This week the IAB released their “Don’t Be A #Clickhead” campaign aimed at agencies and advertisers who continually look to measure the impact of their advertising activity based on the number clicks delivered, and cleverly called them out for being…’clickheads’.
Which, for what it’s worth, has been a long time coming. The desired outcome of the campaign was to highlight their measurement toolkit which emphasises the use of techniques such as attribution modelling, econometrics, brand studies and controlled tests.
Here in the office we’re huge fans of this campaign. We’ve long been advocates of recommending that campaigns stop using arbitrary metrics such as CTR to measure the effectiveness of a campaign, and have been able to show real business growth as a result.
The most recent problem advertisers are facing is measuring the effects of their online media through offline conversion points,
Here I’ve outlined some of the techniques to solve this based on the work we have developed with clients.
In-store measurement
The majority of customer journeys start online: a search for the “Best beach holidays” (It’s Cozumel, Mexico); an influencer video on H&Ms “fashion haul for February”; or an email received from The Perfume Shop on the “New perfume collection 2019” etc, but still we see the proportion of offline sales are still relatively larger than online sales across a number of businesses and retailers. We regularly use partners to measure the effectiveness of our online ads and OOH billboards on store visits by setting up an exposed group and control group and measuring the uplift of those that visited a store after being exposed to an ad via their physical location. For one such advertiser we managed to increase uplift to their stores. We were then able to further calculate incremental ROI by channel based on the uplift rate, their store conversion rate and in store average order value.
Call tracking and measurement
We partner with Infinity, a call tracking software provider, to be able to track and report on users who contact a brand after being exposed to advertising either online or offline. This software doesn’t just allow us to track and report on the number of people that called after being exposed by different media but we’re also able to determine certain thresholds on the call to be able to rate the quality of the leads we’ve driven from the campaign, last year we were able to increase an advertiser’s leads by 73% whilst cutting their cost per lead by 31% since the implementation of the measurement software which heavily contributed towards their annual lead target.
CRM modelling and measurement
We’re also able to ingest data from advertisers CRM systems through the use of marketing platforms which sit between their main CRM database and our advertising, allowing us to track users based on the channels they were exposed to. This means we can see customers who booked both online and offline and link them back to a single customer view, giving us the full picture of all touchpoints for those that have completed a conversion. Moreover, it means our analytics team can measure and understand the influence that one channel has on every other channel, which becomes a powerful tool for strategy, planning and optimisation.
So, if you’re an advertiser tasked with measuring the effectiveness of your online ads towards offline goals, I hope this has given you some small insight into how you may be able to achieve that. Whatever you do, don’t rely on click-through-rates to tell you everything you need – or want – to know about your advertising. You will inevitably be both disappointed and misled.
By Nick Graham, Digital Strategist