A new study has found that nine out of ten marketers would be able to justify ‘slightly’ or ‘significantly’ more investment in programmatic if the measurement was improved.
Although the survey, conducted by Infectious Media, showed that 92% of respondents believe that providing measurement services is a key part of a media agency’s role, 66% found that accurately measuring campaigns is ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ challenging.
Additionally, the majority of respondents agreed that a lack of education and transparency has made measurement even more difficult.
Meanwhile, advertisers continue to judge the success of their programmatic campaigns on clicks, with 56% of advertisers describing number of clicks as the most important metric, followed by cost per click (45%) and click-through rate (43%).
This is despite the fact that click data is often distorted by fraud and has been proven to be an extremely flawed metric for predicting a sale.
Although the majority of advertisers (53%) are currently in the process of changing their approach to display measurement, many agree that a range of obstacles prevent them from doing so, such as privacy restrictions (57%) and access to relevant performance data (57%).
“It’s clear from our study that advertisers are waking up to the fact that the measurement model most have relied on for their programmatic campaigns is broken and digital ad spend is being held back as a result,” said Martin Kelly, Infectious Media CEO and co-founder.
“Advertisers are looking to agencies to show greater leadership on how the system can be improved. Unfortunately, most have been content with the easy option of spending advertisers’ money on cheap inventory that meets a given target on clicks, regardless of the risk of fraud or the limited ROI this delivers.”
Kelly added that agencies have a responsibility to educate their clients on more “sophisticated approaches”, such as offering them metrics that fit their business objectives and “challenging them to think beyond clicks”.
