” Another person said, “I am focused on getting users to engage with our car configurator.” So I asked everyone, “who is responsible for selling cars?” Everyone started looking around the room at each other like it was the first time they were hearing this question. Now I realize that car buying is a considered purchase and only happens every 5+ years for most Americans. So if the manufacturer has a marketing allowable of $3,000 for each car sold and 5 different teams track toward that goal, the manufacturer is likely over-paying to acquire some customers.

The same holds true if you are trying to sell a pair of pants. If the brand has a CPA goal of $7 and the social team, programmatic team, and search team all track toward $7, the brand is likely to be over-paying by $14 and that’s only if the sale is incremental to their organic traffic. If a consumer buys a pair of $70 pants and was touched by 3 different vendors, each vendor will report a sale at $70 for a total of $210. The problem is, you only have $70 in the bank. How do you know which vendor(s) to give credit to or how much to give each vendor?

Measurement got a whole lot harder last year, no doubt. With the loss of mobile device tracking and half the desktop browser cookies, not to mention what’s to come from Google, it is technically impossible to track every sale back through your touch points to measure attribution. Even if you could, the percentage of credit most brands attributed would be incorrect. The changes with Facebook back in June 2021 have also made it difficult to target and identify audience composition. But no worries, Facebook say’s, “just trust our algorithms and we will find you more look-a-like audiences to scale your efforts on Facebook. Do you really want one of your largest marketing channels operating as a black box?

Since June, I have heard from several buyers that Facebook isn’t working as well anymore. This makes me scratch my head because the same people that were on Facebook a year ago are still on Facebook. The only difference is that your targeting ability has been made more challenging and you can’t attribute all your Facebook generated sales accurately. I recognize that this is a problem but as they say, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Find a way to measure accurately and understand your audiences in more detail so that you can target better on and off Facebook, pay lower CPM’s, and scale your creative to talk to everyone uniquely. Lucky for you, we have 3 emerging tech solutions to highlight today that work great on their own and even better when combined.

  • Measured Provides clarity on the true incremental contribution of every media channel, campaign, and tactic, using transparent and proven experiments designed for each unique platform. By measuring across all channels at once via a 3rd party incrementality partner, 1+1 will always equal 2.
  • ProfitWheel analyzes your customers to deeply understand who they are and what they look like online. To remain privacy compliant, ProfitWheel aggregates your customers into cohorts after they discover what they read, post, and buy online. You then use this data to buy look-a-like audiences in an open and transparent manner so you can continuously be optimizing. Your CPM’s will be less expensive than if you were to leverage Facebook’s black box methods and you will drive more sales revenue while spending far less. Best of all, you can use this information to buy media on other channels and contextualize/personalize creative.
  • Hunch is a creative services tool that helps brands and agencies scale their creative for every campaign through audience personalization and contextualization. You can leverage your ProfitWheel data, weather, geography, time of day, sports scores, and several other attributes to help your creative resonate and stop the scroll with display or video..

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