You know that moment when leadership asks, “How much are we spending on social video?”
You pause — not because you don’t know your campaigns, but because answering means:
- Pulling multiple reports.
- Reconciling mismatched labels.
- Piecing together data from different teams to get to a single number.
That’s not just a reporting headache. It’s a sign your measurement isn’t speaking the same language across teams and platforms.
Standards create a shared foundation, while customization makes measurement fit your business. You need both. But when they don’t align, you don’t just get messy reports — you:
- Lose the ability to benchmark across your business and industry research.
- Undermine the accuracy of measurement models, with errors compounding over time.
- Make budget calls based on incomplete or misleading data.
When customization creates chaos
Your internal taxonomy might work fine for one team — until campaigns cross platforms, departments or agency partners. Each group uses a slightly different structure and classifies things their own way.
Suddenly, something that felt airtight when you set it up starts to break the moment you try to roll it up into a single, unified view.
Misalignment creeps in fast:
- Spend gets scattered across mismatched categories.
- Definitions shift from one platform to another.
- Analysts burn hours stitching reports together to answer a fundamental question.
- Metrics become unreliable, making benchmarking impossible.
Here’s what it looks like in the wild
You’re running three completely separate campaigns — all with social video in the mix:
- Campaign 1: New Product Launch – Video Strategy – Awareness
- Campaign 2: Loyalty Program Promotion – Social Strategy – Prospecting
- Campaign 3: Clearance Event – Direct Response
Different teams own them. Different budgets fund them. Different objectives drive them. Individually, the naming makes sense in each team’s world.
However, weeks later, leadership asks for a roll-up of total social video spending, and you realize these campaigns are classified into three completely different categories in your reporting.
On paper, social video looks underfunded. In reality, it’s scattered across strategies, inconsistently labeled and almost impossible to identify without a manual deep dive.
Dig deeper: 3 ways to get more from your paid social ad spend
From quick fix to scalable solution
The path to clarity starts at setup.
- Indicate when an ad placement is running on social media.
- Classify creative assets by their actual format (e.g., video).
- Capture the buying method (e.g., programmatic guaranteed vs. biddable).
That way, you can roll up all social and video activity — and see precisely where they overlap. In practice, your setup fields might include:
- Channel = social.
- Format = video.
- Funnel stage = Awareness or direct response.
- Buying method = Biddable.
These labels move with the creative or tactic across platforms — no detective work later. From there, make it scalable by adopting industry frameworks like IAB Tech Lab’s:
- Ad Creative ID Framework (ACIF): Assigns unique IDs and structured metadata (format, messaging type, funnel stage, audience target, placement context) to each creative so it travels cleanly between systems.
- Content taxonomy: Standardizes how you classify environments (e.g., finance, news, gaming, lifestyle).
- Audience taxonomy: Provides shared definitions for behavioral, interest-based and intent-based segments.
When classification is standardized from the start — and tied to these taxonomies — you eliminate hours of rework, enable accurate benchmarking and give your measurement/MMM partners clean, ready-to-map data.
What you can do now
To turn standards into everyday practice, focus on small, high-impact moves your teams can adopt immediately.
- Align on definitions and adopt standards: Get your teams on the same page for funnel stages, content categories and audience segments. Anchor them to shared taxonomies and creative metadata frameworks.
- Label setups and classify creative clearly: During campaign setup, indicate when ads run in social and classify creative assets by their format (video, display, etc.) so roll-ups are effortless.
- Clarify KPIs: Decide upfront what counts as engagement, conversion and success — and ensure team consistency.
- Build a translation layer: Map how each platform’s line items and/or tactics align to your taxonomy and keep an (alpha)numeric key so anyone can interpret reports without guesswork.
- Enable benchmarking and integration: Alignment allows you to measure against peers and gives your measurement partners data they can consolidate without heavy manual mapping.
Dig deeper: How to balance ROAS, brand safety and suitability in social media advertising
Customize smartly, standardize strategically
Customization isn’t the enemy. It’s what makes your measurement reflect your business. However, aligning with shared standards ensures your custom setup works with the ecosystem, not against it.
The payoff?
- Benchmarking power: See exactly how you compare to industry norms and across your organization.
- Cleaner integrations: Feed MMM and analytics partners consistent, easy-to-map data.
- AI readiness: Structured metadata gives optimization models the context they need to perform better.
Here’s your challenge: Pick two to three active campaigns right now, align their setup to these principles, and watch what happens. Your next reporting meeting could take 10 minutes instead of three hours — and for once, the answer to “How much are we spending on social video?” will be crystal clear.
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