As analytics develop, media companies and advertisers have more measurements than they actually need in order to assess marketing initiatives. This leads to media companies and advertisers placing emphasis on metrics that may not be relevant. This happens with impressions; people think that more individuals seeing an ad means more people are likely to purchase a given product. But impression count certainly is not always applicable to marketing situations. It is hard to determine to what degree an increase in sales can be attributed to an increase in impressions. Before uncovering this, impressions are just another measurement that marketers have at hand but don’t know what to do with it. For sales-driven businesses, conversions and cost-per-conversion are much more relevant.
Other metrics are often important to consider, even as they are overlooked in favor of impressions. For marketers who only care about building brand awareness, impressions and cost-per-impression should be taken into consideration. All in all, different situations and contexts demand different measurements.
In the face of the modern data explosion, marketers have more measurements at hand than they know what to do with. Linda J. Popky discusses this phenomenon in her Harvard Business Review article “Identify the Marketing Metrics That Actually Matter.” She explains marketers should not try to measure everything measurable. “Much of this data (e.g., clicks on a web link) is too granular to be used for higher-level decisions.” The only way to help navigate through the mess is to have a deep understanding of business goals, which will help marketers focus on a few key measurements that can truly help tell the story.
Usually marketers will set up campaign measurement KPIs upfront. This requires an understanding of the predicted audience. To help set KPIs, media companies have to estimate and predict how many viewers will be in a given channel at some point in the future. After campaign implementation, media companies need to provide measured audience data to marketers to measure how the campaign performed compared to expectations. These two measurements cannot gauge the actual audience that viewed and engaged with the ad anyway, but they help set the budget and measure a campaign’s performance.
In terms of which party should be held responsible for which part of the process, I think that media should provide accurate audience product and make sure that the ad is really “viewable.” As for how the creative and the campaign engage the target audience, the agency that produces the campaign should be held responsible. When the whole campaign is off target, then the marketers should really think about what went wrong.
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