Tracking Ads: Leveraging the Power of Data

At Merkle | Periscopix, our top priority is to help our clients achieve their core business goals. From product innovation to market leadership and international expansion, we are able to use our tools and expertise to align our goals with your broader strategy. As platform specialists and experts in Google’s DoubleClick Digital Marketing Stack, we can track and consolidate performance data for all digital marketing channels in a single space, allowing us to obtain invaluable insight into the user journey and consequently the most efficient way to allocate resources.

The Digital Marketing Landscape: A User Journey...

Ensuring that digital activity is creatively and strategically aligned with more traditional tactics has become standard for most marketers. However, the digital marketing landscape continues to be very fragmented for many brands, as Paid Search and Programmatic teams are systematically separate from other departments like Content, Email, Mobile, Affiliates… the list goes on. This makes it difficult for each channel’s performance to be compared on an equal basis, and clients are constantly asking themselves “What content do my users engage with?”, “Which platform generates most leads?”, and ultimately:

"Where should I focus my resources?"

At Merkle | Periscopix, data tracking and analytical savviness are combined to provide informed answers to these questions. We are able to adapt hypothetical user path designs planned in advance to the real-life journey that customers undertake before purchasing online. By tracking impression and click data across the board through a single platform, we can match our strategies to users’ real-time online behaviour and ensure budgets are allocated in the most effective way.

The Power of Data: Tracking Impressions & Clicks

Using DoubleClick Campaign Manager, we are able to create “tracking ads” that gather impression and click data in real time for activity that is managed by a third party, such as email marketing and social activity. While tracking 3rd party activity comes at a slightly higher cost than our normal campaigns (an additional £0.05 per thousand impressions), the benefits of tracking ads are twofold:

What can we track?

Tracking Ads can track:

- Social Activity

- Search

- Email Marketing

- Gmail Sponsored Promotions

- HTML emails & Mobile Apps

How does it work?

1. We create a tracking ad using the DoubleClick Campaign Manager platform.
2. The tracking ad, which is essentially an invisible bit of code, is then placed on an ad served by a third party, like Gmail or Twitter.
3. Each time the third-party advert is shown to a user, we automatically serve the invisible ad alongside it.
4. The tracking ad captures data from the third-party ad and sends it back to DoubleClick Campaign Manager for analysis and reporting.

Insight Management: Analysis & Attribution

Once we have set tracking ads on all our marketing activity, we are able to look at consolidated impression and click level data from all the different channels in a single interface.

What are the benefits?

• Reporting: Having equal reporting metrics across channels in single platform enables us to report more thoroughly and efficiently, and allows us more time for data analysis and insight generation.
• Analysis: By tracking all activity to such a detailed degree (impressions & clicks), we are able to gain a better representation of the complete user journey at every touch-point of the brand online.
• Attribution: We can then accurately elevate how the different online channels interact and contribute to each of our goals, allowing us to gauge the relative importance of each of these channels in our clients' path to conversion.

Please see the above example of a classic Path to Coversion.

Leveraging Performance Data: Media Planning in Advance

By making sure that our clients obtain the full picture of their brand’s digital impact, we can develop a clearer path to attaining both digital marketing and overall business goals.

At Merkle | Periscopix we integrate strategy building with digital media tracking in advance, which allows us to link data-driven insights to creative ideas and above the line marketing strategy in order to better connect brands with consumers.

To read this blog written by Angela Echarri on the Periscopix website, please click here. Alternatively, get in touch with one of our team to see how tracking ads can help you!