Reporting – The Often Ignored But Super-Important Facet In Adtech

As the digital ecosystem evolved and more transparent consumer data became available across numerous channels powered by the internet, Adtech has seen quite a rapid growth rate. In fact, the US Adtech market alone is estimated to be worth around USD 134 billion. By the end of 2021, nearly 88% or USD 81 billion worth of US digital ad displays may well be leveraging programmatic advertising.

Today, brands and advertising agencies understand why it is essential to leverage Adtech to enable better outreach for their messages amongst the most suitable customers. They seek myriad benefits like optimal spending, tighter targeting, better intelligence, and deeper insights that can drive improvements in future strategies. While features like targeted campaigns, AI-driven personalization of content and customer segmentation, faster outreach, etc., are all celebrated as key capabilities of Adtech, there is an important aspect that gets little attention – Reporting.

Reporting is often an ignored but super-important facet in modern Adtech. In fact, reporting forms a critical part of the deliverables an Adtech platform or solution provider must guarantee. Advertising agencies and marketers need to know how their campaigns are working, what has happened, and what hasn’t. Therefore, they need a clear understanding of what reporting does and how it can bring more value to their conversations with decision-makers. Let us explore a few reasons why reporting is essential to brands and agencies alike.

Why Reporting is Essential

Justify investments

It’s the norm for clients or brands to ask for clear justification for every advertising dollar spent by an agency or marketer. It’s obviously essential to have a clear statement on where the money goes. Modern SaaS Adtech platforms offer comprehensive reporting of how every digital channel consumes money from a brand’s advertising budget. 

The reporting provides a clear break-up of how advertisers target different channels like social media, 3rd party websites, and other forums online at the agency or department level. It allows a considered comparison against expected returns in terms of conversions from each channel. This means fewer queries and more transparent visibility for the brand’s leadership into where the money is being channeled.

Transparently communicate

For winning the trust of the brand leadership, marketers and agencies must let them know upfront what to expect as the campaign progresses. With robust reporting, you can agree on the information you must provide to the folks fronting up the cash on an ongoing basis. Powerful reporting provides the means to transparently inform the brand owners what has been achieved by a particular ad campaign. A typical report for an Adtech platform would contain a detailed break up of budget consumption by all channels based on ad content and the impact achieved. This is the context in which the metrics that you as an advertiser or agency would track become vital as they show the performance against the desired results. It also allows deep dives into specific facets that are important. For instance, it could show conversions, the performance of every piece of content (like an email campaign or a video marketing campaign), the resonance of the campaign and different variants of messages for different customer segments, etc.

Better understand consumer behavior

The reports brand owners get from their ad campaign (powered by the latest in Adtech) are an invaluable glimpse of how different consumers feel about the brand, the messaging, and the ad campaign. Advanced reporting features offered by modern Adtech platforms offer slicing of the results by demographic, age, gender, and other parameters. 

Brand owners get to know how a particular ad campaign performed for each of these consumer parameters and map that to other factors like different channels. This is a crucial insight into how well their brand is positioned in the market, how eager are customers to buy into their product or offering, how their messaging strategy needs to be refined, and much more. 

Evaluate Vendors

Reporting is one of the best ways to identify how well the Adtech platform delivers value for the investments made. As mentioned earlier, it provides a transparent picture of what the platform achieved. Modern Adtech platforms can offer granular reporting on specific metrics across any target marketing channel that a brand wants to include in its marketing mix. For example, suppose the brand wants to know how many consumers in a particular age group watched their ad on Facebook. In that case, Adtech platforms can report this specific insight to enable better-informed decision-making. The ability to generate custom reports that drive the decision-making process of brands is a crucial factor to judge while evaluating the performance of your Adtech platform.

As the Adtech market grows significantly and the shift to digital channels accelerates for consumers, brands need to ensure they have the right choice of platforms to power their marketing strategies. While selecting an Adtech platform for your business, ensure that reporting is given the same priority as other features. As we have seen, reporting is a critical part of any Adtech platform. In fact, it’s what can serve as a statement of the value the advertising efforts and budgets are bringing to the brand.