Ad Effectiveness Measurement Without Cookies

Getting to "the meaningful why" with deterministic data.

It’s imperative for brands to understand how their advertising dollars affect their brand lift and bottom-of-funnel KPIs like sales, web, and e-commerce lifts. Our partners at Havas Media Network are passionate about ad measurement. They help clients build the best framework to understand how their advertising efforts are contributing to ROI.

During a recent webinar with Adweek, DISQO spoke with Katie Kieft, Director of Analytics at Havas Media Network, to learn how she turns data into insights and how they can use those insights to improve their campaigns, drive lift through the funnel, and achieve business success.

Q: Cookies are staying. Does it change anything for you, or how your brand clients are challenging you?

Simple and short, no. It changes nothing. We can all agree that the scrutiny around third-party cookie deprecation has really stressed the importance of implementing an interoperable technical solution for digital campaigns and activation versus simply relying on one single identifier like the cookie. We are pushing our clients to understand that there are other ways beyond the cookie to measure ad effectiveness. 

Even though Google has paused efforts to deprecate the cookie, user choice and identifying how it will impact the measurement ecosystem are still unknown. So, we encourage our clients and agency partners to continue their efforts as if nothing has changed. We have already seen match rates decline throughout the last couple of years from a cookie perspective. So, identifying different solutions that enable us to measure data and deliver on our goals is really important.

Q: How do you stay ahead and adapt your media planning and buying strategies to effectively reach the target audiences that your brands are looking to reach?

Planning and testing alternatives to what exists today is paramount, especially in our industry, where things change at lightning speed. The one thing for certain in the media landscape is that things will be different tomorrow than they were yesterday. Working with our valued media partners and other technologies to identify solutions beyond cookie-dependent activation and measurement is critical. For instance, testing completely deidentified and deterministic data based on first-party data versus cookies and then determining how they compare from a metric perspective.

Q: What advice would you give brands looking to balance short-term performance goals with long-term brand building in their media strategies and planning?

Balance is key. When we talk about brand building and balancing it with short-term performance goals, we imply the two are separate. In reality, they work together. Ensuring we identify how to make those initiatives and goals work together is key. We know that investing in and focusing on brand building to fill the funnel is important, but performance and business success are what keep the lights on for our clients. We can be strategic about it by developing a successful measurement framework, allowing us to quickly identify if we are driving towards the objective established at the beginning.  You can also look to other solutions like DISQO’s full-funnel Brand Lift and Outcomes Lift solutions, measuring results, from awareness to intent to actual purchase or performance behavior.

Q: How difficult is it to work between media partners, platforms, publishers, and brands? Can you tell us about your clients’ expectations for proof of efficacy from your team and how  you translate that to your media partners?

Proof of efficacy is table stakes when it comes to measuring campaign impact. Without it, there's no chance for progress or improvement. Making sure that measurement and media plans are made in tandem is crucial. We look at measurement not as an afterthought of an already developed plan, but instead from an upfront strategic planning stage to identify what questions we want to answer and what are the indicators of a successful campaign. We must implement measurement solutions that can answer those questions and prove efficacy.

It's important that measurement isn't the only factor driving a plan but that it works in tandem with strategic alignment. At the end of the day, it’s important to ensure everything is aligned with our clients’ strategic objectives and goals for their business.

Q: How are agencies differentiating themselves with their data-driven capabilities?

The industry can change at the flip of a coin so, being flexible and adaptable with your data approach is really the important factor here. You must also provide solutions that work for all clients regardless of where they stand with their current first-party data. So, from a Havas Media perspective, we see it as an equal opportunity for data. We work with our clients on what solutions are the best for them now and in the future. 

We do this in several ways, for instance tapping into our Converged platform, or working to develop a strategy to grow our clients’ first-party data over time by identifying providers with the best data source and developing strategies that allow them to ethically grow. It's about serving the options we have, understanding what's best for the brand, and focusing on transparent identity, accurate and privacy-safe data, and data that specifically feeds our clients' objectives. There is no one-size-fits-all; it will probably remain ever-changing in our industry!

Q: One of the primary reasons you and other clients turned to DISQO is our direct source of identity. How important is holistic and deterministic measurement across an entire media plan as opposed to probabilistic methods?

It's very important. I think a lot of people in the industry would agree that having piecemeal and siloed measurement solutions complicates how we report campaign impact when they sometimes show different results and are based on different methodologies. We've talked a lot internally about how “opportunity to see” especially, or platform-specific siloed measurement solutions are tricky to roll out and limit the ability to holistically understand campaign impact. Identifying which data source is the source of truth can be very problematic. So, a single solution that provides cross-channel measurement, complete with walled-garden channels, has helped us develop deeper solutions, as well as an understanding of where we can drive the most impact for our clients. 

In regards to deterministic versus probabilistic data sources, I think it’s still important to know that they both serve a purpose when it comes to the measurement space. Identifying scale versus precision can help define when to use them. When we look at probabilistic, we gain a wider understanding and measurement. With deterministic, we might have a much smaller scale, but it's more pinpoint accurate. So, we will continue to balance those two together, especially with the cookie disappearing. They’ll both serve their purpose down the road. A holistic measurement approach is crucial to understanding the big picture.

Q: What value has our partnership delivered for Havas Media Network?

The DISQO solution provides a lens that connects the full-funnel measurement from brand building to short-term performance. Seeing behavioral outputs and more engaged intent is a much stronger point than just looking at attitudinal responses for purchase intent. So, knowing that someone actually performs a search or goes to a website, versus, telling you that they will, is a much more powerful insight. Correlating brand impact and how it drives other metrics down the funnel, whether it’s sales or foot traffic, and identifying how brand-building efforts can drive lower-funnel performance is another great capability of DISQO’s solutions. Another is gaining insight into the historically blind spot of social media platforms and other areas that are more siloed.

The relationship and partnership with the DISQO team have been excellent. They work with us as partners and care about how we go to market. The results we see with DISQO allow us to develop the most impactful and powerful measurement solution out there. It's been a great partnership, which cannot be overstated. We gain answers to the questions that are most important to us and our clients.

Q: What's the most challenging issue today that's interfering with your complete understanding of world-class cross-channel ad effectiveness measurement, and how can the industry come together to solve these issues?

The biggest challenge is not a new challenge: more data, more problems. I think it will continue to be that way, but it's also an opportunity. The more data measurement and solutions we have access to, the more insightful information we gain. With AI’s capability to distill data from a variety of these different sources, we have to ask ourselves where the focus should be. What is the source of truth? Where do we need to prioritize what those results are saying? Ideally, a lot of the results get to the same end result, but quickly and seamlessly identifying at scale the different data sources and what they mean together will be the powerful future use of the technology. 

Another challenge that we've often seen as we get deeper into brand perception and intent measurement is the “say versus do” gap. We know that from a human perspective, what you say and what you do could conflict. So marrying those two pieces of information is beneficial. We’re working together to see how we can further evaluate and identify a methodology to understand what human intent actually is. I’ve always wanted to know the “why” and am very passionate about consumer behavior and why people do what they do. Having more access to information and understanding is what I look forward to in the future.