Awareness is a Dead Metric*

Increased ‘awareness’ in isolation means little for already established brands if it didn’t move people down the attention funnel towards conversion. And yet, we continue to see this as the primary - and standalone - marketing objective of most briefs.

We should spend way more time on increasing consideration and purchase intent by being relevant. This is possible not just by using the most relevant proxies (e.g. saves, shares, comments), but also mining the conversations and data here for deeper audience understanding. We can also do this by directly asking audiences questions through polls (now available in the comments on Instagram), or even indirectly via off-platform studies (especially if that’s something entrenched within the brand’s legacy measurement process).

And while we’re at it, let’s stop asking people “How did you hear about us?” Unless your brand is new, most people have already heard of you and tend to have no recollection how this awareness originated. Instead, ask questions like, “Why did you buy?” and “What do you like about our product/service?” to better understand the relevance of the brand.

For almost 20 years, the industry has used attribution technology – with its black box models and algorithms – to tell us how effective their marketing is. This indirect process can make estimations that will sometimes be close to the truth, but there is a serious lack of transparency: Nobody except the owners of the technology knows exactly how it measures. 

The alternative is to measure directly – without the estimations – but that comes with its own set of challenges… Why? Because platforms tend to want to attribute as much credit as possible to their own channels to retain ad revenue, they often emphasise on last-touch attribution rather than understanding how the different channels collaborated to drive people to conversion (despite evidence that shows the efficacy of multi-channel marketing strategies). 

Any marketing – whether a single short-form video or a full-length TV ad – delivers two potential results. 

Either:

If the brand is only using one marketing channel, measurement becomes easier. You can assess incremental reach and conversions, and probably don’t need a third-party to help you. But for the majority of brands, it’s essential to run tests to assess the multi-channel lift if you measure – for example – how much better search marketing works when run alongside Instagram (e.g. it converts twice as many customers).