For all the potential of full-funnel marketing, however, one key challenge persists — the difficulty of effectively measuring impact across the funnel, especially upper-funnel efforts like brand marketing. Quantifying outcomes related to awareness and perception has long been a concern of marketing teams. But as media channels multiply, consumer behaviors change and ad budgets are more heavily scrutinized, the measurement challenge has only been magnified.

Effective measurement strategies and solutions are crucial to investing in upper-funnel strategies that generate long-term demand for a brand. They also play a vital role in helping brands understand their audience.

“The customer journey today is complex,” said Saroj Thatte, director of software development for measurement products at Amazon Ads. “Full-funnel campaigns paired with good full-funnel measurement clarify the customer journey — helping brands understand what informs and inspires their audience on their decision journey. With those insights in hand, brands can make more effective decisions about which channels to use for a campaign and how to allocate budget.”

Three essential principles of effective full-funnel measurement

To overcome challenges related to measurement, brands are adopting strategies and solutions based on three core principles — measurement that is unified, reliable and actionable.

Because marketing today is omnichannel, measurement must also be omnichannel. This means that brands get a holistic view of their marketing across all their touchpoints, including offline channels.

“In practice, unified measurement means capturing signals across your customer touchpoints, then bringing them all together so you can analyze them and derive insights about what’s working with your activation and what isn’t,” Thatte explained.

Second, given the complexity of marketing today, advertisers are implementing ad technology that can accurately aggregate and interpret signals. Reliable measurement solutions are anchored in sound scientific methodology, align with industry standards and anticipate and respond to shifts in the ad industry.

Finally, marketers are favoring actionable measurement.

“The purpose of measurement is that you can use it to take action — whether in the campaign-planning phase when the campaign is in-flight or post-campaign,” said Thatte. Measurement is foundational for marketers’ decision-making and their ability to remain agile.

How principles of full-funnel measurement show up in practice

Practically, these principles come to life in how brands measure critical upper-funnel KPIs like reach and lift, as well as how they approach marketing and campaign planning.

Today, consumers interact with brands across more than 20 channels, according to BlueVenn. To reach and engage their audiences with brand-building campaigns, brands are increasingly running multichannel campaigns. When it comes to adequately evaluating a campaign’s full reach in a fragmented media environment, it’s crucial for a brand to get unified measurement across channels.

As an example of this idea in action, Thatte described a brand-building campaign across linear …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron