It comes as no surprise, that more brands are turning to Performance Marketing, and to vendors who can provide the technology to facilitate Performance.
Performance Marketing is on the up and up, year after year. In a recent article on MarTech Today, columnist Jim Yu discussed Performance as an imperative for CMOs worldwide.
At the heart of his discussion, he urges that performance-led platforms should be at the core of the marketing stack. As Yu puts it, “The CMO’s performance imperative demands that they can clearly demonstrate how every element of their spend is bringing about meaningful returns, lest they fall prey to the very real risk of budget-slashing.”
Performance is the overarching concern for marketers everywhere, to justify maintenance and growth of their budgets.
So it comes as no surprise, that more brands are turning to Performance Marketing, and to vendors who can provide the technology to facilitate Performance but not sacrifice scale. But where will Performance lead marketers?
We sat down with ClearPier’s Ad Ops and Client Services team to get a better understanding of the future of Performance Marketing in the year to come. Here’s what ClearPier’s Demand Optimization Manager, Terry Kalambalikis, and Digital Analyst, Albert Ng, had to say about performance marketing.
1. What can we expect for Performance Marketing in the year ahead?
Albert Ng, Digital Analyst:
I believe Programmatic buying will be the base of all digital performance marketing in the future. It’s the only way to move forward with accountable marketing.
The automation of programmatic buying will evolve and be extended towards optimization and contextual/behavioural learnings, in which as a result provide insight and recommendations to accelerate the process of taking the appropriate actions for a better performance
CTR will no longer be true measurement for performance. Instead, it would be primarily be measured through attribution.
Brands and Marketers will begin to realize that attributions requires them start applying processes to verify the data they are running on. Along with quality inventory, marketers will make the attributions part of a broader plan in order to create a solid foundation of data to run the most effective marketing campaigns.
2. What marketing trend or buzzword are you totally over?
Albert Ng, Digital Analyst:
“Engagement.” Honestly, this is probably THE most overused word amongst marketers. It is not an actual measurement of performance, it is a fluff word used to generalize any results of performance. It’s also not specific enough and so doesn’t provide enough insight. Scroll depth, for example, is a strong measurement because it indicates how deeply engaged your visitors are with your content.
Engagement alone will include accidental clicks which can skew your results. Engagement over time, on the other hand, is a more specific metric that actually tells you something: your visitor’s propensity to return after their first visit. Engagement, isn’t enough, you need to expand the metric to get real insights.
Terry Kalambalikis, Demand Optimization Manager:
“Millennial” – What is a Millennial? How do you really define an entire generation with varying interests, hobbies and issues? What really makes them different than anyone else aside from the year they were born?
I mean, you get 29 year olds who may like Hockey, Politics, Movies, Videogames etc., but you also get 50 year olds who can and do like the exact same things just as you get 17 year olds who may be interested in the exact same things. They consume the same content as anyone else, and aren’t the only ones using smartphones or social media.
So how does one market to Millennials? I think this word is over used by pretty much everyone and is just a lazy way to define a group that doesn’t really exist.
3. What do you think the biggest challenge advertisers and brands will now face?
Albert Ng, Digital Analyst:
With so much content being created daily digitally, it becomes difficult to be able to authenticate or verify any third party sources that are being run by the advertisers. Brand safety is going to be the top concern, globally which means only vendors who can guarantee it – or at least has brand safety as a top priority – will win.
Terry Kalambalikis, Demand Optimization Manager:
Not necessarily a new challenge, but I would say Ad Fraud.
There’s no fool-proof way to combat fraud, and no third party actually provides a solution that prevents it. You can monitor it, and possibly action on it once you identify the problem, and use various wrappers that may look out for suspicious traffic and monitor for bots, but in the end, it won’t stop the fraud from happening, and would require media buyers and marketers to actively monitor reports and react on the fly, which is not only a massive, time consuming task, but a task that is likely almost impossible.
Those that enable fraud always find new ways to get ahead of marketers and exploit the system, just the same as how those who create malware and viruses are almost always ahead anti-virus programs, so the fight against ad fraud will be something that will continue to be a problem through 2017, and likely grow into a larger problem as more and more spend is pushed into the digital ad space.
Want to learn more? Connect with our team at sales@clearpier.com
