Inside Google Marketing - Brand Measurement

Key Takeaways

[Music] good morning i'm keith washington here from the google ads marketing team and i'm being joined today by my colleague amaya garbayo from the google media lab team welcome amaya hi keith it's great to be here amaya i'm excited to hear your insights on google's approach to brand measurement but first tell me about the media lab team who's on that team and what do you do there we in the media lab come from diverse backgrounds agencies publishers and client-side for advertisers like coca-cola kellogg bank of america and many more and we are responsible for investing google's marketing media dollars in particular i work measuring the brand effectiveness of those dollars everything from campaign measurement to advanced analytics i love that but tell me how is that different from what other marketing teams that other companies are doing in many other companies the measurement and optimization department does just that measuring but in the google media lab we use data to inform many other aspects of the media process from establishing media planning minimums to evaluating creative effectiveness sounds invaluable what are some guiding principles your team uses that marketers watching today can take away with them there are four main strategies and tools that my team uses to provide google with the best data possible to drive the desired outcomes with our dollars first pre-launch build the best plan before we spend any money second during the campaign we are tweaking the planning market to maximize outcomes then the post campaign analysis which evaluates what did we get for our money and then finally we prepare google for the future to come doing in-depth channel analysis or piloting new approaches to measure in a world without cookies so when you're in this pre-launch phase what are some of the things you take into account we look at two things one the ability of the creatives to deliver success in market second if the media weight is sufficient to communicate the message and how does your team measure and achieve creative excellence google tests in lab the vast majority of the creatives that are using our media campaigns the program evaluates the creative effectiveness is global involves various research partners and is executed with the same rigor methodology across all brands the creative testing program has a strong ability to predict the performance that we will see in market and hence all our brands use the data to optimize creative and ensure google guests the best return on investment for our advertising money our goal is to have 75 of the creative to be optimized and then use the 25 remaining for creative experimentation in the chart you can see the progress made towards that goal in the last few years across all google brands wow and how does a program help improve over time the program provides not only scores to determine the best creative to live brand metrics but also guidance and best practices for our creative teams the best practices are tailored to the kpi that we want to impact for example supersizing all logos and text is very very important for awareness but only somewhat important for purchase intent on the other hand using close-up frames of the product is important across all kpis in the funnel to deliver success i have an example of how the program has helped improve results something as simple as identifying the brand in the opening frame can increase awareness by two times let's take a look let's get one oh yeah man every time i want to get i ran out of storage yesterday i had to delete a picture of my grandma why so i could take a picture of my grandma no that's cold ice cold i just want a phone that gets me yeah knows my schedule knows my taste knows my music i'm over the hype super over it just say goodbye to this thing i'm gonna do that oh you're just gonna oh bye bone okay i see what you're doing google here is another example of the impact of the creative testing program and how it helps tailor assets to the different video channels to maximize in-market effectiveness television uses a rebuild format while online video works better with app from branding showcasing the product upfront to account for any skipping behavior once each asset of the campaign has been tested the brand manager will get an email with an assessment of the likelihood of success for that campaign the final round of decisions are made based on this data to ensure we maximize the roi of our dollars okay so we've covered creative but what about media planning that's gotta have a pretty big impact too now you are a step ahead of me google media lab has a tool called the preflight check that scores every campaign and determines if it complies with best practices and if it can be successful at delivering brand lifting market if the campaign fails like you saw in the first chart agencies and internal teams will get to work to tweet the campaign and ensure a passing check before launch lastly we periodically verify the signal quality of our programs if we have done our job well campaigns that comply with both programs should get more success in market than the ones that do not the chart that you see split campaigns using the two dimensions discussed creative quality on the vertical axis and media sufficiency on the horizontal axis campaigns that have both passing creative and sufficient media weight are effective and efficient here in the upper right hand corner while campaigns with neither in the bottom left struggle to deliver positive results and even when they do they are less efficient but perhaps more