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Where does viewability fit into measuring the success of ad campaigns, asks Oath’s Alex Timbs
A marketing campaign that doesn’t produce a measureable impact is of little value to anyone. This goes for any campaign, whether mobile-only, social media friendly, or entirely OOH – campaigns are only valuable if they deliver impact. However, what we define as ‘impactful’ opens up a much larger debate, in the complex and nuanced digital world.
It has long been debated by brands and agencies what metrics should be counted when it comes to assessing a campaign’s performance. Especially after years of post-recession budget squeezes during which marketing departments had to justify every single marketing dollar. Nevertheless, the need to demonstrate ROI will always be of great importance.
Our industry has worked its way through a number of different metrics to serve as the ‘catch-all’ success yardstick for online campaigns, with viewability most recently taking a large chunk of the limelight.
50 per cent viewability is the current industry standard. However, a great deal of inventory available across the landscape struggles to hit this. If the majority of ads that do tick this box are only just hitting the mark, then we can’t rely on viewability alone as an effective measure of campaign performance. It’s still something the industry remains to use as a crutch, but it can’t be seen as the be-all-end-all to campaign measurement.
The best place to start when monitoring performance and overall effectiveness of a campaign is with the overall business objectives – what is it that you’re trying to achieve? Basing KPIs on these goals at the start will ultimately help any campaign deliver true ROI.
For some campaigns, we may include viewability in this list of KPIs but for others, even the click-through rate or social media traffic may be more important, or other engagement factors. Once objectives have been set, it’s crucial for marketers to understand how each KPI is used and what it represents.
Using only viewability, for example, misses out on subtleties in feedback, which could be key in future campaigns, such as why and how people are engaging with digital ads, rather than just how many people have seen it.
That’s not to say that viewability doesn’t have a role in today’s digital ecosystem or that we shouldn’t be setting up viable standards across the industry.
Clarity is still required to define what counts as a view to ensure consistency across the entire advertising industry.
Even if viewability doesn’t encompass the entire value of a campaign’s performance, it is one element that needs to be considered.
Those companies that only look at sales figures to determine ROI won’t clarify where these sales are attributed to and whether the ad campaign resonated with the right audiences. While useful, these metrics fail to represent brand awareness, or how a consumer’s perception have changed, or whether people have spent time viewing content – something viewability and qualitative feedback can provide insight on. That’s why technology platforms are using algorithms to dig deeper into why and how people are engaging with digital content.
As we stop attributing success to one single touch point, the industry should make the move to using Multi Touch Attribution and Marketing Mix Modelling models, which has already shown growth. According to research by Econsultancy and Oracle Marketing Cloud, the impact of cross-channel interactions is classed as major by almost three quarters of marketers (73 per cent), with over 50 per cent claiming that integrated engagement has a remarkable impact on ensuring advocacy and improving retention across channels.
Having a holistic view of what elements of an overall campaign worked (and to what degree) is not only valuable but critical in informing future campaigns.
All activity should come back to ROI and performance, whatever your objectives are. And when we say this, we’re not just talking about performance in the binary sense of ‘did it work or not.’ The data collected and the analysis we run should allow us to complete the marketing campaign cycle.
No single measurement works in isolation, nor does one measurable apply to every brand and its success. That means starting with business objectives vs campaign objectives. Viewability is the ‘hygiene’ measurement that will contribute to performance, but even then it won’t tell you exactly how successful your digital ads were.
Brands always need to keep the bigger picture in mind – whether embarking on a new campaign or wrapping one up. No matter how many people see your ad, if the content isn’t engaging or targeted, then it doesn’t matter how many people view your ad.
Alex Timbs is head of data and attribution, Oath