Simply put, paid social comprises of any post on a social media network that has dollars supporting it. The truth is, organic social posts don’t usually gain many views or reach most of the audience following a page. To get content in front of brand-new or returning customers, brands need to pay up!
Today, that means moving beyond boosting posts and tapping into the various buying options that exist within platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit.
The great news is that advertising on social media is a very effective way to reach just about any audience. While all social networks offer some type of advertising, the first step in determining where to buy is to identify which networks are the most popular with your target customer.
You can also look at which platforms perform well for you organically, which ones your competitors are leaning into, and which ones have the best targeting options to allow your message to get in front of the right person.
For example, Pinterest is a great place to reach women. Their targeting options include (but are not limited to) creating audiences based on what users are interested in, the search terms they use to discover new ideas, and the actions they take to engage with pins and websites.
Facebook and Instagram have very similar targeting options, but may allow you to appeal to a wider customer base. If you’re looking to reach millennials or younger consumers, Snapchat or TikTok might be the right choice. And if a more business-focused client is the key to growing sales of your product or service, you can try LinkedIn’s very detailed targeting options to find folks based on their skill set, job title, industry, group memberships or employer company.
You’ll also want to consider the different methods of buying that are available on these platforms. They all offer the option to secure ads in a real-time biddable auction that you can access self-serve. Ads in the auction can be optimized toward the lowest possible cost per result.
This is different than buying solely based on impression cost, because the auction serves the ads to the person who is likely to take action after viewing the ad. This is particularly advantageous when the goal of your campaign is to gain long-term brand awareness, ad engagements, website traffic, online conversions, leads, app installs, or online or offline sales.
Outside of the advertising auction environment, many social networks also offer specific reserved inventory (or types of ads) that can be bought at a flat rate. Examples include Reddit subcategory takeovers, premium Facebook video ads that show in front of curated content, and Twitter trending topic takeovers. To secure one of these types of ads, you’ll need to work directly with a representative from the social network, or with a company that has partnerships to leverage on your behalf.
The final consideration when buying a social media ad is selecting the ad format you want to use. Photos, videos and carousel ads that feature multiple images or videos in one ad unit are now commonplace across all of social. Depending on your campaign goal, you might want to consider A/B testing different types of creative to see what performs best, or experimenting with more interactive ad formats like augmented reality lenses.
The good news is that, regardless of the creative format you choose, all of these ads can be bought in the same ad auction and optimized within one campaign to meet your primary business objective efficiently and effectively.
Learn more about how Basis creates effective paid social strategies for our clients here.
Travel marketers need to stay at optimum performance in order to compete and thrive in today’s fast-paced market. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic presented unique new challenges, travel marketers had to work overtime to advertise to their target audiences with the best deals at the right times to win customers.
Whether you market for airlines, cruise liners, hotels, or in the travel entertainment industry, you need dashboard reports to keep performance on the side of cutting edge.
Serious travel marketers use myriad channels and strategies to reach their target audience and drive conversions. In order to optimize output, you need to regularly monitor performance for each. For accommodation and transportation businesses related to travel, near real-time insights are necessary to make the most relevant campaign decisions.
Based on your unique marketing strategy, you may need to observe reports for:
Switching back and forth between different channel reports and trying to stitch together a complete picture of performance just doesn’t cut it for most industries, especially those working in travel.
That’s why creating a comprehensive dashboard report of KPIs from across your program is of paramount importance. Not only does it help you understand how your marketing initiatives work together, but it also makes it possible to link outcomes to other business operations and revenue statistics.
Just how valuable your dashboards are for optimizing marketing and operational performance depends greatly on how you piece them together. Here are some best practices for creating effective dashboards as a travel marketer:
The key to success is putting the most essential metrics at the forefront. Which key performance indicators (KPIs) you should track hinges on your vertical and typical strategy to earn and maintain customers.
