Rather than relying on panels, digital advertising promised precision. Marketers could track clicks across the entirety of their media spend and get precise measurement of the impact.
But as signals become scrambled (or removed), old-school panels are coming back in style. Google just started recruiting for a 1,000-person-strong panel to feed its conversion models this week.
“We’re going through a big sea change in terms of targeting and measurement,” says Rick Bruner, our guest on this week’s episode. Bruner is head of insights and analytics at Standard Media Index, which offers ad spend and pricing intelligence.
Bruner “applauds” Google’s move to launch an online panel, but adds this note of caution: “I don’t see this as a watershed moment and solving the bigger problems.”
Even so, Google’s panel is part of a larger transformation happening in advertising analytics.
As media measurement transforms, marketers will likely have to cobble together multiple measurement methods and continue to experiment in order to understand the impact of their media spend.
For example, randomized controlled trials (you know, what scientists used to test the COVID-19 vaccines) are a gold standard that can also be applied by media companies, like through the use of ghost ads, Bruner notes. Marketers who want to understand incrementality, in particular, benefit from including such tests in their measurement.
Attention metrics
Panels are also feeding another type of measurement that’s starting to gain traction: attention metrics.
Positioned as better than proxy metrics like viewability or video completion rates, attention metrics often combine onscreen behavior (think scrolling or interaction with an ad) with information from panels, such as eye-tracking studies.
Attention metrics are being applied across tried-and-true mediums, including social media, along with newer ones, like gaming. But for attention metrics to truly take off, industry organizations, such as the IAB and the Media Rating Council (MRC), will need to get involved. It wasn’t until the MRC started certifying viewability vendors that viewability went from an add-on to a must-have.
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Although market interest is slowly ramping up, attention metrics have not yet reached that level of maturity.
