The IAB Australia Ad Effectiveness Council released The Digital Ad Effectiveness Playbook recently and it is great resource in guiding accurate measurement of the success of media activity. The Playbook has contributions from IAG, Columbus, Kantar, Impact Radius, ComScore, Nielsen, Facebook, eBay and Experian.
For me 10 points jumped out of the work carried out by council members:
1. Businesses must work hard to measure “people” based metrics not just cookies or devices & their interaction with marketing messages across all channels
2. Easy default metrics can be dangerous traps when assessing activity – generally the most accurate models to measure success require the most amount of effort
3. Metrics based on short term business goals can be misleading & lead to problems with longer term brand health and sales
4. Inventory reviewed within attribution models must have been viewable and valid (served to a human)
5. Stop using click through, last interaction & last click tracking to measure success
6. Ensure effectiveness & attribution models address incrementality when looking at sales
7. Validate data quality including the “freshness” of the data
8. Set up experiments wherever possible to track impact & continually improve performance
9. For cross media measurement work to find ways to assess all channels equally without losing granular data which is important to inform models
10. There are many different elements that drive success & assessing the of ad activity must take the following into consideration:
- a. Media channel
- b. Environment/Content
- c. Ad Format
- d. Data & audience targeting
- e. Timing
- f. Frequency
- g. Creative
- h. Other marketing activity
- i. Cost
The playbook is now available for download here.