If you work for a hotel, there are a lot of factors that can impact performance, both operational and strategic. Besides your occupancy rate, per night rate, bookings, and check-ins, you should also be monitoring a selection key marketing performance metrics to optimize your efforts. Those may include:
Other industry-specific metrics you should have in your dashboards comprise:
By uploading your hotel occupancy and performance data to your dashboard, you can assess more specific performance indicators, namely bookings by room type or hotel location. More importantly, you can tie occupancy and revenue back to certain marketing initiatives that are driving results.
When marketing for airlines, cruise liners, and other types of travel-related transportation, there are many critical metrics you can monitor to optimize performance. Some general KPIs may be:
Additional metrics to consider include:
Keeping marketing and sales performance KPIs in a centralized dashboard empowers you with both an overall snapshot of performance and the ability to develop a detailed understanding of how your site traffic and conversions lead to revenue.
If your business provides tours, entertainment, or other recreational activities related to travel and tourism, these metrics should be top of mind:
Following these KPIs allows you to monitor the performance of all sorts of marketing efforts, such as optimizing for local search results and paid ad performance as well as the success of offline marketing initiatives.
Most travel marketers use a variety of channels and strategies to reach their audiences and nurture leads to conversion - the likes of email, social, SEO, and PPC to name but a few. It’s tempting to keep your dashboards organized by creating different performance reports for each channel. However, this doesn’t allow you to see the big picture and understand how different marketing touchpoints work in unison to meet set goals.
That’s why you should use a multi-touch attribution (MTA) model to see how specific channels and campaigns perform. This will empower you with insights into the incremental impact of each touchpoint on driving conversions.
You can easily reflect MTA in your dashboard by tracking KPIs such as Conversion Rate and Cost Per Conversion. Using the right dashboard tool, you can dig into data and break down these KPIs to learn the impact of different channels, campaigns, and creative assets.
All dashboard reports should include detailed visualizations that depict performance. Oftentimes these elements can tell you much more about performance at a glance than regular data reports. Employing dynamic aids like charts, graphs, and timelines can help you uncover what factors are influencing your KPIs. Your visuals can depict any of the following:
When creating dashboards using sophisticated reporting technology, it’s easy to gain a deeper understanding of these driving factors in just a few clicks. With interactive visuals, you can hover over widgets to get more detailed data, filter by different metrics, and adjust date ranges to get the insights you need in real-time.
Your marketing performance reports shouldn’t exist in a silo away from other key organizational data. Marketing, sales, and day-to-day business management are all linked to each other. There is no way to grasp these connections and optimize performance without analyzing data holistically.
A hotel marketer, for example, might discover that their advertising strategy in the off-season increases bookings and cancellations in a way that lowers their overall occupancy rate. Armed with that knowledge, they can make changes to their ad targeting or redistribute investment to improve key business operations metrics.
The great thing about adopting sophisticated dashboard reporting software is that it’s simple enough to create multiple reports that you can switch back and forth between. Your business data and performance insights are relevant to all sorts of key players across the company. However, they shouldn’t all necessarily be turning to the exact same dashboards to glean the insights they need.
Rather than breaking down your dashboards by channel, try creating reports for different positions within your business. For example, you can build a dashboard filled with KPIs relevant to your marketing department, or HR department, or sales, or for executives. If you don’t want to create dashboards for different departments, you can also create them for different purposes. Here are four types of dashboards you can create:
Operational dashboards are designed to offer a snapshot of overall business health with a focus on the main KPIs mentioned above for the different travel-related industries. Operational reports must always give a real-time perspective. They aren’t designed to surface insights to improve operations, but instead serve as a monitoring tool to ensure KPI performance doesn’t deviate from expectations. Operational dashboards make it easy to spot issues in day-to-day business execution or data flow.
Strategic dashboards include key organizational data points like bookings, revenue, and customer acquisition costs. They do not include more detailed marketing performance and operational metrics. Instead, strategic dashboards are constructed to give c-suite executives an overview of performance so they can find opportunities for improvement. The goal is to offer a quick snapshot so leaders can dig deeper with more independent, granular analyses.
