Singular & Grow.co Release State of the Industry: Digital Marketing Measurement

Digital ad spending continued to swell in 2017, increasing 16% to reach $224 billion worldwide, with mobile ad spending accounting for a record 63% of total spend, according to estimates by eMarketer.

As the cost and demand for digital ads grow, so too does the importance of digital marketing analytics. Yet the amount of data sources funneling information into the modern-day marketing stack is continuing to expand, placing a heavy burden on marketing teams to effectively ingest, analyze and optimize increasingly large and diversified sets of marketing data.

In Singular & Grow.co’s State of the Industry: Digital Marketing Measurement, we set out to understand how marketers are handling today’s marketing data deluge. Survey results highlight a host of fascinating trends in the digital marketing world and reveal where leading digital marketers are making their largest investments in terms of ad partners, infrastructure and analytics providers.

Produced in partnership with Grow.co, the world’s leading community for growth-focused mobile apps, the State of the Industry survey drew responses from Singular customers including StitchFix, Kabam, Lyft, NexonM, Yelp and Ibotta as well as non-Singular customers.

Respondents represent a broad array of verticals, geos, team sizes, budgets and revenue streams, with more than three-quarters of respondents identifying their businesses as “mobile-first” companies whose primary touchpoint is a mobile app.

Below is a snapshot of findings from the survey. 

Media Sources Surging: The average digital marketer spends across 12 different media sources at any given time, but in 2018, 51% of marketers say they plan to increase the number of media sources they use.

• MarTech Complexity: On average, marketers utilize 17 marketing tools and services to run their digital marketing campaigns.
• Analytics Woes: Notably, only 13% of marketers are confident in the accuracy and completeness of their data, while just 8% of marketers are confident they’re attributing campaigns across devices and platforms.

Average number of media sources, 2017

With this wealth of new data comes major analytics challenges. In 2018, as marketers increase the media sources they use, go deeper on specific platforms, and advance their analytics toolset to support both efforts, the size and diversity of the data they can collect is constantly growing and evolving.

To remain competitive in 2018, mobile marketers understand they must meet these challenges head-on with automated solutions that unlock granularity, quickly expose data inaccuracies and fraud and, above all, centralize the full gamut of marketing data in a single platform. Call it the Catch-22 of modern-day marketing: an ever-increasing need for crystal-clear analytics amid an ever-increasing flood of data.

It’s no surprise, then, that 98% of marketers prefer a single platform for measuring marketing performance.

A single source of truth for marketing data allows marketers to analyze, optimize and automate marketing data with far greater precision and far better results. These are the capabilities that will allow growth-focused apps in 2018 to distinguish themselves in an increasingly competitive digital economy.