LONDON: Marketers need to adopt a different approach to measuring digital marketing effectiveness, according to a new report which makes the case for a Return on Brand Impact (ROBI) metric.

The State of the Industry: Mobile marketing in EMEA 2017, a study by the MMA and WARC, showed that just 22% of marketers were using brand metrics to measure mobile marketing effectiveness, with most opting for engagement metrics (65%), behavioural metrics (60%) and audience delivery (57%), while almost half (45%) used business metrics like Return on Investment (ROI).

But On Device Research, in its latest report, Brand Advertiser’s Guide to Digital Ad Effectiveness: Top 10 Learnings for 2018, advocates for a move to ROBI, a metric that sits at the intersection of campaign spend data, reach data and uplift data.

It is, says On Device Research, “a framework that brands can use to understand the Cost Per Incremental Purchase Intender (CPIPI) by media partner, creative format or frequency, which can enhance ROI by leveraging learnings from every campaign”.

The study argues that an analysis of ROBI by media partner, DSP, creative and platform allows for a level playing field when assessing brand impact.

The report places this in the context of work done by Les Binet and Peter Field in The Long and the Short of It, where they showed that ad budgets weighted towards long term brand building drive “very large business benefits” – including price inelasticity, profit growth, market share increase and brand equity.

The perceived challenges around measuring incrementality and linking sales data to ad exposure contribute to a culture of short-termism when it comes to ROI measurement, On Device Research notes.

But that situation is changing as it becomes possible to gain comparable brand metrics for the walled gardens to understand how they fit into the overall digital mix and to use geo location data to understand footfall attribution.

Sourced from On Device Research; additional content by WARC staff