Beyond brand awareness
Editor's note: Based in Encino, Calif., Emily Tomasiewicz is manager, mobile products at research firm SSI, Shelton, Conn.
Remember when Facebook first launched in 2004? Members could only sign up with e-mails ending in .edu, and even then only through select colleges and universities. Today, we have moms, dads, grandfathers and even cats showcasing their own Facebook profiles. Millions of businesses represent themselves solely through Facebook, bypassing the costs needed to build their own Web sites. Ad agencies better understand who they should be targeting (with ads shown through Facebook). Celebrities, public figures, influencers and publishers can share promotional posts and tag content they’ve created with brands. All of this activity amounts to an average of 1 billion daily active users in over 130 countries. Facebook has done well for itself.
But the point I’m trying to make doesn’t start and end with Facebook. This same kind of behavioral data can be seen by thousands of other sites and apps (think social, YouTube, e-mail, search, display, referral, etc.). They’ll tell you the number of people who saw your post and can break it down by gender, age, location, tap-through rates, likes, tags and shares – it can get pretty rooted. In the not-so-distant past, understanding how well your posted content performed was enough to fuel future marketing efforts. However, as spending continued to soar, brands and agencies were still facing the same challenge: how to measure purchase impact.
To be more specific, connecting the dots between finger swipes and computer clicks with actual purchase conversions still remained a major hurdle. Today, while market researchers haven’t completely eliminated that challenge, the proliferation of mobile consumer behavior enables more strategic techniques by layering in behavioral research with social, survey and in-context data. Strategic market research techniques, like mobile and out-of-home (OOH) ad effectiveness, gather active data that blends well with existing third-party platform statistics, presenting a full and more conclusive picture behind consumer behavior.
Let me speak plainly. Much of what the advertising companies do is about brand awareness and staying current and top-of-mind with their consumers. But in the end, purchase influence is key. The question at the crux of every marketing meeting becomes: Is our advertising strategy driving sales? We know our target audience, sure, but is it positively impacting their decision to buy or support our brand in the way we intended?
Growing ever larger
In 2016, global mobile penetration is huge and growing ever larger. When a consumer is shopping on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles, commuting to work by metro in the nation’s capital or driving through the plains of middle America, it’s likely that they have their phones out, apps open and fingers scrolling (that’s right, an AT&T study reported that 70 percent of drivers use their phones while operating vehicles – so watch out!). Interactions with advertising content on mobile platforms can be lightning quick as users skim past paid content on Facebook or Instagram, filtering out what’s irrelevant to them without thinking twice. A separate study by comScore estimated that consumers see an average of 1,700 banner ads each month and don’t click on a single one. A gap in incomplete, third-party data begs the question: even if a consumer doesn’t click a paid content post on a social platform, is it still being seen and/or having an effect?
Mobile devices of all kinds, including smartphones, tablets and wearable technologies, are the new frontier for companies looking to personalize their marketing and reach Millennials and Generation Z. Yes, the landscape is still somewhat experimental. What is clear, however, is that brands no longer have the capital nor time to execute full-fledged campaigns and gather the effectiveness of their results thereafter. It’s all about iterating on the run and personalizing ads to reach consumers where they are.
More specific profiles
As companies continue to refine their marketing approaches in this new, pocket-sized digital age, it’s the unique advertising identifiers (commonly called IDFAs or advertising IDs, respective to iOS and Android devices) that act as the common denominator or point of departure for evaluating ad effectiveness on mobile. In short, these can act as tracking IDs allowing brands to see how people are virtually interacting with their ads to help them create more specific customer profiles around that data.
Mobile apps don’t support cookies like the PC environment does. But it’s fair to say that advertising IDs are somewhat analogous to advertising cookies in their ability to track when a particular device user takes actions as a result of an ad. These might include things like installing an app, clicking on a banner or playing a video. With this kind of data, brands can aggregate behavior about a single consumer (likely the mobile device owner) across a series of mobile environments.
