White Paper | Authors: Nishith Saraswath Mediaocean, Diet Pineda The Trade Desk, Shrivardhan Sarda Yahoo, Gibson Camson Carousell Media Group | IAB SEA+India Programmatic Council subgroup
INTRODUCTION
Total digital ad spend in Southeast Asia and India was projected to reach USD11.87 billion by the end of 2022. With this huge amount of money, it makes sense for marketers to want to know where their budgets are going and that their media dollars are well-spent through attribution. Experienced brand marketers are using different attribution modelling to understand the effectiveness of their campaigns. Big brands that have both an offline and online presence use Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), and invest time in analysing different marketing investments across all of their channels.
MMM provides a top-down view of offline marketing initiatives across all channels. MTA provides data from multiple touchpoints and channels to understand the full user journey along digital marketing campaigns. MTA is a more granular approach, providing a clear insight into where to invest budget.
MTA is what we’ll be focusing on for this article to highlight why every touchpoint of your campaign is important and to explore the opportunities of addressable omnichannel campaigns.
METRICS THAT MATTER
Despite the clear benefits of MMM and MTA, there are still a number of brands across Southeast Asia that are still attributing the success of their campaign to the last-click. While last-click attribution is very straightforward, easier to track and easier to explain to management, focusing on this data point alone as a measure of success leads brands to make incorrect optimisation decisions that we’ll outline below.
A Comscore study that shows that conversions from clicks are a rare occurrence. According to Comscore, the highest correlation with conversion is Impression (correlation = 0.49) and Viewable impression impressions (correlation = 0.35), and interestingly, clicks (correlation = 0.01) is the lowest. According to Kirby Winfield, SVP of Corporate Development, Comscore –
“Our study shows why other non-click metrics of engagement, such as interaction or hovering, may be much more important in evaluating campaign performance than the click ever was. It’s time to start measuring the impact of campaigns using metrics that really matter, not just the ones that are most easily measured.”
This validates the fact that if a marketer is only looking at last-click attribution, they will only capture the lowest correlation with conversion and they will miss the full picture of the campaign performance. In reality, they’ll only see growth from their organic conversion and none from their paid marketing campaigns. This will leave the brand with unanswered questions about where the organic conversions are from, and which channels or ad formats are most effective in their campaign. This might sound familiar to some brands.
FOCUS ON THE CONSUMER JOURNEY
Moreover, the last-click attribution method’s main beneficiary is Google (via search ads) and they announced that they are ditching the last-click attribution. Google clearly tells its users not to focus on last-click attribution and instead understand the consumer’s user journey.
Therefore, relying solely on last-click attribution may not be the most effective way to understand the sources of your sales. To be a more effective marketer, it is important to consider the full consumer journey. In order to better understand conversions, we will examine the following topics:
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Understanding Multi-touch attribution and other attribution models
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Running Omnichannel campaigns and maximisng key media, such as global sporting events and OTT
UNDERSTANDING MARKETING ATTRIBUTION
Marketing attribution is the process of determining which marketing touchpoints and activities are contributing to conversions. These could come in a variety of shapes and sizes from sign-ups, to downloads, to purchases of a product or service, or some other meaningful conversion types.
Why do marketers implement an attribution solution?
Overall view of all channels and how they contribute to Conversion
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Look inside/across their campaigns and determine channel and overall ROI
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Customer Journey Pathing
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Customer journey allows marketers to make more accurate decisions regarding each channel/touchpoint.
Understand the Customer and/or Value of the Customer
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Informs audience segments based on customer information.
Customer lifetime value of each touchpoint or across channels and help determine campaign spend across acquisition/retention programs.
Improve Marketing Strategies and Spend
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Informs overall spend across Channels/Campaigns (Paid Search, Email, Digital Display, etc.)
What are the types of marketing attribution models?