Analytical dashboards are designed to offer time-bound reports relating to how numerous interrelated factors perform and help identify trends over weeks, months, quarters, or years that might present strategic opportunities. For travel-related businesses, analytical reports can illustrate seasonal changes in demand or bookings, or even opportunities to improve the supply chain. These types of dashboards are often complex, detailed, and include all relevant metrics that could be a driving factor for trend fluctuations.
Tactical dashboards are specialized to monitor performance of several important business processes across marketing, sales, or customer service. They unlock detailed insights on performance in a single business process and are designed to help improve cross-team communication, collaboration, and strategy optimization.
Many industries can benefit from comprehensive, real-time reporting of marketing and business metrics. Businesses working in the travel sector, though, have a greater need for these insights given the competitive market and travel climate. One-off analytics tools can tell you a lot about how different channels perform. However, unifying all your data using a single system eliminates gaps in knowledge and unlocks your full potential.
The reporting technology within Basis DSP integrates with all your important data sources and allows you to customize reports to fit your unique business needs. Airlines, cruise companies, hotels, and other travel-related businesses can all benefit from the complete and immediate insights provided by our dashboard reporting technology.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics used to assess the effectiveness of a wide array of business initiatives such as sales and marketing activities. A KPI report is an analysis of these important figures that is used to evaluate overall performance.
Most businesses have numerous technologies and tools that track performance metrics like traffic, conversions, sales, and revenue. So why create a separate KPI report? In this article, we look to answer that question while providing some handy tips on how to create an impactful one.
All marketing channels come with a long list of metrics that can help delineate performance. When analyzing all of them in isolation, it’s easy to get bogged down by the details and miss the big picture of performance. KPI reports only include the most critical metrics to measure initiatives.
KPI reports also include data from different sources which would normally be analyzed separately. This makes it possible to understand how various business initiatives might work in harmony to improve outcomes. Unifying data analysis can surface new insights into how certain initiatives impact overall performance and how individual departments work in unison to drive key marketing goals.
A KPI report is a powerful tool company leaders and decision-makers can utilize to monitor performance, identify optimization opportunities, and make changes to work towards marketing goals. However, a KPI report must include all the right metrics and analyses to maximize its value for your business.
Here are seven tips you can implement to ensure you create an effective KPI report from the beginning:
In order to choose the right KPIs, you first need to have a clear understanding of what your business goals are, both in the short and long term. All businesses have general goals in mind when trying to optimize performance, such as driving more sales, improving conversion rates, increasing retention, etc. However, these general goals must also be measurable.
The best approach is to outline your business goals and ensure each of them is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound).
Here are some examples of SMART goals:
The more specific and measurable your business goals are, the easier it is to select the right KPIs to improve them.
An effective KPI report must include metrics that directly reflect your business goals. Once your goals are outlined, you can select KPIs to measure them. It’s important to remember that each goal will have a number of relevant KPIs that can help paint a picture of performance.
It all depends on what strategies you’re using to drive your goals. For example, if your goal is to increase website conversion rates by 10% in Q1, and you’re using PPC ads, SEO, and social media to nurture leads and drive site traffic, then KPIs from these channels would all be relevant, as well as marketing KPIs that reflect on-site behavior. If your aim is to boost sales across channels by 20% this year, then sales performance metrics are key to follow.
Here are some general and channel-specific KPIs you may want to track based on your goals:
SEO:
PPC:
Social Media:
Sales Performance:
Marketing Performance:
Customer Experience:
It’s crucial to remember that different metrics are relevant for businesses based on their industry and what strategies they utilize in sales and marketing. You don’t want to overlook important KPIs just because they’re not as commonly used as others.
For example:
- SaaS and other online subscription-based businesses will want to measure recurring revenue as a KPI.
- ECommerce businesses will want to track average order value and new vs returning customers.
- Retail businesses will want to track average customer spend and stock turnover rates.
Other critical metrics to follow will depend on what strategies you use to drive key goals. Businesses that sell high-ticket or specialized items rely heavily on content marketing and email marketing to nurture leads into making a purchase. While metrics like site traffic and sign-ups will be important for this type of business, time on site, page views, and email engagement rate will also be strong indicators of performance.
