Google’s launch of an improved set of metrics aims to make online brand management more effective for advertisers. Announced with fanfare at the Ad Age Digital Conference last week, advertisers are most definitely paying attention.
Digital advertising (unlike, in many instances, traditional adverting), is often quickly and easily measured. The problem, however, is that the measurement tools we’ve been accustomed to using for decades in many cases don’t do a good enough job at measuring digital advertising.
Google’s new services for advertisers are called Active View and Active GRP, and the broad focus is on what Google calls “making the web work for marketers” by building useful metrics into tools that advertisers already use to measure campaigns. Which, of course, is kind of a big deal.
Google’s New Brand Metrics
Active View
With Active View, users can count “viewed” impressions. Basically, this tool allows you to determine how much of an ad is visible on a viewer’s screen and how long it’s viewed. If at least 50% of the ad is viewable for at least one second it’s counted as an impression.
According to Google, Active View will be available in the coming weeks within Google Display Network Reserve. The search giant also plans to make the Active View metric what they call a “universal currency,” and they’re currently offering it to publisher partners as well as in a pilot program to their DoubleClick for Advertisers.
Active GRP
The Active GRP metric is also pretty important. And something we’ll no doubt be hearing a lot more about moving forward. Active GRP is, to some extent, essentially fashioning the measurement process after what’s been the standard in TV advertising measurement for years.
Gross rating point isn’t new. It’s an integral component of offline media measurement, particularly television advertising. As an example when a brand wants their campaign to reach x amount of a demographic (men, women, teens, etc.), with a certain number of ads, they use GRP to measure that.
The thing about Active GRP that makes us particularly excited is that it will allow marketers the ability to do real-time campaign tracking and measurement, and allow them to make changes based on those metrics. Holy sweet spot, does this make my little black heart sing.
That’s the true beauty of the web today, particularly when you’re a marketer. Using real-time data and monitoring it (what’s the benefit of data, after all, if you’re not closely monitoring it?) allows quick adjustments and changes that can ultimately result in huge impact and overall campaign efficacy for brands and agencies.
The other thing we like about this—according to Google, this approach doesn’t use personally identifiable information, allows users to opt-out through their Ad Preferences Manager and doesn’t share data with third parties. Based on all the attention on privacy these days, this is a smart move.
Google is in the process of using Active GRP in a pilot program for DoubleClick for Advertisers clients; the metrics will later be rolled out to other products.
For an additional overview of these new metrics and how they can help quantify your digital marketing efforts, check out a video from Google that describes the Brand Activate Initiative.
For data and analytics junkies like me, this is big news. And for brand marketers everywhere, it’s certainly something we’re all paying attention to. And according to Google, there’s more to come as part of this larger brand initiative. It will be exciting to watch not only as these tools grow and evolve, but also to see what sort of impact they have when it comes to measuring brand metrics—and see some real world case studies as to how digital marketers have been able to tweak and refine campaigns as a result of the data amassed.
You can read more about this at the DoubleClick Advertiser’s blog. So, what do you think?
Image by kalexanderson via Creative Commons
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years’ experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging develoment, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly’s coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”