Advertisers are turning their attention to cross-channel measurement and attribution to bridge the gap and find holistic insights into how different channels, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Search Ads 360 are impacting their bottom line. But despite widespread attention, even the savviest industry vets are struggling to connect the dots.
Why Is Cross-Channel Advertising So Challenging?
- Social and digital channels don’t communicate with each other, so the total number of conversions reported by each channel can be higher than the actual amount delivered. When this happens, advertisers can miscalculate KPIs, such as CPA and ROAS and optimize toward underperforming channels, audiences, and ads.
- Social channels’ attribution models and windows aren’t standardized, and function in silos, which prevents advertisers from accurately comparing channel performance and assigning credit. On the contrary, Google Campaign Manager offers multi-touch attribution models, allowing an advertiser to give credit to multiple touchpoints in the conversion path. For example, if a user clicked on a Facebook ad, but then saw a retargeting ad in display and clicked that and converted, Google Campaign Manager can split the conversion value across both of the channels.
- Reporting and metrics vary between channels, which means a click, view or engagement on one channel may describe a different user action on another, preventing any sort of unity between digital initiatives.
To solve these problems, advertisers are using third-party measurement partners, like Google Campaign Manager (formerly DoubleClick Campaign Manager or DCM), to determine success across channels. While it may seem like an obvious step, aggregating digital initiatives into a single source of truth helps advertisers understand which touchpoints delivered the desired action.
Imagine this: An advertiser is running a cross-channel campaign on Search Ads 360, Facebook, and Twitter; however, all three channels are attributing the same conversion based on their siloed attribution models and window. Sound familiar?
This all-too-common scenario has prevented advertisers from gauging efficacy and making informed campaign decisions based on accurate data.
Google Campaign Manager is making sure that scenario and those like it are left in the past.
Instead of piecing together an impossible puzzle, Google Campaign Manager aggregates all digital advertising initiative in one platform, so advertisers can see a holistic view of campaign performance and find actionable insights to inform future campaigns. Managing creative, analytics, and digital teams in one product will also bring everyone together to share insights, work more efficiently, and get closer to the data.
In a cross-channel world where consumers jump from place to place to inform and make their purchase decisions, the ability to evaluate digital initiatives across the board cannot be understated. Google Campaign Manager gives advertisers all the tools they need to successfully measure each channel’s performance.
To give advertisers an extra layer of support, Brand Networks released a measurement integration with Google Campaign Manager to streamline the activation and reporting process for advertisers. The integration allows advertisers to unify social and Google Campaign Manager reporting and maximize efficiency with an improved optimization strategy that goes beyond native metrics. From there, Brand Networks’ automation tools inside Iris can ingest and react to Google Campaign Manager data, allowing advertisers to make better-informed optimization decisions.
