Your Advertising Shouldn’t Be a Black Box

You’re paying for the advertising. You should be able to see exactly what you’re getting.

Recently, a marketing leader at one of the world’s largest professional services firms shared a frustration with us about her advertising program. The problem wasn’t creative or targeting, and it wasn’t even necessarily performance. She simply wasn’t getting the level of transparency she needed from her agency.

That’s not necessarily an indictment of the agency. Digital advertising has become extraordinarily complex, with agencies, platforms, DSPs, data providers and publishers often sitting between an advertiser’s investment and the ultimate impression. But that complexity makes transparency more important, not less.

She wanted better visibility into where her advertising investment was going, who the ads were actually reaching, how often those audiences were seeing them, where the ads were appearing, and what was happening as a result. That conversation stuck with me because none of those should be difficult questions to answer.

Marketing leaders have become accustomed to an oddly low level of visibility into what can be one of their largest discretionary expenditures. If you’re investing hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars in advertising, you should be able to see where that money went and what it accomplished.

Reporting Isn’t the Same as Transparency

Most marketers certainly aren’t lacking advertising reports. We have plenty of them: impressions, clicks, CTR, CPM, spend, perhaps viewability, and usually a dashboard full of charts showing whether everything is trending up or down.

But reporting activity isn’t the same thing as understanding what happened to your investment.

I wrote recently about the gap between ads being served and ads actually reaching the buyers you care about. That remains a significant problem. But there’s another issue underneath it: too many marketers don’t have enough visibility to know where the gaps in their advertising actually are. My previous post made the case for asking for an inventory performance report showing where your ads actually ran. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think marketers should expect considerably more than that.

True advertising transparency should let you follow your investment through the entire chain:

At each stage, there are questions every marketing leader should be able to answer.

Where Did Your Money Actually Go?

Start with the most basic question. If you spent $500,000 on advertising, how much of that $500,000 actually purchased media?

That may sound obvious, but depending on how advertising is purchased, some portion of your investment can go toward management fees, platform licenses, technology costs, seats or implementation before a single impression is served. Those aren’t inherently bad expenses. Agencies and technology platforms provide valuable services that marketers may choose to pay for. But you should understand the economics of your program and know how much of your total investment is actually reaching media.

For the dollars that do reach media, marketers should then be able to see what they bought and how they performed. A good media review shouldn’t stop at spend and impressions. It should connect those numbers to measures such as CPM, account coverage, cost per page view and influenced traffic so you can begin to understand not merely whether the budget was spent, but what the investment accomplished.

One anonymized customer media review, for example, put spend alongside a 78.3% account coverage rate and an $8.96 cost per page view.

There’s an important distinction here. “We delivered the campaign as planned” answers an operational question. Marketing leaders also need the answer to a business question: What did I get for my investment?

Were My Ads Actually Seen?

An impression is not necessarily a person seeing your ad. Invalid traffic remains a fact of life in digital advertising, and bots and other forms of non-human traffic can consume impressions that appear perfectly legitimate in a top-line campaign report. Even an impression delivered to a real person has limited value if it wasn’t actually viewable.

That’s why marketers should be able to see the numbers, understand how those numbers were measured, and ideally have them verified by an independent third party.

In one anonymized DemandScience customer media review, for example, the invalid traffic rate was 1.52%, viewability was 65.87%, and average time-in-view for viewable impressions was 51.57 seconds. The report also defined how those measures were calculated and identified IAS as the measurement source.

Those metrics matter because a campaign can technically deliver every contracted impression while still wasting money on impressions of little or no value. Delivery is important. But delivery by itself doesn’t tell you enough.

Who Did I Reach, and How Often?

Here’s another reason top-line impression counts can be misleading. Suppose a campaign delivered 500,000 impressions. Did you reach 500,000 people once, 100,000 people five times, or 25,000 people 20 times? Those are radically different campaigns, yet the top-line impression number is identical.

