Programmatic display spend is on the increase, estimated to be $60 billion in 2019. With so much spend on the table, I believe it’s important to make sure the basics of campaign measurement are available to advertisers.
For the purpose of this article I will focus on display (and to some extent in-stream video) – they are arguably the most scaled programmatic channels. I’ll likely visit other programmatic channels (audio, DOOH) in another post.
Reporting metrics vs Measuring success
In an industry that’s obsessed with metrics, the last few years have generated many different metrics that marketers can observe at in programmatic. Clicks, impressions, reach, CTR, viewability, average frequency, site visits, unique visitors, completion rate, audibility, post click conversions, post view conversions, quality impression, human impression, human measurable and viewable impression that has 50% of the creative which is on screen for 2 seconds or more. And this is far from an exhaustive list.
We have all the metrics that we could ever ask for and more – and yet we still cannot consistently measure the success of campaigns.
The purchase funnel and knowing what a successful campaign looks like
Before we get into the weeds, let’s take a macro view at things. Let’s look at the business need – at why you are running a media campaign to start with.
You’re probably buying media to target one (or more) of the stages of the purchase funnel. Marketers want to drive some action that will eventually generate a purchase of a product and/or service.
Let’s keep that information front and centre as we look to measure our programmatic display media campaign.
This is important because many programmatic campaigns are planned with metrics in mind – a media planner will say we need to drive site visits, get video views or generate reach.
What they’re really saying (or should be saying) is I want to increase awareness of my product or I want to increase the consideration of my service.
This may sound like arguing semantics but it’s important because programmatic campaigns, like any media campaign, should have some sort of ROI: You are investing in media and hoping to move some business metrics. Media metrics are just a proxy to the business goals you want to achieve.
So the first part of measurement is identifying what your goal is and what the media KPI that is linked to that goal is.
Here are a few media KPIs that one may use per stage of the funnel:
Awareness KPIs: Reach, number of viewable impressions, completed video views
Consideration KPIs: page views, time on site, CTR (click through rate)
Conversion KPIs: cost per sale, cost per sign up
Tools to help you measure
With the above in mind, it becomes a bit easier to measure the success of your programmatic campaign. The next step is to select which tools to use for measurement. I’ve compiled a non-exhaustive list of tools. If you think there are other tools that do a good job of measuring feel free to drop them in the comments along with why and how you use them.
In-DSP reporting
The reporting suite of demand side platforms has come a long way. A significant number of media metrics that you may want to look at, such clicks, impressions, CTR, video views, completion rate will be directly available within your DSP’s reporting tool. Some DSPs (like Google DV360) offer even more in-depth verification metrics like viewability. DSPs can also offer a pixel solution to track conversions.
Adserver (Google campaign manager, Sizmek)
Ad servers allow you to measure across DSPs and across different publishers even if you are not buying programmatically. For metrics like unique reach, adservers can be invaluable. Adservers can also be useful for cross channel attribution (although walled gardens and privacy regulations are making this type of attribution more and more difficult). They are in some cases being made redundant by the capabilities of DSPs but they are far from obsolete.
Verification vendors (Moat, Doubleverify)
These tools can really help you measure you media quality. Not all impressions are equal – verification vendors can help you quantify the difference. In some cases you can build you own media metrics in those tools – for example “video view that is both viewable and audible” can be such a metric. This is useful for more advanced advertisers that want to ensure their media buys are of good quality.
Site analytics (Google Analytics)
When a user clicks through your programmatic ad, you can also track their behavior on the landing page. How much time did they spend on the site? Did they bounce? How many pages did they navigate through? Did they sign up to your service?
App analytics (MMPs like branch, kochava)
These tools help attribution in-app conversions. They are a sort of adserver + site analytics for apps. They are indispensable for app-based advertisers and can help measure things like cost per conversion, LTV and retention.
Brand lift studies
The last measurement method I’ll visit in this article is brand lift studies. Brand lift studies split your audience into two groups, a treatment and a control. Treatment group gets served ads whereas control does not. Following ad exposure, users in the treatment group get served a survey with questions such as “which of these products are you familiar with” – similarly users in the control group get served a similar question. The difference in the answers, also known as uplift, is considered to be due to ad exposure. This is a very useful measurement method to get qualitative data about awareness and consideration.
Summary
Measurement is a foundational skill in running programmatic campaigns and it isn’t too hard to pull off once the campaign goals are clear. The crucial thing is that after a campaign concludes and the results are measured, to learn from those results and integrate them in following campaigns. After all other key reason behind measuring, aside from seeing what the impact of the campaign we ran is, is to make sure we’re learning and improving future campaigns.