Unique visitors becoming popular industry standard for measurement
The increasingly complex mix of media in consumers’ lives has made it more difficult for marketers to track and measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. But new tools and tactics are helping marketers track and understand interactions and campaign effectiveness across multiple platforms, according to a new eMarketer report, “The State of Cross-Platform Ad Measurement: Industry Trends and Current Practices.”
To address concerns about multiplatform complexity, industry groups, service providers and other interested parties have focused on two key challenges:
- Finding a way to count the unique number of ad exposures for a single person, regardless of media
- Developing tools that better allow advertisers to measure their efforts across multiple platforms, rather than on just individual platforms
In traditional media, the gross rating point, or GRP, is a standard metric used by media buyers to buy and plan advertising across channels such as out-of-home, TV and radio. Digital, however, lacks similar standardization, relying instead on a handful of measures such as cost per impression (CPM) or cost per click (CPC) for buying and planning search, display and social advertising across platforms.
Nielsen and comScore are working together to develop a uniform digital measure, starting first with display advertising and the “viewable impression.”
Challenging as it is to measure impressions on multiple platforms, it is probably even harder to track unique users across those platforms. But there is evidence that this will remain an important metric.
The ANA and Forrester Research in early 2012 found the greatest number of US marketers (47%) believed the future industry standard for cross-platform audience measurement was unique visitors or viewers.
But there are still limitations to single-source solutions, and multiple solutions are the only alternative when it comes to metrics such as brand awareness, loyalty and actual sales impact.
The full report, “The State of Cross-Platform Ad Measurement: Industry Trends and Current Practices,” also answers these key questions:
- What steps are being taken to address the current challenges of cross-platform ad measurement?
- What tools and technologies are media buyers using to measure advertising across platforms?
This report is available to eMarketer corporate subscription clients only. Total Access clients, log in and view the report now.
Check out today’s other articles, “The World's Most-Read Online Newspaper Changes the Rules” and “In Argentina, Online Videos Reach Far and Wide.”