Measuring digital campaign effectiveness need no longer be done in isolation from other media, argues the research director at Millward Brown.

A panel on cross-media measurement at ad:tech London this year highlighted that marketers are often measuring the contributions of all the different types of media within their campaigns using different methodologies. There are many solutions for evaluating various different media and communications campaigns -- from print, TV and direct mail, through all the different types of digital campaigns (search, advertising, social networking activities, IPTV and so on), PR and word of mouth. There will probably always be some requirement for measuring the impact of a single-media campaign and digital is no exception to this. In fact, it's the measurability of this media that makes it so attractive to so many marketers.

But let's face it: not many companies are operating a single-media communications strategy. The panel at ad:tech failed to come up with a real solution to the problem, only agreeing that finding a common way to measure across different platforms was important. I wholeheartedly concur that comparable cross-media measurement is needed, not least because measuring digital campaigns in isolation can provide a fairly misleading picture of how this media is actually working for your brand.

People do not just interact with your brand online. They may have also encountered your brand's communication on a tube poster, reading a magazine or watching the TV. For this reason, it's important to track the whole consumer journey from offline to online and back again. Because the journey doesn't always start or end online, measuring click-throughs really doesn't give the complete picture of what a person did before they bought online. The influence of any other media or communication that a consumer might come across on their journey to online purchase cannot be underestimated, but it can be measured.

It is crucial to find a holistic way to measure across all campaigns if you want to understand which of your many offline and online media investments has the most impact on desired brand outcomes -- such as improving image perceptions, increasing brand loyalty and ultimately generating sales -- or to understand how different media work together in synergy with each other to impact these measures. Finding a common way to compare the output from different media is not easy, but it can be done.

By comparing the contributions of all the different media encountered along the consumer journey to purchase on an 'apples for apples' basis, you can gain a better understanding of which media and which media combinations are contributing most to the desired brand response. This can help to guide future media budgets and ensure that the return on marketing investment is maximised. In the current economic climate, I doubt there is one marketer who does not want to maximise their spend or better understand which activities really make the most impact on what really matters for their brand.

And a lot can be learnt from the results. For example, the overall return from digital media may be greater per dollar spent than other media, but a proportion of this may be due to it working in synergy with TV activity designed to help drive traffic to the website. This level of understanding is important to ensure that planning recommendations take into account that some media may work better in conjunction with others and that looking at pure overall return per dollar online is only part of the story.

And of most importance to digital marketers, a cross-media analysis could help show the real benefits of having digital in the media mix, in particular, proof of the value of including digital for those who have, until now, been nervous about spending money in new areas. If you can justify the spend on digital versus other media competing for the same pot of money and show how it fits into the overall marketing mix, then its an easier decision to make to include it in the future.

In conducting a cross-media analysis, a few things need to be taken into consideration. For example, it is important to measure before and during a campaign to ensure that you take into account how people felt about the brand before being exposed to the media. Otherwise, there is a risk of wrongly attributing a media effect (e.g., a significant increase in consideration) to a group who were heavily exposed to the media, when in fact, they already had high levels of consideration and that is precisely why they were targeted more heavily by the campaign.

It is also important to consider how the media exposure is being measured. Of course, in the digital space, the most accurate way to measure exposure to media is to use cookies. For other media, there are different methods, some using recognition and some using media consumption questions. Although recognition can have its advantages, the use of media consumption questions tends to provide the most impartial and complete estimate of media exposure. It is not subject to misattribution in the way that recognition is. Further, recognition is really measuring the impact on people who have already remembered the copy (likely due to power of the creative) -- so it is more of a measure of remembered effect than actual media exposure in terms of opportunity to see.

The benefits of using cross-media campaigns to build brands are clear, but many marketers are a long way from understanding the synergies that they provide and using them to hone the efficiency of their media investments. Measuring digital campaign effectiveness need no longer be done in isolation from other media. The true value of digital campaigns lies in understanding the contribution they make to other media and the contribution that other media make to the overall digital strategy.

Claire Dewhurst is research director at Millward Brown.