• by John Bauschard , November 4, 2009

Media departments are no place for guessing. With millions -- even tens or hundreds of millions -- at stake, clients want hard data showing that their budgets are being well spent.

Yet for too long, media executives have been forced to rely on indirect information to judge a campaign's post-buy effectiveness. If sales or awareness goes up, things must be working -- even though dozens of non-advertising factors affect such measurements. If all GRP goals are fulfilled, the ad spend is a success -- even though it only proves people saw the ads. To be sure, all these metrics are important. But to complete the picture, it's critical to look at what advertising is meant to impact: consumer behavior. And thanks to cross-media analytics tools, reliable measures finally exist to calculate true payback of media investments.

In the new world of media analytics, online and offline data are married to create an amazingly accurate picture of what a campaign is accomplishing. Everything from site analytics to competitive media buys, ad server stats to CRM, store sales information to traditional ratings results, is integrated with the agency's media purchase data to create multi-source insight into campaign effectiveness.

Dedicated analytics products now exist that let researchers and planners not only evaluate campaigns post-buy but monitor them as they unfold using near real-time data. What's more, the same information can be used to model alternatives, demo hypothetical buys, and make changes midstream if a campaign isn't reaching objectives.

Because they are a direct measure of consumer interest, Web analytics play a key role in the new cross-analytics paradigm.

But it's not enough to look solely at the client's Web site activity; additional measures need to be included. As many as 10 to 20 discrete data sources may be needed to generate the insights necessary to make effective changes. Additionally, in order to evaluate and determine the drivers of consumer activity within the media mix, advertisers need access to granular data across disparate systems to formulate a perspective on creative and messaging effectiveness.

Advertisers are already benefiting from online/offline data integration. In one case, a major healthcare services provider was looking for a way to reduce its cost of obtaining qualified leads through its advertising. Its target was $100 per lead; by obtaining real-time visibility into its campaign performance and making a fact-based, strategic shift from national TV to its best-performing DMAs, the advertiser decreased its cost-per-lead by 21% in the first month, from $112 to $89. Moreover, it maintained an average 13% decrease in each of the next four months.

Together, the cost-per-lead improvement, combined with a more effective local television buy, produced millions in additional revenue. Efficiencies are further gained by being able to measure lead flow and predict future revenue generation as the leads flow through the conversion process. That's the kind of results clients hunger for -- and agencies can now reliably generate with the right technology solutions.

Today's multi-source analytical tools also provide much needed objectivity and credibility for media personnel. Instead of planners analyzing media buys -- a potential conflict of interest -- these comprehensive, exhaustive solutions are neutral in stance. In the end, all anyone wants is the simple truth about how well a campaign is performing, or whether a shift in strategy is warranted. Advanced cross-media analytics can finally provide both.