Paid Media Analytics

Having toured the owned and earned channels for marketing communications, we finally arrive at the paid media channels. At its most basic, Digital Paid Media is an extension of traditional advertising, and as the channel name implies, paid media is where advertisers have traditionally paid out large portions of their budgets to have their message placed in front of consumers. In traditional advertising, these ‘impressions’ through paid media may be achieved through television, print, radio and out of home (OOH) placements such as billboards and bus-stop sidings. In digital advertising, impressions are still a currency of measurement for many formats — especially in digital display advertising — but as is to be expected with the digital format, engagement (e.g. click-through, field input, video play) has become an increasingly prominent measure of value and success, and in many cases, conversion against an outcome from that engagement is evaluated as the ultimate performance measure for paid advertising. Because so much money is spent on paid advertising, measurement of efficiency and effectiveness in paid media advertising has become a pressing concern for digital marketing managers, who need to understand and try to optimize the returns they are receiving from their expenditures across an ever expanding array of digital advertising channels. This interest in measurement has prompted the emergence of hundreds of technology solutions for managing and measuring paid digital marketing. This chapter will begin with a summarization of the paid media touch-points, the ecosystem in which these are activated, the fundamental measures of performance for paid media, and the ways in which analytics are being applied to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of paid media marketing through targeting and programmatic buying.