Price inflation, ad fraud, marketing metrics: 5 killer stats to start your week

1. Weak consumer spend and strong competition keeps prices down

Shop prices declined by 0.4% year on year in August, slower than the 0.1% drop seen in July and marking the fastest rate of decline since June 2018.

Weak consumer spending and heightened competition saw prices in non-food categories fall by 1.5%, compared to July’s decrease of 1.2%.

Food inflation eased slightly to 1.6%, from 1.7% the month prior, although fresh food inflation accelerated in August to 1.4% from 1.2% in July,

Promotional activity at supermarkets slowed the rate of the price increase for non-alcoholic beverages, confectionery, and bread and cereals. Meanwhile, prices of some fresh goods declined in response to market developments; for example, meat prices fell for the fourth consecutive month in August due to a drop in global meat prices.

Lastly, ambient food inflation slowed significantly to 1.8%, from 2.4%.

Source: BRC

2. Britain ranks 14th in the world for ad fraud

Britain had the 14th highest ad fraud rate in the world at 11% in the second quarter, behind Australia (30%), the US (19%) and India, which has the highest rate of ad fraud globally (39%).

The percentages relate to programmatic ads that are determined to be invalid traffic (IVT).

Smartphones experience the highest rate of IVT at 22.7%, followed by tablet (20.3%) and desktop (16.3%).

In-app fraud is three times higher than the web, with more than a third (36.2%) of mobile in-app programmatic video listed as IVT.

However, sites that use ads.text (a text file that publishers and distributors can use to publicly declare the companies they authorise to sell their digital inventory) have on average 8.4% less IVT.

For example, sites without ads.text saw IVT of 15.5%, while the rate on cites that used ads.text was 14.3%.

 Source: Pixalate

3. Satisfaction is the most popular metric used by marketers

 

Satisfaction is the most popular metric used by marketers across the globe and is applied in 53% of all marketing mix decisions studied. Satisfaction is the most used metric in eight of the 16 countries included in analysis of more than 4,000 marketing plans from in excess of 1,600 companies, and features in the top three of used metrics in 13 of the nations.

This is followed by awareness, which is used in 45% of plans. ROI came in third (43%) while other popular metrics include target volume, likability and net profit.

In the UK, the most used metric is satisfaction (51%), followed by awareness (46%).

The study, which looked at 84 marketing and financial metrics, also found managers use about nine metrics per marketing decision on average. 

Source: University of Technology, Sydney

4. Two-thirds of location-based ad spend ‘wasted’

Almost two-thirds of location-based ad spend is being “wasted” because of poor quality data and mis-targeted location impressions.

Inaccurate or poor location data resulted in up to 65% of mis-targeted digital spending, with 36% of spend was wasted due to poor quality location signals and 29% due to mistargeting.

Location data is divided into two types – IP and GPS. GPS data is used in just 14% of location-based ads, with IP data accounting for the rest (86%). But 36% of GPS-enabled apps were found to display location fraud.

But the research found that by improving data transparency, a 40% increase in location signal quality and a 10% increase in accuracy could be achieved.

Source: Location Sciences

5. Marketers waste a fifth of their media dollars on poor quality data

Marketers rely on high-quality data for driving successful marketing initiatives, but they’re struggling to achieve it.

While 82% of 409 organisations surveyed place a high priority on refining data quality, some 26% of marketing campaigns have been negatively impacted by substandard data during the last 12 months.

Wasted media spend is linked to having poor-quality data, with about 21 cents of every media dollar spent in the last year by the organisations surveyed wasted due to poor data quality. This represents a $1.2m (£1m) and $16.5m (£13.7m) average annual loss for the midsize and enterprise organisations respectively.

To improve their data’s insight potential, marketers should strive for marketing and media data that rates as high as possible across seven quality dimensions: timeliness, completeness, consistency, relevance, transparency, accuracy, and representativeness.

A third (33%) of respondents claim the data they use meets the timeliness dimension, followed by completeness (30%) and consistency (30%).

However, just 9% are “mostly” or “completely” confident their data meets all seven.

Source: Forrester Consulting