Communicators measuring digital media effectiveness—in silos only—will miss crucial ad exposure data, creating a distorted view of performance insights, or “mutant data,” new research from audience insights platform DISQO reveals. The firm’s new study uncovers the critical risks marketers face in understanding advertising performance when constrained by siloed measurement.
As the loss of identifiers threatens to increase siloed measurement across the industry, the firm’s cookieless measurement approach and insights show the overlapping use of media platforms by consumers.
As discussed in its new report, A Kaleidoscope for Cross-Platform Measurement, DISQO leveraged its opt-in behavioral panel to study the digital journeys of 166,256 US adults on mobile and desktop, and found that 62 percent of those people used multiple social media platforms monthly, while 44 percent used multiple social media sites weekly.
As depicted in the table below, DISQO’s analysis with a specific target audience revealed granular insights on the overlaps in platform use by that audience across the most popular social media destinations where people in the U.S. spend their time.
Note: Read across each row to see the percent of users in the first column who also use the other social platform for each column. Illustrative for a sample audience skewing female and younger.
“Siloed measurement has vexed brands and agencies for a while, disintermediating them from a true and objective understanding of campaign performance,” said Anne Hunter, VP of product marketing at DISQO, and author of the new report, in a news release. “Estimating performance by impression modeling with contaminated control cells just won’t cut it.”
The report outlines that for typical campaigns with at least weekly optimizations over a month or more, the overlap between platforms destroys the fidelity of even a weekly optimization on a given platform. Control cells are contaminated, creating what DISQO calls “mutant data” that distorts the view of performance. The consequences can be dire, including lower return on ad spend, inaccurate insights for future campaigns and excessive administrative costs.
The new report is the second installment of DISQO’s New Foundations of Ad Effectiveness series. Against the backdrop of the rapidly changing adtech landscape (with the loss of mobile IDs, tagging, third-party cookies and other identifiers), the series challenges the conventional wisdom of what works in advertising to uncover best practices for the next era of digital advertising.
Download the full report here.
Additional reports in the series are forthcoming to provide marketers with data-driven understanding of media measurement and optimization.
