When we tallied the results of Datran Media's fourth annual marketing and media survey, optimism about 2010 advertising spending, after a decline in 2009, was just one of the common perceptions that brand marketers and agency professionals revealed. In fact, 73.6 percent of marketers indicated that they believe advertising revenues will increase in 2010. Correspondently, as the majority of respondents indicated confidence that digital marketing will be more effective than offline channels, 93.6 percent of respondents claimed that they intend to increase budget allocation for digital. Marketers selected digital channels like email (39 percent) and search (24 percent) as the strongest performing channels for them last year.
Still, as marketers continue to embrace digital channels to reach a targeted audience (84.2 percent), generate quality leads (73.6 percent), and retain existing customers (56.8 percent), there is a significant gap between the percentage of marketers that claim that they engage in online audience measurement and those that claim to take action on what they measure. With all the rich data offered by digital campaigns, you'd think marketers would figure out how to use metrics to their advantage.
So what gives? Accuracy topped the list of marketers' biggest challenges around measurement. The lack of ability to take action on data and lack of standards are also key barriers. This is hardly a surprise. Looking back to a few recent brand measurement studies, better, common, and more meaningful metrics for online audience measurement are in high demand. The industry first needs to understand what audience measurement actually means. Simply stated, audience measurement is the process of monitoring consumer behavior across all touchpoints, throughout their daily routines, across the web. As campaigns are executed across diverse multi-channel platforms, piecing the measurement story together is imperative. On the other side, digital media measurement -- the process of tracking media placement to conversion and establishing an ROI -- is a closed-loop process and just one piece of the overall measurement plan.
We are not doing our job as an industry if we continue to endorse the same unilateral measurement metrics initially introduced to help measure radio and television audiences more than 70 years ago. The good news is the marketplace is already responding with strong competitive offerings.
So what are marketers measuring effectively? According to the survey, clicks are reported to be the most prevalent metric collected by survey respondents; however, clicks do not tell the whole story. Clicks might give marketers an idea of the route taken by a customer, but they do not show the finish line. A click is just one step, a single chapter in the audience measurement story. Further down the funnel, marketers are measuring conversions, transactions, and impressions, and 40.2 percent are now measuring audience too. Survey respondents ranked conversions (89.3 percent), click-throughs (59.8 percent), and unique views (42.9 percent) as most important. This is good news as, in general, marketers have at least agreed upon baseline metrics for measuring the digital channel from a direct conversion perspective.
So what does this all mean, and how should marketers use it to their advantage? Is a click measured in email the same as a click measured in a display campaign? How we as an industry understand this data -- how we access it, incorporate it, and implement data insights into actionable intelligence -- has been a significant stumbling block for interactive. Marketers need to begin incorporating campaign results from all channels and developing a measurement that assesses the value of a marketing message as a whole. This methodology lays the foundation for the next generation of interactive audience measurement and helps you understand how engagement in the email channel, for instance, ties back to a search or social media campaign. When you use data from a variety of sources like search, email, and direct mail, you can more accurately measure audiences and put an actionable plan together for your next outreach.
With marketers expressing a desire to incorporate emerging channels like search, mobile, and video in 2010 and beyond, the need for better audience measurement will be more important than ever. You can read the full results of the survey here.
Dennis Syracuse is chief marketing officer at Datran Media.
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