Beyond statistics that sites and apps like Facebook provide, however, there are a ton of third-party technological platforms that can give a full picture of mobile advertising’s influence around actual buying behavior. Those that specialize in collecting real-time conversion data around mobile ad campaigns are specifically pertinent. In-app engagement has more consumers eagerly enabling their location settings given the benefits offered in return. Consequently, exposing content to people in real time based on where they are can be pretty effortless. Companies now considering where consumers live, for example, are becoming more adept at tailoring language to consumers. That being said, location is one of the most valuable factors supporting mobile ad effectiveness research that market researchers have identified.
Geofencing – a technique that creates a virtual fence around a geographical area to detect and then trigger relevant messages, alerts or coupons to consumers’ mobile devices as they cross that “fence” – is one primary way market researchers recruit and measure panelists’ store visitations after exposure. When the technology was still new in 2013, an article by my colleague, Allen Vartazarian, was published in Quirk’s titled, “Why geofencing is the next mobile market research must-have.” It’s fascinating to observe how quickly our industry responds to the changing ad landscape to adopt what really works. Considered an infant technology just three years ago, geofencing is quickly becoming the backbone of ad effectiveness research.
Of course, more traditional post-exposure and post-campaign surveys integrate well with geofencing to offer companies a deeper level of insight into how their mobile campaigns are working with target demographics in predefined geographical areas. The research is especially useful when it’s presented to consumers on-site and gathered as close to the time of the shopping experience as possible. The ultimate goal is to make an intelligent tie between ad spending and tangible foot traffic to a store, or buying behavior in-app – beyond finger swipes and social referrals.
True media planning for OOH
In the same vein, the power of mobile allows brands to reach consumers when they’re on the go. Billboards and transit advertisements have been around for ages (in fact, the earliest form of advertising was OOH, as wall posters and signs were found in the ruins of Pompeii dating back to the first century AD). While the OOH advertising format isn’t new, the way we can track its effectiveness with mobile is cutting-edge. Mobile panels now enable true media planning for OOH ads by aggregating demographic and behavioral data of things like vehicle traffic to help planners more strategically place ads that will appeal to target customers. Again, location-based geofencing comes into play here, as research integrations can trigger surveys for mobile panelists when they’re in or around targeted retail locations.
For instance, it’s smart business to target a woman out shopping at a retail complex with an alert about a 20 percent-off sale at, say, Banana Republic. While she’s already out browsing, the likelihood that she’ll stop in and make purchases after seeing the location-based advertisement is exponentially higher. How much higher? That’s precisely where the OOH ad effectiveness research and time-specific mobile surveys come in.
Not show the full picture
Hopefully I’ve convinced you by now that including mobile-based ad research is a necessary venture, but it still might not show the full picture. Results from marketing campaigns are gathered from a number of sources: servers; e-mail and CRM systems; cross-device solutions; media buying platforms; and third-party data providers, to name a few. Tracking IDs in the form of cookies, pixel tagging, e-mail, username, IDFAs/advertising IDs, etc., are used across these disparate sources. But each type of ID used is stored separately and is unique to its source. To elaborate on a more specific challenge, over 2.5 billion people worldwide use e-mail and nearly 4.5 billion addresses exist. When most people are using multiple accounts, the pathway back to identification might lead to a dead-end.
So how do we identify the same user across all of these channels (that is, develop a user-based attribution model) without using any personally identifiable information? The answer lies in uniting all of these different tracking IDs from the same user and mapping them to a single unique ID. A single unique ID that contains every way a consumer interacted with a specific brand creates a robust consumer-level profile that not only identifies target audiences but also uncovers when and through which channel ad campaigns work best.
More engagement?
Do personalized, geo-based messages get more engagement than their generic counterparts? That’s the idea these days; true mobile ad effectiveness has a lot to do with whether someone sees an ad and then walks into a store and/or buys a product. Making that connection is within reach when combining active mobile ad effectiveness with passive data already being collected elsewhere. Advanced attribution models allow us to take campaign measurement a step further by tying online, offline and cross-device behavioral data together to finally close that loop.
There is an enormous amount of anonymous, user-level data available to market researchers today. But the growing dominance of mobile as a media platform must be considered and researchers should always leverage user-based attribution models when applicable. When brands and agencies consider every source of influence, they’re equipped with the fullest, most up-to-date information to more accurately target their customers, better customize direct consumer messaging and, most importantly, validate their ad campaign impact to more efficiently plan and invest resources in the future.