Study: Majority Of Digital Marketers Up Investment In ‘Outcome-Driven Media’

Originally posted on B&T Magazine | November 26, 2018

The move will address growing media complexity and better understand the impact of their campaigns on business results.
The research, by Outcome media company, Xaxis, which is also GroupM’s programmatic media arm, assessed how satisfied marketers around the world were with their existing methods of measuring the success of digital display campaigns, especially in terms of how they deliver against their strategic business and marketing goals.
Speaking on the research, Xaxis Australia managing director Imran Masood said:
Imran Masood, Xaxis Australia MD says: “It’s an incredibly exciting time in our industry. In Australia, 80%+ of our advertisers are asking Xaxis to create custom outcomes."
“The goal is to drive greater efficiency for a brands investment and align marketing strategies to business objectives."
“The opportunity for us is to elevate the conversation away from basic media metrics and guarantee outcomes that matter for a brand.'
“We do this by leveraging the scale of our market trading advantage, speed and science in connecting our proprietary and partner technology solutions, and the smarts of our amazing people.”
It also asked what the main barriers were to moving to new metrics, and whether they were planning to increase their investment in ‘outcomes-driven media’.
This was defined as “planning and optimizing campaigns against KPIs – often tailor-made for an advertiser or campaign – that are much more closely aligned to the marketer’s ultimate marketing and business goals”.
For example, outcome-driven media might be focused on custom-made footfall, ‘cost per incremental visitor’, or brand lift and viewability metrics, rather than less direct proxies for success such as cost per thousand (CPM).
The results of the survey found that 88 per cent of marketers in the Asia Pacific region are planning to increase their investment in the emerging field of ‘outcome-driven media’ over the next two years.
However, there is a mixed picture in relation to how marketers view existing ways of measuring digital media success.
The majority (90 per cent) of APAC marketers surveyed said the primary metrics they used – most commonly cost per acquisition (CPA), cost per completed view (CPCV), cost per click (CPC), and click-through rate (CTR) – were very or somewhat effective in evaluating the success of campaigns against strategic marketing goals.
However, almost three quarters (74 per cent) either strongly or somewhat agreed that evaluating digital media spend had become more difficult over the past five years and almost four in five (79 per cent) said they were very or somewhat likely to change the primary metric they used to measure campaigns over the next 12-24 months.
For marketers in India, the need was even clearer, with 91 per cent agreeing they were likely to change how they measure campaigns.
The research highlights that linking digital media spend to business impact is critical for marketers.
More than nine out of 10 (92 per cent) said they use one or more custom KPIs to link the impact of digital display campaigns on ‘measurable business results’ and more than four-fifths (87 per cent) strongly or somewhat agreed that it was “essential for digital campaigns to drive a direct correlation”.
However, this figure varied between countries region.