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Let’s talk about campaign data. We know that waste is significant in the current paid media ecosystem – wasted dollars account for up to 74% of total media spending, according to a study conducted by ISBA and PwC.

We also know that advertising is in the midst of a fundamental change. Transparency, trust and privacy are important concerns; Technology diffusion and regulatory changes are happening all the time. The effectiveness of the media has never been so jeopardized.

At a time when clicks are harder to measure than ever, many brands are wasting money on outdated models in the media spending landscape – and are looking for a way out.

Marketers should look beyond the campaign-level data

Complicated by expansive channel growth and a complicated and crowded Martech vendor landscape, marketers have lost the ability to make real-time decisions. The volume and complexity of the data generated by digital advertising programs are impossible for humans to search through and optimize.

Beyond collecting total data – more than just KPIs, total clicks, and total costs – brands should have a fundamental need Media data model gain better knowledge.

To bring a media data model to life, marketers should take two key actions.

1. Create a single source of truth

Gathering data is important, yes, but it is also worth tracking potential data loss when making critical decisions. Marketers sometimes switch from one channel to another in a day and may leave that information locked away and forgotten.

Fragmented data can be a major source of frustration. To mitigate this problem, all data and analytics should be in one place and go beyond impressions, spend, and other key metrics at the campaign level.

Housing spend and performance data – including ad orders, campaign metrics, and more – in one place means you can track your media spend significantly faster and build better supplier relationships.

2. Integrate your technology

New technology partners can be added on a daily basis, while old ones fall off plan. Once all integrations are complete, you can start performing ongoing optimizations versus a single lookback audit at the end of a campaign. You don’t get the full story just because you hit a campaign KPI like cost-per-click. Could you have done better?

Stock portfolios need to be rebalanced for maximum growth, the same goes for media plans. Would you hold onto a stock just because it met your target return of 10%, especially if that stock is overvalued?

With all of your media in one place, you can track every dollar and tactic across vendors and partners. When vendors hit their end of the bargain, you can evaluate, manage, and negotiate the supply chain.

So what’s at stake?

A basic data model can reveal the effects of fraud and bad traffic. It can evolve into a results-based model like the skills-based model by integrating and looking beyond campaign data.

You can view impression percentages as fraud or invisible, but what about dollars? When you build a connected data model, dollar amounts and purchase paths that remain with fraud and visibility problems become visible, as opposed to a current model that only extrapolates averages.

In addition, a connected data model enables you to understand what fees your partners and suppliers are charging so that you can see whether they are on contract.

Building a basic media data model begins with assessing your current condition. There are seven areas to focus on that can help brands drive millions in media spend. Recognizing these specific areas enables brands to understand how they are spending and what they are spending on overall.

You can analyze what you are doing today. Knowing what you want to achieve makes all the difference here.

There are three main types of data that offer different levels of visibility.

Excel and CSV feeds

The data in these feeds can include username, location, creation date, and so on. They are basic ways of capturing information, but they are not the most transparent of images. If a campaign ran for three months, you would see data, but in an overview at best.

Things You Can Do With Excel Feed Data:

• Analyze cost and performance metrics
• Assess campaign-level performance on a large scale
• Comparison with ad server for discrepancy reports

Brands can save 10-15% just by building a CSV data model.

API integrations

API data insights pick up where Excel feed data leaves off. The API was designed with the end user in mind. The data can be broken down further and visualized for better possibilities.

Things You Can Do With API Data:

• Analyze cost and performance KPIs for performance levels and more
• Create benchmarks and indices for all markets and brands
• Evaluate limited supply chain data
• Analyze creative and audience data

Brands can save 15-25% which can then be reassigned – while not all API feeds are created equal, understanding the depth of API capabilities is important.

Log files

These are impression-level reports that track impression costs and performance (regardless of whether the impression generated a click or not). Log files can help you see the entire supply chain, and they can break down nuances with reporting features that let you …

• Create custom whitelists or blacklists
• Know the cost of fraud, invisibility, and brand security calculations
• SPO with primary and secondary KPIs
• Build contextual domain lists based on performance metrics, that is, look at the complex data about what’s not working, what’s blocked, or what’s a waste of money

This method can save companies over 25% of media value, sometimes as much as 50-60%.

However, log files are not easy to manage. Some tools, such as PwC’s Media Intelligence, can help decipher the granularity of the data and provide precise analyzes and specific recommendations. It searches billions of rows of data to consolidate log files and then presents aggregated data that reveals vital information to improve the value of your campaigns.

Once you have learned how to evaluate your data, you can report on what is affecting your media data models and future goals. Because the log file data is so deep, you can forecast trends, make plans for the future, and do custom analysis.

But first you need to understand where you are in your journey.

Create an action plan for your media data model

What’s the smartest way to make media spend more effective? Some of these can be edited right away, while other things take time. Consider three groups of actions.

This now:

• Identify the current gaps.
• Prioritize affected cases.
• If necessary, create a report automation.
• Find those quick wins.

Design for the future:

• Assess skill needs.
• Create strategies and roadmaps.
• Identify integrations.
• Define and start a POC.

Build and innovate:

• Invest and build skills that you activate.
• Optimize marketing models.
• Measure effectiveness.
• Keep the pulse of change.

The choice is yours You can build the software yourself or buy it. Then you can begin realizing a new journey of trust, optimization and automation in digital media.