Christian Dubreuil, MD EMEA, ad and audience at Dynata, explains how rigorous measurement, based on extensive data sets, can help marketers in their quest for transparency and provable return on investment.
Scrutiny around the return on investment (ROI) from advertising has never been higher. With investment in online spend continuing to grow and channel diversification resulting from the proliferation of online, marketers and advertisers need to be able to validate their spend and truly understand the impact it has had on KPIs, as the calls for transparency continue to grow.

Traditionally, online media is measured using impressions and clicks, which has worked for many years. However, the publicity around the Association of National Advertisers study into pervasive, non-transparent business practices in the media-buying ecosystem, as well as international publications from McKinsey, Ebiquity and Accenture on the subject, made online advertisers more aware of the need to find a transparent measurement strategy which gives real insight into the business impact of spend. These traditional measurement tactics only tell part of the story and can lead to ineffective evaluation of campaigns and inefficient allocation of budget.

Audience validation
Businesses are constantly looking to find better, more effective ways of working that keep up with new technologies. Viewability, cross-device measurement and audience validation all deliver real value in terms of actionable insights against KPIs. The foundation of all these metrics and insights is quality, reliable data.

With access to first-party data from real consumers, marketers are able to dig deeper than impressions and clicks to understand the true impact of their campaign on their intended target audience. Dynata’s extensive array of data, which is available on a single platform, enables programmatic access to the industry’s most deeply profiled data. The combination of permissioned data with an independent platform gives marketers singular assurances of trustworthy, transparent, accurate and unbiased results for better marketing optimisation and ROI, whether in terms of audience validation or viewability.

With a reach that encompasses 60m people globally and a library of over 2,700 profile attributes collected directly from individuals through survey data – the largest data set of its kind — users can benefit from a trustworthy data resource that is designed and actively managed to deliver a variety of advantages. Marketers and advertisers can leverage this high-quality data to identify their audience and assess the impact of their campaigns on that target audience to prove ROI.

Feedback loop
Using innovative technology to identify exposed consumers, dropping tags into digital ads and cookies onto opted-in consumers, as well as tracking mobile IDs, Dynata provides a true advertising feedback loop, which enables marketers and advertisers to use our first-party data for targeting, to validate the reach of campaigns, identify non-human traffic, provide brand safety and measure viewability, as well as quantify the uplift of the campaign across each media channel and device.

Ultimately, these new measurements put the metrics that are important to each individual marketer at the heart of the analysis, whether it is engagement, brand awareness, purchase intent or another KPI – that is what quality first-party data allows you to measure.

Technology is driving the advertising industry forward, and marketers and advertisers who don’t want to get left behind need to adopt these true measurement standards to stay relevant. It’s never been more important to demonstrate the impact of advertising on the wider business, and looking beyond traditional measurement tactics will help marketing and advertising achieve their goals, optimise their spend and realise the ROI of their investment.

Footnote: Dynata rebrand
Research Now SSI is now Dynata. The new brand speaks to the company’s unique value proposition: Dynata offers one of the world’s largest collections of first-party data, contributed by people – consumers and business professionals – who opt in to participate in surveys and market research. The current opinions, reactions and data that they provide are critical to organisations’ decision-making, particularly to business investment in marketing services spanning from product development and brand tracking to advertising.

The new brand reflects the company’s strategy to provide precise, accurate data, based on real people across the marketing spectrum, from research to advertising, to achieve new standards of marketing performance, and to close the learning and knowledge loop across marketing disciplines. Dynata understands that marketers have evolved beyond big data and are now seeking reliable, connected information that will give them game-changing insights, more relevant engagement with their customers and prospects, and significant competitive advantage.

This article first appeared in the February 2019 print edition of Mobile Marketing. You can read the complete issue online here.