How to Measure Results for Programmatic DOOH

Are you considering Programmatic Digital Out-of-Home (pDOOH) for your next campaign? The ability to buy advertisements based on impressions is somewhat new to OOH, but it comes with many possibilities to target more specific audiences and for more granular data attribution.

pDOOH advertising uses automation technologies to deliver ad campaigns to the right people in the right place and time. However, you’ll need an effective strategy in place to measure results.

This article will explain the metrics available for pDOOH, how to set up campaign goals, and what insights you can glean from a pDOOH campaign. 

What Kinds of Metrics are Available for pDOOH?

Measuring pDOOH metrics and insights will help you map the customer journey and find the best mix of inventories within or across markets to maximize ROI and reach your marketing objectives (e.g., reaching a specific audience or achieving a reach frequency).  

At Billups, when we run a pDOOH campaign, we look at the following metrics: 

• Impressions and CPM within the stated budget: We ensure we deliver the highest possible number of impressions within the set targeting requirements. 
• Target Audience Impressions: This is the estimated number of impressions of the client’s target audience, e.g., women aged 25-45 who are sportswear shoppers. 
• Reach and Frequency Estimation: In pDOOH, it is not commonly used at the planning stage and is more often delivered in a post-campaign report. 
• Location or website visitation lift or a footfall study: Billups’ in-house science team or a 3rd party data provider can provide information on how much physical and online traffic your campaign drives.  
• Brand lift or sales lift study: These studies show a lift in brand favorability and an increase in sales, respectively.

Understanding and comparing those metrics with market averages is key to cost-efficient programmatic campaigns.

Programmatic DOOH has challenges similar to traditional OOH campaigns. It's sometimes difficult to get accurate exposure measurements for specific locations and formats due to mobile data quality limitations, such as ads placed in elevators, buildings, and malls. However, the larger the campaign is, the more accurate data can be used for exposure measurement. 

How To Set Up Programmatic DOOH Campaign Goals

To measure a programmatic DOOH, you must define the campaign goals and KPIs. This is also a crucial step to take before you start planning. Here are some common campaign goals and how they affect planning:

Increase brand awareness in the specific market. 

• Use maximum available venue types that fit your audience targeting and brand.
• Exclude venue types with a relatively small number of impressions.
• Use dayparting and limit ad play hours depending on your budget.

Drive foot traffic toward your locations and Point of Sale (POS.) 

Suggestions: 

• Use POI targeting within a 1-mile, 3-mile, or 5-mile radius, depending on your type of business, POS locations, and its number and budget.
• Select the maximum available venue types within the selected radius that comply with your brand positioning. 
• Use dayparting and make sure it matches your POS working hours. 
• Use multiple creatives (morning/evening) to ensure they fit the environment and help navigate people toward your location.

Reach a large audience within a short time period (e.g., event promotion).

Suggestions:

• Use multiple venue types with high target audience concentration 
• Use dayparting to select more screens with your target audience concentration peaks. 
• Use different creatives to drive an updated message to your audience, e.g., days left, tickets left, last sales, and so on. 

Drive website traffic/app downloads. 

Suggestions: 

• Target venues with high dwell time, such as place-based networks, bars, hospitals, office buildings, gyms, and gas stations. 
• Make sure to use video creatives where possible with the maximum accepted lengths (some venues can play 15 sec or 30-sec video at the same cost). 
• Ensure your website and app name are visible, and the message is clear. The creative itself plays a vital role in driving traffic, so please do not hesitate to contact our team for advice. 

At Billups, our in-house programmatic specialists work hand in hand with you to help you create detailed plans for each or any of these goals and execute campaigns with high efficiency. 

Use Attribution Model To Improve Programmatic DOOH

Attribution allows you to identify who was exposed to a programmatic DOOH ad and what actions they took online or offline as a result.

At Billups, we can deliver attribution studies to your programmatic campaigns no matter what DSP you are using. However, there are minimum requirements that your campaign needs to meet to enable attribution measurements, such as budget, total impression number, and venue types. 

These attribution studies enable you to use metrics, including exposure, location, or website visitation lift per market or unit types, so you can run optimizations by excluding underperforming units and shifting your budget to higher-performing sites for better end results.  

Suppose you plan to have multiple flights in different DMAs. In that case, we highly recommend adding attribution studies and analyzing results after the first flights. Then you can run optimizations and compare the results of subsequent flights. This will give you performance metrics for optimizations and data to estimate your ROI. 

What Gets Measured Gets Done

Selecting and measuring the right metrics can help you understand programmatic DOOH campaigns' performance to fine-tune your targeting and media buying strategy to achieve your marketing goals.

Thanks to advances in data science, we can now collect and analyze a large volume of information to revolutionize OOH advertising. Brands can leverage granular segmentation to deliver the most relevant and timely messages to their audiences. 

Get Started with Measuring your pDOOH Campaigns

You can use various tools and platforms to measure pDOOH campaign results. These can help you aggregate mobile and online channels, use retargeting to improve conversions, leverage mobile and geofencing technology to inform targeting, and more. Want to learn more about how Billups can help you with your pDOOH campaigns? Contact us today!