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MiQ: Know what every media dollar will achieve

Guaranteed Performance solution delivers specific outcomes and lowers the risk in media buying.

The need for brands to optimize their media investments has never been greater. Market volatility and reduced consumer spending have put pressure on marketing performance, and a fragmented media landscape has made it harder for advertisers to find and engage audiences. 

More than ever, every media dollar counts. 

It’s why MiQ has built a solution called “Guaranteed Performance” which caught the attention of advertisers. It’s a method of buying and selling ads in which the advertiser and partner agree on specific campaign outcomes. 

Compared to standard programmatic, Guaranteed Performance provides more assurance that brands will achieve their intended return on investment. 

“It reduces the risk in media buying,” says Shakib Azam, Head of Client Partnerships at MiQ. “You’re measuring the campaign end-to-end and delivering specific outcomes for clients,” whether that’s clicks, conversions, sales, or in-store visits, basket size or another other metric, he explains.   

Before onboarding a new advertiser, MiQ forecasts best- and worst-case performance scenarios based on the client’s data, budget, and their KPIs, Azam says, “and then we let them decide if it’s a wise investment of their media.”

With Guaranteed Performance, clients pay only for the results MiQ has agreed to deliver. To ensure outcomes are reached, the company pulls large datasets (such as first-party, supply path and bidstream data) into its MiQ Performance Engine. The proprietary AI-powered platform provides day zero insights, ongoing campaign recommendations and insights on how to optimize a client’s budget across channel mix, audience, inventory, supply partners, and creative. 

The performance engine supports omnichannel full-funnel marketing strategies, from branding and awareness through to purchase. Taking an omnichannel approach is critical to achieving results, Azam says, given that consumers’ path to purchase often involves multiple channels. 

Financial institutions know this well. The company works closely with some of the largest financial brands on cross-channel campaigns to drive customer applications for various products such as mortgages, loans and credit cards. In the past, these brands have struggled to measure and forecast the business impact of their media spends, Azam says. 

This has changed with the Guaranteed Performance solution. Recent campaigns have surpassed benchmarks and uncovered valuable insights about what drives results. 

For one recent campaign, the brand’s goal was to lower their cost-per-application while increasing the number of applications. The campaign consisted of running ads programmatically across YouTube and Display. The brand began by running general product information creatives on YouTube, with the goal of driving awareness about the product. That was accompanied by display ads directing viewers to a landing page to learn more about the latest features of the product. Finally, to encourage applications, MiQ retargeted the audiences most likely to convert with display ads and a strong call to action to apply.

The campaign delivered 12% better cost per application while also delivering a 20% higher scale on total applications generated compared to previous benchmarks. 

MiQ’s Performance Engine has also uncovered insights that can be used in future campaign planning. For instance, compared to a single-channel campaign, a multi-channel approach added 20% incremental audience reach and 10% incremental applications. What’s more, the data shows that customers exposed to multiple channels generally convert twice as fast as customers exposed to a single channel. 

Multi-channel campaigns lead to incremental reach and better performance. And as part of its Guaranteed Performance offering, MiQ can now target audiences on every channel, including social media, according to Azam. Brands often have difficulty connecting their programmatic campaigns and social media advertising in a seamless way. But MiQ can connect that audience data to help manage duplicate exposures more effectively. For example, suppression of campaign ads to social users who have already seen them on other channels. This leads to less audience saturation and better reach and frequency management across the campaign.

This, he says, allows MiQ to use its clients’ media dollars even more effectively. 

As a rule, Guaranteed Performance works best for direct-to-consumer brands i.e. for brands where the campaign KPIs can be tracked online, such as sales. Some of MiQ’s’s biggest clients, for example, are large automotive brands with budgets that run a few million dollars per month. 

“The consumers’ journey to purchase is one of the factors that helps us identify which clients may benefit from a Guaranteed Performance model,” Azam says. “Product categories where customers spend time on online research and exploration fit well with Guaranteed Performance because the campaign can optimize to various KPIs. Brands that are in evolution towards setting up their online channels are also good fits. By and large, any direct-to-consumer product brand fits the mold really well.” 

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