Despite a boom in digital advertising, quantifying online display advertising success is still perplexing many marketers. Not only is the worth of display ads seemingly difficult to measure, but many companies still express scepticism over whether they actually work for their business.

Click-through rate (CTR) remains a vastly over-used metric in the complex digital landscape, despite its inherent limitations. Under CTRs, any display ad seen but not clicked is treated as waste and is attributed no value at all. Mindsets need to change and accept that brand awareness in the digital ecosystem is more about reach and viewability, and less about click-throughs. It’s about how many individuals viewed an ad and whether consumers have engaged with a brand as a result, even on the most basic of levels. So how can marketers assess the true value of their display advertising investments? Here are a few important practices:

Display campaigns first need to be defined by their objectives, and then measured accordingly. Question what it is the campaign is trying to achieve: to drive conversions, get people hunting for a product via a search engine, or drive more traffic to a website? If a display ad prompts consumers to search for a product, shouldn’t it be considered a success?

Next is the requirement for effective creatives combined with intelligent messaging to make the right impact. After all, the whole point of display is to talk to consumers at the point when they are as yet undecided and their levels of intent are naturally a lot lower, which means the power of the message and creative needs to be greater. In situations where levels of intent are inherently higher, the nature of the creative matters less because the consumer already knows what he or she wants to do, or is already interested in buying. All this constitutes an immensely under-appreciated part of the process of optimising a brand’s media mix.

Fortunately, digital provides the opportunity to test a wide range of creative and messaging variants relatively inexpensively. When combined with cross-channel attribution technology that can drill down to the most granular level of data (like creative, message, placement and size) brands can test the types of communication that actually result in their audience exhibiting cross-channel behaviour, even if that behaviour comes days, or weeks, later.

Advertisers need a clear perspective on the touchpoints that have worked most effectively to drive conversions or drive traffic – both online and offline – as well as the ability to quantify and link the impact each attribute has had on that activity. Attribution provides this level of insight by constructing a chronological sequence of interactions that a user has with a brand, creating a multi-dimensional picture that reveals and quantifies a variety of advertising tactics, including online display ads.

Looking at each component of a campaign individually, and as part of a marketing mix, allows for accurate predictions of the impact any potential changes might make to a brand’s promotional efforts. For example, marketers looking to reduce online display spend could, through attribution, discover that this would likely result in a reduced number of search marketing conversions. With attribution, marketers could also drill down to a more granular level and uncover the relative performance of each banner ad in a creative series. Insights such as this not only help brands discover the most effective marketing tactics, but help ensure budget spend is directed towards those areas that will deliver the best results.

Attribution technology can also serve as a unifying platform to finally get creative agencies and media agencies working from the same playbook. While the media agency can get busy concentrating on identifying the best places to target the audience and which channels are most suitable, the creative agency can dedicate its time to testing different creative and messaging strategies to see how each exhibits response. For a brand this only means less hassle, clearer directives and more time to concentrate on the important stuff.

So, for more successful digital campaign planning, it’s time to step away from click-throughs and start giving credit to conversions where it is due. With accurate measurement and attribution, brands can begin to benefit from outstanding actionable insights that will go on to deliver bigger and more immediate returns not only on display advertising investment, but on their overall marketing mix.