“Efficiency is the most important metric not talked about,” said Quantcast’s EU managing director, Phil Macauley, at the annual Automated Trading Debate on Monday.
For Macauley the way industry is going about measuring campaigns – whether through clicks, “bizarre” engagement metrics, last-ad-seen or click-to-convert – is hiding the true efficiency of the work.
“In most cases 80-90% of budgets can be shown to dead dogs and no one would know any different – the campaign would still look as if it’s performing really well,” he said, in a comment that will worry anyone invested in programmatic advertising.
Macauley, who started his career in TV before moving into digital, said the sooner industry can start using “proper attribution” methods to understand the efficiency of all the metrics, the sooner it will capitalise on the benefits of the sophisticated technology now at its disposal.
“Right now there are too many campaigns which are not set up correctly to deliver on the advertiser’s business objective,” he said.
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“The sooner we use the right technology or attribution – or even going back to understanding brand-lift metrics – the sooner we’ll get this technology to deliver.
So why is this happening? Macauley said it’s a product of a “digital silo” whereby metrics such as ‘last seen’ – fully embraced and understood by technologists – are embedded into wider planning and buying processes.
“They are embedded into how advertisers ask for budgets from the financial department, where they have to present clicks, for example.”
The problem, Macauley argues, is that the sophistication of the measurement does not match that of the technology.
“Companies with high click-through-rates might well drive top-line awareness metrics, but it doesn’t drive purchase intent.
“It’s understanding the simple things that we know from offline media that don’t seem to be penetrating digital media as fast as we’d like.”
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