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Single Channel Attribution (Last Click, First Click)
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Multi Touch Attribution
UNDERSTANDING MULTI-TOUCH ATTRIBUTION (MTA)
Let’s discuss Multi-Touch Attribution, since that’s a model which can have a significant impact in the omnichannel approach by clients in their digital marketing.
For example, a consumer is looking for a plane ticket for their next holiday. After looking at the flight prices and searching for some luggage or other travel items, they are being targeted by Singapore Airlines ads. The consumer watches some shows on an OTT platform and sees video ads from Singapore Airlines, which brings to mind their holiday plans. The next day, the consumer sees a native ad from an ecommerce app from which they look at the website to see more about the flight; and they also sign up for its newsletter. After a few days, they receive a promo via email with a discount that finally triggers them to book a flight. This is a conversion.
Each of the ad formats mentioned above represents a touchpoint in the consumer’s journey and each touchpoint influences the consumer to generate conversion. While all channels add value to conversion, Multi-touch attribution allows the advertiser to determine which added move value in the journey; and the advertiser would look at the OTT, ecommerce or EDM and set a value to those touchpoints. This data may help them optimise the budget on their next campaign.
With the same example above, multi-touch is looking at all advertising formats and defining a value to those ad formats. Last-touch attribution will only look at the format where the conversion happened, which is the EDM and marketers will miss the opportunity to optimise more in the correct ad format. If you are the marketer and keen to understand multi-touch attribution, you may dig deeper into the campaign and start seeing the full picture. Last touch doesn’t take into account this full journey and define correct optimisation decisions.
These models take a broader view of attribution and attempt to place a relative value on the impact of all touchpoints across the customer journey, although these are weighted differently depending on the model you select.
If you are operating with a more complex model, longer cycles and a multitude of channels it’s likely that this is to where you find yourself gravitating.
Getting started with Multi-touch Attribution
For marketers who want to understand attribution – especially multi-touch attribution – it tends to be complex and confusing. It’s generally accepted that marketing attribution is complicated simply because digital media can also get complicated. Multi-touch attribution, however, is one of the most important parts of effective advertising as it allows you to have a clearer picture of your customer and have a feedback loop in your campaigns.
While multi-touch attribution is sometimes messy, there are a few things to consider to simplify getting started.
Seek opportunities to run addressable omnichannel campaigns
Multi-touch attribution simply starts with an omnichannel campaign. While there’s a plethora of ways to reach consumers digitally from display, video, DOOH etc, marketers tend to stick with one or two channels as they focus on either awareness or conversions. In taking this siloed approach, marketers miss out on the opportunity to reach consumers at their most relevant touchpoints.
Instead of thinking of a desktop experience, a mobile experience, a tablet experience, and a DOOH experience, pursue one holistic approach, an omnichannel experience that consumers can appreciate and remember.
In starting an omnichannel campaign, first identify the inventories or channels in your markets that are either biddable or non-biddable. To distinguish the two, biddable media is any media that is bought through real time. Biddable media allows you to have a measurable and scalable activity. Given biddable media means addressable media, try to run biddable media as much as possible. This includes moving publishers that you normally transact with direct Insertion Order, to a programmatic buy ideally in a single and consolidated buying platform.
In addition, break down the biddable media that run in either a closed ecosystem (aka walled garden) or an open ecosystem. Attribution would be different between the two as the former may have certain limitations like external measurement or onboarding your own data.
Aside from consolidated attribution, running omnichannel campaigns provides the following benefits:
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Seamless Storytelling and Customer Experience
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Sustainable Brand Building Activities that Drive Long-Term Sales
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Pleasant Brand Experience through Efficient Frequency Capping
Understand Your First-Party Data and Identify Partners
Aside from focusing on biddable omnichannel campaigns, as a marketer you need to gather and understand your most important asset – your first-party data.
In a 2021 study, 88% of marketers say collecting first-party data is a key priority – largely driven by privacy-related data restrictions and of course, the future demise of third-party cookies.
