Today, purchase decisions are largely driven by brand values—sometimes more than the product itself. So, understanding consumer perceptions about your brand is key to modern marketing success.

A new white paper authored by our behavioral science lead and Director of Strategy April Huff, PhD, outlines methods for measuring, monitoring, and analyzing your brand’s health to garner valuable insights about your brand as well as perceptions about your competitors, your industry and your positioning with both.

“During the pandemic, we’ve seen a lot of shifts in consumer behavior, and we’ve seen people have come to expect a lot from brands—maybe more than in the past,” says Huff. “To me, that indicates you must make sure you’re telling a coherent brand story while understanding your customer and what they expect.” And brand health tracking is one way that marketing teams can quickly get an overview of brand perception, either at a glance or over time—then apply those insights to strengthen consumer experiences.

Are You and Your Audience on the Same Page?

The simplest brand health tracking strategy can accomplish a variety of goals. It can help you understand how you size up among competition or identify your unique strengths. When tracking over time, you can even zero in on quickly shifting trends or sentiments about your products.

Speed is especially important for modern business. Every brand wants to become the most talked-about in their category, and those conversations happen increasingly online, meaning brands must feed the feeds through content that’s relevant to audiences and their concerns—like how L’Oréal Paris drew on social insight to develop a shoppable content hub, Beauty Click, or how Northgate Market capitalized on consumer behavior to hijack Super Bowl ads in a clever way. By tracking brand health over time and across audiences, brands can better identify opportunities to jump into a conversation, rework their messaging or design entirely new experiences—all at a greater speed. 

Build Experiences That Speak to Consumers’ Needs

Brand health tracking can have a much deeper impact than simply knowing what people think about or want from your brand. In fact, Huff advocates that brand teams should build a business case on how health tracking affects clear business KPIs. “Leadership wants to know what brand health is, but unless you can tie it to revenue or other important KPIs, it’s hard to make a compelling case on why these insights should be prioritized,” she says. How might the price of a product or its ease-of-use affect loyalty or purchasing intent, for example? Evaluation of brand health data can help find causality in the way several factors influence how and why people engage—or disengage—with your business.

As brands continue tracking health over time, it’s inevitable that metrics will become more consistent—but far from being a bad thing, this means it’s time to really dig in and pinpoint where to take action. “When we see a baseline established around familiarity, consideration, purchase intent and preference, we ask: where can we add value and move the needle a bit more?” says Huff.

This data may then inspire creative digital ideas, helping turn insights into action—a top-of-mind concern for modern marketers who aim to deliver a fair value exchange through virtualized experiences. In conversation with Tom Beck, Executive Director of SoDA, MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar discussed what he calls the second reawakening of digital, in which experiences across a brand’s ecosystem are measured against how they build brand love while also driving real results.

“We’re now at the point of maturity in the industry where we can go, it’s not just cool, it’s delivering impact, business impact,” says ter Haar. “There’s a celebration of digital beyond just being a channel for direct response. We truly believe doing amazing things in digital helps build brands and helps drive business.” Having a better understanding of the audience’s perspective can make these experiences much more effective.

Fill in Gaps in Research and Data

A robust brand health strategy is measurable against key business KPIs over time does more than just tell you how consumers feel about your brand—it’s an excellent initial step in building first-party data, too. “As we move into a world where first-party data becomes king, brand health tracking is an important channel to tap into to understand potential customers independent of changes in privacy laws,” says Huff.

Brand health tracking is built on data willingly offered by consumers—whether they’re your most loyal base or prospects in the general population. And the way you measure sentiment is largely defined by the kinds of data and research that you already have available, meaning brand health insights should complement existing strategies rather than sit in a silo. By growing in sophistication over time, brand health tracking can power evaluation techniques like driver analysis, perceptual maps and more that inform decision-making across the business and the customer experience.

When data and creativity come together, brands can better understand and act on consumer values. From gaining insights that inspire experiences, augmenting existing research or simply finding where your brand stands among the competition, brand health tracking is an important method to meet consumer concerns and needs more effectively—and April Huff’s report offers clear steps on how to apply what you’ve learned to your marketing strategy so that you can make the right decisions at the right time.

Give your brand health a checkup.

Today’s CMOs have a lot on their plate: their role is increasingly responsible for overall business growth, managing brand communications, customer experience and in some cases the adoption of new technologies. Each of these responsibilities touch upon the different ways that consumers interact with a brand, making it essential for CMOs—and their teams—to manage a wide-lens view of the consumer journey. But in order to successfully integrate business objectives with data and customer experience, they’ll need to establish marketing strategies in which both work hand-in-hand to support one another.

