What ad actually influenced someone to buy a ticket to an event? Did it make a difference in their decision at all? We’re excited to announce today that we’re taking a big step in answering these questions.

From today Bolster is one of just two advertisers in the Asia-Pacific region to access Facebook’s new Advanced Measurement (AM) tool. Developed by Facebook over the past few years, AM represents the next big movement in measuring advertising results.

Preview of Advanced Measurement comparing performance of channels side-by-side.

Solving an age-old problem

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

— John Wanamaker sometime in the early 1900s

It’s one of advertising’s oldest and least favourite problem: attributing results to advertising spend.

Digital advertising went a long way to fixing it. The conversation went from, “It seems like when we spend a lot of money on press ads our sales spike a bit,” to, “This person bought a ticket after seeing this ad.”

But that introduced its own issues. Just because someone saw an ad doesn’t always mean it had an impact on them. And what if they saw a few before purchasing? Which ad (if any) should take the credit for the sale?

Standards were needed so the industry came together to settle it.

It was agreed that if someone interacts with many ads, the last one clicked gets the credit. This is what’s known as the ‘last touch’ model.

Understanding the problem

You’re thinking of buying tickets to a festival. You see these ads over a few days and keep your eyes out for the lineup announcement:

You see that tickets are on sale, click the link to see how much they are, and close the window:

A few days later you decide you want to go. You search ‘Mountain Sounds tickets’, click the first link (an ad), and buy a ticket:

You probably wouldn’t have searched ‘mountain sounds tickets’ had you never seen the announce video. And yet under the industry standard ‘last touch’ model the search ad still gets 100% of the credit for the sale.

There’s another problem. Facebook limits third-party tracking and no single system tracks across all platforms.

So even if you thought last touch was an okay approach, you couldn’t really apply it accurately for campaigns across multiple channels such as Facebook and Paid Search/Adwords.

A skewed reality

A lack of understanding of attribution issues coupled with an over-confidence in the data has led some digital marketing campaigns astray.

Marketers will move budget to the tactics reporting the cheapest conversions and are surprised when sales fall. In reality they’re moving budget away from the tactics that were working — they just couldn’t tell clearly from the data.

The next frontier

Using machine learning, AM solves or reduces a lot of the attribution challenges detailed above. We’re excited to see the results as we roll it out for our clients, and believe this tool will help the music industry understand what’s really influencing each ticket sale. For the first time:

• We’ll be able to accurately track nearly the ad interactions across all channels (publishers, Facebook, Google Search, programmatic display etc.) in a single system.
• Move beyond the ‘last touch’ model (see below) to better tell which ads across the entire campaign are actually influencing sales.
• Being to more accurately see the different journey users go through — from the first ad seen to when they buy a ticket — and how long that journey is.
• See how people use devices to interact and purchase tickets and answer questions like: “Do they do one on mobile and the other on desktop?”

For now the rollout is limited to a few clients for testing. So have a chat with your campaign manager if you want to know more.