Report: 68% of Marketers Struggle to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Digital Media Spend

Despite creating custom key performance indicators (KPI), new research suggests that marketers are still struggling to measure the overall effectiveness of their digital marketing tactics.

Xaxis recently conducted “The US Outcome Media Report” and discovered that the majority of respondents (68 percent) agree that evaluating the effectiveness of their digital media spend has become more difficult over the past five years, despite having resources such as KPIs.

About 79 percent of respondents say that they use at least one custom KPI. However, in order to evolve with the rapid pace of change, 72 percent of respondents say that they are likely going to change their primary metric within the next 24 to 48 months. Twelve percent of respondents said that their existing metrics are too embedded internally.

Approximately 20 percent blamed a lack of budget or resources for their struggles.

Marketers, Digital Initiatives, and their Return on Investment

Marketers may now have several KPIs at their fingertips, but previous research suggests that they are not always on top of measuring the effectiveness of their marketing initiatives.

Kantar-Millward Brown published the “Getting Media Right 2018” report and found that only 17 percent of marketers measure the ROI of all of their marketing activities. Thirty-nine percent said they measure the ROI of “most” of their activities.

A total of 37 percent claimed that they only measure ROI for “some” of their marketing tactics, while 7 percent said they don’t measure ROI at all.