Impact Navigator Validates and Quantifies Impact During Promotional Periods
The Background
abaGada, a data-driven, online media agency part of dentsu, and Native Instruments, a leading manufacturer of software and hardware for computer-based audio production and DJing, partnered together to drive innovation across their advertising plans and media buying.
The Challenge
abaGada believed in the power of their Google Display Network, Google Search, and Facebook Advertising buys to drive revenue growth, the seasonal and promotion-driven nature of Native Instruments’ business made it hard to understand the true impact of their media investments. Native Instruments was confident that their cyber weekend promotions helped increase sales but struggled to understand what impact their media buys were having during such an unusual time of year.
The Solution
Skai has been an abaGada partner since 2017 and fully supports measurement of Display and Social advertising using Skai’s Impact Navigator, Skai’s incrementality measurement platform. abaGada partnered with Skai, in collaboration with their customer, Native Instruments, to design a 4-week experiment to measure the incremental impact of advertising on Google Display, Search, and Facebook on net revenue around their critical winter promotion.
In order to properly measure advertising’s impact during a promotional period, the Skai team conducted model validation on past promotional periods to ensure that Impact Navigator’s models were properly predictive of user behavior and market demand during these key and unique times of year.
The Impact Navigator platform’s algorithms identified a representative 30% of geos in which Native Instruments could turn off their always-on Google Display, Search, and Facebook campaigns. Limiting the test to just 30% of markets allowed Native Instruments to maintain a strong market presence during the test and limit revenue impacts to their business while ensuring abaGada and Native Instruments could be confident that results could be applied across their full media buys. Where data analysis and test design would normally require several weeks and more than 100 hours from specialized data scientists, the Impact Navigator platform analyzed thousands of scenarios in seconds to carefully develop a recommended test design based on Native Instrument’s business goals, allowing the abaGada team to run the experiment they were hoping for without tying up expensive data science resources.
The Results
At the end of the four-week experiment, Impact Navigator measured an ROI well above profitable levels, concluding that monthly net revenue had increased more than 12% as a result of their investment in Google Display Network, Google Search, and Facebook.
As part of the final analysis, the Skai team performed an evaluation of the daily incremental ROI. Investigation at the daily level uncovered that though their media had an incremental impact on days when email promotions were pushed to customers, the impact increased nearly 50% during other periods of the campaign where advertising was necessary to generate awareness. As a result, Skai, abaGada, and Native Instruments concluded that during promotional periods, Google Display, Search, and Facebook buys generate the highest return when focused ahead of, and following on, promotional pushes. Using these insights, abaGada and Native Instruments have recalibrated their attribution models and updated their 2021 plans and budgeting given the validation of their promotion strategies.
