A privacy-safe measurement method that creates a fairer playing field between local and international media.
In a media landscape where third-party cookies are disappearing and international platforms increasingly define the measurement framework, it is becoming harder to accurately assess the true impact of campaigns. Click metrics and traditional reporting often provide an incomplete picture, meaning local media receive less recognition than they deserve.
Closed Loop Measurement offers a solution. By linking campaign data to actual purchases in a privacy-safe way, advertisers gain insight into which media channels truly deliver customers. This creates a fairer, more transparent and more results-driven way to evaluate campaign performance.
As a marketer, you have several methods available to evaluate the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing campaigns. One commonly used indicator in digital advertising campaigns is the click-through rate (CTR), which shows how many people clicked on your ad. The next step is to determine whether those people ultimately made a purchase.
However, stricter privacy regulations, cookie banners and the widespread disappearance of third-party cookies have made it much more difficult to measure and attribute online behaviour today. Measurements based solely on clicks and cookies often miss a significant share of the relevant data. This means that not all interactions and conversions can be accurately recorded using this method.
Imagine that 100 people see your ad and 10 of them eventually become customers. Due to privacy settings, cookie banners and browser restrictions, you may not be able to correctly measure or attribute all those conversions. As a result, your campaign may appear to generate less value than it actually does, leading to a distorted view of the results.
It is also essential to look beyond ad clicks.
Click measurement only tells part of the story: it shows who responds directly, but often misses the indirect effects of a campaign.
Many consumers do not take immediate action after seeing an ad, but are influenced throughout their customer journey by multiple touchpoints across different channels.
The total impact of a campaign is therefore often determined by the combination of all those touchpoints, with each channel playing a role at a different moment in the decision-making process.
By focusing only on clicks and direct conversions, you risk underestimating the effect of branding and the broader influence of your campaign on behaviour and perception. That is why it is important to also consider the contribution of all media channels and how they work together to influence the final result.
This is where things often go wrong. When you only look at the last click, meaning the final touchpoint before a purchase, the channel that closes the conversion receives all the credit. As a result, the contribution of earlier touchpoints and the impact of local media channels often remain underexposed. Yet local publishers can play an important role at the start of the customer journey by building brand awareness, creating trust and stimulating initial interest. When success is attributed solely to the last channel in the chain, it creates a distorted view of the real value of each media partner. This can lead to local media being perceived as less efficient or too expensive, while in reality they are an essential link in building brand preference and purchase intent.
By focusing only on the last click, you risk largely missing the effect of branding and the broader contribution of upper-funnel channels.
International platforms are attracting an increasing share of local Belgian budgets, partly because social media platforms are easy to activate. In addition, they often present impressive figures in their reporting: broad reach, high numbers of ad clicks and favourable costs per acquisition (CPA) or per lead (CPL). But how reliable are those results really? Social media platforms often operate as walled gardens and rarely provide fully transparent insight into their measurements.
By comparison, local media can sometimes appear more expensive or less effective simply because they do not report or get measured in the same way.
As a result, you end up optimising for what is easiest to measure, rather than for what actually delivers the most value. Budgets then shift towards channels with the ‘best-looking’ reporting, while the real question you want to answer is simple: which channel delivers high-quality customers, and at what cost?
That is exactly where Closed Loop Measurement makes the difference: it closes the loop between campaign activity and sales results, giving you a much clearer view of the real return generated by your campaign.
Privacy changes and the limited availability of offline sales data make it harder to track the full customer journey.
Big Tech Platforms excel at post-click analytics but only reveal part of the picture.
Connecting media exposure to real online & offline conversion to reveal true business impact.
With the Ads & Data Impact Monitor (AIM), an online survey conducted within a representative panel, we measure the effectiveness of your campaign across all our media channels. We analyse the impact on your brand and also map which concrete actions consumers say they took after seeing your campaign, such as visiting a website, going to a store or making a purchase. This gives advertisers insight into campaign results throughout the full marketing funnel, from brand awareness to conversion.
