You’re pretty sure you’ve identified your most valuable customers and the best way to reach them, thanks to your new data collaboration strategy. Now the next question is: Do you have the right messages in the right places?
Between TV, CTV, social media, digital, and programmatic, you need to be able to look across customer channels and know what’s working – and what’s not. There are more opportunities than ever to reach your customers on multiple devices and platforms. As a result, measuring the value of your media investments can feel daunting, if not impossible. But it doesn’t have to.
With data collaboration, you can unlock previously inaccessible data across all forms of advertising – no matter where the data resides – and measure its effectiveness.
Cross-screen measurement in the real world
Take McDonald’s, for example, who built a multi-source attribution model to measure incremental lift. It’s a sophisticated and effective measurement solution that gives McDonald’s near real-time performance measurement that is used to optimize in-flight ad spend so they can understand the performance of campaigns across screens.
There are three primary components to the McDonald’s attribution solution:
- Data partnerships: Collaborating with media partners provides access to exposure-log-level data. That detailed information helps McDonald’s fine-tune its media planning and better understand customer paths to conversion.
- Enterprise identity: McDonald’s created a unique, unified customer identifier that allowed them to securely tie together datasets that had previously been locked in silos within the company. Connecting that data revealed stronger customer insights that led to better measurement and targeting.
- Data clean rooms: McDonald’s leverages safe, neutral spaces for data collaboration without any one party having access to customers’ personally identifiable information data.
McDonald’s Senior Manager of Global Business Insights, Katie Bell, says data collaboration and the company’s attribution model have been a game changer in discovering what performs best within campaigns.
“It’s allowed us to really measure across the board and has helped our brand and content teams understand what creative is working. We saw an opportunity to build a tool that allowed us to get performance reads on a more real-time basis [and] make optimizations mid-campaign or immediately after.”
Considerations for building a cross-screen attribution modeling tool
While McDonald’s has significant resources to build this kind of attribution tool, Bell said the methodology of creating the model holds true for smaller brands. Here are five key areas Bell says to focus on and questions to consider:
- Data collaboration trends and data partnerships: How can you anticipate changes in the data marketplace as it evolves and be prepared for transformation because of things like signal loss and new privacy regulations. And how can you plan for emerging trends so that your partnerships endure?
- Ongoing control of your first-party data and methodology: How can you protect customer trust and brand value by maintaining ownership of first-party data? And are you using a reliable methodology that yields trustworthy outputs?
- Real-time optimization: How can you see cross-screen campaign performance in near real time? Will you be able to make optimizations mid-campaign (versus weeks or months after the fact)?
- TV measurement: How can you optimize messaging and content for this evolving customer channel? How will you evaluate performance of your networks and dayparts within campaigns?
- Correlation with key business metrics: How can you connect the dots across all channels (social and paid media) to analyze performance holistically – and also understand how they interrelate?
Improve customer experiences with accurate cross-screen measurement
McDonald’s is using data collaboration to better understand its customers’ relationships to the brand. Being able to measure the efficiency of campaigns and media spend has proven critically valuable to the company.
Understanding what data will drive attribution and optimal customer experiences is critical. But solving for cross-screen measurement and analytics like McDonald’s can be a game changer.
This blog was originally published on Jessica’s Shapiro’s LinkedIn. Follow her for more CMO insights.
