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Mobile advertising matters more every year, but are you measuring what matters most? If your metrics are not telling you with certainty whether or not your mobile campaign is delivering a return on your investment, then you’re looking at the wrong metrics.
It’s no surprise, really; mobile is a rapidly evolving category without established standards (though mobile standards are finally getting some traction), so you can expect to find mobile ad delivery/measurement companies with questionable campaign measurement tactics, tools, or insights– or using attribution metrics that don’t really give you a solid case for ROI.
But let’s face it– you already know what matters most. It’s the same metric for any advertising medium: sales lift.
Why should mobile be any different? The answer is, “It shouldn’t!”
If you cannot see that your marketing dollars are making a change at the cash register— yes, even in mobile— then you’re using the wrong approach to measurement.
The Two Most Valued Metrics
“Was my ad budget a good investment?” A 2014 Forrester Consulting study showed that most marketers want to answer this question via sales lift and new accounts opened.
Yet in spite of this, most marketers report using traditional digital metrics, such as impressions, taps, or hits to assess campaign value. (Some are getting better results by measuring downloads or mobile purchases.) This is a very incomplete picture, because clickers aren’t necessarily buyers. Moreover, clicks are an even less reliable measure on mobile because mobile users average eight times the clicks compared to desktop, possibly due to “fat finger” accidental clicks.
Particularly for brick and mortar retailers, basing your mobile campaign on clicks/taps can lead you down the wrong path, possibly even steering you away from the real buyers. Clicks, like store visits, are a useful metric for, say, identifying possible customer engagement. But do they identify campaign success? No.
Another common mistake: using store visits based on mobile ad request data as a conversion metric. The most common method for counting store visits is using ad requests sent from customers’ phones while they are in-store. The critical flaw is that users must access an ad-supported app on their mobile phone while they are in a store in order to be seen. Think about it– have you ever stopped while grocery shopping to play Candy Crush? Not likely.
Another question: how do you know if a customer purchased your product just by visiting a store? Measuring success based on store visits often results in spending big on mobile campaigns without being able to connect the dots to a lift in sales.
When you attempt to justify your ad spend by anything other than sales lift, it will be nearly impossible to defend your mobile ad spend.
Why does it matter? Because 86% of marketers polled in that study say they’d boost their mobile ad budget if they had the right metrics and nearly a third said they’d go at least as high as a 50% mobile budget bump.
Decisively Measuring a ROAS: Use Sales Lift
Measuring Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) based on sales lift is not easy, but it’s possible. Read our whitepaper on how to get this measurement. The short story is this: To accurately calculate which sales resulted from mobile advertising, your mobile services provider must be able to separate sales results. Meaning, sales resulting from customers who weren’t exposed to the mobile ad versus those who were. If marketers don’t have access to the sales data, then several third-party options exist for retail, such as using cooperatives or by integrating credit card data from a provider such Nielsen Buyer Insights.
As the mobile marketplace evolves, the opportunities to touch your customer along their path to purchase will grow. By measuring sales lift, you can confidently invest in this fast-growing medium.