By achieving this through constant performance measurement and optimization of content, organizations empower themselves to adopt a more agile process of marketing, which enables them to rapidly experiment and optimize campaign content and media spend through engagement. This culture of experimentation—with results to back it up—is key to achieving the always-on stream of content that today’s consumer expects, offering several relevant, personalized permutations of a message rather than the “big idea” campaign that was so popular in the past.

Close the Loop on End-to-End Marketing

Effective marketing today isn’t born just from an initial set of figures, but in fact results in new data that can be used to further optimize that content. This strengthens the creative so that it remains relevant to consumers along the digital journey. Whether an initial set of metrics lives up to expectations or not, data-confident organizations that continually measure performance may use those insights to increase content effectiveness, save in costs over the long-term and maintain trust in their creative partners.

Think about what a campaign that uses data poorly looks like. We’ve all found ourselves haunted by a product we’ve viewed (or even purchased) in our travels across the internet—an experience that can come off as annoying or even downright creepy. That this situation is all too common demonstrates how brands often miss key opportunities for effective retargeting or adapting their message to consumers’ changing priorities or intents. Those who continually optimize content through an agile process rapidly gain and apply new insights to adapt their message to the consumer’s interests or place in the sales funnel, resulting in more relevant and effective targeting.

We took this end-to-end approach in a recent awareness campaign for Gladskin, the Dutch skincare brand, and their award-winning acne treatment. The processes described below enabled the brand to five-times lower CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) and higher-than-forecasted reach. To achieve this, we measured what content brought audiences past initial engagement, then applied those insights to continually change the positioning, messaging and creative for greater results.

Optimizing Content for Increased Relevance

As with any campaign, this one began with an initial set of research on a hypothesized audience. Through preliminary engagements from consumers, we were able to quickly zero in on key insights that informed the next phase of production and user targeting. For example, we noticed that Instagram Story content focusing on models’ faces performed especially well in the awareness stage; this content achieved a 37% higher CTR than story content that focused on the product’s effect on the skin.

This aligned well with what you would expect from a platform like Instagram, as the face-focused content was akin to your standard beauty deliverable. But we found that the opposite was true in the consideration phase: Instagram Story content that performed better at this stage fixated on the skin and science behind the product.

Similarly, content that drove more users to convert focused on the research behind the product’s award-winning formula and customer testimonials, depending on the format used. The former was most effective with carousels that let users dive deeper into the product benefits in detail, while the latter performed best in single-image link ads.

Which type of message performs best per platform or format isn’t set in stone; it’s different per campaign, driving home the importance of closely measuring performance across the course of any campaign. But what both winning formats in the consideration and purchase phases had in common was that they provided consumers with justification to buy after their interest had initially been piqued, a key insight for subsequent retargeting efforts.

One can imagine how sticking to a single type of content throughout the consumer journey is comparatively ineffective in pushing consumers through the funnel; think back on that example of a product listing stalking a customer who happened upon it once. By highlighting new insights through frequent A/B testing, we could rapidly remix transformable assets into more and more attractive deliverables—and even support new creative formats, like Instant Experiences on Facebook.

Boost ROI with Optimized Spend

Cracking the code to the most thumb-stopping, relevant messages to consumers is one thing, but it doesn’t do anyone good when those messages fall on deaf ears. In addition to optimizing content, agile marketing processes let you plug data in to deeply target new groups (or continue to retarget engaged ones) for continued success.

For Gladskin, we worked with Brainlabs (an award-winning digital marketing agency) on a new approach to organizing target interests. Rather than sort them by theme—in this case, things like “teenage skincare” or “acne treatment”—we identified how well each individual interest performed. From there, we divided the top-performing ones from the bottom.

Weekly reporting enabled us to continually replace the lowest-performing interests with new ones. Over time, this process will result in ever-higher engagement rates and reach into new, increasingly relevant audiences over the course of the campaign. Tied with the process of optimizing insights-driven content as detailed above, this end-to-end approach is truly reactive to audience engagements and intents.

As measurement becomes increasingly essential for CMOs to improve customer experience, increase communication effectiveness and drive overall business goals, brands must embrace agile processes that allow for the continuous optimization of campaigns. This repeated experimentation through closed-loop, end-to-end systems provides brands with the insights they need to achieve specific business outcomes for long-term success.

Performance marketing is just the first step.

Google Chrome to Drop Third-Party Cookies

On January 15th, Google announced that third-party cookies would be blocked in Chrome by 2022. Over the past 24 months, increasingly aggressive iterations of Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in Apple products have challenged the third-party cookies used for measurement and targeting. However, Chrome currently commands a majority of desktop browser share globally, which makes Google's announcement significant for the industry. In the next 24 months, third-party cookies will become effectively unusable for advertising measurement.

Based on current usage, by 2022 the market will be dominated by browsers that block some or all third-party cookies by default.

