Marketers have always been under pressure to prove performance – the ROI of their activities – and as access to data grows, measuring results is getting easier than ever.
Or is it? That depends on what you’re measuring.
A recent study by the Association of Canadian Advertisers (ACA) found that a whopping 94% of Marketers were using click-through rates to assess their digital-media ROI. This despite the fact that there’s very little evidence connecting CTRs to actual sales. Even Facebook knows this: Brad Smallwood, Facebook’s VP Measurement and Insights, has said “We continue to tell you how many ‘clicks’ your video has generated, even though we have proven that clicks bear no correlation to sales.”
And let’s not forget that other go-to metric for online video these days: Views. After all, the numbers are pretty impressive: 100K views! One million views! Ten million views!!
Ten million views is great, but 316 million views is even better; that’s what the average six-week TV ad campaign will deliver. Which is to say that yes, numbers are important, but perspective matters, too.
So, what do marketers need to remember? That click-through rates, online impressions and television GRPs are all strictly delivery metrics. If they don’t drive business results, they’re largely irrelevant.
At thinktv, we wanted to delve into this a little bit more so we partnered with MediaCom’s Business Science division to look at the correlation between TV investment and key financial indicators. One troubling finding was the over-reliance on data sources that are not tied to performance.
The industry needs to change the channel on metrics – from delivery to outcome. Those are the numbers that truly matter in the boardroom. And they can be achieved through a variety of attribution and econometric models – models that consistently demonstrate TV’s unparalleled ROI.
Got questions? Great. We’ll be at the Marketing Evolution Summit to talk about the Power of TV Advertising and the importance of tracking media attribution. Hope to see you there.
For now, check out the full white paper Missed Opportunities in Media Planning (and the Case for ROI) for more detailed information.
To see a presentation of the white paper, watch this clip from The Future of TV Advertising.
And have a look at MarketShare’s U.S. econometric study of the most effective media across a number of categories.
