Five things you need to know... Digital measurement

Arun Kumar, director of digital operations at Aegis Media Asia-Pacific, offers his advice.

1. Get your metrics right. Objectives need to be simple and focused. Broadly, you can track acquisition or branding. Acquisition can refer to sign–ups, contest participations, registrations, positive conversations generated by consumers, sales or even traffic driven to the site. No matter how much we desire, there will never be one standard metric used for all campaigns because their objectives are different. `Digital’ is a different world where customisation is essential. Differentiate between the media buying currency (cost per thousand impressions, cost per click, etc) and the business output (sales, leads, test drives, credit card sign-ups, etc) that is being measured.

2. Understand how various metrics are being tracked. It’s important to understand whether your objectives are being tracked correctly. For example, what is the consumer’s path likely to be in your website? If you are tracking conversions on your site, where would you embed the ad server or site analytics tool’s tags? Do you want to measure the drop-off from the home page to the registration page or are you interested also in the number of people who downloaded a brochure? If you are relying on SOV by looking at spend reports, it is important to keep in mind that not all internet activity like paid search, organic search or affiliate marketing are covered by syndicated sources.

3. Don’t complicate by using multiple tools. Ad-serving, site analytics, bid management - each of these toolsets has unique capabilities with multiple overlaps. Hence, it’s recommended to align all stakeholders on the tools that would be used. Often there is confusion on how to integrate data from the ad server and the site analytics tool. Many of these tools work well with each other - bid management with ad serving, for example. Understand what works best for you and keep it simple.

4. It’s not always about acquisition. It is possible to measure impact on branding either through before/after surveys or by using online panels. It is also possible to leverage paid search merely to reinforce a message instead of necessarily leading to a click.

5. If you can’t measure it, don’t do it: Digital campaigns run without any tracking in place are frankly worthless. If you do not know how you will track and measure performance, save your money.

The value in the digital space comes from being able to track and measure variables that may be unique to a business or a category.

The biggest challenge lies in understanding the different tools available and how they can be made to work together. The solution lies in the way objectives are set. If they are sharp and focused without being ambiguous, it’s possible to have simple tracking & measurement solutions.