Measuring the Delivery and Effectiveness of Programmatic Campaigns
As we all know, one of the main issues with buying ads is trying to find out which half of the media cost is lost. Consequently, measuring both the delivery and effectiveness of a Programmatic campaign is a must-do task, and this article will explain in a nutshell how to set about doing so.
Before we dive into this topic, I’d like to point out that we will focus only on those tools that are widely used on the Internet, and not specific Content Management Systems (CMS) or ecommerce platforms, as their specifications and features vary significantly. For that reason, we will cover effectiveness measuring from the perspective of the Demand-Side Platform (DSP) on both the Programmatic market and the widely-adopted Google Analytics.
Measuring delivery and effectiveness on the Demand-Side Platform
DSP is a tool that is used to manage Programmatic buying. The “Demand” in the name of the platform is associated with the fact that the impressions are commodities on the Programmatic market. DSP is a platform that allows the buyer to utilize all the available targeting options, and to select the best ones in order to focus the media spend exactly where it will achieve the best return on investment.
Targeting features, covered in our previous blog entry, are important, as we need to know exactly which targeting features yield the best results. And in order to do so, we need to precisely keep track of the impressions, clicks and conversions that are the result of the campaign itself.
In the following section, we shall use as an example, Google’s Display and Video 360 (DV360), which happens to be one of the most popular DSP platforms.
Tracking impressions
Measuring delivery of the campaign in terms of impressions, and maybe viewable impressions or complete views, is relatively easy in DV360. All the impressions that are bought are directly shown in the UI, and can also be reported whenever needed.
The first step is to build the specific structure of a Programmatic campaign in order to keep track of all relevant information.
For example, if you want to utilize three different targeting options (e.g. three separate audience groups, each on a different website), you should create three separate line items that will reflect the selected targeting options. This will allow you to be able to report them separately, and determine which was the most successful.
In rare cases, some manual adjustments to the reports might be needed. In one of our campaigns, for example, we found that due to the way some Publishers had implemented a synchronized creative (horizontal banner + two sections of the background, on both sides of the content), the impressions had tripled (as both the DSP and the Supply-Side Platform (SSP) had counted all three parts of the creative separately). Because of that, in order to keep the reporting uniform across all the Publishers we had bought impressions from, we had to manually adjust the report.
Tracking clicks
DSPs are able to track clicks on most of the creatives. This is not possible in the case of creatives served from third-party tools; that is, unless specific macros are implemented when the creatives are uploaded to the platform. However, it’s not the number of clicks that’s the most important, but rather the Click-Through Rate (CTR), or even Cost Per Click (CPC). But these metrics cannot be either measured or reported if the clicks haven’t been tracked properly. In order to make this possible, we must make sure that we have either uploaded the creatives directly to the DSP, or used all required macros in the case of third-party creatives.
Tracking conversions
In order to keep track of the conversions that have resulted from the campaign, you first need to implement tracking pixels on the destination website. These pixels need to be generated from the DSP and installed on the page in the right place. And by the right place, I mean the specific part of the website that is directly associated with a conversion taking place. If you want to keep track of the number of purchases, installing it on a “thank you for your order” page should be sufficient. If you’d like to measure how many times a PDF report was downloaded from your page, you should launch this pixel as soon as the file has been downloaded.
Once the pixels are in place, you need to associate them with specific line items within the campaign. If that is successful, and the campaign indeed delivers some conversions, they should start appearing in the reports. Please note that DV360 reports three kinds of conversions: total conversions, post-view and post-click conversions. Only the latter two show the conversions that were associated with the campaign (although this association might be rather weak) and should be monitored closely.
Measuring the effectiveness of Programmatic Campaigns using Google Analytics
If you already have a Google Analytics account, and you’re using it to monitor your online campaigns, it’s a good idea to use Google Analytics to keep track of the money spent programmatically.
This is more difficult than in the case of measuring the campaign in the DSP itself, as you need to keep track of visits and conversions on the website. To do so properly, you should prepare a set of creatives with the use of UTM tags. Here I would suggest using either the utm_content or the utm_term, depending on your setup.
In order to be able to keep track of all the important data, you should have a separate set of creatives ready for each of the line items that are used to target the impressions in a specific way. So if you run a campaign with 15 LIs (which is not that uncommon, if you’re doing experiments and optimization), you need to upload the creatives 15 times; each set with a slightly different URL destination, and with different UTM tags.
If you create the line items first, you can use their IDs as the value of the UTM tags. This will allow you to match the data in the reports from two different sources: DSP and Google Analytics. Please note that the numbers of clicks (in DSP) / visits (in Analytics) will not be fully aligned with one another, as there may be discrepancies; which might be the result of accidental or fraudulent clicks and should cause you to stop a specific part of the campaign.
At this point, your setup of the Google Analytics account needs to be considered in order to keep track of the conversions. Without this setup, you will only be able to report the visits that result from your campaigns.
At the end of the day, I suggest you use both the DSP and Google Analytics in order to keep track of the results of the campaign. It’s better to have two independent data sources than to have to rely on only one.
Customer Success Team Manager