Closed Loop Measurement focuses on actual purchasing behaviour at the end of the marketing funnel. While AIM is based on reported behaviour through declarative research, Closed Loop Measurement measures factual behaviour based on linked campaign and sales data. Both methodologies provide valuable insights: AIM helps understand the broader brand and behavioural impact of a campaign, while Closed Loop Measurement shows which campaigns effectively led to purchases. Together, they provide a more complete view of real campaign performance.
We make media impact measurable across the entire consumer journey, from first contact to purchase.
The combination of AIM and Closed Loop Measurement provides an end-to-end measurement model for both brand building and sales impact
With Closed Loop Measurement, we link campaign data to sales data in a privacy-safe way via data clean rooms such as InfoSum and LiveRamp.
A data clean room is a secure environment in which databases from different parties can be compared and matched without raw data being exchanged. This allows advertisers and media partners to collaborate based on data while respecting privacy and confidentiality.
A concrete campaign by fashion retailer e5 shows how this works in practice.
Objective: attract new customers and reactivate inactive customers
After the campaign, we linked e5’s online and offline purchases during the promotional period to people who had seen the campaign at Ads & Data. This matching also took place within the secure environment of the data clean room.
This allowed us to determine who had first been exposed to the campaign and then actually made a purchase at e5.
The results?
Real world example
In collaboration with Initiative (Omnicom), Nationale Loterij developed a strategy to reduce its dependence on international platforms and third-party cookies by investing more strongly in its own data. At the same time, they wanted to compare the impact of local Belgian publishers with that of social media platforms. That is why Nationale Loterij was the first in Belgium to set up a structural data collaboration with Ads & Data and other Belgian publishers.
The focus was on a reliable and privacy-safe data collaboration. Nationale Loterij’s database was linked separately to each publisher’s database via InfoSum’s data clean room, without exchanging raw data.
Based on that matching, campaigns were set up and Initiative (Omnicom) carried out an effectiveness measurement. The focus was on what people do after seeing an ad, without using third-party cookies. Instead of looking at who clicked on an ad, they analysed who took action after being exposed to the campaign. This was done by securely linking each publisher’s campaign data to Nationale Loterij’s conversion data within the data clean room.
The results were striking. People who had seen the campaign converted twice as often as people who had not been exposed to the campaign. This is strong proof of the power of local data and campaigns. In addition, local media proved to perform at least as well as social media platforms in terms of conversion.
Thanks to these insights, we can make better use of the impact of local media. By integrating view-through conversions as a performance KPI, we finally have a more accurate, reliable and future-proof measurement method. This approach gives us a real and transparent view of our players across the full funnel, based on verifiable figures.
Toon Diependaele – Project Manager First Party Data – Nationale Loterij
Closed Loop Measurement enables Ads & Data to demonstrate the true impact of local media. It offers advertisers a privacy-proof alternative to international platforms and strengthens our position as a strategic, data-driven partner that creates and proves value across the full marketing funnel.
Ann-Sophie Libbrecht – Innovation Manager – Ads & Data
Closed Loop Measurement finally makes campaign effectiveness tangible. By linking media activity to real return, it creates a more transparent view of which channels deliver customers. This allows budgets to be allocated more purposefully, leading to more efficient campaigns. The key learnings show how this approach contributes to smarter measurement of local media, enabling a fairer comparison with social media. The result: local media perform at least as well in terms of conversion and return.
Measurable return
Fair comparison
Local impact
CLM provides reliable insight into which media channels actually deliver customers.
The method helps advertisers deploy their media budgets more purposefully for more efficient campaigns.
CLM enables an objective comparison between local media and social media platforms.
With CLM, you gain transparent insight into campaign effectiveness without compromising privacy.
CLM shows that local media can perform at least as strongly on conversion and return.
With this key technology, Ads & Data strengthens its position as a local publisher.
Want to hear more about what Closed Loop Measurement could do for your brand? Our experts are here to help.