Optimizing audience measurement across platforms: 5 questions to ask

With millions of U.S. adults working from home, video consumption habits have shifted dramatically over the last several months. While the workday used to involve a long commute and hours of sitting in the office, many homebound employees are now finding time to squeeze in daytime TV viewing ranging from streaming cooking content to a midday news brief.

Based on data from the Oracle ID Graph, we know that each consumer uses an average of six connected devices, all with different experiences and content vying for their attention. Consumers have more choices than ever before to access media across fragmented channels like TV, digital, and mobile.

More channels for content mean more channels for ads, but it also means more blind spots when it comes to who is actually receiving your ads and how often. Achieving cross-channel clarity is necessary to maximize return and improve campaign efficiency. Here’s a checklist to help guide you in optimizing your measurement strategy from digital to TV.

1. Are you accurately measuring reach across platforms to gain new insights?

For years, measuring cross-channel advertising lacked consistency, leaving advertisers to wonder how to make sense of fragmented systems and data points. Marketers had to settle with cobbling together measurements from various sources to make their own calculations of who saw an ad and where. This sometimes provided the illusion of progress but did little to remove blind spots or mitigate waste.

However, new industry developments offer marketers the ability to attain people-based measurement and compare like-for-like metrics on reach and frequency across all channels, platforms, and audiences in one place. This gives marketers the insight needed to optimize their marketing investments across their entire campaign.

2. Are you monitoring for ad fraud and viewability?

Ad fraud is one of the adtech industry’s oldest and most intractable challenges, with criminals drawn to new and emerging platforms like over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV (CTV). And although linear TV advertising is less prone to fraud, it suffers from another challenge—capturing consumer attention.

Bottom line: there’s no point in measuring an ad that’s delivered to a bot. For your investments to be worthwhile, your ads must have the opportunity to be seen by a human. That’s why starting with valid and viewable impressions should be the baseline. With that peace of mind, you’ll be able to assess which channels deliver the most real, relevant impressions for your campaign and adjust appropriately.

3. Are you evaluating your TV partners to achieve the best ROI?

Since 1962, brands have bought TV commercial airtime ahead of the television season during what’s called “upfronts” to lock in primetime slots. Now, advertisers can flex their dollars and concentrate spend on the TV partners and channels that deliver the best results.

New solutions are available to help marketers compare reach and frequency from digital to TV. These tools help identify which networks provide the most efficient reach so they can adjust their budgets, as necessary. Additionally, they can access smaller networks with a high concentration of their relevant audience to increase reach using TV’s “long tail.” Using these data-driven insights ensures your TV strategy is set up to maximize efficiency.

4. Are you comparing spend by channel to discover which are most effective at reaching relevant audiences?

Marketers have primarily relied on demographic viewing data to identify the right audiences for their TV campaigns, but those broad segments also have limited the granularity and accuracy of their campaigns. Now, marketers can confidently expand traditional definitions of relevance to other audience characteristics outside of just demographics.

Instead of only focusing your reach to women who are 18-49 years old, for example, marketers can onboard their own 1st party data, interest segments, and other relevant audiences for their brands. How different was the 22-year old version of yourself from who you are today?

Once marketers identify those relevant audiences, they can more astutely evaluate the reach and frequency of their campaigns against those custom audiences from TV to digital. This will help them gain a well-rounded view of which channels are the most efficient at reaching their custom target audience so they can optimize accordingly.

5. Are you calculating frequency across your entire portfolio?

When allocating your ad spend across multiple channels, it’s critical to understand reach and frequency throughout your entire campaign portfolio. Not only will you improve efficiency and maximize your ad dollars, but your audience also will benefit from receiving your messages at the most relevant touchpoints without oversaturation.

Whether you realize it or not, you have a frequency problem if you are buying ads across channels. Even if each individual partner is delivering the right frequency—which is unlikely at scale—it’s almost certain that a big chunk of the people you want to get your ad (as well as those you don’t want to get it) are receiving it too often. For example, if you’re working with multiple partners, one of them could exhaust your message on the same person, which is draining not only on your budget, but also consumer patience.

Attaining a single view of the customer was once a pipe dream for marketers looking for clarity across fragmented channels and inconsistent measurement. But today, new tools are available to help marketers connect the dots and bridge the measurement gap across formerly disparate systems. Moat Reach empowers marketers with the confidence of knowing they can impact their audience, deliver their campaigns at the optimal frequency, and capture the right attention.

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To learn more about Moat Reach and how you can improve campaign efficiency, request a demo.