The Journey of Making Measurement Your Brand’s Strategic Advantage

A New Adventure: Evolving Challenges in Getting to Your Destination

With industry wide data privacy enhancements and degradation to signal quality, measuring media effectiveness has never been more fragmented and challenging. However, fundamental marketing concepts have not changed, and the functions (looking at you CFOs!) who support investment into a holistic measurement strategy will be able to leverage better quality insights, putting them at an advantage over competitive brands, as per study by Bain. Therefore, how can you evolve your measurement strategy to ensure you’re quantifying and optimizing the value your marketing efforts have for your company’s bottom lines?

Charting the Itinerary: Understanding & Following the Three E’s

At Snap, we believe changes in the industry are forcing advertisers to move away from outdated methodologies (such as last-click attribution) that depend on large platforms playing scorekeeper and shift to a mature measurement framework that is privacy compliant. Mature measurement doesn’t have to be complicated, however it does need to be holistic and data driven.

Snapchat believes in the mastery of the three E’s framework for measurement and optimization - Execution, Experimentation and Evaluation. These tiers provide insights at various levels of scope, speed and complexity. Not implementing all three can leave your business at a disadvantage through improper optimizations. However, with a test and learn mindset, all three tiers can be combined into a measurement framework to better understand your media investments.

You can think of our three E’s as if you were navigating a ship, where Evaluation is the compass that guides your decisions, Experimentation is the map that helps you course correct and find efficient routes and Execution is all the components of the boat that power it everyday. Advertisers who adopt this robust measurement approach see better advertising outcomes. 

Key to success, establishing a North Star: Aligning the selection of your execution and experiment KPIs with your ultimate evaluation KPI.

Evaluation (Quarterly/Annual): Using Your Compass

These are holistic, privacy-safe solutions that assess individual channels and overall marketing spend on a quarterly/annual basis. A great example is Media Mix Models - they quantify the incremental impact of paid, owned and earned marketing and non-marketing activities on a pre-defined KPI such as sales or web visits. They account for both short and long term impact of advertising across both online and offline media. They are also privacy compliant as they leverage sales data instead of user-level information.

These models are complex, usually require significant historical data and are more expensive to run, and therefore are not the best for short term hypothesis testing, but often provide the best insight to KPIs that best correlate with business goals.  At Snapchat, we work with many of the leading measurement companies globally. One such example is our latest work with Neustar, a Transunion company, which you can read more about here.

Experimentation (Monthly): Check the Map, Find Efficiencies, Make Corrections

One cannot rely only on strategic quarterly or annual evaluations and wait for weeks for results. Often, brands are running campaigns every week or month and want to understand how to optimize campaign to campaign. Implementing a test and learn approach with controlled experimentation is the key tool to enhancing learnings and improving performance against your marketing KPIs.

Few examples of Experimentation are given below but the actual test will depend on objectives:

1. Brand Lift studies testing multi-format impact on Brand Awareness & Message Association.

2. A/B testing UGC vs. Product creative through 1st & 3rd party attribution data.

3. Developing unique Geo experiment treatments to measure impact of tactical changes impact on reach, CPM and validated with MMM reads.

Picking the right experiment method and KPIs are crucial to driving success. But where brands often go wrong is prioritizing easy accessible correlation metrics over causal experimentation KPIs. If experimentation is not anchored on driving towards the evaluation KPIs, then media optimization may be driving negative progress away from actual bottom-line results.

Nutrimuscle Saw 67x More Revenue Attributed to Snap Than Visible in GA

For example, Nutrimuscle, a sports supplement brand leveraged Fospha to understand channel performance beyond Google Analytics reporting. Using Fospha’s full funnel measurement solution, Nutrimuscle found that Snapchat was driving 67x more revenue that was visible in Google Analytics, and was a key driver behind a 45% increase in revenue and overall reduction in cost of acquisition. Had Nutrimuscle over optimized towards Google Analytics reporting, they would have left sales on the table. With this right sized understanding of Snapchat’s media impact, Nutrimuscle increased their Snapchat investment.

Execution (Daily): Monitor the Weather and Adjust Your Sails

Execution is the day-to-day engine/sail of your boat, and its activation depends on the measurement strategy as determined by the evaluation and experimentation solutions. For execution to be successful, there needs to be alignment between martech, analytics, media strategy and investment teams on what data’s being used, where and how is crucial. Snapchat provides performance pillars, giving advertisers fundamental executional principles and questions media should be aligned with based on an advertisers KPIs.

Your Execution solution enables you to use platform tools and data integrations to drive real-time optimization and monitoring, but it should not be used to determine the overall success of a campaign. Daily attributable performance can be leveraged to make minor adjustments but should not be leveraged to make large scale allocation decisions as it can diminish incremental impact on business outcomes. Day to day executional trends can also be used to develop hypotheses and influence prioritization for the experimentation roadmap.

Inkbox, a temporary tattoo company, leveraged Haus.io’s geo-experiment framework to run an experiment and found the analytics reporting wasn’t telling the full story of impact of their Snap Ads. Snapchat was not only delivering on day-to-day attribution KPIs, but also drove strong incremental sales across their e-commerce website as well as Walmart & Amazon.

To learn more about how to structure your measurement agenda against the three tiers of measurement and optimization please contact your Sales representative or Marketing Science lead.