Once you’ve chosen your KPIs, you’re ready to start building your reports. You can do this by exporting data to a spreadsheet and running your own analyses, or you can use software to create automated dashboards.
Dashboard software is a powerful tool because it can collect data from all your sources, then run analyses for you. This saves significant time that can be reinvested into other initiatives, like performance analysis, strategy optimization, and exploring new business initiatives.
Dashboard reports can be updated in real-time with the latest data, always providing you the most updated summary of KPIs. You can also utilize any number of premade dashboard templates, then customize reports to focus on the KPIs that matter most to your business.
Always look for potential gaps in your understanding of performance using your KPIs. This is vital when first setting up your KPI reports as well as in the long term. Start by listing out your business goals and then grouping your KPIs around every one. (It’s possible that a single KPI is relevant to more than one goal.)
Next, consider what you might be missing when using these KPIs for each particular goal. For example, someone with a sales goal would want to track revenue metrics, but shouldn’t ignore influencing factors like traffic and conversion rate.
If necessary, you may need to add in more KPIs to get the full picture. Just make sure you don’t overwhelm your data reports with too many metrics. Only include the most essential KPIs you need to effectively track performance (between five and nine metrics is a good guideline).
If you want to get the clearest picture of your marketing and sales performance from your KPIs, it’s essential to use visual representations of data. Summaries using tables of key metrics show you what the hard numbers are, but you often have to dig into the data to really understand performance. When you use visual representations (such as graphs, charts, and funnels), it’s much easier to understand your current performance and how it compares to the past.
When you use an analytics dashboard for your KPI report, you can create custom visuals to illustrate your most important insights. These are nothing like static charts or graphs — they’re interactive and adjustable. You can hover over elements to get more detailed information, adjust the date range, or filter certain data types to really understand what factors are impacting performance. Your KPIs can tell you a lot about performance, especially when you use visual representations to track them at a glance.
An effective KPI report will provide you with insights you need to make changes that optimize your strategy. In order to get an idea of what kind of changes need to be made, you need to link KPIs back to financial investment.
Where is your money going and what are the results? If PPC takes up 20% of your marketing budget but is responsible for 50% of your sales, that’s a good investment. If another channel or marketing initiative isn’t performing well considering your investment, then you might want to reduce the allocated budget.
Always tie your most important performance KPIs back to wherever your money is going so you can avoid wasted spending and optimize your financial investment in sales and marketing initiatives.
There are myriad ways to create KPI reports, including making your own spreadsheets and using automated dashboard software. Many businesses opt to create their own reports manually so they can include all the metrics and analyses they want. However, this is not the best approach. Dashboards are actually much more flexible than manual spreadsheets. With dashboard software, you can include any type of analysis you want using customizable widgets.
When you use dashboard software, all you need is a single report. There’s no need to run new analyses every time, updating your spreadsheets using the latest data. Dashboards automatically pull from all connected sources to give you the most recent analysis every day.
Reporting software is also adaptable — it’s easy to make small adjustments to get insights that are most pivotal to you at certain times. You can adjust the time-frame of your reports, or dig into key metrics with filters. KPI reports are designed to offer a snapshot of performance, but dashboards make it possible to have this and more specific analyses at your fingertips.
Dashboards simplify everything related to reporting, freeing you up to focus on other important business initiatives, like strategy and growth. If you want to get the most value out of your key performance indicators, then invest in a quality dashboard and follow the tips outlined here to create an effective KPI report.
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At Basis Technologies, our universal reporting and analytics dashboard empowers marketing teams to make better, data-driven decisions for campaigns. You can view metrics from programmatic, direct, search, social, and connected TV via one platform. Ready to learn more? Get in touch with us today!
At Centro, we know that keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends can be tough and time-consuming. To make that easier, we’ve compiled all the articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy our latest list below!
Google Clarifies Its Stance On Post-Cookie Advertising IDs [:02]
While much of the industry has been scrambling to find workarounds following Google’s initial announcements around increased consumer privacy (and the deprecation of third-party cookies), caution should be exercised, as Google expressed concern over some proposed identifiers that "do not meet the rising expectations that consumers have when it comes to privacy.”
