Digital Campaign Validation is Foundational for Advertising Impact

In a recent whitepaper ‘The Value of a Digital Ad’, Comscore distilled the advertising measurement spectrum into three clear components:

• Performance: viewable delivery, to actual humans, within the target audience;
• Effectiveness: how a campaign changes attitudes to a brand;
• ROI: how a campaign, including the cost of measurement, changes sales.

Performance, effectiveness and ROI have often been measured in isolation, but forward-thinking brands have made substantial gains in all areas, by taking a unified view of the findings to inform future activity. If unified and comparable metrics are used at each stage of the campaign, there is greater potential to transfer learnings within a campaign into future activity and more effectively reconcile with the measurement of other media.

‘Validation’ concerns itself primarily with the performance side of the campaign equation. Performance measurement begins with isolating and filtering a key threat to accurate metrics – Non-Human Traffic (NHT). Activity generated by anything other than a valid person requesting content is, often, for the purposes of fraud and is traditionally not identified at the ad server side. By failing to account for NHT, the campaign metrics become contaminated with invalid impressions which is not only detrimental to gainful insights from other performance metrics but also negatively impact effectiveness and ROI calculations.

The scale of the NHT problem varies by market, publisher and content type – video being more susceptible than display as an example. However, for certain advertisers and publishers, it can be incredibly problematic. Data from US shows that 75 per cent of all campaign NHT came from only 21 per cent of campaigns, suggesting that diligence from a small number of advertisers could make a large difference to market averages. On the publisher side, it is again a small percentage of inventory lowering averages – 15 per cent of observed US publishers experienced sizeable NHT problems. There is a wealth of quality inventory available for informed advertisers but there is a need to accurately and quickly adjust campaigns during planning and even delivery.

Whilst filtering NHT increases the chances of a campaign to be seen by a valid user, the next stage i.e. being able to deliver an actual brand message also poses challenges. Data from US shows that a majority (54 per cent) of impressions are simply not ‘viewable’ for a plethora of reasons, including duration on screen, location on pages, and increasingly, some nefarious practices. Viewability was found to be better on inventory bought directly from publishers. It becomes clear that there is a need for advertisers to understand how to make informed choices and benefit from the quality that does exist.

When combining the risks of NHT and poor viewability, it is clear that wastage on a campaign can quickly stack up before even posing the question of whether valid impressions have been delivered to the target audience. When it comes to demographic targeting comparable to non-digital media, Comscore’s benchmarks show that the broader the target range, the higher the in-target rate tends to be. This makes sense given that a wider target requires less sophisticated targeting techniques. What also becomes clear, however, is that demographics inferred from online behaviour tend to be significantly weaker than demographics from registration data or offline sources when validated against Comscore’s panellist profiles.

Using individual solutions for each stage of measurement (NHT filtering, viewability and audience targeting) tends to rely on applying blanket expectations at one level, such as the assumption that an overall viewability rate is consistent across different variables being analysed in a campaign. However, natural variations by category, publisher, media type and demographic target mean that a flat expectation for any of these metrics gives the potential to grossly over- or undervalue performance. A single-tag solution that accounts for all three offers the possibility of distilling campaign measurement to a ‘Human GRP’, accounting for reach and frequency based on real human eyeballs – a crucial foundation for the ensuing effectiveness measures of brand and sales lift, and indeed evaluation against cross-media activity.

Whilst campaign validation metrics are perhaps less glamorous than highly quotable sales/attitudinal uplifts or ROI claims, they are no less important. In fact, they are a crucial and inextricably-linked foundation for these effectiveness measures, and it is virtually impossible to drive the campaign results without first qualifying which impressions actually had the potential to influence consumers’ behaviour.