MediaPost | Metrics Insider

Attribute That!

Tue, 14 May 2013 13:10:03 -0400

Attribution modeling or path-to-purchase analysis? These concepts are often used in the same context -- and, at times, are confused with one another. The purpose of both is to establish optimal touchpoints for consumer interaction with the brand and to optimize individual online channels to achieve the best cost savings and customer experience. So, what is the difference between the two?

Bring On Good Measurement!

Wed, 08 May 2013 09:31:00 -0400

Online advertisers are blinding themselves. And they're doing it on purpose. The digital channel enables us to track and gather actionable performance data virtually in real time. But we don't do it. I'm not referring to the much-maligned click-through rate, or CTR. Even though CTR still shows up on an RFP from time to time, most of the industry has rightly downplayed the significance of the CTR as a valid performance indicator.

Better Safe Than Sorry

Thu, 02 May 2013 01:12:33 -0400

After months of writing and speaking about Making Measurement Makes Sense (3MS), on my own and with esteemed colleagues from the buy and sell sides, I've learned that redundancy is actually a good thing. This is especially so in terms of the task at hand: changing measurement in a complex ecosystem. While we all crave standards, demand quality and believe that digital media need to be part of big brand allocations on a regular basis, some on the sell-side remain concerned about changing currency too quickly. Most of the concern centers on the technological complexity of assuring stable viewable impressions measurement for transactional purposes.

Industry Trend: Higher Expectations As Marketing Attribution Matures

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:41:00 -0400

As with any service, technology, or combination of both, the expectations of the marketplace grow more sophisticated as the industry matures. Such has been the case in the marketing attribution space over the last 12 months, as brands, agencies, executives, media buyers and marketing analysts have all undergone an education from vendors, analyst firms and other thought leaders in the space.

Out Of Chaos, The Path To Purchase

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 07:13:22 -0400

There is one diagram that any marketer would be capable of sketching from memory, even after being awakened from the depths of an REM sleep cycle. It is a trapezoid with a shorter lower base -- or, perhaps, an overturned truncated cone --featuring several rows of words such as "awareness," "consideration," "engagement," "product discovery," "purchase" and "loyalty" placed within. Recognize it? Yes, it is the good old purchase funnel. For some marketers, this is all they remember from their MBA courses. But the industry has collectively concluded that the traditional purchase funnel is dead

Programmatic Buying Meets Attributed Metrics: A Match Made With Big Data

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 16:26:19 -0400

One of the latest trends in today's digital marketing ecosystem involves the intersection of Big Data, marketing attribution and programmatic media buying. It's a trend that provides a glimpse of a future where the media buying process is much more efficient, and produces results far superior to traditional buying methodologies.

Data Scientists Swim, Surf, Pick And Juggle

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 18:11:00 -0400

As mobile advertising specialists, we depend on the work of our data scientists. They're the ones who figure out exactly what our data can do for us, by applying algorithms that unlock immense value for us and for our clients. But what exactly do data scientists do? Does their day consist of diving into deep blue oceans of data, swimming among shoals of algorithms and algebraic coral? Do they pick away at a rock face of solid data, to find diamond insights compressed over millions of years? Do they surf data? Do they juggle it? Tame it? Ingest it? Given that I have a team of data scientists, I thought it would be interesting to give you a taste of what they do on a daily basis. What are their challenges, and how do they overcome them?

How To Become A Data-Centric Organization

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 12:02:41 -0500

Big Data is more than just a physical presence on a server. It requires a change in thinking, as comScore chief Gian Fulgoni hammered home in a recent blog post. If your marketing organization isn't prepared to accept and leverage the Big Data that's accessible to your business, chances are your competitors will. So how does one prepare for, and align their organization to be more data-driven? As with many challenges, the first step is identifying the roadblocks before considering a solution.

Silence Is Golden

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:03:04 -0500

It seems the notion that silence is golden has lost its luster. As an industry, a collective collaborating to solve thorny measurement issues, we have not been tooting our horns recently. There has been much progress on the development of standards and testing needed to institutionalize a viewable impressions currency and then some.

