The Unknown: Proving Your Digital Spend is Working

In an age where programmatic audience targeting is being positioned as “direct mail online” – it is incumbent on marketers to demand transparency and proof of results when they onboard and target a known list of households and persons.

There are any number of faux measurement factors that get applied to suggest your digital ad spend is producing a “lift factor” or “modeled results.” These are forecasted results, and in today’s marketplace only a deterministic measurement can and should be applied every time you sign an insertion order.

There are three key measures you need to ask your digital partner for:

1. Match rates: Let’s face it - onboarding is a blind faith exercise. To protect privacy the onboarding black box is appending people to cookies based on linking emails to users’ prior traffic. In a typical list of a thousand emails or postal addresses there is a match rate of 7,000 to 15,000 cookies. Ironically, in that inflation of matches - only 23% to 40% of your list is actually being matched. Cookie blocking and Apple devices alone reduces the unique users by half, creating a statistically high rate of duplication and waste.
2. Unique user reach and accurate delivery of ads to your list: linking the audience to the ad served and to the household or person who viewed the ad is not as impossible as it is often portrayed. Standard cookie-based approaches tell us the cookie in the black box protects us from knowing the ad served is to a specific person or device. Going with Facebook or Google IDs drops this pretense but doesn’t improve results, because unique user coverage is reduced to within the walled garden of Google accounts or Facebook IDs.
3. Attribution of ads served to the point of sale: Attribution is the part you care about – did the campaign work? This metric should apply to both the online sale and the sales that take place on the phone, through mail or in the storefront. There are any number of predictive modeling solutions that make a best guess based on a sample, but what is required is a deterministic answer at scale – did the household or person from my onboarded list transact? The only way that happens is if there is transparency to the user up and down the funnel from the match rate, to impressions served, and to the party transacting the sale.

The Semcasting alternative to black box onboarding and attribution is based on IP matching to digital delivery points covering the U.S. and Canada. We bypass the cookie match problem and cover over 400 million devices – linking across mobile devices to home and business networks. The objective of our non-cookie based technology is to maximize the match rates of unique users — reaching the right people at a rate of up to 85% of the time based on thousands of campaigns in retail, financial, healthcare, B2B, political, and beyond. The difference is that we maintain a persistent ID within our Safe Haven from a postal or email list through to the attribution of a sale whether that sale is online or in the store.

We build proof of performance into every campaign.

Learn more about attribution or get a personalized demo by contacting us today.