The Final Analytic Framework Step: Measure, Learn, Optimize, Repeat

Our Analytic Framework blog series is all about the invaluable insights programmatic can drive and how, if approached methodically, there are vital lessons to be learned about everything from customers to content.

We know it’s important to begin with key questions: what business problem do you need to tackle from a strategic perspective? Do you want to understand your customers on a more profound level? What type of messaging seems to be speaking to them in a meaningful way?

Our first post in the series focused on a CPG brand that asked Amobee to help design a targeting strategy for a hygiene product they assumed appealed mainly to female millennials. After examining site data and grouping visitors into segments, however, we found more than half of people interested in the product were parents or retired people over the age of 50.

Those marketers could have heard us out, congratulated us on discerning some pretty interesting information, and then blithely continued to target to young women. Instead, they asked Amobee to work with their brand insight team and agency to develop and implement a new campaign with targets based on age and gender – which are among the least expensive, most accurate and scalable methods of targeting.

Having a framework in place and asking the right questions allowed them to find an untapped audience segment and formulate a way to address its members. That’s far from the end of the process, however. It’s not uncommon to get an answer to one question – in this case, which segments might we have left untapped – and subsequently have other questions arise: for example, now that I know this audience has an interest in my product, are there fruitful changes I can make to better meet their needs? How can I increase engagement with this new and potentially valuable audience?

Even marketers without pressing new questions in mind can benefit from an analytic framework; they can use it to simply validate that they’re on the right track and to confirm that their audience understanding, strategies and modes of measurement are optimal. In those cases, they may be asking themselves something as rudimentary as whether the KPIs they’ve been employing are the correct ones. Perhaps they discover that making certain changes to their measurements increase the value to the business. For instance, Amobee worked with one retailer whose KPI really should have had a time component in it. Doing so enabled the brand to achieve more impactful moments with their consumers. A marketer who discovers something like that can use it as a metric for some portion of a campaign or some isolated group and see if it drives a greater return.

Again, the process does not end there. Chances are that more questions will come up: if time is important to the metric, for example, what else does that mean for how we measure? Should we be looking at changing other types of measurements? Does this change how we handle the testing process or the way in which we onboard new vendors? Are there greater implications?

It’s important to understand that this is a cycle, rather than a fully linear progression. We’re measuring, learning, optimizing and repeating.

A successful analytics program should always enable you to point back to questions you’ve had answered and the impact those answers have had on your business. If not, what’s the point? You are not doing academic research for the sake of pure exploration. Everyone who works in analytics wants to do the “cool stuff,” but we know we have to go beyond that impulse. Our goal is to make the greatest material impact possible on our clients’ businesses. A strong analytical framework makes that possible.

For more, see our intro post to the series.

 

About Amobee

Founded in 2005, Amobee is an advertising platform that understands how people consume content. Our goal is to optimize outcomes for advertisers and media companies, while providing a better consumer experience. Through our platform, we help customers further their audience development, optimize their cross channel performance across all TV, connected TV, and digital media, and drive new customer growth through detailed analytics and reporting. Amobee is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tremor International, a collection of brands built to unite creativity, data and technology across the open internet.

If you’re curious to learn more, watch the on-demand demo or take a deep dive into our Research & Insights section where you can find recent webinars on-demand, media plan insights & activation templates, and more data-driven content. If you’re ready to take the next step into a sustainable, consumer-first advertising future, contact us today.