interesting is the fact that media weight is crucial for effectiveness bottom right corner but creative is more important for efficiency understanding the nuances in this chart helps brand make trade-offs between effectiveness and efficient when needed the biggest accomplishment of the creative testing and the pre-flight check programs is that they help google marketing maximize the chances of success before we spend a single penny once the campaign is live optimizations come into play again to ensure we maximize outcomes so you're able to make immediate changes in real time during the campaign how does that work as we discussed at length in the previous section the creative results heavily influenced creative selection before the campaign starts but even during the campaign those results continue to be valuable to upward and downward investment across all channels similarly an early read across various platforms will impact budget shifts towards channels delivering better outcomes for example in this campaign the early success of youtube triggers shifts in budget to capitalize on the success that sounds like a lot of moving parts how do you ensure your team is able to keep up in order to make all these optimizations in a systematic manner and as fast as possible the media lab has developed decision trees decision trees such a great term would you please explain what decision trees are for the folks who may not be familiar the decision trees contemplate every possible outcome of all metrics with rocky market and offer a blueprint of actions and approval protocols that will make sure we make decisions swiftly what happens after everything is said and done google evaluates the outcomes and answers the question what do we get for our money first we need to understand what happened against our primary kpi and the goals we established before the campaign launch second we ensure we discuss only three material stories that have deep implications for both the strategies and tactics then we determine a series of actions the stakeholders responsible in the impact of those actions on upcoming campaigns both short and long term this all sounds pretty powerful but how do you account for things like evolving consumer expectations concerns about privacy and more people than ever shopping from home with an eye towards the future google measurement also conducts better analysis across all campaigns channel deep dives does methodology reviews and monitors the shifts in consumer viewing habits preparing google marketing for what is to come in this particular example we have analyzed the historical investment of their very own youtube and determine a few variables critical to drive success we utilize classification remodeling which is a supervised machine learning model that helps us explore the structure of a data set while developing easy to visualize decision rules for predicting the outcome variable in this case ramlift does the analysis reveal anything special about youtube the analysis confirms some of the known important variables like campaign length and frequency but also reveal endemic to the platform elements like building youtube creative that are critical or successful in addition to the improvements that we recap the analysis also revealed how a new youtube product video ad sequencing helped deliver success on the platform video ad sequencing allows marketers to ensure that individual consumers will see a serious vats in a specific order in the right number of times to help a full understanding of complex messages within a given time period this allows markers to do incredible tailoring with tons of flexibility which is unmatched by any other video channel in the industry for our brands the campaign that include video ad sequencing were two times more effective than the ones that did not oh okay i see how the combination of multiple formats builds frequency without annoying consumers like myself but can you give me an example of what that really looks like of course a typical video ad sequence might open with a longer 30 second format early in the week follow with an unskippable 15 second on thursday and close with a six second reminder on sunday video ad sequencing can be used with a single concept in various ad lengths as the example we are showing or you can introduce additional concepts and have longer series the possibilities are endless and video ad sequencing can be used to address many marketing challenges and oh by the way in addition to better brand metrics it increases consumers engagement with the ad and is also more efficient than the standardized got it so with all this data how do you keep all the senior stakeholders informed we have a scorecard that summarizes all that with only six metrics the metrics have been standardized and they are blessed globally to represent 100 of the investment we use six metrics to paint a full picture of the entire budget that gets delivered to our cmo and our most senior leaders every quarter there are three metrics that we evaluate before the campaign starts the budget the percent of budget behind past creative and the percent of budget passing pre-flight check and then we look at three metrics after the campaign concludes the percent of budget that lifted the primary kpi one effectiveness metrics using the numbers of individuals lifted in one efficiency metric the cost per individual lifter thanks to maya for spending the time with us today and thanks to all of you for watching i hope it was helpful to understand how google measures brand in order to drive a more effective and efficient marketing investment [Music] you