When it comes to measuring online advertising effectiveness, digital media has failed to talk the language of brand advertising. For the last decade, measuring online advertising effectiveness has meant recording actions such as click-throughs, subsequent conversions and site impressions: the language of direct response. Brand advertisers, however, talk in terms of audience. When buying offline media they deal in the number of people a campaign reaches (reach) and the number of times these people see the campaign (frequency). Advertisers are restricted from taking full advantage of online brand advertising by the lack of comparable metrics for measuring online advertising effectiveness.
Being Greater with Data, a new White Paper from Microsoft Advertising, shows the extent to which this measurement barrier is preventing advertisers spending more online, and explores existing measures that can be used to enable brand advertisers to measure online advertising effectiveness with comparable metrics to those used offline.
Being Greater with Data advocates two forms of measurement to bring online brand advertising in line with offline: one deals with audience quantity, the other with advertising quality.
Measures of quantity such as reach and frequency can be made available online by combining campaign data, such as impressions, with online panel data to provide audience delivery, and the report explores whether this is sufficient to create an online equivalent to traditional media GRPs.
However, Being Greater with Data summarises that measures of advertising quality are equally significant in assessing the value of the audience experience delivered by a campaign. Microsoft Advertising’s Dwell on Branding research provides strong evidence that a user’s active engagement with an ad is one of the most meaningful online measures of brand engagement.
Click here to download the full Being Greater with Data report.
Find out more about the Dwell on Branding report on the impact of dwell time on brands.
Read more about measuring campaign performance in our Understanding Digital section.