In B2B, the distinction becomes even more important. You aren’t simply trying to accumulate anonymous impressions. You’re trying to build awareness and engagement among a defined set of accounts and the people who influence buying decisions inside them. That means marketers should be able to see audience reach, account coverage and frequency, and understand whether important audiences are being underexposed or oversaturated.

In the same anonymized customer example, approximately 254,000 impressions were delivered against just over 50,000 unique IDs, producing an average frequency of about five. The reporting also broke those impressions down across desktop, tablet and mobile.

Now you have information you can actually use. If a high-priority audience isn’t receiving enough exposure, you can adjust frequency. If a relatively small audience is being saturated, you can pull back. If your target-account coverage is weak, you can revisit the audience strategy rather than being reassured by a large impression number.

| You can’t optimize what you can’t see.

Where Did My Ads Actually Run?

This may be my favorite question to ask anyone managing an advertising program: Can you show me exactly where my ads ran?

And I don’t mean categories of sites or a handful of impressive publisher logos on a PowerPoint slide. I mean the actual inventory, publisher by publisher, showing where the campaign really ran and how those placements performed.

In our customer media reviews, for example, we can show the sites on which impressions were served along with impression volume and performance. In the anonymized campaign we’ve been using here, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo, AOL Mail, People and Fox News were among the sites generating the greatest impression volume during the reporting period.

Why does that matter? Because “premium inventory” is a claim. An inventory report is proof.

Seeing the actual placements lets you determine whether those environments are appropriate for your brand, whether your audience is likely to be there and which placements are actually producing engagement. Our media review process can go a step further by showing an ad “in the wild,” running on an actual publisher site during the campaign.

That’s the level of transparency marketers should expect. Don’t tell me where my ads could have run. Show me where they did.

What to Ask at Your Next Advertising Review

None of this requires a CMO to become an expert in the mechanics of programmatic advertising. It does require asking the questions that get underneath the top-line campaign report.

Our B2B Advertising Advantage guide includes six that I think belong in virtually every advertising review, whether you’re working with an agency, a platform, a managed-service provider or an internal team:

Those aren’t trick questions, and they aren’t about putting a partner on the defensive. They’re the kinds of questions that give both the marketer and the people managing the campaign the information they need to make better decisions.

Transparency Isn’t About Assigning Blame. It’s About Making Advertising Better.

There’s a larger point here, and I think it’s an important one. Advertising transparency shouldn’t primarily be viewed as an audit exercise or a way to determine who is responsible when something isn’t working. The bigger benefit is that visibility gives everyone involved in the program better information to make the advertising better.

When you can see that frequency is too low in an important segment, you can change it. When particular inventory isn’t performing, you can move spend. When account coverage is weak, you can adjust the audience strategy. When creative is generating impressions but not engagement, you can change the creative. And when you can connect media delivery with account-level engagement, the conversation starts moving away from whether the campaign “delivered” and toward whether it is accomplishing what you actually need it to do.

In fact, greater transparency can make the relationship between a marketing team and its agency or media partner stronger. When everyone is working from the same view of reach, frequency, media quality, inventory and engagement, the media review becomes less about explaining what already happened and more about jointly identifying opportunities to improve what happens next.

That’s the standard we’re trying to set at DemandScience. Our advertising reporting provides visibility across investment and performance, account coverage, media quality, reach and frequency, inventory and engagement. Our managed advertising programs also provide publisher-level inventory reporting and third-party media-quality measurement.

But I don’t think this should be a DemandScience-specific standard. Whether you run advertising directly with DemandScience, through one of our agency partners, with an ABM platform or through another provider, the principle should be the same.

Don’t just tell me my ads reached the right audience. Show me who they reached and how often. Don’t tell me the inventory was high quality. Show me where the ads ran. Don’t tell me fraud was low. Show me the independently measured rate. And don’t just tell me the campaign performed. Give me enough visibility to understand what actually happened.

It’s your money, your brand and your audience.
Your advertising shouldn’t be a black box.