We Need to Make Digital Measurement Easier

[Editor’s Note:  Sorry for the long layoff, I am going to be better about posting starting today]

To be clear, I don’t mean that we need to make it easier for us digital marketers, but that we need to make it easier for the brand representatives that we have to report to.

When I go through plans and recaps for marketing programs, the problem becomes very clear.  People who have been dealing with traditional marketers for a long time expect just a few things from TV, print, and radio: Reach and Frequency.  These are estimates, and they are provided by the people selling the media, so they don’t need to be calculated by those buying it.

It’s simple, and clean, though it does nothing to tell you about the effectiveness of the channel after the fact.  How many people saw the ad, and how often.  Move on.

Sometimes you will see a brand lift study built into a buy, which basically just consists of polling some consumers to see how the ad made them feel (with varying degrees of scientific rigour).

Then we get to digital, and suddenly the performance metrics increase exponentially.  The breadth and depth of data that we have available to us in the digital space is both a blessing and a curse in that sense.

First of all, we subdivide “digital” into myriad channels of increasing specificity.  There is display, search, social, in-text, and more.  Each of these sub-channels has multiple ad unit types, and in turn, each ad type has multiple statistics that can be tracked.

(For instance, display ads can be static units or interactive units (and static units can be further broken down by size, so there are standard banners, skyscrapers, etc.), and so you have reach in terms of unique users, then interaction rates, time spent in the ad unit for rich media, click through rate, video plays in unit, and more.))

You can measure attributes of the ads themselves, like click through rate, impressions, cost per impression/click, etc., and you can also measure on-site actions and behavior, like conversions, bounce rate, time on site, and so on.

We haven’t even talked about the social metrics like Facebook likes, tweets, +1s, ‘conversations, and additional followers/friends.

The upside of all of this is that obviously the data gives us visibility and optimization options that traditional marketers can only dream of.  The downside is that we are actually held to performance standards unlike traditional offline media channels, and moreover, that the people who we report to get lost in all of these metrics.

Traditional media channels don’t provide brands with much in the way of data or measurement options, and maybe the answer is that they should be forced to come up with better ways to justify their value.  More likely however, we as digital marketers need to find ways to simplify our reporting.

This may mean actually giving brands less raw data, and it’s possible that Pandora’s box has been opened and it is too late.  However, I think that the only possible outcome is the creation of a weighted composite number that is based on an equation taking into account a variety of metrics across digital channels, pegged to an index.  The million dollar problem is just figuring out how to do it, but you can bet that I will be working on it, as I am sure others are.

Expect a 'part two' of this entry in the future.