The vast majority of advertisers believe that poor measurement is preventing them from pumping more money into programmatic budgets.

According to a survey of 214 decision-making marketers with programmatic budgets of over $100,000 a year across EMEA, APAC, and North America, carried out by programmatic agency Infectious Media, nearly 90 per cent of marketers would say they would be able to justify more investment in programmatic with better measurement.

It was found that measurement is seen as the top digital challenge for marketers, with 66 per cent saying that accurately measuring campaigns is either ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ challenging. High viewability was identified as the second biggest challenge, followed by increasing brand safety protection.

In addition, 64 per cent of respondents believe that a lack of education and transparency make programmatic measurement difficult, stating that marketers require more of both to measure programmatic effectively.

“It’s clear from our study that advertisers are waking up to the fact that the measurement model most have relied on for their programmatic campaigns is broken and digital ad spend is being held back as a result,” said Martin Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Infectious Media. “Advertisers are looking to agencies to show greater leadership on how the system can be improved.”

It was also found that advertisers still value clicks as the most important indicator of success, despite distortion by fraud and it being proven as a flawed metric. 56 per cent of respondents said they see number of clicks as the most important metric, followed by 45 per cent saying cost per click and 43 per cent declaring click-through rate.

“Unfortunately, most have been content with the easy option of spending advertisers’ money on cheap inventory that meets a given target on clicks, regardless of the risk of fraud or the limited ROI this delivers,” added Kelly.

“Agencies have a responsibility to educate their clients on the more sophisticated approaches that are available, offering them metrics that better fit their business objectives and challenging them to think beyond clicks.”