6 Types Of Post-Cookie Data That Will Still Be Available After 2022 [:05]
Third-party cookies may be on the way out in Chrome, but that doesn’t mean the end of data-driven advertising. There are still many other types of audience data that marketers have at their disposal, including identity graphs and consented third-party data, household-level data, second-party data, contextual data, cohorts and, of course, first-party data, including login data.
[RELATED: Tune in to this month’s webinar on What’s Next After Third Party Cookies]
Only 4% of iOS Users in US are Opting In to Ad Tracking [:02]
According to Flurry Analytics, which has been tracking daily opt-in and opt-out rates following the launch of iOS 14.5, roughly 4% of users in the U.S. are allowing apps access to their Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) tag.
ATT is a new feature that requires developers to ask users before tracking their movement across other apps and the web. Touted by Apple as an important user privacy tool, critics say the requirement to obtain ad tracking permissions will dissuade users from participating and thus hurt businesses reliant on ad revenue.
A Lull in the Enforcement of Apple’s Privacy Safeguards Causes Confusion over Fingerprinting [:07]
Apple’s App Tracking Transparency isn’t perfectly clear on what is and isn’t allowed when it comes to fingerprinting. Or at least, it isn’t clear to some of the tech companies that focus on mobile measurement. One company’s fingerprinting is another’s probabilistic attribution. Is this selective interpretation of the guidelines or unclear guidance? Maybe a bit of both.
How Publishers are Rebuilding Identity to Control Their Own Destiny [:05]
The exit of third-party cookies and other (flawed) identifiers is a rallying cry for publishers to take control of their destiny. Cracking the identity code will take multiple tools. The fact is, there is no silver bullet for publisher monetization in the post-cookie world.
Can Apple Change Ads? [:13]
While Apple has made software changes that impact privacy and advertising, and have made public statements about its priority on privacy, could they change the way advertising works in the same way they changed the music industry, created an ecosystem for phone apps, and computing as a whole? Apple looks for businesses it can transform with simplicity and control, and take a cut, without owning anything itself, and where it can use that to leverage hardware sales–could that work for advertising?
NewFronts Highlight Power Of CTV [:04]
This year’s NewFronts cemented streaming as a main vehicle to reach TV audiences following a massive shift in viewing behavior fueled by the pandemic. CTV ad spend experienced 22% growth year-over-year in 2020 – its highest gain to date – while nearly three quarters (73%) of CTV buyers shifted budgets from broadcast and cable to CTV this year, according to IAB data. Advertisers, on average, spent $20 million on CTV in 2020, and more than a third (35%) expect to spend more this year.
Podcast Advertising To Surpass $1B This Year [:02]
US podcast advertising is poised to grow as much in the next two years as in the entire past decade, according to a podcast revenue study conducted by PwC and the IAB. Podcast advertising revenue rose to $842 million in 2020, from $708 million in 2019, helped by a particularly robust, 37% year-over-year gain in the fourth quarter.
How the Cannabis Industry Adapted in the Pandemic [:03]
It’s been a year of wins for the cannabis industry, from relaxed regulation and increased legalization in more states, to dispensaries being named essential services to growing positive sentiment towards a previously counter-culture industry. The last year has seen increases in ad spend to promote and differentiate cannabis companies to prospective consumers.
[RELATED: Check out last month’s cannabis webinar]
Augmented Reality Is Changing the Cosmetics Industry Forever [:05]
Amplified by the pandemic, a flurry of prominent cosmetics brands are trying to reproduce the in-store experience within apps that superimpose digital representations of cosmetic products, from brows to eyeliner to contouring cream, onto your face as viewed through your phone’s front facing camera. And then, of course, they try to sell that augmented reality vision to you in real life.
[RELATED: Check out April’s retail webinar]
In 2021, nearly two-thirds of all digital display ad spend will be native advertising. That equates to over $57 billion, representing a remarkable 21% YOY growth. How can marketers maximize the effectiveness of their native campaigns, differentiate their brands, and rise above the cacophony of banner noise?