The Next Two Years

With this announcement and self-imposed deadline, Google will have to work out how their own ad platforms will interface with third parties, such as ad exchanges. The programmatic advertising ecosystem of which Google is a significant part of is based on third-party cookies. As things stand, Data Management Platforms (DMPs) will be significantly challenged. Likewise, view-based and today's multi-touch attribution (MTA) solutions are effectively moot. Many forms of third-party data, already challenged by government regulations like GDPR enforced in May 2018, will cease to exist.

Google has proposed a mechanism to allow for anonymized and aggregated measurement called the Chrome Privacy Sandbox which was announced in August 2019.

Sand What?

In August 2019, Google announced an initiative aimed at evolving the web with architecture that advances privacy, while continuing to support a free and open ecosystem. They call it a "Privacy Sandbox." Right now, these constitute a set of proposals for browser APIs that will eventually serve as privacy-preserving technical alternatives to third-party cookies.

There aren’t any tangible tools inside the Privacy Sandbox—at least not yet. Google said in their blog post that it aims to "eventually" build these tools with the industry over the next two years to ensure interoperability in the programmatic and ad tech ecosystem.

How Will We Target Audiences Without Cookies?

Third-party cookies have been used for everything from frequency management to behavioral targeting. How might marketers continue to employ these tactics moving forward?

Audience-based and user-level targeting have been the cornerstone of programmatic buying over the past decade. Indeed, the very concerns around ad targeting and user privacy contributed to Google's announcement.

There is every reason to believe that targeting will still be possible, as will attribution, but the mechanisms will need to radically change. The scale and scope of addressable audience targeting will decrease and advertisers may turn to federated learning, contextual targeting, and other techniques to drive business performance through programmatic platforms. Another suggested approach would be for the browser itself to segment audiences based on their browsing behavior, and once there are a sufficient number of other browsers in this interest group an advertiser could target them.

What about frequency management? In October 2019 Google introduced frequency management across bid requests without a third-party cookie associated with them. Instead, Google employs machine learning to analyze behavior from across their ad inventory and provide an estimate with a high degree of confidence the number of impressions an individual had been exposed to.

Lastly, publishers with first-party audience relationships are poised to fill in audience targeting gaps left by the removal of third-party data cookies. For example, this would include a publisher with a paywall that requires a user to login to read content. Publications are likely to sell more curated inventory packages (here's an example from Meredith), much of which will be available programmatically via private marketplaces (PMPs) and programmatic direct/guaranteed deals.

Spending on programmatic direct channels has grown significantly in recent years and is expected to continue climbing.

How Will We Measure?

Conversion tracking will become increasingly difficult to measure using current approaches, but there are several solutions available now and on the horizon. For example, as Campaign Manager log-level data loses fidelity, solutions like Google Ads Data Hub stand to open up new possibilities with more durable data and more privacy-safe methodologies. Likewise, platforms like Amazon and Facebook are working on similar solutions.

Source: "The New Possibilities of an ID-Redacted World"

Google's proposal for a conversion measurement API would allow for click-based attribution without using cross-site trackers. Trials for click-based conversion measurement sans third-party cookies will start by the end of 2020. Read more on the Chromium Blog and in AdExchanger.

What about view-based conversion tracking? Most current approaches will cease to work in any major browser once Chrome deprecates third-party cookies, but Google has indicated that the future of measurement may be more probabilistic or panel-based. Whether this will allow for view-through conversion tracking remains to be seen.

How MightyHive Will Adapt

As with many businesses in the programmatic space, a number of MightyHive services are built to some extent on top of the third-party cookie, such as programmatic audience activation, dynamic creative, and advanced attribution.

In their current state, these technologies will not work in two years’ time. However, there is every reason to believe that ad tech will continue to innovate and adapt with these changes opening up new opportunities for more advanced and smarter marketers in a new cookie-less era.

• We have already started developing targeting and measurement approaches independent of cookie-based approaches for use on multiple bidding and measurement platforms. Further, as a leading Google partner, will be collaborating closely with Google on the Privacy Sandbox protocols and work hard to bring these solutions to our clients.
• MightyHive has deep, holistic consultative expertise to bear on these challenges. For example, we have invested heavily into data science, API and Cloud-driven solutions to help marketers gradually increase the utility of their first-party data while simultaneously reducing reliance on third-party cookie pools.
• As part of S4Capital, with our sister company MediaMonks, our clients are exploring end-to-end digital strategies that leverage first-party data to drive content and programmatic media.

We argue consumers should always be the first constituent in considering the digital advertising experiences online and adapting to this shift requires marketers to place more attention on the value exchange traded for a consumer's attention. The key will be to move with the market, as opposed to push against it and seek short-term fixes.

As always, MightyHive is your partner and your advocate.