How can marketers maximize the effectiveness of their digital spend?

Digital channels are the most effective tool for brand building, according to a recent study by Kantar and Marketing Week – with 86.7% of 1,500 brand marketers saying digital drives long-term results vs 80.1% who think the same for traditional media. This evidence challenges the entrenched – if inaccurate – idea that digital is a performance-based channel that is only effective at driving short-term metrics such as clicks (one of our pet peeves at the IAB – as all the Clickheads out there know).

So how can more marketers maximize the effectiveness of their digital advertising spend? The key to successfully leveraging digital channels tends to lie in selecting the right measurement strategy for your objectives. Here, members of our Research Group share their advice.

When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of digital advertising, which research methodologies would you recommend?

The power of marketing mix models
Michał Protasiuk (senior marketing research & insights manager, YouTube Ads, Market Insights, EMEA, Google): "The best effectiveness framework combines marketing mix models (MMMs), attribution, and experiments. Advertisers should start with MMMs to understand the overall impact of their marketing campaigns. Then they can use attribution to drill down into the day-to-day performance of individual channels. Robust marketing experiments can then be used to validate and improve both MMMs and attribution models."

Tailoring research to campaign objectives
Emily Thompson (insight manager, The Guardian): "Research needs to be tailored to the campaign’s length and objectives. Recaller vs. non-recaller is cost-effective for shorter campaigns and offers a clear understanding of impact. Longer, bigger-budget campaigns need a multi-wave methodology, perhaps with additional components like Response Time Testing or qualitative techniques (e.g. focus groups)."

The rise of attention
Emmanuel Pierre Josserand (senior director of brand, agency and industry relations, Freewheel): "Advancements in technology have helped to massively improve the way advertisers can now determine the effectiveness of their digital advertising at scale. Attention is a great example of that, as it moved to become a key metric and potentially a currency for advertisers to transact on."

What advice would you give marketers who are feeling the pressure when it comes to proving the effectiveness of digital advertising?

Don’t measure digital in silo
Mike Follett (managing director, Lumen Research): "Embrace media mix models (MMMs). Too often, digital is in a silo, with its own language and numbers that are incommensurate with other media like TV and OOH. MMM studies allow all media to be considered on a level playing field - and this is something that we have to embrace and extol if we are to be taken seriously."

Glean insights from aggregate data
Sam Clough (global strategic insight director, SuperAwesome): "Given the predication towards direct attribution for digital, basing decisions on claimed and aggregate data can seem risky, but these tools can provide insights to help enable marketers to base decisions on important KPIs including recall, intent and brand perception."

Benefit from culturally relevant research findings
Monika Pick (senior insight manager, The Guardian): "Digital formats are best at making people more positive about a brand, increasing positive conversations and driving purchase. Whether looking into the cost-of-living crisis or into people’s ways to find happiness nowadays, we make sure advertisers’ campaigns benefit from culturally relevant research findings, so their communication with consumers resonates well."

Data should be informed by KPIs
Emmanuel Pierre Josserand (senior director of brand, agency and industry relations, Freewheel): "Different media serve different purposes and will reach audiences in different ways. When it comes to measurement and effectiveness, the data marketers provide should cover a particular event of their KPI, depending on campaign goals. They may not need to compare the insights, but rather present these as complementary."

What do advertisers find particularly valuable when you are sharing insights on brand-based digital campaigns?

Insight from brand lift is invaluable
Sam Clough (global strategic insight director, SuperAwesome): "For the advertisers we work with, being able to measure the impact of their campaigns and glean deep insight from brand lifts is invaluable for proving ad performance, brand impact and planning future campaigns."

Less is more to maximise attention
Mike Follett (managing director, Lumen Research): "Attention is finite, people are distracted, and advertisers need to assume indifference on the part of their audiences. So, we find that for all the talk about 'storytelling' a better rule of thumb is KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). When it comes to digital advertising, less is more. Simple, elegant advertising that uses distinctive brand assets to grab attention and communicate quickly is a consistent recommendation from our data."

Understanding brand building's downstream impact
Michał Protasiuk (senior marketing research & insights manager, YouTube Ads, Market Insights, EMEA, Google): "Advertisers value understanding brand building's downstream impact, which is not immediate sales but growth in branding metrics and search interest for core brands or products. Search interest can also indicate future sales. Mature brands often want to understand efficiencies across brand-based digital and non-digital channels."

Identifying untapped audiences
Francesca Bender-Elliott (insight manager, The Guardian): "We’ve standardized our ad effectiveness to develop benchmarks so advertisers can understand campaign performance in context, as well as providing insight into specific brand-building and campaign metrics. Approaching effectiveness research broadly - looking at topical issues and building on past learnings - has helped identify untapped audiences and led to repeat business."