Marketers are spending more on media than ever before. Yet, measuring the effectiveness of those investments and knowing how to optimize across it all (by channel, partner, creative, tactic, and more) to make the most of every dollar, can be dizzying. To truly maximize the ROI of our advertising efforts, we need to aggregate performance data for a bird’s eye view then slice and dice down to more granular insights (and everything in between). Check out the brand marketer’s guide to seeing, understanding, and optimizing advertising performance—in 6 simple steps.

1. 6 ESSENTIAL WAYS TO MEASURE
MEDIA EFFECTIVENESS

2. Measuring the effectiveness of advertising dollars has never been
more critical or more complex. Marketers are expected to spend
over $550 billion in 2018 on global advertising and media, yet
an estimated 26% of budgets are wasted on ineffective channels
and strategies. That means there is over $137 billion dollars that
can be reallocated to improve business outcomes. But in order to
identify this $137 billion and understand where to use it, brands
must collaborate with media partners and agencies to get holistic
view of how every decision—big and small—drives brand growth.
If you’re responsible for managing media investments, answering
these 6 essential question will provide the business-building
insights needed to continually adjust strategy, optimize
performance and maximize ROI.

3. 1
Ultimately we want to know how we can best drive sales across all
facets of the marketing organization. We do this by stacking up our
media buys and measuring their cumulative impact downstream.
In this example, we can see monthly media spend broken down
by publisher and how sales fluctuated with those changes in
allocation. The winners and losers are clear. In January, advertising
spend was over 2 times higher than any other month, but sales
were lowest. Conversely, the media buys in March and May were
the smallest, but the most efficient in driving sales per dollar
spent. This gives a quick macro view, so we can expand or drill
down to identify correlations between high and low performing
months. Try examining shorter date ranges, honing in on individual
publisher performance, or looking for correlations between other
KPIs and changes in media allocation.
Are our media buys
driving sales downstream?

4. 2
To confidently answer the question, “Where is my next
marketing dollar best spent?” we need to not only know where
each dollar is actually going, but also the non-working media
expense associated. Non-working media spend like agency
fees, production costs, design fees, etc. is on the rise and is an
essential—but often unmeasured—portion of the media budget.
It’s therefore essential to include it in our analysis to get a
comprehensive view of the true cost of our media. Then, once
we have a bird’s-eye view on media allocation and fluctuation in
spend ratios by campaign, we can start to compare performance
of creative, channels and tactics, and drill deeper to understand
the optimal balance of media investments.
For example, this percentage bar chart tells us that we spent
the most on non-working media for the Holiday and Super
Bowl campaigns. From there we can look at overall campaign
performance (i.e. cost per impression or outcome), drill into the
channels to see which tactic or channel performed the best (or
worst), and adjust our ratios for future campaigns accordingly.
Where are we investing the most media dollars, including
non-working spend?

5. 3
Which agency is most efficient at generating impressions,
engagements, conversions, etc?
If you’re working with several agencies, it’s
important to see how those partners stack
up against one another. Once you’ve pulled
all of your agency performance data into an
integrated and normalized source of truth,
the possibilities are endless. A simple stack
ranker like the one above showing CPM is
an easy way to quickly see which media
buys are garnering the most awareness per
dollar. Swap out CPM for any efficiency or
effectiveness metric (cost per engagement,
CTR, cost per conversion, etc.) to compare
how well each partner is achieving each
business goal.

6. 4
Viewability remains a hot topic for marketers, and rightfully so.
With average ad viewability estimated to be about 54%, 46 cents out
of every dollar spent on wasted impressions that no one ever sees.
The good news is that improving the percentage of ads consumers
see is easy to do if you have your data integrated into a central
marketing performance hub.
The example above shows aggregate actual (billed) impressions
versus viewable impressions across all campaigns, brands, agencies,
etc. for the year. Both spend and viewability were highest in July,
however, the delta between the two was also the highest (meaning
percentage of impressions wasted). The opposite occurred in
January. From here we can slice and dice down to agency, publisher,
campaign, ad sizes, etc. to try to find patterns between high and
low viewability and performance. As low viewability is identified,
there is ample opportunity to close the gap.
Recommendations on how to diagnose and respond to poor
viewability are covered in Beckon’s 2017 Marketing Truth or
Hype Report.
What's the difference between the verified viewable impressions
and impressions we’re actually billed for?

7. 5
It’s no surprise that brands and their
agencies are quickly shifting more and
more spend from traditionally bought
media to programmatic. Beckon’s
analysis of $16 billion in marketing spend
across more than 200 brands found that
programmatic media delivers 2x the results
of traditionally bought media. What is
surprising, however, is how few brands
are tracking it. The landscape is changing
rapidly, and viewability can vary greatly
across channels, ad types, platforms, etc.
Measuring what portion of your media is
bought programmatically and monitoring
the ROI of programmatic versus traditional
will give you the ability to respond and
adjust how those dollars are being
allocated over time.
How much of our media is bought programmatically?

8. 6
This complex but critical question is best solved with
a bubble chart because we need several metrics to
see the full picture. In our example, each bubble is a
creative asset or media type, and we’re using clicks and
impressions to measure high (and low) performance—the
more impressions we serve, the more clicks we should
see. Average performers would fall on the line of best fit,
superior performing creative would garner more clicks than
average, given the number of impressions served, so we’d
see the best creative fall above the line. Spend is reflected
in the size of the bubbles. This means we want to see
big bubbles above the line (more spend against superior
performers) and little bubbles below the line (less spend
on poor performers). In this analysis, we can quickly see
that the creative represented by the yellow bubble isn’t
resonating well and is cause for concern (high spend and
low engagement). Conversely, the purple, red, and dark
gray bubbles all show higher engagement but lower spend
and impressions.
So the answer to our question is, “No, we’re not allocating
the most spend to highest-performing creative.” It’s a great
time to ask our partners to help us understand what we’re
seeing, if we should shift budget to our higher performing
types or if there’s more to the story.
Are we allocating the most spend to
the highest-performing creative?

9. LEARN MORE
Maximizing the ROI of every media dollar requires
collaborating with partners to experiment, drill down,
and roll up to measure success and respond accordingly.
If answering any of these essential questions is a
challenge, our library of data ownership, agency partnership,
and media effectiveness resources can help get you there.
LET'S CONNECT
Get in touch at hello@beckon.com.