When assessing digital ad performance it is essential to consider what will ALWAYS be UN-TRACKABLE.
Think about products with long sales cycles. Multi-person decision making units. Expensive purchases with longer consideration windows.
Scenarios where the eventual purchase may happen weeks, months – possibly even years after the first click.
The customer journey is complex. It often involves time lag, multiple touch points, multiple devices, IP address switching, even different people. All the while navigating ad blockers, VPNs, cookie denials, different email addresses etc
What about a journey that starts digitally but is then completely physically. Or starts physically, and finishes digitally. How do you attribute the ad spend there?
Just because a digital campaign’s performance looks poor on the surface, it doesn’t mean it’s not driving SIGNIFICANT value on the backend. If you base advertising effectiveness only on what you can see in-platform you could be axing campaigns that are the very seed of your success – you just can’t see it.
This is at odds with the modern day obsession with tracking every ounce of digital marketing spend to the digit – but also maybe where brands can actually develop an edge.
When others are obsessing over the minutiae, you can look at your growth statistics, rate of customer acquisition and profit margins.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t not track your campaigns, but look at them in a different way. Take a more holistic point of view.
Media efficiency ratio (MER) is a great place to start.