A transparent and actionable audience measurement tool for digital media provides reassurance and valuable insights to both brands and publishers, writes Conor White.
What’s next? This is a question we ask ourselves every day in Nielsen. It was in this very mindset that Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings was conceived. With digital positioning itself as a lead medium in the Irish landscape, Digital Ad Ratings is the natural progression to deliver an independent and accurate measurement system for this sector.
Candice Ulrich, Head of Nielsen Watch, describes Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings as ‘An advertising verification tool that offers actionable measurement. It empowers advertisers to adjust their digital advertising campaign while in flight, to ensure that they reach their desired audiences and maximise their media investment’.
So what does Digital Ad Ratings offer?
Trust: The first accredited and truly independent measurement solution for digital ad campaign age and gender demographic integrations with multiple viewability providers.
Demographics and Accuracy: Matches back to the largest demographic data set in a privacy safe way, with unparalleled accuracy and size, providing audience profiles by age and gender.
Speed and Granularity: Delivers next-day reporting of online ad campaign performance across platforms and devices in a user-friendly interface.
Cross-Platform Comparability with deduplicated reach: Provides metrics consistent with television such as GRP, reach and frequency, offering clients, agencies and media a common language and way to communicate metrics and performance.
It is the first digital advertising solution that provides a true cross-platform view of digital audiences across computers and smartphones.
Using Digital Ad Ratings, agencies can work with their media partners to optimise online campaigns across screens and accurately gauge the success of their digital advertising campaigns.
Omar Hamdy, Head of Digital in EbiquityMarsh, says: “We believe Nielsen DAR offers a useful and an independent solution to measure audience data utilising online and offline sources. It provides an independent view of audience which allows buyers to compare it with publishers and tech vendors data. This solution will prove to be even more valuable if it’s able to run on YouTube”.
As a developing tool, we are continuously improving the reach of Digital Ad Ratings with the view to have full market access by the end of 2018, including all major video publishers.
Publishers can demonstrate their ability to deliver advertising messages to desired audiences across digital platforms—including mobile in-app and in-browser placements. Media Owners are able to monetize with knowledge and confidence using the data that advertisers and agencies trust.
According to Doug Farrell, Group Head of Digital at DMG Media Ireland, one of the first groups to adopt Digital Ad Ratings: “In our small market we have a distinct lack of third party audience verification and reliable competitive metrics. In 2016 DMG Media Ireland undertook one of the first Nielsen DAR multi-site campaign audits. We were very happy with both the accuracy and depth of the audience data. We felt confident taking this 3rd party verified audience data to the market and most importantly, this level of unbiased transparency was welcomed by clients and agencies alike. In a murky digital landscape it is more important than ever for publishers to illustrate the power of engaged audiences”.
Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings provides transparent and actionable audience measurement across digital campaigns, which are comparable to television. On a global scale Digital Ad Ratings is now available in 34 countries. Our footprint covers markets that make up 85% of global digital ad spend.
So how does it work? We gather a census level count of the impressions; we gather aggregate demographic profiled data from our third party data provider, giving us an effective panel of over half the Irish population. We take this data and calibrate against our own Nielsen survey of over 4,000 Irish households. This allows us to leverage high quality panel data and probability based data to calibrate it for the following biases and errors in 3rd party data. This is a key advantage of Digital Ad Ratings’ methodology and we are avoiding audience duplication by de-duplicating the audience.
As Digital Ad Ratings continues to expand in the Irish market, we will be able to develop industry benchmarks at a local market level. This will allow advertisers and publishers to evaluate their performance relative to broader industry campaign norms and in comparison to their peers. Advanced analytics provide additional insights for digital publishers to showcase the full value of their properties and the audiences to whom they deliver.
Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings is part of our Total Audience framework, a suite of solutions providing media owners, advertisers and agencies with consistent and comparable metrics for content and ads – wherever they’re consumed. Powered by the largest consumer data sets and the highest-quality panel in the world, Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings has set a new industry standard for digital audience measurement.
When you have that level of data you will not only see what’s next, but you will get there first, so the next time you are asked “what’s next?”, you will already have the answer.
Conor White is a Senior Commercial Executive – Digital Solutions, Nielsen Ireland
First published in Irish Marketing Journal (IMJ May/June 2018)© to order back issues please call 016611660
