Crafting the right digital strategy to hit your ultimate marketing goal is a balancing act. You need to vet platforms, allocate budget and determine appropriate campaign KPIs.
This last point is seemingly the easiest element of a campaign to settle upon. However, focusing on the wrong KPI or not understanding how various KPIs interact with each other may negatively impact campaign success.
In today’s advertising marketplace, where the tech-stack can provide innumerable campaign measures, digital marketers need to put extra care into fine-tuning their campaign KPIs to help ensure that the scale they need is not limited by the measures they put in place.
The ideal versus the reality
Wouldn’t it be perfect if every campaign could be tuned so it delivers 100 percent viewability, zero percent invalid traffic (IVT), 100 percent in-demo targeting -– and deliver in-full while hitting click-through rate (CTR), cost per acquisition (CPA), or video completion rate (VCR) goals?
Marketers, like everyone else, must operate in an imperfect world. There are tradeoffs –- and these tradeoffs might mean altering or changing the weight placed upon various campaign KPIs to help ensure success.
A one-size-fits-all approach to campaign design and measurement does not always work, and it certainly does not always work for a single advertiser under every condition at all times of the year.
As we move into the months where marketers are executing their Q4 strategies, this is especially important to consider. Most brands this time of year need scale to affect the buying habits of as many consumers as possible. More than ever, a finely-tuned advertising strategy with strategic campaign KPIs is necessary to help ensure the ultimate opportunity is not hindered by restrictive or competing measures.
Performance measures, whether an advertiser’s campaign KPIs or a supply partner’s benchmarks, are the currency by which we evaluate the efficacy of the advertiser/media partner relationship. Their critical importance to the relationship reinforces the need for careful measurement planning and design.
Advertisers should carefully balance strategic campaign performance measures such as acquisition, brand impact, and video completion with tactical delivery measures of viewability, brand safety, and in-demo performance. The balance struck between measures will vary for each advertiser and will likely be impacted by overall marketing objectives.
How to strike a balance
Striking a balance does not mean abandoning one measure -– such as viewability -– for the sake of another. Marketers should recognize, however, that there is interplay between measures. And that the focus on one measure may impact another.
Advertisers have the right to demand -– and media partners have the responsibility to provide –- a high-quality and effective advertising environment. As we head into Q4, it is important to review overall marketing objectives and how they translate to individual campaign KPIs. Adjust where necessary and work to understand how a focus on a specific KPI has the potential to either enhance or detract from another.
A poorly-designed program with conflicting KPIs may potentially limit your reach and hand customers over to a savvy competitor. Consider how the KPIs you focus on could impact the return on your media investment.
In the end, you want to use your media spend as efficiently as possible to scale your programs to engage as many potential customers as possible.
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