Read on to find out Croud’s top six predictions for 2024 in the world of digital measurement...
ONE: Brands get increasingly serious about first-party data
Privacy regulations, browser changes and now IoS 17, mean that third-party data is now so patchy it is close to useless, and so 2024 will see further acceleration in the shift to first-party data strategies for measurement, targeting and personalisation. Second party data will also increase in importance, but is riskier and also very patchy.
First-party is the only way to go.
TWO: Flight from Google Analytics reporting
GA4 is proving very unpopular and as more enterprise brands are forced to switch in 2024 it will dawn on marketing teams that they will have to work harder to make the numbers make sense, and this will drive adoption of alternatives. GA will remain the biggest show in town, because of inertia and because it is free, and we predict one of the biggest areas of analytics growth will be analytics tools directly linked to the GA4 BigQuery raw data tables (which are actually an improvement on what went before!).
Serious players are already moving away from using GA reporting as a single source of truth.
THREE: More interest in cookieless impression modelling
Because the industry has no choice! Talk of the cookie apocalypse will no longer be just talk – it is happening as we enter 2024. Not everyone can do MMM and more granular approaches are needed.
That’s why Croud developed a statistical impression modelling approach that we can incorporate into our predictive attribution.
FOUR: Marketing focussed on cost efficiency and branding
Because marketing costs have generally risen faster than inflation, and endless discounting has hit the floor. Profitability is being squeezed on both the cost and revenue side of marketing, and brands as diverse as AO and ASOS have realised they cannot run their businesses on the basis of endless promotions, and are leaning more into the quality of their customer relationships.
For marketing this means a laser focus on performance efficiency and cost management at a tactical level, combined with more interest in long term brand building, especially via social.
FIVE: Ups and downs in MMM
Because MMM is very much back in vogue but it is not a magic bullet. First, as frameworks like Robyn have come out and also open source Python packages etc, people without expertise are increasingly “having a go”. Yet if MMM is so easy, why are there not endless self-service MMM SaaS platforms for it? The reason is because MMM is very easy to do badly: you get a great R-squared but the numbers make no sense at all.
Experts in MMM will remain in very high demand as tech only solutions fail to live up to their promise.
SIX: More and more AI
Because AI is taking over especially in digital! AI is the most important technology since the internet itself, and will probably be far more important in the long term. In the tech first space of digital marketing, it is already making huge waves in all areas.
Data driven AI powered marketing advice is something Croud is looking at and all the major analytics providers now have AI on the roadmap – so in 2024 it will be no surprise that more AI advances will be coming your way.
To learn more about marketing measurement, please get in touch with our team.