In this month's Centro webinar, we'll be joined by Jonathan Kim, who leads Platform Partnerships at TripleLift—one of the pioneers in native advertising and a Centro partner—to look at why native continues to be a top performer and see why marketers should consider the various native formats available to them through platforms like Basis.
A U.S. Federal Government agency focused on national health safety was seeking to address the rise in opioid addiction and harm caused to communities. Each year, millions of Americans suffer from dependence or addiction to prescription or illicit opioids – a growing epidemic. The Federal Government in partnership with The White House launched a multi-tactical public awareness campaign to raise general awareness of the opioid epidemic and that addiction is widespread across the country and in local communities. Research showed many communities and citizens felt they were immune to the crisis. Storytelling messaging drove audiences to the campaign landing page to further engage with stories of diverse Americans impacted by the epidemic. The client partnered with Basis Technologies to build a digital strategy and tactical deployment around this important message.
The client’s goal was to aggressively confront opioid addiction by educating and engaging a broader audience who may not necessarily believe they could be directly affected by the epidemic and shift the perception that anyone can become addicted to opioids.
The challenge for this client was reaching the appropriate target audience and measuring impact against them. Through extensive research, the Basis Technologies team was able to strategically define the target audience from both demographic and geographic perspectives and use that information to guide tactic and partner selection. The campaign was designed to reach people ages 25-69, mostly blue-collar with a lower household income, in key states that have the highest drug usage. A brand lift study was included to measure the direct impact that the ads had on the audience’s perceptions.
The omni-channel media strategy was designed to connect with the target audience by generating initial awareness, encouraging engagement, and ultimately shifting perception. Utilizing a full-funnel approach, Basis Technologies partnered with Hulu to support campaign objectives over the course of fifteen months. Basis developed a layered targeting strategy with content adjacencies around news, health, and substance abuse, custom keyword alignments directly related to the opioid crisis, and third-party behavioral targeting based on target audience demographics and relevant interests (drug enforcement, drug policy reform).
The Basis Technologies team tackled ongoing performance by implementing real-time changes based on key performance indicators, exceeding the defined VCR, eCPM, and eCPC benchmarks. Ultimately, measurement through a Nielsen brand lift study proved the campaign was successful with an 84.9% overall lift in perception among exposed audiences, with 70% more likely to agree that anyone can become addicted to opioids compared to 37.9% of nonexposed audiences.
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Today's digital agency landscape is hyper-competitive. With swift shifts in technology, changing privacy laws, the sharp rise of new platforms and competitive disruptors, it’s more challenging than ever to maintain an agency's success.
For perspective on this topic, we speak with former digital agency president and partner Mitch Joel about his experience building, running and selling agency Twist Image (to WPP). Joel shares his thoughts on meeting client expectations, managing talent, assessing revenue models, and more.
In the months since Google announced it would be disabling third-party cookies in its wildly popular Chrome browser, the advertising world has been waiting anxiously to see what technology will take its place as the go-to digital identity solution.
One of the leading contenders? Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) enough: Google, which in 2019 announced the Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) as part of its Privacy Sandbox initiative. The promise of FLoC is that it will gather data on users, then group those users into groups (or cohorts) with like-minded individuals for marketers to subsequently target with relevant ads.
Advocates have said FLoC will provide advertisers with an identity solution that is nearly as accurate as third-party cookies while maintaining individual users’ privacy. Critics, however, have called the implementation a power grab by the world’s leading search and digital advertising company, meant to strengthen its grip on the industry while offering little in the way of actual privacy enhancements.
Regardless of where you fall on this spectrum, Google’s FLoC is now alive and kicking on many of its Chrome browsers as they test the new tech—but that may be just about the only place you can find it because pretty much every other major browser has already decided to block or not adopt Google’s FLoC tracking technology. This includes Mozilla (Firefox), Microsoft Edge, Apple’s Safari, DuckDuckGo, Vivaldi, and Brave.
