Report: Australian marketers moving to new outcome driven media metrics

Marketers are looking at new metrics to measure digital media placement to better prove its effectiveness and increase budgets, according to a new report. 

The research, by media company, Xaxis, which is also GroupM’s programmatic media arm, found while marketers are happy with the current basic metrics, a large majority of digital marketers in the Asia-Pacific region plan to test new success metrics to deal with growing complexity. 

The survey of almost 5000 digital media marketers across 16 key global markets revealed 88 per cent of marketers in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region are planning to increase their investment in the emerging field of ‘outcome-driven media’ over the next two years. 

The majority (90 per cent) said the primary metrics they used – most commonly cost per acquisition (CPA), cost per completed view (CPCV), cost per click (CPC), and click-through rate (CTR) – were very or somewhat effective in evaluating the success of campaigns against strategic marketing goals. 

However, almost three quarters (74 per cent) either strongly or somewhat agreed that evaluating digital media spend had become more difficult over the past five years and 79 per cent said they were very or somewhat likely to change the primary metric they used to measure campaigns over the next 12-24 months. 

The research highlights linking digital media spend to business impact is critical for marketers. More than nine out of 10 (92 per cent) said they use one or more custom KPIs to link the impact of digital display campaigns on ‘measurable business results’ and 80 per cent of Australian marketers strongly or somewhat agreed it is essential for digital campaigns to drive a direct correlation. 

“The opportunity for us is to elevate the conversation away from basic media metrics and guarantee outcomes that matter for a brand," Xaxis Australia MD, Imran Masood, said."We do this by leveraging the scale of our market trading advantage, speed and science in connecting our proprietary and partner technology solutions, and the smarts of our amazing people.”

The research also found 84 per cent of those surveyed agreed being able to link business objectives to digital media spend ‘positively impacted’ their marketing budget and the same majority agreed understanding how media can meet business objectives allowed their organisation to have a measurable advantage over competitors. 

Priorities for media spend in 2019 for APAC marketers was ‘increased efficiency’ (45 per cent), followed by ‘demonstrating marketing strategy aligns with business objectives’ (42 per cent), ‘improving ad viewability levels’ (36 per cent) and ‘effective allocation of resource’ (36 per cent). 

Xaxis global CEO, Nicolas Bidon, said the research clearly demonstrates outcome-driven media is a key priority for APAC marketers moving into 2019, with a continuing focus on proving the link between digital media spend and business success. 

“The research sends a clear message to the industry that, when business objectives are linked to digital spend, there is a positive uplift on budgets to enable those businesses to secure greater competitive advantage,” he said. 

The research was conducted via an online survey in September 2018 among 4798 digital brand marketers across 16 key global markets: US, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Poland, Argentina, Canada, Mexico, Australia, China, India, and Singapore.

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