How Better Mid-Funnel Measurement Will Transform Marketing

ADWEEK | October 29, 2024 | By Gregory Friend, VP, Content, Insights, and Strategy, Nativo

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The new battleground for advertisers exists in the core—the mid funnel—that space between awareness and conversion where people decide which brands warrant their actual consideration. However, to unlock the power of the core, marketers need the ability to measure it. Historically, that’s an area where the ad industry has been sorely lacking—until now.

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The top and bottom of the funnel have been hot for ages. From viewability to attention to the myriad attribution options, measurement and activation have become second nature. Finally, the industry is at a point where the core, where mid-funnel advertising, is beginning to follow suit.

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Let’s look at why the mid funnel has been so slow to get here, and the ways in which greater transparency and sophistication are transforming how brands understand and activate their mid funnels.

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Legacy challenges of the murky mid-funnel

Brand marketers talk a lot about “full-funnel” impact. But the reality is brands have neglected the middle of the funnel, and as a result, consumers as well. And it makes sense.

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The middle of the funnel is missing because it’s complicated, slow, and expensive to measure, and a lot of content components often are not tied directly to media. As such, while the murky mid funnel currently swallows tens of billions of dollars of marketing budget every year, it delivers very little visibility into its impact and opportunities for improvement. In fact, a recent Demand Gen Report found that 59% of marketers consider the inability to measure mid-funnel activities effectively as one of their biggest challenges.

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TThe result is a marketing funnel that essentially looks like a barbell, without the bar itself. It has weights on either side—corresponding to the focus and expenditure on awareness and conversion, but without a bar of consideration connecting those weights in the middle. Why? Well, that barbell, the middle, is hard to create and even harder to measure. Because marketers can’t measure the mid funnel, their media investments in that area are deficient, or in some instances nonexistent altogether.

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That means there’s a lot of branding spend is going to waste in the form of awareness that’s never converted to consideration. At the same time, the performance end of the funnel is spending way too much money trying to find prospects who, with proper mid-funnel media investment, would naturally flow their way.

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Both problems require better measurement in the middle. Measurement that marketers haven’t seen before. Many of the current measurement tools employed at the top and bottom of the funnel are ill-suited to the needs of the mid funnel. For example, even the most basic of brand health studies are typically quite expensive to conduct, are snapshots in time rather than ongoing investigations, and are too expensive to use ubiquitously across campaigns. At the same time, basic viewability, attention, and engagement metrics don’t offer deeper insight into the impact of content and media on brand perception and consideration.

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Advertisers need a complete picture of their media impact, including in the mid funnel, to move the needle on consideration and boost downstream lower-funnel outcomes. Fortunately, toolsets are evolving to provide just that.

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What it takes to measure the mid-funnel

The mid funnel, by virtue of the amount and variety of content and media that exists within it, is complex. What marketers need is a simple and affordable way of measuring it. Any measurement solution in the mid funnel needs to be capable of solving for three key pain points:

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Cost-efficiency: Brands can’t afford to constantly invest in expensive, one-off brand lift studies. The ideal mid-funnel measurement tool will be integrated into content-focused media-buying platforms at no additional cost.

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Speed: Brands lose opportunities if they can’t optimize their content and media throughout a campaign. A strong mid-funnel measurement tool must provide insights in near real time, compared to the weeks or months typical brand lift studies require.

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Intuitiveness: A lot is happening in the mid funnel, and the associated data analysis can quickly become so complex as to be unmanageable. The ideal measurement tools will let brands understand the impact of their content-driven media with a single score.

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Nativo’s Brand Rank helps brands and agencies measure mid-funnel effectiveness by comparing a brand’s lift in perception against top competitors. Using an always-on baseline and embedded content activation metrics, it shows how a brand ranks within its industry or vertical, showcasing its relative position among competitors based on consumer consideration. Advertisers can track the qualitative impact of campaigns, particularly in terms of brand consideration lift, for a clearer picture of their competitive position. Importantly, it measures within the footprint of the brand’s targeted audience, compared to other solutions whose ranks are based on paneled users.

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The usefulness of this approach was recently demonstrated in a campaign for a state tourism organization that tapped into Nativo’s unique high-impact native ad formats. The organization wanted to better understand how its content and advertising efforts were driving impact, but it had limited budget to invest in brand lift studies.

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The tourism organization leveraged Nativo’s Brand Rank to understand where its destination sat relative to competitor destinations in its audience’s consideration set, both before and after engaging with the organization’s content. Through a control and exposed test with Brand Rank, the travel organization found that it went from a No. 5 position pre-exposure to a No. 1 position post-content exposure, beating out other popular destinations. Overall, the organization saw a 3.5X lift in brand rank as the percentage of people who ranked the destination No. 1 among competing destinations grew from 12% to 43%.

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The tourism organization didn’t have to guess if and how its content campaign was improving consideration. It could see for itself. That’s the power of mid-funnel measurement, and it’s the essential missing element for brands looking to gain a competitive edge with their content and consideration-focused media.

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