Measurement Platforms Full Review

Measured

www.measured.com

Measured was founded in 2017 as a multi-touch attribution solution for web (desktop) advertisers. The idea was to unify all data from all marketing channels, make decisions based on insights, and run ”experiments” using control testing to identify the best media mix.

Measured has been around for a few years, and while they have not grown to the size of the leading attribution providers, their solution is unique in it’s core offering. Unfortunately the focus has been on the web advertising world, while mobile measurement remains unattended by measured.

Measured offers an approach to incrementality testing based on partial blackouts and matched market tests (i.e. comparing NY to SF, as both are similar size and economic health) or by using an audience split test.

Integration / Development Needed

Measured supports integration with multiple providers.

Almost all ad networks they support are web ad networks and affiliate networks: Share A Sale, Affilae, NetAffiliation, ShareA, Affiliate Future.

When it comes to Mobile – Measured allows advertisers to onboard the data from other attribution solutions like Appsflyer and Adjust, rather than support integrations with mobile ad networks.

The integration itself does not require code which is a nice plus for Measured!

Onboarding

The platform itself is relatively simple to use. It provides analytics and data aggregated across your marketing channels.

Don’t expect the dashboards to look like the mockups Measured has on the website though – the platform itself looks different, and has quite some bugs in it.

We did though like the incrementality insights we found. Too bad Measured doesn’t support Mobile.

Support

Measured doesn’t offer a support policy on their website, and there is no support ticketing platform. Whenever you’ll need any help with anything – you’ll need to reach out to the team.

Measured has been growing fast as a company (from 50 to 70 employees over the past 12 months). There are 2 support people working in India – but they do provide pretty good support whenever you need help.

There’s no online documentation. Note that.

But again – the platform is relatively simple.

Useful insights

Measured provides a platform for incrementality measurement using split audience groups and partial blackout experiments.

This is a useful method to run incrementality measurement as long as there is access to the data.

With web traffic – this option is becoming obsolete while in Mobile the option is not present as browser cookies are non persistent.

The ability to create an audience split has been made redundant in mobile as the operating systems started blocking access to user identifiers.

The platform was supposed to provide clear actionable insights to advertisers offering you advise where to increase budget, where to lower spend based on the incrementality provided by a channel. However, the source of the analysis is all based on “multi-touch” attribution that is slowly vanishing from the world as more and more browsers do not allow access to user level data for any 3^rd parties without the users’ consent.

Accuracy

When comparing Measured with our Google analytics for website, we did find some major discrepancies. Measured does not provide information about the discrepancies, however, when we compared Measured to our BI platform we found that Measured takes its data directly from the ad networks and does not provide deduplication over the data.

Google analytics provided us with more accurate data than Measured.

Secure

As a measurement platform – Measured is not very secure. The platform mainly supports data aggregation from affiliate networks and should have included far better anti-fraud measurement as part of the solution.

Affiliate marketing tends to be infested with fraudulent activity.

Measured placed the entire responsibility of security and accuracy of the data with us (the customers!)

Privacy compliant

Measured solution works using cookie data and user level data for multi-touch attribution.

The solution does not meet current privacy requirements as addressed by major browsers and operating systems.

Measured does have some documents behind a registration wall about how the software supports measurement once identifiers are deprecated – but Measured does not provide any transparent information about how this is actually done.

Unbiased vs. Biased

Measured is an independent company who grew organically over the years. During 2020, Measured took a $2,000,000 loan from “Timia Capital” a debt financing company.

This allowed Measured to grow the team significantly during the past 12 months, especially in Chanai , India.

We could not see any strong bias towards any specific ad network or media platform.

We were surprised by the amount of affiliate networks represented in Measured.com platform and from the fact that Measured did not attempt to solve the measurement problem in Mobile.

But overall – we consider Measured as an unbiased company.

Pricing Model  & Price

Measured offers SaaS pricing at approximately $7,500 per month or $90,000 per year.

For most web advertisers who are looking for an incrementality and media mix measurement the pricing model of Measured does make sense.

There were no hidden costs and additional fees for services.

While the value with measured is small – for the price charged, it’s a good deal

Review Summary:

Measured is a web advertising measurement solution offering advertisers with a multi-touch attribution model and using this to try and measure incrementality. Measured had its success in 2018, but once the browsers started deprecating cookies in browsers (following the same move that happened by Safari and Firefox), the approach of measured.com became irrelevant. Today, measured only serves customers as a data consolidation allowing customers to upload data from various affiliate platforms (pepperjam, ShareASale, affiliate future, affiliea, affiliate future, affiliate by conversant, net affiliation), ad networks (criteo, steelhouse, adroll), and other advertising platforms (roku, the trade desk).

Measured pricing was fairly straightforward. In average, we spent $7,500 per month with Measured (about 1% of our revenues). The costs were high for the value we received.

Pros & Cons:

• Measured processes data from web advertising platforms (typically affiliate networks) helping customers to make budget allocation decisions
• The incrementality “feature” is a set of recommendations for experiments (for example: pause all campaigns on affiliate future for a month to identify if the same affiliate ids operate in another affiliate platforms)
• The suggestion for incrementality testing is to run an audience split test. This is not possible anymore. Seems like the platform has not been updated in a while.

Measurement Platforms Review for Measured:

Support	★★★★★☆☆☆☆	Onboarding	★★★★☆☆☆☆☆
No Dev Needed	★★★★★☆☆☆☆	Privacy Compliant	★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆
Accuracy	★★★★★☆☆☆☆	Pricing Model	★★★★★★★★☆
Useful Insights	★★★★★★☆☆☆	Price	★★★★★★★★☆
Unbiased	★★★★★★★☆☆	Secure	★★★★★★★☆☆