Some publishers, including The Guardian, and online services such as GitHub are also resisting the new tracking tech from the global search and advertising giant, and WordPress is considering making “disable” its default FLoC setting. Even government officials are beginning to grow skeptical of Google’s new technology, with several regulators across the EU voicing concerns about FLoC.
Where does this leave marketers and advertisers in search of the One True Replacement for third-party cookies? Well, for better or worse, it leaves them right about where they were before FLoC debuted: in search of answers. The immediate future of identity and tracking appears to be an amalgamation of first-party data and a loose network of unaffiliated tracking tools, including the International Advertising Bureau’s Project Rearc, LiveRamp’s IdentityLink, Unified ID 2.0 (aka UID 2.0) and (yes) FLoC, among others.
As advertisers, publishers, developers, and consumers continue to sort things out, it’s important that industry players stay committed to working together: listening to the market, collaborating with regulatory bodies, adapting and developing new products, and keeping customers/users abreast of any changes as they develop. While a single identity solution may be appealing to advertisers, the near future demands a multi-faceted, multi-tool approach rather than betting too heavily on just one solution, as marketers will need to rely on a variety of options while the industry works through its options.
In other words: sit tight, folks. We may be here a while.
Looking for other resources on advertising life after the death of third-party cookies? Check out our whitepaper on “Embracing the Identity Crisis.”
We’re living in the age of big data—so why does data so often feel more like a problem than a solution? If you’re a marketer struggling to reconcile your reporting responsibilities with the rest of your client work, you’re not alone.
Read on to learn why reporting has become such a pain point for agencies, as well as what lies ahead for media planners looking to create more efficient and sustainable reporting workflows.
Marketing reports are how media planners prove out the value of their partnerships with clients. They’re also an integral part of telling the story of who you are and what you can accomplish as a marketer or agency.
The numbers prove out the value of reporting: A McKinsey survey found that agencies who used data-based reporting intensively were 23 times more likely to acquire customers than non-intensive agency users, and that they were 19 times more profitable as well.
Despite the value of reporting, marketers are running into two main problems when it comes to their day-to-day work:
Media planners aren’t running into challenges with data because of their own professional inadequacies. Rather, these problems arise from the marketing landscape itself, and how the use of data has naturally developed within our industry.
Media complexity has tripled in the past 20 years. Beginning in the 1990’s, the digital age triggered a proliferation of new channels to connect with consumers. Flash forward to today, and marketers are working out of a variety of different platforms to run their campaigns across search, social, programmatic, website, CTV, and more.
Enter our first problem: With media planners working out of many different platforms to run their campaigns, they must also sift through each of those platforms to pull reports. At the same time, clients want cross-platform insights in order to holistically understand the impact of their ad spend.
To deliver these insights to clients, media planners spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to wrangle their data into a cohesive story. This often signals the use of time-consuming, inefficient, and plain unpleasant manual processes.
In a survey by CtrlShift, half of the campaign reports created by programmatic media buyers from November 2018 to January 2019 were done manually, according to 60% of their 93 respondents.
Media buyers are relegated to these manual processes because the infrastructure to manage and analyze these large data sets is still being developed.
Finally, marketers are hindered by data saturation. We’re now able to collect consumer data so effectively that the volume of data has become unwieldy.
This proliferation of data, coupled with the lack of infrastructure, has led to what some marketers call "infobesity:" The collection of so much data that it becomes inconsumable.
Automated reporting is the inevitable future of campaign reporting. Many platforms have been created to solve for the pain point of manual reporting in marketing.
If automated reporting isn’t an option, marketers will need to find creative ways to make their reporting workflows more efficient.
MarTech columnist Matt Umbro advises spending no more than 25% of your client's monthly billable hours on reporting. To make the most of that time, start with your client's goals. What problems are they trying to solve?
Pull your insights based on what will be most helpful in telling the story of how you're solving their problems—and don't feel like you need to make use of every data set available to you.
Basis by Centro is the most automated, intelligent, and comprehensive solution on the market. Learn all about it here.
