Comcast Spotlight is bringing more bottom-funnel advertising attribution to local television by showing advertisers how many incremental website visits their campaigns generate. “Attribution measured at the local level is a challenge for anybody because your sample sizes get terrible when you’re trying to do measurement at the local level,” says VP of Data Strategy Justin Evans.
“We think a big-data approach can change that,” Evans adds in this Beet.TV interview. He describes it as “a major innovation that our clients are really leaning into.”
It starts with advertisers tagging their websites and Comcast creating a baseline of minute-by-minute traffic to those sites so that it can show subsequent lift generated by campaigns.
“When ads run we measure over the next thirty minutes how much their website traffic goes up correlated with that ad running. We have a model where we take credit for the increase in website traffic over the course of the thirty minutes,” says Evans.
Among the insights to be gained in addition to total incremental website traffic is how many times individual viewers visit the websites and how many of them drill down into product pages. Data also show how different creative iterations performed, along with specific days of the week and geographies.
“It’s an eye opener for them because it’s the first time they’re really been able to have proper accountability for television advertising at the local market.”
Comcast hopes to improve the perception of local TV from “pretty much white space” as regards ad campaign attribution.
“We’re in effect training and educating our clients to work with us in a way where television is held accountable for its results,” Evans says. “We are creating an ongoing dialogue with clients how to improve it over time. We think there’s going to be a whole generation of local advertisers that are now going to think about television in this way and it will really be a game changer.”
