No one questions it. If brands want to improve their business results, they turn to marketing insights to help them better engage their audience. But there could be a problem with this.
They're likely getting only a partial view of their marketing impact, and this undermines their ability to maximise returns from their media investments.
The limited visibility is because campaign measurement tools are typically set up to evaluate last click attribution. This means they can’t account for the impact of media investment across the entire customer journey, which is often complex and spans channels, both online and offline, and paid and organic interactions.
Performance-driven brands are using holistic measurement tools to gain visibility of their campaign’s true impact and to optimise returns.
When a brand lacks a clear view of how its online campaigns drive bottom line growth or offline sales, or is unaware of the influence of paid ads on organic traffic, it will undervalue its marketing efforts. This leads to blind spots in marketing strategies, inefficient budget optimisations, and missed opportunities for growth.
Holistic measurement solutions, however, let brands gain robust insights across more metrics, and make well-informed business decisions. Already, performance-driven brands are using these solutions to understand the true impact of their campaigns and unlock higher returns. Here are three ways you can do the same.
Maximise the synergy between paid and organic marketing
Brands typically assess paid and organic traffic performance separately, but their results are synergistic. Holistic measurement solutions provide visibility into the interplay between paid and organic marketing, and show how brands can tap into it to amplify both results. A meta study we conducted reinforces this finding.
We worked with financial advertisers in India to link their Search Console accounts — a free tool that lets users understand and improve their Search traffic — to their Google Ads accounts. With it, they were able to measure how their click-through rates (CTR) varied according to how they reached users searching online — organically, via paid ads, or both.
In the case of TATA AIG General Insurance, when its customers saw both paid ads and organic listings, its CTR was 5X that when customers saw only organic listings, and 2X that when they saw only paid ads. Its SVP for digital business marketing, Riaan Rodrigues, says, “Overall, this has been an invaluable tool for our Search strategy and for enhancing our online presence.”
When TATA AIG General Insurance customers saw both paid ads and organic results, its CTR was:
With holistic measurement insights of this sort, brands can, for example, identify relevant queries for their business that have low organic traffic and strengthen their presence on those queries with paid search. They can also tailor their text ad such that it shows up with a more useful, prominent, and differentiated message from their organic listing to maximise synergy.
Unlock greater growth with full omnichannel visibility
For brands with an omnichannel strategy and presence, typical measurement solutions only show how media spend drives e-commerce sales or online conversions, and not offline transactions. As a result, brands miss the true value of their media investments, and this prevents them from optimising for better returns.
Indian jewellery brand Tanishq was among those brands. It was savvy about investing in digital campaigns to drive sales at its more than 400 stores across India. But it struggled to attribute offline sales back to its online campaigns.
Google’s store sales measurement solution, however, gave Tanishq the holistic business insights it needed. The solution used the hashed in-store transaction data that Tanishq uploaded to match and attribute transactions to the brand’s ads on Search, YouTube, Display, Discovery, and Maps. And here’s what it found: The brand had achieved a 667X improvement in overall return on ad spend on store sales and direct-to-customer channels.
The holistic insights helped the brand identify the campaigns that drove the highest return on ad spend, and this let it better optimise its campaigns and strategies.
Tanishq’s Group Manager, Gaurav Midha, says, “Using store sales measurement with Performance Max for store goals campaigns, we were able to quantify the business impact that our local advertising delivers, increase our offline sales by 7%, and unlock new marketing and growth opportunities.”
Gain visibility into the impact of branding and grow conversions
When it comes to brand campaigns, the impact is often assessed on reach. But as businesses face macroeconomic pressures and the need to deliver performance, they’re increasingly seeking clarity as to how their brand campaigns drive results and conversions throughout the funnel.
For leading apparel marketplace Ajio, its search to understand the impact of its YouTube brand campaigns on its performance campaigns led it to Ads Data Hub.
The holistic, privacy-centric measurement solution allowed the brand to combine its first-party data with event-level Google media data to measure the unique reach, optimal frequency, and impact of brand and performance campaigns on conversion rates.
What it found was that when people were exposed to both its brand and performance campaigns, instead of only the latter, it had a 55% higher conversion rate and a 61% higher open rate on its app.
Ajio’s Head of Marketing, Arpan Biswas, says, “In a competitive landscape, it isn't enough to just stand out. We need to attract the right customers and convert that awareness into tangible results. Ads Data Hub helped us effectively measure the relationship between our brand and performance campaigns, showed us how branding was impacting performance, and gave us levers to optimise this media mix.”
Indeed, 20/20 visibility into the impact of your marketing campaigns is possible with holistic measurement solutions. And armed with accurate marketing insights, you’ll be able to step away from blind spots and make business decisions that’ll let you fully optimise your media investments and bottom line results.
