James Luty.
Picture this all-too-familiar scene: You're presenting a campaign dashboard to your client when they ask, "Can you tell me which hour of the day is most profitable for us?" You tell your client you’ll check with the team, but your heart sinks as you enter the measurement maze.
In your head, you know that, to get an accurate answer, you’ll have to persuade your analyst to connect several separate solutions, go through all the insights and run an ad hoc report. This might take weeks, and at the end of it you might not even get a satisfactory answer.
Meanwhile, your client is waiting…
Marketers need reliable, repeatable measurement to drive results
With this complexity of extrapolating insights, it's no wonder that, 1 in 2 marketers have abandoned holistic measurement[1] practices, according to a Forrester Consulting and Amazon Ads survey. Yet, ironically, "connecting media to outcomes" remains a top priority for C-suite decision makers.
And the challenge has only intensified with the emergence of 250 new streaming services and retail media networks have launched worldwide in the last decade alone[2]. While marketers face fragmented audiences and signals and an inability to connect media to outcomes, the Forrester survey revealed that ‘improved use and analytics of customer insights’ was the top priority for eight in 10 marketers. This likely reflects the growing demand from brands to use their first-party signals to drive more efficient strategies and better understand the customer experience, a key step in evolving their approach to measurement and insights.
Three steps to better measurement
To end the insights doom loop, technology partners and agencies can work together to evolve their approach to measurement and insights by building and scaling integrated solutions.
- Lower the barriers to unifying siloed data sets across media, commerce and first-party signals while raising the bar on privacy.
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) enables advertisers to join their first-party data with Amazon Ads signals to better understand the customer journey and build and activate audiences in a privacy safe environment. And by bringing AMC into the AWS Clean Rooms environment, advertisers can access and activate their first-party signals without ever having to leave the secure AWS cloud
- Turn data scientists into agents of scale, by empowering them to build scalable products that prioritize key use cases.
Data scientists are often bogged down by repetitive tasks and one-off requests. To deliver on customer expectations we need to elevate their role from data crunchers to strategic enablers. Invest in tools that allow your data scientists to create scalable, reusable analytics products.
- Democratise Data Access for Business Teams to deliver fast insights to customers.
By providing user-friendly, point-and-click solutions. This will create a more agile, responsive approach that can quickly adapt to changing client needs and market conditions.
Better, faster measurement answers can define competitive advantage
As brands grow more cautious of wasted ad spend and marketers feel the pressure to prove ROI, agencies must evolve and advance their measurement strategies to deliver the insights their clients need to deliver smarter campaigns and better results.
Investing in next-gen solutions like AWS data clean rooms and integrating robust analytics platforms like AMC are critical steps in this measurement evolution. Agencies that follow this method and capture first-mover advantage will rapidly stand out, exceeding client expectations and driving more effective and insightful marketing campaigns.
Learn how UNICEF turned one-time givers into repeat donors through campaign designs based on Amazon Marketing Cloud insights.
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