Collecting and understanding your first-party data allows a more seamless omnichannel multi-touch attribution. This happens as you get to know what channels you should start with and how to maximise them using available existing customer data that you already have; and where to source other relevant data.
While there are many ways in acquiring first party data, a solid framework is a must especially if you intend to maximise this for MTA –
1. Define your objectives. A first-party data strategy doesn’t work in isolation – hence, the importance of omnichannel campaigns and attribution.
2. Understand your consumer through research, analytics and benchmarking.
3. Identify all the means where your brand can collect data – it can be through your website, app, paid media, surveys, offline, etc.
4. Like segregating biddable vs non-biddable media, group your data on what’s possible to be unified – taking into consideration fragmentation, identity duplications, and also closed ecosystems (walled gardens) that may have some challenges in identity resolutions during attribution.
5. From here, as you collect more data, you’ll be able to enrich it through profiling and data, and activate it according to the objectives of the campaigns.
6. Lastly, as the promise of multi-touch attribution, analyse and optimise your first-party data.
When combining activities such as omnichannel campaigns and data collection, you also need to be cognisant that you will need to identify key partners that will help power your multi-touch attribution. Aside from considering a single buying platform, you will also need to understand the role of your ad server, if you need a service of CDP (customer data platform) or if you can just rely on MMPs (mobile measurement partner) for app campaigns. There are many ways of running multi-touch attribution – your category/product sales cycle and the way you collect data and run omnichannel campaigns can help guide you identify what you actually require.
KEY OPPORTUNITIES IN OMNICHANNEL CAMPAIGNS TO FUEL MARKETING ATTRIBUTION
Global Sporting events are a big Omnichannel Opportunity
All over the globe marketers are always looking for the most innovative ways to engage with their audiences. With the current opportunity that digital advertising provides, while it is easy to reach your audiences, it is difficult to hold their attention. The importance of talking to the audience around what they are passionate about and interested in is paramount for any successful marketer. Other than the audiences that can be created based on psychographic indicators and online behaviors, it is important for a brand to engage in conversations that consumers are passionate about. The buzz that is always generated online during a big sporting event provides a unique opportunity to do so.
FIFA world cup 2018 had a massive viewership of around 3.7 billion people worldwide and 50% of the people watched it from the APAC region. This for brands is a golden opportunity to engage with their consumers and participate in their passion. Similarly, ICC Men’s T20 World cup last year generated a record viewership of 167 million people around the world. Using these world sporting events to your marketing advantage can be one of the biggest differentiators for a brand.
Success and acceptance of these tactics has been seen in recent years with CPG brands using such events to deliver an omnichannel advertising campaign to launch a brand in the market with great success. Recently an agency won two awards in India for best use of tech for a Moment Sync campaign around IPL in India.
Driving engagement with Moment Sync in Digital Advertising
Based on Meta’s research, more than 90% of the users who are watching TV are also online and with more video and live content being consumed online, a lot of attention and time by consumers is devoted to digital channels. Hence digital advertising is one of the more lucrative avenues for advertisers to hone into the relevant and passionate conversations. Innovative campaign tactics that build on delivering the right message to the right consumer at the right time can make all the difference between a good campaign and an exceptional advertising experience for the end consumers.
Big Ad technology companies offer the tools needed for delivering such exemplary campaigns. For example, with the use of technology it is possible to deliver ads every time a team or a player scores a goal, good tech companies can even take this further and allow you to use events like injury times etc.
For a pharmaceutical company providing pain killers advertising during injury time with the right messaging and creativity, is an opportunity which is unparalleled in providing overall context to their content.
Even triggers like Break time or game win can provide opportunities for CPG brand and ecommerce companies to tap on the loyalty of the fans and sell more products. Regardless of the business a brand is in, the opportunity to engage, catch the attention of your end consumers and be a partner in their celebration is a priceless way to enhance the lifetime value of the advertising campaigns.
