Six Tips & Best Practices to Drive Better ROI Outcomes

The fragmented media landscape and the sheer volume of new platforms, channels and services has made tracking ROI increasingly complex for marketers. Nielsen Canada, the leader in audience measurement, data and analytics has compiled the top six tips and best practices marketers can use to harness the power of data to increase ROI on marketing and media campaigns.

Tip 1: Improve targeting to increase ROI

Trying to stretch a marketing budget to cover the constantly expanding media landscape is a challenge. It’s important to understand the unique reach and frequency of advertising campaigns across publishers and platforms. In a data-driven marketing era, leveraging in-flight indicators to optimize your campaign in near real-time is the key to reaching more of your target audience, and increasing ROI.

Tip 2: Measure and maximize brand metrics

Brands today often measure media’s impact on sales and infrequently measure media’s impact on brand. To unlock a campaign’s full potential, marketers must use a varied mix with channels that drive both ends of the funnel.

Remember: ROI is a long game, and media plans that balance short-term lifts with continual brand building will realize better outcomes. Running marketing mix models (MMMs) will help optimize channel mix for short term-sales, and a second analysis can then be done to optimize channel mix for awareness or other upper-funnel metrics. This approach addresses the need to meet short-term sales goals while seeding long-term growth through brand building.

Tip 3: Use creative to drive sales

In an increasingly fragmented media landscape where consumers see an overabundance of ad clutter, getting—and keeping—their attention often comes down to creative excellence.

A recent Nielsen study, commissioned by Meta, examined three years’ of marketing mix modelling data for 41 brands across a wide range of CPG categories and found that campaigns with high-quality creative achieved 35% greater effectiveness.

Tip 4: New media = new ways to engage

With the wealth of new media platforms and formats available to consumers, marketers have more ways to engage with potential buyers than ever before. Brands that are investing in newer media and formats are seeing big returns. With each new marketing channel, attribution and optimization become critical for identifying which formats will drive the most ROI.

Tip 5: Optimize spend across regions to see ROI lift

Often brands think poor ROI means they should spend less. However, it may be the case that brands are spending too little to break through and have impact. Nielsen’s 2022 ROI Report found that 50% of media plans are underinvested by a median of 50%. If marketing teams committed the ideal amount of resources, their ROI could jump 50%. Breaking down performance by region can make additional performance distinctions to determine ROI.

Tip 6: Leverage multiple data sets for deeper insights, better performance

The most effective marketing tactics combine the power of both behavioural and contextual data to drive the highest ROI. By complementing contextual data with high-quality, deterministically sourced behavioural data, marketers can be more effective and efficient with their marketing campaigns. Impressions delivered to audiences using behavioural targeting produce higher ROI than impressions delivered using contextual targeting alone.

By putting these six tips into action, measuring channel effectiveness, and optimizing your marketing campaigns becomes much more manageable with the right data and the right tools to help turn that data into actionable insights.

Written by Katherine Canario, Nielsen Director, Sales/Marketing Effectiveness in Canada