The marketing analytics category — which spans software services that help measure marketing and media efficacy — has grown significantly in the past three years. According to Forrester’s data, adoption of unified measurement methods has increased by 13% since 2021; marketing mix modeling is one of the top five technologies a marketer plans to use in the next 12 months; and marketers rank media management service providers as the top partner they plan to use over the next 12 months. To meet this demand, we’ve seen new and existing software and service providers introduce and expand their capabilities for media, marketing program, performance, and channel measurement.
Announcing The Forrester Wave™: Marketing Measurement And Optimization, Q3 2023
Marketing measurement and optimization (MMO) professional services providers represent a subset of the marketing analytics category. These providers help B2C marketers gather data about marketing spend in order to measure, analyze, and optimize marketing and media strategies across paid, owned, and earned initiatives. We recently published a landscape of MMO service providers to help marketers understand their business value, market maturity, and market dynamics.
To help marketers select the best provider for their business needs, we just completed The Forrester Wave™: Marketing Measurement And Optimization, Q3 2023. This report identifies the nine most significant marketing measurement service providers — Analytic Partners, Circana, Course5 Intelligence, Ekimetrics, Gain Theory, Ipsos MMA, Kantar, Nielsen, and TransUnion — and assesses the current offering, strategy, and market presence for their strategic and tactical marketing measurement solutions.
Though the providers included have a “services-centric” go-to-market approach (with contracts that include scope of work, access to their UX, training, and education, and supporting services), they all also have a tool that gives clients access to marketing and media performance and builds future investment scenarios. They also offer broader technology stacks that speed up data collection, processing, and enable machine learning models to keep pace with the velocity of data and reduce time to value for insights.
Key MMO Services Market Insights
Our evaluation revealed a market where the top providers:
- Continue to focus on data support and assets. Providers continue to guide clients on how the changing advertising ecosystem and other market forces, like privacy regulation and data deprecation, impact marketing measurement and optimization. Service providers in this evaluation continue to invest in data partnerships to improve processes and management, building proprietary ROI data benchmarks. They are also experimenting in data clean rooms for better and more precise ad and marketing tactic measurement.
- Prioritize agile measurement practices. Client references for the providers evaluated indicated the need for more frequent model updates and analysis to keep pace with changing customer needs. Service providers are offering frequent model refresh, “right time” data ingestion, access to marketing and media performance insights with better charts, graphics, and the ability to build more complex marketing scenario plans.
- Support a brand’s multiple objectives through insight services and education. B2C marketing executives need to drive business growth, but there is a lack of alignment on how to get that done. Service providers recognize the complexity of the market, consumer behaviors, and brand objectives, and they offer services and insights that can help marketing leaders decipher short-term insights — like lift in revenue due to marketing — or long-term impact, like how marketing impacts brand value. To further help B2C marketers make sense of marketing performance, service providers offer a wide range of training and education on data-driven marketing.
Forrester clients can read the full report to see how the vendors stack up — but keep in mind that the written report just scratches the surface of the full evaluation. Download the interactive scorecard tool and use it to customize the Forrester Wave model for your organization’s objectives.
Please feel free to set up an inquiry with me or Joe, and we’ll help you consider how to get the right measurement firm for your specific needs and objectives.
