Measurement continues to be critical for brands trying to understand the impact of their marketing. As I’ve written previously, effective marketing measurement helps businesses uncover the best ways to invest their limited resources. That leads to better marketing, which leads to new customers and continued growth.
But as the customer journey has become more complex, marketers often find it difficult to gain a complete view of customer engagement and attribute marketing’s impact accurately.
Today's challenges make it even more important that we find solutions together. That’s why partnerships play a critical role in Google’s measurement strategy.
As digital marketing has evolved and grown, Google has worked with a variety of partners to deliver reliable measurement solutions, which allows us to expand coverage, enable choice, and help advance the industry.
More coverage, more choice
To continue Google’s long history of working with partners to provide comprehensive, best-in-class marketing measurement, we recently announced Google Measurement Partners.
Measurement Partners includes over 20 measurement providers and combines the best of Google and partner technology across the marketing funnel, covering specializations for the following seven categories: viewability, reach, brand safety, brand lift, sales lift, app attribution, and marketing mix modeling. These partnerships are in addition to delivering innovation with our own measurement solutions, including Brand Lift, Unique Reach, and Active View.
For example, we’re partnering with companies like Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify for viewability, verification, and brand safety, and Nielsen and Oracle Data Cloud for sales lift.
The program expands our measurement coverage, helping us provide marketers with a more complete view of the customer journey — offline to online, between customer touchpoints, and across devices and screens. Google Measurement Partners does all of this while giving marketers the freedom to choose the measurement solutions that work best for them. And they can be confident in the results knowing the solutions are verified to meet rigorous standards for accuracy, quality, and user privacy.
“Building an effective measurement strategy covering all marketing activities is essential to advertisers who rightfully demand accountability — including brand safety — from their investments,” says John Montgomery, global executive vice president of brand safety at GroupM. “Clients have different requirements and must often work with multiple measurement technologies. Ensuring these solutions work well together in providing accurate, consistent data is a progressive move forward.”
An ongoing effort to help move the industry forward
Since launching our first ads products more than a decade ago, we’ve continued to work across the industry to push for a better, more effective online advertising ecosystem. This includes partnering with the Media Rating Council (MRC) on industry standards for measuring the effectiveness of ads; becoming a founding member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab Open Measurement Working Group; working with the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) to stamp out ad fraud; and teaming up with IAB UK to launch its IAB Gold Standard.
Common guidelines and standards help advertisers and publishers make confident decisions when it comes to investing marketing dollars. And our work with third-party verification and audit partners helps ensure the accuracy and objectivity of both Google metrics and reporting from other providers.
Reliable measurement in today’s complex marketing environment can be a challenge, but it’s never been more important. By working closely with partners we can expand coverage across the full customer journey, offer choice to advertisers, and accelerate innovation across the industry. And ultimately this will help brands better connect with their customers.
