BEYOND HOME

29/09/2009

John Stanton

Myth measurement: what you really need to know about your advertising

In the new era of accountability responsibility and state-authorised bonuses everyone is trying to measure everything.

Most of the time, this is a justification of activity, inactivity, existence or jobs. But in the world of advertising, we need to be particularly careful what we measure. As the saying goes, we know that only half of our advertising is working - we just don’t know which half.

Online marketing has the beauty of being 100% measurable - or so we are led to believe. The use of cookies and pixels enables us to track who has seen our ad and what they did after it. And all this is beautifully packaged as “analytics” - a lovely word implying science and absolutes.

But online analytics don’t tell us as much as we think they do. Is it enough to know how many people viewed an ad? What about how people think and feel? How do you measure the whole experience?

Measurement v money

With media budgets shrinking across the board, it has become even more important to justify every penny spent. And so it seems strange that marketers are still so attached to one-dimensional metrics when they really need to know as much as they can.

We’ve taken an overview of advertising measurement - both on- and off-line - in our whitepaper: Finding Out Which Half Of Your Advertising Is Working. Please feel free to download it here - and leave a comment or get in touch if you want to continue the discussion or find out more.