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“Facebook, Google, and other marketing channels are not synchronised. Whether your sale is coming from Google or Facebook, clicks isn’t clear. That’s where marketers like us struggle since data given by both are different.”- Ravi Hudda, Chief Digital Officer, Raymond
The ever-changing landscape of marketing on digital platforms presents a dilemma for marketers trying to allocate the right investments. The biggest retail brands rely on social marketing channels to target specific demographics and spend millions of dollars on each campaign. A renowned brand, Purple.com, the marketplace for beauty and wellness products, spends 100% of its marketing budget on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Google.
In a recent interview with Fortune India, Nippun Aneja, chief business officer of Purple.com, shared his experience and highlighted that the digital strategy increased the company’s efficiency by 50% in the last few years. He also said, “It helps us create demand in relevant geographies, which is difficult in traditional ways.”
Nippun also highlighted the challenge of getting a holistic view of a customer’s journey across platforms to help allocate money efficiently. Like Purple.com, other brands like Raymond struggle with access to different data insights, presenting modern marketers with a new challenge to plan campaigns and track conversions.
A Shift in Digital Buyers’ Journey
According to the combined report of Meta and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), an Indian spends an average of 6 hours/day on digital platforms. So, investing in online marketing platforms is not an option anymore for brands. It was also noticed that locations determine the required exposure of ads to complete the goal of an advertising campaign.
For example, suppose a company runs an ad campaign for ‘App Installation” and targets a specific age group of audience in cities like Kolkata. In that case, it might need 3-5 exposures to the ad. On the other hand, 2-3 exposures are required in cities like Delhi to make people install an app.
As per the data the Boston Consulting Group shared, 55% of marketers who make digital media investments can be suboptimal due to inaccurate measurements. As a result, the cost of acquiring the campaign increased by 65%, which became a major concern for marketers. In India, 70% of organisations are underinvesting in the measurement of digital advertisements.
“There are multiple marketing measurement practices in the industry without any clarity on what really is creating the right impact.” – Pallavi Malani, Partner and Managing Director of BCG.
Marketers Puzzled With Data Insights
The consumer’s buyer journey has become complicated in the last five years; it is difficult for marketers to track the marketing channels from which the final sale came. So, the biggest dilemma for marketers is accurately measuring the digital spend and last click.
For example, a customer may buy an insurance product through a Facebook ad, but just because it was a last click doesn’t mean this ad influenced her decision. There are chances she might have seen an ad on Google or in a newspaper and then came across this ad. So, the biggest question for modern-age marketers is whether to attribute 100% of the ROI of the campaign to Facebook.
Ankush Agarwal, co-founder of AdYogi, a digital marketing agency, also highlighted the issue of ad overlap, which is high in most campaigns. He said consumers’ chances of interacting with Facebook and Google are extremely high. So, the solution is to find a neutral measurement partner.
Choosing an Agnostic Platform
Marketers must choose a platform-agnostic approach to allocate the right investment to the ad campaign. Vyshak Venugopalan, Principal Solution Consultant at Adobe India, said that a brand needs a true measurement that is platform agnostic of everything else and covers the entire consumer journey. The challenge of most measurement tools is tracking the journey from showing ads to the conversion path to the actual conversion. All this happens in different ecosystems, making it difficult for marketers to determine the point of sale and the channel that brings the conversion.
Since advertising is going through a technological revolution, marketers must ensure the right money is spent on the right platform. As per the forecasting report shared by the Financial Express, digital spending on marketing channels in India will reach approximately Rs 56,900 crore by the end of 2024. So, the biggest challenge for marketers in the digital age will be to use measurement tools that facilitate tracking ROI and last-click conversion.
