CTR Is Old News - Measure What Happens After The Click

Digital ad spend across the globe continues to stay on its steep climb. In 2017 alone, it is predicted to touch USD 205 billion, accounting for 37% of all global advertising investment this year. But this growth aside, marketers are struggling no less to prove the ROI of their digital efforts. At the same time, the demand for measurable ROI from internal stakeholders, budget approvers, and C-Suite has become deafening. To understand this gap, let us first understand the current measurement conundrum.

The Problem with Click-Through Rates

That digital advertising is one of the most difficult mediums to measure goes without saying. Marketers have been uncertain about which metrics point to success. One such metric is CTR, or click-through rate. It is one that advertisers and marketers rely on most heavily. The reason is that CTR is expected to demonstrate audience's intent and interest in your brand or product/service.

But how does a marketer or brand know for sure if this click actually meant something? The obvious issue with click-through rate is that it is an assumption of intent, at best. The click could have been a mistake; it could have been a means to get the ad out of one's face. It could have meant intent too, but there is no certainty of that.

The Only Metrics That Really Matter

Does that mean that valuable ad spend is seeping through the cracks due to lack of sound measurement techniques? We'd say yes, it is a challenge marketers have been grappling with since the advent of digital advertising.

From what we have understood of marketers and business in general, the only metric that really matters for any marketing investment is actual walk-ins at the store and completed transactions. It is important to see the impact of marketing investment at the most granular level – store visit and SKU or products actually sold. Other metrics like CPM and CTR might sound great on paper, but a metric means nothing if it can't measure actual business impact in dollar value.

How Does One Measure Footfall and SKU-Level Impact of Digital Ad Spend?

We're glad you asked! We have a solution that is known to work. LifeSight, our digital advertising solution has a game-changing mission – help marketers link digital advertising to business impact, drive incremental sales, and acquire new customers.

A crucial part of this project we took on a few years ago was to measure and quantify success in ways that makes sense to brands, marketers, and advertisers. LifeSight enables brands to leverage large custom-built audience segments and explicitly attribute purchase to targeting tactics. Our end goal, just like our customers, is to drive and measure actual footfalls and purchase.

Using the powerful combination of digital advertising effort with our deep analytics capabilities, brand marketers get usable insight into their customers' buying and pre-purchase behaviors. Eventually, LifeSight allows you to measure ad effectiveness by bringing actual footfalls, sale conversions, and granular level impact to SKU into the equation.

With LifeSight, we have taken measurement one-step further by allowing brand marketers to optimize their digital campaign to a single metric that they are accountable for – product level ROI.

How It Works

Marketers can now quantify physical in-store sales impact as an outcome of digital marketing campaigns. But more importantly, they can do this on a near real-time basis with LifeSight.

The execution of this ambitious goal rolls out in the following manner:

1. Leading agencies and brands work with us on a managed-service model to reach consumers. Our approach is device agnostic. We can capture customer mindshare across smartphones, tablets and PC screens.

2. We provide marketers with an entire spectrum of location-based data, in near-real time, from a single credible source – our mobile location analytics capabilities. We combine data sources like cell tower, in-store WiFi, beacons, GPS, IP address and more. This allows marketers to view the online-to-offline journey of their customers in near real-time.

3. We make measurement much more accurate and transparent than the industry is currently accustomed to. This is done through a two-pronged strategy – our partnership with credible, legitimate sources of transaction data as well as our proprietary opt-in app Manis. Everyday, consumers share millions of itemized receipts across several hundred thousand retail locations with us in exchange for deals and reward points.

SKU-Level Advertising Effectiveness

In a game-changing move, LifeSight allows SKU-level advertising effectiveness measurement. It ensures that marketers have a one-stop solution to not only allow targeted advertising but also measure effectively and derive actionable and highly personalized yet secure and anonymous insights about their consumers. A win-win scenario if there ever was one!

Are you ready to set up, launch, and measure marketing initiatives in a precise and transparent manner for the first time ever? LifeSight has the answer.