Today’s media transformations provide unprecedented problems for marketers. The proliferation of new channels is fragmenting viewers. This is accompanied by an input of data from diverse platforms with varying levels of granularity and definitions and metrics that adhere to different standards.

The expense and complexity of reaching relevant audiences through their chosen channels have the potential to increase. But, marketing expenditures and resources are unlikely to increase at the same rate in the current economic context.

In this fragmented media world, there is also a potential to increase efficiency and overall efficacy by employing a data-driven approach to budgeting, targeting, and monitoring campaigns. In fact, by continuously learning and experimenting, the most successful businesses can utilise data to drive growth even more effectively by integrating brand and performance marketing efforts, which are all too frequently conducted in isolation.

There are five essential pillars to properly implementing this strategy.

Brands are increasingly utilizing digital channels to meet both long-term and short-term marketing objectives, which is altering the function of digital channels. In this setting, innovation in data-driven marketing across all channels will be crucial to unlocking future development, and creating new tools and KPIs at the core of a marketing organization will be an integral part of this process.

The measuring framework of advertisers should incorporate both short-term tactical optimization and long-term strategic objectives. Return on investment and return on ad expenditure remain essential to direct-response optimisation, but a greater emphasis should be placed on long-term growth measures that extend beyond brand health, such as customer lifetime value (LTV), long-term ROI, and price elasticity.

In the past, brands have frequently tended to focusing on the short-term benefits of digital marketing, as it is relatively easy to trace conversions and sales to specific campaigns and the relationship to financial success is obvious to the business. In addition, marketing organisations may have lacked the confidence and analytical abilities to calculate LTV, employ econometric tools such as marketing mix modelling (MMM), or conduct controlled tests and lift studies.

Yet, modern measuring technologies make these techniques more accessible (see section 3, below), making it more feasible to take a long-term perspective using KPIs.

Now that third-party cookies are being phased out and users may more easily opt out of monitoring, marketers are confronted with developing privacy-conscious methods for transforming data into consumer information.

If organizations have the appropriate data architecture and consumer consent in place, they can leverage first-party data to personalize customer experiences based on where each individual is in the customer journey. It is also essential for determining LTV based on how frequently a consumer makes purchases during a normal purchase cycle, how much they spend each time, their expected expenditure across the whole brand relationship, and the probable length of that connection. With this information, companies can optimize their advertisements for customer value versus unique and similar audiences.

The application programming interface (API) plays a significant role in enabling campaigns to be driven by an advertiser’s first-party data paired with that of ad platform partners in a manner that respects consumer privacy. For instance, businesses may conduct lift studies via the Meta Conversions API to assess both upper-funnel reach campaigns and lower-funnel performance activity.

Bolia, a Danish furniture retailer, utilized the Conversions API in order to comprehend the connection between online advertising and in-store sales. Its media agency, Dentsu Denmark, assisted in structuring and anonymizing the brand’s retail sales data and linking it to its digital and physical channel activities.

Bolia could therefore monitor the effect of Its advertisements on both online and offline sales, and subsequently optimize its campaigns according on the purchasing inclinations of the target demographic. As a consequence, the brand earned a fourfold increase in attributed sales, a twofold improvement in return on investment, and a 23 percent increase in attributed online conversions.

At the same time as campaign planning is receiving fresh consideration, businesses are reevaluating marketing measurement. This begins with a gap analysis to see where they are not currently capturing the long- and short-term effects of their marketing. As a result, marketers are likely to realise that no one measuring instrument can meet the objectives of modern advertisers; rather, a portfolio of measurement tools is required.

In this regard, Meta has collaborated with Deloitte to develop Measurement 360, a new methodology that proposes a comprehensive perspective of brand measurements and sales consequences. For tactical optimisation, businesses may test full-funnel campaign strategies using lift studies, whereas marketing mix modelling enables them to assess against strategic goals by integrating the short- and long-term effects of marketing with elements such as price elasticity.

Marketers may believe that econometric approaches like as MMM are reserved for huge companies with large teams, yet econometrics is becoming an integral element of the measurement puzzle for all businesses. MMM may be conducted swiftly and automatically, saving time and resources. It is granular enough to accommodate various advertising requirements. In addition, it delivers actionable intelligence that may help tactical campaign optimization decisions as well as long-term planning and assessment.

Attribution models are still helpful for monitoring and comparing the short-term benefits of direct-response campaigns, but they cannot be used as a foundation for budgeting since they fail to account for long-term consequences. Thus, the gold standard is to triangulate using attribution, econometrics, and controlled experiments, employing the various methodologies to explain and confirm one another.

The condition is that corporate operations and organizational structures must be adapted to accommodate these new modes of operation.

In order for brands to discover and assess the incremental effects of different advertising methods, it is crucial to analyse alternative measuring tools. New growth opportunities may be unlocked by experimenting with different messaging and ad styles to target people at various stages of the sales funnel.

According to research, firms who conduct 15 tests each year earn 30% more ad success than those that do not. Individuals who have conducted 15 trials in the prior year might anticipate a 45% increase.