OVER THE TOP (OTT)
The digital video ecosystem has undergone major shifts over recent years.
Innovation accelerated in the region and globally, and digital transformation is being replicated within the traditional TV space.
The pandemic accelerated the growth of OTT and CTV in APAC and globally as streaming content became a habit while people were confined within the four walls of their homes. Also with the fragmentation of audiences, OTT as a platform has seen a significant rise in viewership and consumption of professionally produced content. This has created a communication platform for advertisers to reach out to their potential target audiences in a brand safe environment. The platform provides different formats (AVOD, SVOD, TVOD) both for viewers and advertisers which creates a win-win situation for stakeholders.
Based on research from GroupM’s Consumer Eye 2022 report, across APAC, consumers are now spending more time watching paid video streaming services over traditional linear TV.
The OTT platforms have seen a massive adoption amongst younger audiences, notably the Gen Zs, however it does cater to a broader audience overall.
Reasons for the growth of viewership on OTT platforms:
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Increased smartphone usage
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Cheaper & high speed data
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COVID19
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Deployment of liner content on OTT platforms
Some of the challenges faced by OTT platforms in APAC are:
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Diverse cultures
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Different languages
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Different income levels
Market Dynamics – AVOD & SVOD
APAC has typically been an AVOD market but the latest metric suggests that we are reaching a tipping point with SVOD likely to overtake AVOD revenue (excluding China) in the next two to three years. AVOD consumption has increased during the pandemic, but weaker advertising revenue has impacted revenue streams. In parallel, we know SVOD platforms have flourished in the past one to two years with ever more entrants to the market as the transition to online continues.
The top 5 drivers of free AVOD are:
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Free service, so why not try it
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It’s good quality for a free service
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It has a wide variety of genres to choose from
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Ease of use and with good search and navigation
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It features high quality movies and shows
As research done by The Trade Desk shows, Women, Gen Zers, and young Millennials are most likely to accept two or more ads per hour of free content. 89% of young Millennial OTT viewers are willing to watch 2 or more ads for free content.
Added punch with leveraging multi-touch attribution:
Multiple digital channels always pose the challenge when it comes to deciding on which channel to spend the advertising dollars. Closed ecosystems like Meta’s Facebook, Twitter and the like, further add more challenges when it comes to optimising for multiple channels. However, there are tech solutions available that help advertisers to bring in data from various third-party measurement platforms. This provides an advantage for Moment sync opportunities where marketers can further optimise their budget to get maximum possible viewability, for example.
Overall, capitalising on second screen behavior and tapping the pulse of the consumers has become easier with advanced tools helping marketers to create advertising campaigns that resonate closely with consumers.
CONCLUSION
Benefits of reaching out to end consumers, at various key attention points, have been felt by advertisers and brands since the advent of advertising. The pre-digital era saw brands reaching out to their consumers on multiple Out Of Home channels like billboards, newspapers, magazines, radio, TV etc. Brands have always known that to get the desired impact and generate brand recall and sales, reaching out to consumers on a single channel is not enough. Measurement in the earlier era of advertising was limited, and in-direct TRP ratings and footfall being some of the indirect indicators.
Digital advertising has changed the entire landscape for advertising impact measurement. However, the fundamentals of reaching the end consumer on various key attention points has not changed. Technology has advanced enough to give usable feedback to advertisers and tying together OOH and Online advertising spends. This is the era of advertising where measurement and attribution are key tools in the success of advertising campaigns.
Omnichannel advertising is becoming increasingly important by brands and markets to retain the edge that they need to stand out in the current highly competitive environment. Last click attribution modelling that has been the prevalent standard in the industry is no longer enough to encapsulate the complexities and opportunities that are present in this connected world. Attribution will remain a challenge for the coming years as the ecosystem evolves with new gen user experiences like Metaverse etc. However, technologies exist that are taking the step in the right direction and Multi touch attribution is the first step towards embracing these challenges and being ready to win the day.