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Advertisers are at a measurement crossroads of sorts in 2023.
Device and browser blocking, as well as government privacy changes, are curtailing unique user reach on some of the well-known advertising platforms. This is increasing customer acquisition costs and severely limiting measurement of campaign activity beyond the first or last click—which has never been an accurate indicator of engagement or conversion. Omnichannel campaigns, too many bots and black-box platform forecasting has made measurement more of a directional exercise than one sufficient for hardcore evaluation of results.
With economic factors necessitating tighter scrutiny of ad dollars, how can marketers digitally target their key audiences more precisely and tie their investments back to actual business results?
Living in a multichannel world
In our omnichannel, multi-device world, many advertisers have concluded that they must find new ways to execute multi-touch measurement.
Multi-touch considers all touch points along a user’s path to purchase, not just the first or last click. However, the problem with multi-touch attribution is that it often means multi-touch across more than a single platform. To state the obvious, most marketers today use more than one platform to run campaigns. With cookie deprecation becoming more real every day, the industry hasn’t aligned upon a standard key to match across platforms at scale, and the so-called universal IDs literally only address half the audience due to match rate limitations. This makes measurement a forecasting exercise based on incomplete data.
Proof of omnichannel performance is about individual engagement, not cookies or devices. The common denominator must be the person, the audience member independent of the marketing tactic or platform.
Last-click measurement has hung on for a reason. More sophisticated measurement models like multi-touch are notoriously tricky to implement based on the investment required by the organization and the impact on internal process changes. Orchestrating IT involvement, analytics staff, behavior changes and likely new investments in technology—it can be a difficult pill to swallow for the C-suite when ROI is more of a promise than a certainty. Navigating massive data files or paying a third-party provider to do it for them layers on even more uncertainty and cost.
