B2B Programmatic Advertising Campaign Measurement Best Practices

As a forward-thinking B2B marketer, you’ve done your research. Account-based marketing is a foundational component of your broader marketing plan. Your marketing team is leveraging intent data to target high value and in-market accounts for your products and services. You’ve also implemented the top B2B programmatic advertising tactics that so few of your competitors are utilizing. Now it's time to see if these efforts are really paying off.

Before you scale your programmatic ABM campaigns (or before you start if you aren’t quite there yet), it's critical to have the right measurement tools and technologies in place so you can monitor campaign performance. This goes beyond vanity metrics like impressions served and click-through rates. Today’s ad tech tools tailored for B2B brands can help you track information such as who has been exposed to your campaigns, who is interacting with ads, and how many conversions you are generating.

Implementing the right measurement tools to assess ROI is the final piece in the programmatic ABM puzzle. It will help you improve your target account lists, allocation of media dollars to optimal targeting tactics, and decrease your cost-per-lead or customer acquisition cost. Below we outline the advanced strategies and technology you need to effectively measure advertising performance.

Related: State of Account Based Marketing in 2021

Start With Your Conversion Tracking Foundation

The first step to tracking your programmatic ABM impact is to set up conversion tracking. Conversion tracking provides insight beyond vanity metrics and helps you report on website engagement, conversions, and customer acquisition cost. The right system will help you boil that information down even further, giving you specific feedback on the accounts who are engaging with your website content and converting on your call to action.

To start, you need to generate conversion tracking tags from each advertising platform you are using. From there, you need to install the tags using your tag management software or within the header/footer of your website. Once your tracking tags are installed and tested, it’s a best practice to “map” each conversion point within your advertising platforms. Once this is complete, the data collection process begins. Overtime, you’ll be able analyze your campaign data and leverage these learnings to adjust your campaigns to optimize performance. The feedback can help inform your creative strategy or help you better allocate media dollars to top performing tactics, devices, geographic markets, and more.

Installing conversion tags correctly requires collaboration across your marketing team, IT department, and third-party suppliers. Depending on the complexity of your website infrastructure, this process can take time and you may experience some hurdles along the way. At the end of the day, B2B marketers must have a clear picture of the average cost to generate leads and convert them into paying customers. Conversion tracking must be in place for your programmatic ABM campaigns to make this happen.

Leverage Audience Insights

To take your campaign measurement to the next level, you’ll want to utilize audience measurement and reporting tools developed by specialized B2B providers. Our team at PrograMetrix has developed a long-term partnership with Bombora – the B2B industry’s most comprehensive and privacy-compliant intent data provider. A unique tool that our team leverages for our B2B clients is Bombora’s ‘Visitor Insights’ tracking tag. The visitor insights tag is a real-time tag that is used to track a variety of activities that occur on your website such as:

• Companies that are visiting your website
• Unique users, sessions, and page views by company visiting your site
• Engagement by company domain segmented by high, medium, and low percentages
• Overall visitor engagement compared to previous date ranges

Visitor insights transforms anonymous website data into actionable B2B insights on the companies visiting your website. There are several ways B2B marketers can get value from visitors insights by installing the tracking tag:

• Measure the effectiveness of marketing and account-based programs
• Identify the companies engaging on your website
• Understand which target accounts you're reaching, or aren't reaching, with your marketing programs
• Learn if your content resonates with your target accounts and optimize content for higher engagement
• Turn anonymous website visitors into warm leads for sales and marketing follow-up

Visitor insights provides deeper visibility into the companies visiting your website and the firmographic attributes of the people visiting your site. The solution helps B2B marketing and sales departments capture leads without prospects having to fill out lead forms or other CTAs on the website.

Measure Audience Composition and Targeting Effectiveness

Understanding which businesses are making it to your website and turning those otherwise anonymous prospects into warm leads is great. But to take audience insights and campaign measurement for your programmatic ABM campaigns one step further, you can tap into B2B product suites that offer ‘Audience Verification’ solutions. Audience verification is a feature that provides visibility into the audience composition and targeting effectiveness of your B2B programmatic campaigns. By placing a custom tag in your ad creative, you can:

• Measure the percentage of impressions delivered to your defined target accounts
• Analyze the number of target accounts and additional businesses reached
• Report on unique users and impressions by account
• Measure unique user and impression trends for each account over time

Knowing which high-value accounts on your target list are being exposed to your programmatic ABM campaigns unlocks powerful insights that helps you further optimize your ABM programs. Audience verification data combined with audience insights solutions helps B2B marketers:

• Measure the efficacy of programmatic campaigns by knowing which accounts are seeing your digital ads
• Maximize Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) for each ad unit, media channel, and ad tech platform you employ
• Track the target accounts that viewed your ads and then made it to your website (through visitor insights) even when prospects did not click on your ads
• Achieve transparency by closing the loop between the impact of ABM programs on sales opportunities

With conversion tracking enabled across your ad platforms and by utilizing custom tags to generate audience insights and audience verification data, your marketing department will be able to measure and optimize your programmatic ABM campaigns at a level your competitors simply can’t match.

How Are You Tracking B2B Programmatic Advertising Performance?

Measuring the performance of ABM campaigns is more important than ever for B2B brands. By using custom data sets such as firmographics, technographics, and intent data, B2B marketers are able to advance their audience targeting tactics to increase lead generation. When you can put advanced measurement tools in place to report back on the performance of these efforts, you'll be able to take control of ABM in a whole new way. Marketing can become an agile partner with your sales team, hyper-focusing creative efforts to maximize new customer acquisition.

Ready to take your account-based marketing to the next level? To learn more about our B2B programmatic advertising services, schedule a free consultation with a member of our team today. We’ll help you implement powerful B2B advertising strategies using account-based targeting, intent data, and more.