AdRoll, the performance marketing platform, today published its 2017 State of Performance Marketing Report, a survey of more than 350 marketers across Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, that analyses their perspective on the changing dynamics of the advertising and marketing landscape. The annual report gives unprecedented insight into how marketers see the future of digital marketing evolving.

This year’s survey explored top-of-mind topics including email marketing, programmatic spend, retargeting and full-funnel performance marketing.

In 2017, attribution will continue its prominence at the forefront of marketing discussions. Last year, AdRoll reported attribution had become one of the most discussed topics in digital media. In the time since, industry professionals have only intensified their interest in marketing measurement, specifically, better evaluating their efforts and optimising their decision process.

The 2017 results confirm that almost 80 per cent of marketers find attribution critical or very important to marketing success. Although a majority of marketers still rely on first- or last-click models, 74 per cent reported that they plan on changing their approach in 2017. To underline this importance, 30 per cent of Australian marketers reported spending the majority of their budgets on measurement alone.

To conduct the survey, AdRoll partnered with third-party research company Qualtrics to garner an unbiased view of how marketers are using and spending towards marketing across their businesses.

“As marketers continue to stretch their campaigns across devices and platforms, we need smarter and more sophisticated measurement,” said Ben Sharp, VP AdRoll, APAC. “Attribution is increasingly critical and yet most marketers still rely on single-click attribution, which only measures a portion of the audience.

“The good news is that the majority of marketers are reevaluating their attribution model. In 2017, we’ll see an increase in spend here as more and more marketers dedicate a large portion of their budget to analytics and we predict we’ll see a rise in spend for custom multi-touch attribution.”

Additional key findings of report include:

Programmatic continues to shine
Marketers have continued to embrace a programmatic approach to digital marketing:

• Over 32 per cent of survey respondents said they are currently investing more than half of their budgets in programmatic initiatives alone — almost triple the 11 per cent ANZ marketers were spending according to last year’s State of the Industry report.
• Additionally, more than 80 per cent of marketers state that programmatic results in a greater return on investment than traditional media.
• To this end, 99 per cent of marketers are familiar with paid social advertising and 40 per cent of marketers ran programmatic ads on social channels.

Full-funnel performance marketing holds value
The full-funnel perspective gives marketers the opportunity to adjust the approach to their campaigns based on where a prospect is in the buying cycle:

• In 2016, marketers allocated 67 per cent of their budget 24 per cent of budget went to upselling existing customers and only 9 per cent spent on driving existing loyalty.
• The most successful channels for attracting new customers, according to marketers, were organic social media (40 per cent), programmatic display (36 per cent), paid social media (35 per cent) and paid search (16 per cent).

Email Marketing Goes Dynamic
A majority of marketers stated that their email campaigns populate with content specific to a person’s actions taken online:

• 80 per cent of marketers surveyed in this year’s report claimed that their email campaigns are dynamic based on user behaviour — expanding their aims beyond traditional batch sends.
• Loyalty sends are still the most popular (41 per cent), lead generation came in second (33 per cent) and cross/up-sell (26 per cent) rolled in third.
  One thing marketers had success with in 2016 was integrating their email campaigns with their other marketing efforts, such as messaging, reporting, and KPIs. Over 80 per cent said they were either integrated or very integrated.

To download the full report, click here.