Brands have experienced massive business disruption because of the pandemic, shifts in consumer behaviors, changes to the advertising and data ecosystems, and rising concerns around privacy. Based on these systemic shifts in marketing and our marketing measurement research on data deprecation and marketing spend investments, in 2022, you should:

  • Increase attention on omnichannel media measurement and optimization. Omnichannel marketing approaches blend advertising channel campaigns together to produce a singular consumer experience across advertising touchpoints, which, most critically, reduces an overabundance of repeated exposures to the same ads. Forrester expects to see consistent investment growth in digital, social, and traditional advertising formats to fuel omnichannel marketing strategies. This trend will require the upgrading of ad measurement by embracing a new set of media metrics focused on omnichannel performance, such as duplicated reach across platforms, interaction rates, and attention. Determine the right mix of omnichannel media metrics that are connected to your media planning and buying strategy.
  • Solve for better campaign and ad-level marketing measurement performance. Campaign-level marketing measurement is in the throes of major transformation because of the deprecation of third-party cookies and Apple’s changes to consumer tracking within its ecosystem. As a result, advertisers cannot use third-party cookies to measure campaign and tactic efficacy across publisher sites, tech platforms, and mobile apps. Some advertisers have turned to identity as a mechanism to track and measure tactic-level performance, but the proposed surveillance in advertising legislation leaves a lot of uncertainty around using identity for marketing measurement. Because of this ecosystem uncertainty, advertisers should consider new approaches to measuring ad or campaign-level performance, such as using impression-level digital data, cohort ad-level performance, or leveraging digital signals to understand performance.
  • Make marketing insights accessible and actionable. To achieve this, we’ve seen vendors improve the usability of their marketing measurement tools to help companies drive insights in action. Further, channel measurement point solutions — such as connected television measurement tools or digital ad technologies — have ad- and campaign-level predictive marketing investment recommendation engines to help media planners make day-to-day media optimization decisions. These user-experience improvements help marketers elevate and take action on their marketing measurement insights and turn them into data-driven marketing strategies.

Keep up with the latest trends and recommendations on how to improve your marketing and media measurement strategy in 2022. If you have any questions or would like to share your best practices in marketing measurement and optimization and media analytics, schedule a guidance session or submit a briefing request.