Audience measurement measures how many people are engaging in a channel, be it TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, online or mobile platforms. With the vast array of channels that consumers engage with these days, a holistic approach to all mediums is essential.
As an expert in this field, www.kantarmedia-audiences.com offers a useful guide to help businesses and brands understand what to expect from audience measurement.
The Right Solution
While digital/interactive media is relatively new to the game compared to television, it must nevertheless be subjected to the tried and tested traditional standards and techniques involved in audience measurement. At the same time, measuring digital channels should also allow for new enhancements to capture the full potential and specific consumer engagement trends specific to the medium. This means that advertisers therefore need to look at a holistic approach to audience measurement that includes innovative business models and marketing communication strategies.
In addition to supporting creative approaches within a broad field of channels, advertisers need to be aware that online audience measurement in particular needs integrated systems that correspond to the individual needs of their brand to allow for consolidations and accurate comparisons.
Challenges of Online Media Measurement
Advertisers are often unaware of the challenges inherent to accurate audience measurement of the online environment:
- Online media (including mobile channels) is evolving at a terrific rate, making it hard to nail down in terms of the exact audience base, opportunities of engagement and their value.
- More than with traditional media, the receptiveness of the audience to commercial communication varies by format, environment type and surrounding content.
- There is a huge variety of online media channels with ‘blurred boundaries’, such as the vast majority of delivery vehicles having small, segmented audiences and the same individuals belonging to a large number of different vehicles. This means that larger samples and/or more specific data collection procedures are often required for accurately measurement.
Audience Measurement Tips
Effective audience measurement systems should:
- Deliver targeted information that fully describes each individual’s engagement activity.
- Provide audience measures that have been defined and pre-established within the industry. As a minimum, it should describe the audiences using the same criteria commonly used in marketing and media research for efficient targeting and segmentation.
- The criteria and metrics need to be consistent across all countries if the company is global, while remaining flexible and adaptable.
- Perform measures that are seamlessly continuous, dated-and-timed and provide reporting that clearly shows the contact between an individual and a particular piece of content.
- Provide contact environmental information and map the entire user journey from start to finish, including the device used and the duration.
- Deliver information to subscribers at a frequency that suits their decision making processes.
- Periodically review and validate the information it delivers against external independent sources, such as an industry or user survey. If there are no external benchmarks available, a replacement validation procedure should be in place.
Additionally, an efficient audience measurement system should be structurally and technically capable of integration into larger cross-media, consumer-centric, holistic systems if it is to be flexible enough to suit adaptable media choices, analysis conclusions, resource allocation and ROI projections.
Conclusion
Audience measurement is becoming much more complex in the modern climate where the consumer technology market is so revolutionary and subject to change. For this reason, experts in a holistic approach such as www.kantarmedia-audiences.com are the way forward for businesses who want to stay ahead of the curve.
This is a guest post.
Ritik Singh
Admin
Sarah Williams
Rachita Kotian