Google and YouTube Advertisers Get New Ad Sales Metrics

Latest Ad Sales solution measures the in-store sales driven by CPG advertising delivered on YouTube

Google’s YouTube is venturing into a parallel market space. It wants to now deliver campaign measurement for offline purchases from advertisements that were broadcasted on its platform. To achieve this seemingly tedious task, the company announced that it will partner with Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS). The initiative is a part of YouTube’s constant efforts to help consumer packaged goods (CPG) advertisers compare offline sales with online advertisements.

How is Nielsen Helping?

The company uses two methods for this purpose. It should be noted that both the methods do not use mobile location to derive data (which is outstanding).

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The first method is analyzing in-store purchases done electronically with consumer data. Nielsen is leveraging third-party entities such as Experian for data privacy and data matching in the back end. Post that, NCS uses the test-and-control methodology to compare YouTube/online advertisements (marketing) with in-store purchases (sales).

The second method is built specifically around YouTube. The method continues to involve mining of retail purchase data but is more advanced than the first one. Since Google does not release its data to third parties, Nielsen will actually have to run their algorithms inside the YouTube ecosystem to extract data. NCS will then proceed to apply complex Machine Learning capabilities in order to find the holy grail of sales numbers that encapsulate the online-offline business model.

The good news for CPG advertisers is that Google is validating these numbers. After Nielsen has concluded and validated the accuracy of their measurement methodologies, they will release a report for the industry explaining their data measurement techniques. For now, NCS is confident that their next-level Sales and Marketing Solution can be used in any publisher environment without any major tweaks to the software.

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“CPG brands need quick and consistent offline sales measurement for their digital campaigns that show how their advertising drives in-store sales,” said Carl Spaulding, EVP of Strategy, Nielsen. “Our team is constantly working towards an advanced future for advertising measurement that offers greater transparency and comparability across all publishers. This new solution represents the next-generation capability of NCS’s Sales Effect measurement services.”

What Should Marketers Know?

Getting first-hand meaningful data is not going to be as easy as it is now. Hence, marketers need to adapt to newer methods of campaign measurement and completely re-invent their metrics.

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