Distrust in Programmatic buying is the symptom of a much wider marketing effectiveness problem. Made-for advertising, low viewability, murky supply chains, fraud, recent YouTube controversies, and many other issue continue to dog programmatic buying. In the world of display advertising, the concept of ‘made-for-advertising’ seems to be just the tip of the iceberg—a surface manifestation of a much more intricate problem that pervades the industry. While these issues still exist to some degree for brand campaigns, for performance campaigns this root issue is often created by a flawed measure of performance and campaign attribution.
A fictional explainer:
Imagine you are in the airline sector running display ads. What is more valuable to your brand- Serving a targeted ad in TripAdvisor or running a totally non-targeted ad on a respected premium site? Assuming you are paying the same CPM cost, the answer is likely to be TripAdvisor. After all, the user is probably in-market and the ad may just change their purchase intention through seeing your ad.
Now imagine the creative on the TripAdvisor site is for dog food; nothing in the creative is associated to your airline brand. The non-targeted ad however is still a fully branded creative, advertising the latest airline prices which are pretty competitive. Which of the placements will perform better using standard attribution techniques (post impression/Post click)? The answer in almost all cases will be the dog food creative on TripAdvisor, not the branded creative. This of course should make no sense to a CFO, why would an ad that doesn’t even advertise my brand perform better than a creative that does?
This is because the buyer is, by visiting TripAdvisor, likely to be in-market for a holiday, they are likely to be buying from your airline brand anyway, the dog food ad had no relevance to the brand, but still claims a big chunk of the attributed sales from those users who were served the ad, and then purchased a ticket via the airline website.
Now imagine TripAdvisor builds an ad exchange, and targets all users who are ‘in-market’ for a holiday off-site. Does TripAdvisor need to run your airline ads in quality sites? Does it need to ensure the ad is viewable and not on Made-for-advertising sites? The answer is- no, when conversion attribution (otherwise known as ‘performance’) is the only measure of success.
Performance attribution is flawed
Measuring guardrail metrics like viewability, site quality, attention, are often just plasters/band aids for a flawed performance attribution system, one that fails to take into account incrementality, or how the campaign improved purchase intent, brand favourability, etc.
To remove fraud, poor quality sites, low viewability rates, and remove wastage from media, brands need to improve how they measure performance. Poorly managed conversion attribution is the root cause of many of the problems we see in display advertising right now. The root cause is not programmatic, MFAs, or viewability, the root problem is how media is bought by people, how those people are are set with flawed measures of success.
Our key recommendation, get an independent view of your measures of success. Build out a measurement framework that ensures incrementality is at the heart. Digital outputs like ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) may make sense as an output, but the methodologies for which they exist may be flawed, or favour specific environments (e.g Chrome over Safari). Understand the ethodologies behind attributed sales, Cost per acquisition, etc. If a brand is looking to fully in-house, consider that your marketing effectiveness team sits alongside, but not within the marketing activation team. This way your teams are not engineered to mark their own homework or set their own KPIs and targets that may no longer align to business objectives.
Want to know more about how Alligator Solutions can free you from the shackles of a flawed measurement framework? get in touch here