6 ESSENTIAL WAYS TO MEASURE MEDIA EFFECTIVENESS

Measuring the effectiveness of advertising dollars has never been

more critical or more complex. Marketers are expected to spend

over $550 billion in 2018 on global advertising and media, yet

an estimated 26% of budgets are wasted on ineffective channels

and strategies. That means there is over $137 billion dollars that

can be reallocated to improve business outcomes. But in order to

identify this $137 billion and understand where to use it, brands

must collaborate with media partners and agencies to get holistic

view of how every decision—big and small—drives brand growth.

If you’re responsible for managing media investments, answering

these 6 essential question will provide the business-building

insights needed to continually adjust strategy, optimize

performance and maximize ROI.

1

Ultimately we want to know how we can best drive sales across all

facets of the marketing organization. We do this by stacking up our

media buys and measuring their cumulative impact downstream.

In this example, we can see monthly media spend broken down

by publisher and how sales fluctuated with those changes in

allocation. The winners and losers are clear. In January, advertising

spend was over 2 times higher than any other month, but sales

were lowest. Conversely, the media buys in March and May were

the smallest, but the most efficient in driving sales per dollar

spent. This gives a quick macro view, so we can expand or drill

down to identify correlations between high and low performing

months. Try examining shorter date ranges, honing in on individual

publisher performance, or looking for correlations between other

KPIs and changes in media allocation.

Are our media buys driving sales downstream?

2

To confidently answer the question, “Where is my next

marketing dollar best spent?” we need to not only know where

each dollar is actually going, but also the non-working media

expense associated. Non-working media spend like agency

fees, production costs, design fees, etc. is on the rise and is an

essential—but often unmeasured—portion of the media budget.

It’s therefore essential to include it in our analysis to get a

comprehensive view of the true cost of our media. Then, once

we have a bird’s-eye view on media allocation and fluctuation in

spend ratios by campaign, we can start to compare performance

of creative, channels and tactics, and drill deeper to understand

the optimal balance of media investments.

For example, this percentage bar chart tells us that we spent

the most on non-working media for the Holiday and Super

Bowl campaigns. From there we can look at overall campaign

performance (i.e. cost per impression or outcome), drill into the

channels to see which tactic or channel performed the best (or

worst), and adjust our ratios for future campaigns accordingly.

Where are we investing the most media dollars, including non-working spend?

3

Which agency is most efficient at generating impressions, engagements, conversions, etc?

If you’re working with several agencies, it’s

important to see how those partners stack

up against one another. Once you’ve pulled

all of your agency performance data into an

integrated and normalized source of truth,

the possibilities are endless. A simple stack

ranker like the one above showing CPM is

an easy way to quickly see which media

buys are garnering the most awareness per

dollar. Swap out CPM for any efficiency or

effectiveness metric (cost per engagement,

CTR, cost per conversion, etc.) to compare

how well each partner is achieving each

business goal.

4

Viewability remains a hot topic for marketers, and rightfully so.

With average ad viewability estimated to be about 54%, 46 cents out

of every dollar spent on wasted impressions that no one ever sees.

The good news is that improving the percentage of ads consumers

see is easy to do if you have your data integrated into a central

marketing performance hub.

The example above shows aggregate actual (billed) impressions

versus viewable impressions across all campaigns, brands, agencies,

etc. for the year. Both spend and viewability were highest in July,

however, the delta between the two was also the highest (meaning

percentage of impressions wasted). The opposite occurred in

January. From here we can slice and dice down to agency, publisher,

campaign, ad sizes, etc. to try to find patterns between high and

low viewability and performance. As low viewability is identified,

there is ample opportunity to close the gap.

Recommendations on how to diagnose and respond to poor

viewability are covered in Beckon’s 2017 Marketing Truth or

Hype Report.

What's the difference between the verified viewable impressions and impressions we’re actually billed for?

5

It’s no surprise that brands and their

agencies are quickly shifting more and

more spend from traditionally bought

media to programmatic. Beckon’s

analysis of $16 billion in marketing spend

across more than 200 brands found that

programmatic media delivers 2x the results

of traditionally bought media. What is

surprising, however, is how few brands

are tracking it. The landscape is changing

rapidly, and viewability can vary greatly

across channels, ad types, platforms, etc.

Measuring what portion of your media is

bought programmatically and monitoring

the ROI of programmatic versus traditional

will give you the ability to respond and

adjust how those dollars are being

allocated over time.

How much of our media is bought programmatically?

6

This complex but critical question is best solved with

a bubble chart because we need several metrics to

see the full picture. In our example, each bubble is a

creative asset or media type, and we’re using clicks and

impressions to measure high (and low) performance—the

more impressions we serve, the more clicks we should

see. Average performers would fall on the line of best fit,

superior performing creative would garner more clicks than

average, given the number of impressions served, so we’d

see the best creative fall above the line. Spend is reflected

in the size of the bubbles. This means we want to see

big bubbles above the line (more spend against superior

performers) and little bubbles below the line (less spend

on poor performers). In this analysis, we can quickly see

that the creative represented by the yellow bubble isn’t

resonating well and is cause for concern (high spend and

low engagement). Conversely, the purple, red, and dark

gray bubbles all show higher engagement but lower spend

and impressions.

So the answer to our question is, “No, we’re not allocating

the most spend to highest-performing creative.” It’s a great

time to ask our partners to help us understand what we’re

seeing, if we should shift budget to our higher performing

types or if there’s more to the story.

Are we allocating the most spend to the highest-performing creative?

LEARN MORE

Maximizing the ROI of every media dollar requires

collaborating with partners to experiment, drill down,

and roll up to measure success and respond accordingly.

If answering any of these essential questions is a

challenge, our library of data ownership, agency partnership,

and media effectiveness resources can help get you there.

LET'S CONNECT

Get in touch at hello@beckon.com.