Dive Brief:

• Amid a backdrop of major change in the digital marketing space, the two largest digital advertising platforms — Google and Facebook — separately made announcements on moves that give marketers better insight into ad campaign success.
• Facebook rolled out two new tools this week: a redesigned Delivery Insights dashboard and an Estimated Daily Results feature, according to a company blog post. Delivery Insights' refurbished dashboard includes in-depth auction metrics and trends in advertisement impressions including amount spent, results and cost-per-result. The Estimated Daily Results tool has a budgetary curve and slider bar to help advertisers set ad campaign budgets.
• Google has partnered with Neustar, a provider of real-time information services, for advanced marketing metrics that can help brands better understand the effectiveness of marketing spending across channels and regions, per a press release.

Dive Insight:

Both announcements come at a challenging time for digital marketing. For its part, Facebook had a series of metrics flubs to cap off 2016 that lead many to question its ability to handle measurement internally. Google is also currently under major fire as marketers pull spend from a number of its properties, especially YouTube, over concerns that their ads are appearing next to offensive content.

Given these snafus, marketers' demand for more advertising transparency is especially acute, with thought leaders like P&G's Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard putting their foot down and demanding more media accreditation. 

The new announcements from Facebook and Google don't address those specific areas of concern, but they do indicate that the platforms are well aware of marketers' frustrations and are now aiming to provide more visibility into information that has previously been unavailable or otherwise sealed behind walled gardens.

Google's deal with Neustar demonstrates the premium increasingly being put on real-time, actionable data insights. Cross-channel and omnichannel marketing is still a major skills gap for many professionals in the industry, so the partnership should be a welcome one by those looking to better tie together their efforts. 

“With today’s explosion of data, marketing touchpoints and devices, marketers are flooded daily with complex decisions on how to connect marketing to revenue,” Julie Fleischer, VP of product marketing and marketing solutions at Neustar, said in a statement.

"Sophisticated marketers are demanding more variations in ROI breakdowns and more transparency into what marketing tactics are working," she said. "By partnering with Google, we are helping marketers make better, faster, data-driven decisions that will have a positive impact on business results."