The Sears Wish Book was the Amazon of its day. First published in 1933, the catalog featured everything from toys to jewelry to pianos. It was like one giant advertisement for Sears products.
At its high point, Sears was printing 7 million copies each year. But the catalog was discontinued in 2011, around the time online shopping was all the rage and digital advertising was taking off. Consumer tastes had changed, and they were no longer attracted to advertising in old-school print form.
The media landscape used to consist of print and linear TV primarily. Today it has expanded to digital and all its extensions – social, mobile, programmatic, over-the-top (OTT), and more. This explosion of new media brought with it click-through rates, bounce rates, and a multitude of new metrics for advertisers to analyze.
In the good old days, advertisers would only need to go to a few spots to get the handful of metrics they needed. Like a plate shattering into a million pieces, those advertising metrics are now all over the place, and advertisers struggle to pick up the pieces and find the necessary data.
Media has evolved, and metrics are playing catch-up
It is estimated that in the 1970s, the average person saw between 500 and 1,600 ads in a single day. In 2007, that number increased to 5,000 ads per day. And in 2021, it was between 6,000 and 10,000 ads. The main reason for the rise over time is that the number of advertising avenues also increased. There are now many more eyeballs to target with messages across multiple mediums.
Add on top of that, the way people consume media is different from the generation ahead of us and the one behind us. There’s still some truth to the generalization that people above age 50 still watch linear TV and read print and those younger do not. This generational divide is further disrupting the media ecosystem and advertisers’ ability to use metrics to connect with the right audience at the right moment.
Advertisers may be grumbling about being inundated with data everywhere they turn, but what if that data was taken away? With the deprecation of cookies looming, advertisers face new challenges to gather the first-party data they need to make informed decisions on campaigns. They are accumulating their own data, such as customer emails and phone numbers, via subscriptions and list-based sources. And so, another metrics stream to analyze emerges.
4 campaign metrics for advertisers to focus on
With so much data and metrics coming at media organizations, it can become a game of whack-a-mole to figure out where their attention should lie. Once one metric is addressed, another one pops right up.
To focus their efforts, advertisers should drill down on these four key advertising metrics for their campaigns:
- Revenue scheduling and forecasting: From an analytics perspective, scheduling and forecasting are essential to know which ads will be running, where they are running, and if there are any variables, such as make-goods, that require reforecasting.
- Inventory Yield: Publishing companies want to sell as much advertising inventory as possible at the highest possible rate. Advertisers want to get the most value for their efforts. Advertisers should look at their yield and optimize advertising as needed.
- Return On Ad Spend (ROAS): This metric measures the revenue generated per every dollar spent in an advertising campaign. It helps to give insights into the engagement and efficacy of the campaign.
- Audience Engagement: These set of metrics determine how effectively an advertiser’s target audience interacts with its website, social media, or another brand platform. For example, average time on page or social shares.
Engagement is where it’s at
A common thread among these critical metrics is engagement. Good engagement means that audiences like what they see and that the medium and the message are the right fit for the advertiser. Bad engagement means that advertisers need to pivot their approach.
But how is an advertiser supposed to track engagement on top of all the other metrics? Salesforce Media Cloud makes it easier with Media Cloud Analytics. It centralizes all the advertising metrics into one platform. Metrics are gathered from multiple media sources – from print to digital and everything in between – and layered on top of campaign data.
Media Cloud uses robust tools to connect these disparate silos of advertising information and processes the data into analyses and dashboards. Armed with these insights, advertisers can make actionable decisions on advertising campaign planning to drive better engagement.
Make metrics matter with Salesforce Media Cloud
Salesforce Media Cloud helps advertisers adapt to the shifting media landscape. It gives them the ability to transform faster with a platform exclusively built for their industry.
As a certified Salesforce partner, Silverline understands the changing media environment and how technology can help advertisers address these challenges. Silverline works with our clients to guide them on their digital transformation journey by recommending best practices, sharing industry relevant expertise, and implementing superior technology.
