Enterprise data and analytics company Acxion and mobile ad tech firm 4INFO have released findings from their recent joint study “Master Mobile Measurement to Unleash True Cross-Channel Advertising.”
The study, commissioned by the firms and conducted by Forrester Consulting, confirmed a common perception in the mobile ad industry: marketers “lack the confidence required in their cross-channel advertising programs to understand the program’s value and justify higher investment.”
“Results indicated that improved mobile advertising measurement would significantly increase the investment in, and execution of both mobile and cross-channel advertising campaigns among the 100 U.S. digital marketing decision makers from consumer-facing brands surveyed,” according to a statement provided to MMW.
While advertisers want to jump on the bandwagon with more mobile marketing (that’s where the customers are going), to date the still nascent mobile attribution technology has failed to provide enough data to inspire enough jumping.
That’s crystal clear from the report: 93 percent of marketers surveyed said they would have run more cross-channel campaigns this year if they had been able to effectively measure their mobile advertising performance.
Most marketers are just beginning to understand how measurement of mobile works and what information is most critical.
The inability to collect the right metrics to show the impact of mobile advertising results in only 18 percent of marketers feeling very confident in measuring the ROI of their mobile efforts.
It’s an important issue — and growing more so every day.
Survey results suggest that if marketers were able to effectively measure their mobile advertising performance against the metrics they care about, “86 percent of marketers would have increased mobile ad spending for 2014.”
“The consumer has already voted with their eyeballs and wallets, and their attention span on their mobile devices,” said Josh Herman, vice president of partner and product strategy at Acxiom. “The key now is helping the advertiser catch up to that ubiquitous consumer behavior in a way that gives them empirical confidence that the mobile ads they bought found their audience and impacted sales. The ability to both successfully identify the same consumer across channels and accurately measure the return on ad spend (RoAS) of cross-channel efforts will be essential for marketers as advertising spans across mobile and beyond.”
Chuck Moxley, CMO of 4INFO, wholeheartedly concurs.
“For marketers to feel confident in their mobile advertising they clearly want to see more meaningful metrics in the form of actual sales lift or new account openings, which really underscores a disconnect between brands and their agencies,” Moxley said. “The brands see the connection to revenue as an absolute imperative, and they want to stop their over-reliance on traditional campaign metrics and KPI’s like CTR, app downloads, and page views.”