DIGITAL DOWNLOADED: Achieving real-time performance

For performance marketers, all marketing channels and devices are linked. Consumers, more aptly called ‘participants’, are participating with your brand in a complex, nonlinear spiral—moving across touch points such as search engines, social networks, content, mobile, television and in-store. The performance marketer’s challenge is collecting and analysing all this data in real time to make faster, more informed media buying and optimisation decisions.  

Where (and when) is the right place to spend each marketing dollar? How do channels and devices interact with each other? Where is my brand’s next live performance opportunity? Answering these questions requires powerful reporting and analytics tools, as well as seasoned strategists and analysts. Achieving real-time performance starts with discovering where your participants are and how they want to engage with you. At the start of your strategic planning process, you should gather all available participant data (from your CRM; offline sources; third-parties like comScore, Hitwise and Forrester; social-listening tools and competitive-tracking tools). This data will uncover customer needs, motivations and barriers that inform engagement strategies, including media mix selection, optimised campaigns, keywords, bids, messaging and landing pages.

Once you understand your participants, you’ll be able to activate relevant cross-channel campaigns.  Then you can focus on continually elevating those campaigns. The key is having data at your fingertips that enables you to shift budgets and strategies in real time. Real-time performance can come within channels, and it can come across channels.  

To illustrate real-time performance within channels, let’s consider how real-time bid and budget optimisations can increase ROI in search marketing.  At Performics, we use a proprietary competitive tracking tool called Benchtools to measure our clients’ paid and organic search share of voice against competitors. Benchtools tracks competitors’ copy, keyword and bid strategies in real time, thus identifying gaps, challenges and opportunities for our clients. These real-time insights are invaluable at key times where mere minutes can mean thousands of dollars for brands that sell online. 

Applications like Benchtools can aid in executing real-time, holistic paid and organic search strategies. For instance, your organic search positions are often subject to the whims of Google, but if you have an automated process to monitor organic positions of mission-critical keywords in real-time, you can react quickly to organic volatility. If organic rank suddenly drops for an important keyword, you can quickly boost paid search position for that keyword.

On the other hand, cross-channel real-time performance is often more elusive. To start, it requires a strong data foundation. At Performics, we leverage our proprietary Global Analytics Center reporting and analytics application to automatically track multichannel paid-search data, SEO, display, social, affiliate and custom data feeds like CRM, offline sales, product-level profitability, call centre data and customer surveys. With this foundation of real-time data, we can plot intersections between paid, owned and earned channels to exploit interactions by fluidly shifting budgets from channel to channel, in real time, based on demand or profitability.

Media mix modelling also plays a significant role in achieving cross-channel real-time performance.  A common use of media mix models includes television and search modelling with the goal of integrating planning and budgets. We’ve seen that, directly after a commercial airs on TV, tablet search volume for that brand spikes. Therefore, if you’ve created a cross-channel model that integrates search and TV, you can dedicate paid search budget to tablets when your TV ad airs to capture the demand you’ve created, in real time. 

Achieving real-time performance hinges on your ability to collect and quickly derive insights from large volumes of participant and cross-channel data. According to IBM, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, and 90 percent of all data ever created has been created over the past two years. It’s no small feat for performance marketers to manage this data to their advantage. But with the right tools, some foresight and an appetite to test and learn, we can achieve real-time performance; at Performics we call this live ROI.

Gareth Mulryan is MD, Asia-Pacific at Performics