Attribution and measurement of display advertising is a tricky business. Traditional metrics like click-through rates (CTR) and cost-per-click (CPC) are passé to a new breed of marketer who demands greater accountability for all marketing including digital advertising. This new breed of marketer is less interested if a broad audience saw an ad, or even if they went to the desired landing page. They want to know all about subsequent actions. Did the campaign drive conversions, lead to product sales, or inspire connections on social media?
A desire for full visibility into how ad spend performs in the context of a customer journey aligns with a growing recognition that personalization is what turns the gears of a dynamic, omnichannel customer journey. The non-linear customer journey spans addressable and non-addressable environments, but the ability to be consistent across all and close the loop gives brands the competitive advantage they seek with personalized interactions.
Consider the Harris Poll sponsored by Redpoint, where 63 percent of consumers said that personalization is a standard service they expect – and 43 percent said that they expect a brand to know them as the same customer across all online and offline touchpoints. This expectation clearly impacts digital ad placement, with brands expected to know how a consumer might respond to the type, frequency, and placement of a certain ad – not just where they clicked, but its influence on their buying journey.
The imperative for personalization creates a need in the CDP advertising ecosystem to move beyond traditional metrics and measure advertising effectiveness holistically in the context of customer experiences, not just on a campaign-by-campaign basis.
A previous blog in this space explored the personalization of a website experience for a first-time, anonymous visitor as one use case for the Redpoint Digital Acquisition Platform powered by LiveRamp. Measuring the effectiveness and value of digital advertising is another. Using Identity Links from LiveRamp, marketers now have an effective way to measure digital advertising campaigns across channels, and provide a greater return on ad spend (ROAS) that does not rely on ambiguous concepts of brand familiarity, exposure, awareness, or recall.
Transition to a People-Based Approach
Post-campaign reporting is often frustrating for marketers who find it less than helpful in providing a differentiated customer experience. Most often when post-campaign data is returned, it is likely channel-specific, incohesive, and inconclusive. Privacy requirements prevented connecting various data types such as transactions and revenue to ad exposure data in order paint a clear picture of digital media impact on a buying journey. Post-campaign reporting that is restricted to a campaign view reveals very little about how a customer moves through an omnichannel journey.
The Redpoint solution transforms post-campaign reporting from cookie-based to a more people-based approach, with visibility across campaigns and creative and across addressable and non-addressable channels. It allows for a consolidated, longer-term view of digital advertising by linking data sets, capabilities and metrics typically associated with a customer data platform – namely, customer data – to advertising reporting. Anonymized customer and prospect records, in other words, can now contain advertising exposure information.
Substitute PII for Identity Links for a Complete CDP Advertising View
As the previous blog detailed, the Redpoint platform makes it possible to create a personalized customer experience in non-addressable digital channels by working with anonymized customer records. Redpoint clients onboard PII-based records to LiveRamp, which removes all PII and anonymizes the data. Clients can then activate audiences across more than 500 destinations that LiveRamp supports.
Advertising measurement is enabled by LiveRamp returning post-campaign data to a Redpoint client’s auxiliary anonymous database. In this anonymized version of a CDP, clients connect the raw post-campaign data to different data types – transactions, promotional history, and impression data – to achieve a cohesive understanding of the advertising impact.
Post-campaign data is sent from the ad networks, DSPs and or publishers to LiveRamp who replaces identifying information with IDLs for the advertiser. This data is collected into the anonymous CDP where it can be connected with additional customer data. Results can be viewed across campaigns, networks, publishers etc. Previously, a customer segmented view of a campaign might provide visibility of an audience’s exposure to an ad on a single platform, whereas with an built-in anonymity from IDLs, the Digital Acquisition Platform makes it possible to have a pull-down view of all audiences against all creative – and measure audience response across the open web.
To ensure full compliance with privacy regulations multiple controls are in place to govern the anonymous CDP. For one, analysis can display findings on cohort groups of 25 or larger. This means marketers can better analyze, for example, which ad performed well for which group on a certain ad network. And not just by measuring clicks and opens, but actually closing the loop on how ad campaigns translate into sales for certain audiences.
Utilizing an anonymized approach to connecting data sets in a new way provides marketers with a fuller, longer-term view of media spend that can, for the first time, be tied to audience response, engagement, and actions throughout the advertising ecosystem without any risk to personal information.
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