Just Because You Can Measure It

Just because you CAN measure it ...?

You’ve probably heard the saying “just because you can measure it doesn’t mean it’s good.” Nowhere has that been more true than in digital marketing today. “Digital” throws off so much data that marketers think they are doing better marketing simply because they have so much data. But nothing could be further from the truth. Of course in theory, having more data can tell you whether your campaigns were successful or not. But more often than not, marketers are using the quantity metrics that are easy to collect and report -- i.e. impressions, clicks, traffic, etc. Those metrics also conveniently fit the “more is better” unspoken assumption -- more impressions, more clicks, more traffic are all better for digital campaigns. But more of those things don’t necessarily mean more of the things that should matter to marketers -- sales and business outcomes.?

Furthermore, too many marketers are not familiar enough with how bots create the illusion of more -- more traffic, more impressions, more clicks. So while campaigns appear to be performing swimmingly, it’s no more than simple bot activity that you're reporting to your boss. Of course bots don’t “convert” -- they don’t pay money, they make money (from gullible marketers spending budgets unwisely in digital). More data is not better data; and more impressions, clicks and traffic does not mean better digital marketing.?

With the impending changes from Apple and Google due to privacy regulations, the corollary will also be true -- “just because you can’t measure it doesn’t mean it’s bad.”?

Just because you CAN’T measure it ...?

When iOS 14.5 completes its roll-out, device identifiers on iOS devices will no longer be available to every leech, without consent. Whether it was bad guys harvesting device identifiers from real devices and replaying them to defeat fraud detection or ad tech companies harvesting identifiers for ad targeting and attribution analytics, they will all have to ask for permission from the user to collect the device identifiers going forward. The default is “disallow” and users have to opt-in to give each party permission. When iOS 15 rolls out on Apple devices, ad tech data collectors will also lose IP addresses and email addresses. Both of these are key ingredients to fingerprinting which underpins a large part of the surveillance marketing ecosystem.?

But does losing the ability to harvest and abuse device identifiers, IP addresses, and email addresses mean digital marketing will suffer too? No. To put it bluntly, advertisers never needed those things to know if their digital campaigns were working -- think TV advertising, print advertising, radio advertising, and even billboard advertising.?They could tell the advertising was working because more humans bought more from them.

To be more specific, advertisers don’t need to know that this specific person bought their soup, soda, or soap. Advertisers just need to know that people exposed to their digital ads bought at a higher rate than unexposed users - much like TV ads, print ads, radio ads, billboard ads. This can be measured without device identifiers, cookies, IP addresses, or email addresses. Of course this assumes that advertisers were doing proper incrementality measurement in the first place. And it is abundantly clear that most are not -- they are simply reporting on the vanity metrics mentioned above -- quantity of impressions, clicks, and traffic. Ad tech companies selling the targeting and tracking would love advertisers to continue to believe that having all those details means the campaigns are working better. As we said above, just because you can measure it doesn’t mean it’s better. And when device IDs, third party cookies, IP addresses and email addresses go away, just because you can’t measure it doesn’t mean it’s worse.

In fact, despite the fact that Safari browsers have done away with third party cookies for some time now (since iOS 13.4), humans still use iPhones, iPads, and Mac computers. Ads targeted to those devices get in front of humans, and some of those humans still end up buying whatever was being advertised. The marketers who bought into the fiction of surveillance marketing are the same ones bidding against each other and driving CPM prices higher on “targetable” Android and Windows devices (those still with cookies). It leaves CPM prices on iOS and Mac devices at a 50 - 70% discount. Smart marketers happily buy ads targeting just iOS and Mac devices because real humans still use those devices; and they get better outcomes without any of the fictitious, and inaccurate, targeting parameters sold by ad tech vendors. Smart marketers saved money (didn’t waste money on ad tech targeting, got 50 - 70% lower CPMs for iOS devices) and got better outcomes (ads shown to humans). Did you know bots love to pretend to be Chrome/Android because the can earn higher CPMs, and hardly ever pretend to be Safari/iOS?

So given the above, are you the smart marketer who has moved on from crappy surveillance marketing to privacy-respecting, and good, digital marketing?