Identifying digital pain points

Extensive qualitative research among marketers and procurement specialists has revealed a common list of concerns. Stuart Byrne, Head of Digital for Ebiquity UK, explains how they can be targeted and overcome.

Every marketer has their own challenges but when it comes to digital, much of the pain is shared. Whatever the sector, whatever the brand, some things are common to a wide range of companies.

I’ve spent the last seven months talking to more than 50 companies, across marketing and procurement, to try and identify the areas where they struggle and the reasons why.

The result is a list of digital pain points that will be familiar to most client side marketers. In fact, it really doesn’t matter if your digital budget is £250,000 or £25 million; the problems you face are likely to be the same.

With digital now representing 30% of total advertising spend in the UK, according to the IAB, it’s now the biggest channel that advertisers use. TV, by contrast, takes 25% of total spend.

The top pain points are (in no particular order): digital knowledge, transparency, visibility, setting and measuring clear targets and paid search expenditure.

Of course, these don’t have to be areas of pain. Digital can be highly profitable, effective and deliver for the bottom line, but only if your training, understanding and partners are all driving in the right direction.

The good news is that there are clear tactics that you can adopt to make sure this is the case for all these common pain points.

Digital knowledge

Many marketers lack digital knowledge and training. At the very least, they feel uncomfortable in the medium. In some sectors they are more comfortable than others – mobile phone companies, for example, are extremely experienced at delivering performance, but some FMCG brands are less confident of what they could achieve.

Get away from classic consumer-facing businesses, and the knowledge gap is even wider. Part of the challenge, of course, is that digital is a new area and is growing and changing so fast. Many marketers simply don’t have the time to keep up with all the elements that are important. They need an extra pair of eyes to look at the granular level.

Pain in this area can be reduced by clear advice that helps identify what’s critical for your business, allowing brands to focus on what really matters for them.

“The way we are set up as a business allows our staff to move from department to department, however when it comes to marketing and particularly digital we don’t have the knowledge transfer.”
FMCG Client

Transparency

You’d expect Ebiquity, with our auditing heritage, to major on an issue like this but it’s a real problem for marketers and procurement as well. The rapidly changing world of programmatic buying and real-time bidding (RTB) are a challenge to understand. For advertisers who invest heavily in display, the fact that inventory is now traded on a biddable metric represents a significant shift from the days when they bought purely on a CPM basis.

The question of how deals are done, at what price and how propriety platforms sit between the media owner and them as an advertiser, are all serious issues. Many advertisers regard the new marketplace as a black box.

Pain in this area can be reduced firstly by understanding how the new marketplace works but also by creating clearer contracts that enforce advertisers’ rights to determine that they are paying a fair price and subsequently securing the media and audience quality they originally signed up for.

“The agency recommended their platform but I struggle to understand what they are really providing and am I really getting a good deal.”
Transport Client

Visibility

Advertisers want to know that their advertising has been seen and too often that’s not always the case in display. We’ve been through all this before in outdoor, of course, but there are now real-time systems available allowing advertisers to know how much of their display activity is actually being seen.

Our research in Germany for a Finance client found that only 61% of its display placements were actually seen. From a UK perspective, a client who undertook a time-specific, pure brand awareness display campaign, which was totally bought through their agency’s trading desk, returned the figures that only 59% of their display ads were seen.

This pain point can be eliminated as part of the agreement between agencies and advertisers to agree performance-related fees for digital. Visibility needs to be part of the equation that determines whether the agency is doing a good job.

Some agencies state they are already using visibility measures to improve their RTB algorithm but my question is: are the agencies sharing that performance data? Among the clients that I have spoken to, it doesn’t seem to be the case.

“Understanding the wastage of our display activity by using visibility has really opened our eyes to the quality of media bought for us.”
Media Client

Paid search

This is one of the most accountable areas of digital advertising but with some advertisers now looking at potentially tens/hundreds of thousands of active keywords, it’s also becoming increasingly complex to manage.

It’s an area of immense importance with some direct response advertisers spending up to half of their rather sizeable budgets in this area. Overall, 18% of all digital spend is now in invested in paid search and some clients are spending many tens of millions of pounds in this performance channel.

Many are looking to see if they can reduce spend in paid search whilst ensuring performance delivery stays the same or is even improved. Coupled with understanding how paid and natural search work together on the page and the ever-increasing importance of mobile search, there is a lot to consider.

Most clients are rightly concentrating on the top level performance metrics such as cost per acquisition, specific KPI delivery, ROI. However by implementing improvements in the numerous variables that impact upon a paid search Quality Score, you can have a significant effect on a campaign’s performance.

“I appreciate my agency do a great job on my paid search, there is so much they do, but sometimes you just need an extra set of eyes.”
Retail Client

Clear targets

Any area of media needs clear targets. Whatever the level of budget a marketer is responsible for, they will always be asked by their superiors how or what their campaigns are delivering.

Too often, however, the metrics that are used bear no relation to the goals of the business and the need for clear, relevant targets applies as much to the client as it does to the agency.

This doesn’t mean that everything needs to prove its worth from day one. There’s nothing wrong in testing different approaches and channels, but it’s essential that you know what you are trying to achieve.

Pain in this area can be reduced by working back from your definition of business success and identifying the media or business metrics that best reflect marketing’s delivery of that success, both by the marketing and procurement departments, as well as the agency you work with.

“The training session was really informative and useful… prompted some of the team already to think more deeply about their channel plans, what to consider and what targets to set in place for the agency.”
Travel Client

Integration

Too many clients treat digital as a silo away from traditional advertising. Too many clients even silo different areas of digital activity. Some agencies even have this structure as well.

It’s not uncommon to discover that paid search activity is often held by a different team to natural search, while someone else entirely handles affiliate and social.

It’s easy to say that these pains could be solved by having people talk to each other more but it’s never that easy. At the same time we need to integrate what happens in digital with other media. We know that TV is the biggest driver of search activity, for example, so you can’t understand what’s happening in this area without knowing the bigger picture.

It’s not uncommon that many of the specialists needed to deliver in specific digital channels don’t always see how the marketing plan is totally interconnected.

“Understanding the full impact the different media has on each other has really helped in the internal set-up and communication within our business.”
FMCG Client