The Bridges Of Madison Avenue

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 12:46:04 -0500

Madison Avenue today is a study in contrast. The media ecosystem has become so complicated that, just to get a general idea of what is happening in digital, social, set-top and mobile requires supercomputers parsing Big Data terabytes. Yet for many Mad Ave residents, advertising is still a simple two-way street.

Worlds Collide! Bringing Offline Data To An Online World

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 13:32:53 -0500

One of the most complex challenges facing marketers is trying to measure and understand the impact offline or online marketing has on purchases, regardless of where they take place. A classic example of this challenge is the difficulty in understanding the value of direct mail: Does it influence a customer to go online and make a purchase there, or ultimately in a store? How can one track it accurately? To truly understand the impact of the entire marketing mix, businesses need to understand what advertisements those buyers were exposed to before making a purchase.

Four Traits Of A Successful Marketing Attribution Implementation

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:20:49 -0500

In the past I've written about how the implementation of a marketing attribution solution forces certain changes to be made within an organization. These changes are well worth the effort, given the significant (15-30%) increase in return on marketing spend that organizations typically achieve through the use of attribution, not to mention the multiple non-attribution-related benefits those changes provide.

Simplify Targeting And Overcome Low Match Rates

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 08:50:58 -0500

There is an explosive hype focused on leveraging an advertiser's customer data to enable better digital media targeting. Several approaches have sprung up over the years that attempt to individually match customer level data to cookies for targeting ads. These processes include matching registered users through either a persistent cookie or an email address; some simply match a customer's personal information (PII) with permission. The match rates are not great! Some advertisers have reported match rates as low as 10% with only 50% accuracy in identifying gender. With low individual match rates exacerbated by inaccuracy, advertisers should start to rethink their data strategy. Is

A Demon Under The Streetlight

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 11:58:00 -0500

There's an old joke about a man searching for his car keys at night under a streetlight instead of around the car where his keys were ostensibly lost. When asked by a passerby why he was searching there he replies, "Because the light is better under the streetlight!"

Merry Happy Movies

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 10:16:52 -0500

The holiday movie hype is upon us. With the importance of movies as an advertiser category, and with entertainment accounting for $729 million in revenues in the 2012 half-year IAB Internet Advertising Revenue report, the IAB thought it fitting to get a picture of how consumers use digital media to find out about movies and decide what to see.

Marketing Attribution: A Time-To-Market Decision

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 16:08:54 -0500

When planning the implementation of an attribution solution within your organization, there are numerous decisions that will affect the length of time required to complete that implementation and begin benefiting from the insights and recommendations driven by your solution.

Not Every Impression Created Equal: An Ad Served Not Necessarily Ad Viewed

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 10:37:30 -0500

While digital advertising continues to accelerate and evolve, there's no doubt that TV retains its ability to reach large numbers of people over short periods of time. But the explosive growth of online advertising is offering marketers and media buyers other opportunities to reach, engage and influence specific audiences, with a calculated frequency and via more touch points. Irrespective of media, there is always a need for (new) measured metrics and standards that can help inform future campaigns and help better allocate marketing spending to most effectively reach and engage audiences.

Mobile Campaign Measurement: Reality Or Figment Of Our Imagination?

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 10:51:00 -0500

Mobile devices present an opportunity for advertisers to reach consumers anywhere in the world at any time. While marketers can sense the impact of the mobile revolution, there's no scientific evidence to indicate whether mobile advertising drives conversions -- and if so, how?

Clear Guidance

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 10:55:00 -0500

Since the ANA, IAB and 4A's launched Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS), a great deal of progress has been made, specifically in moving digital measurement from a "served" to "viewable" impression standard. The Media Rating Council (MRC), is helming the shift from served to viewable ad impressions for online advertising transactions. On Nov. 14, the MRC issued its first Viewable Impression Advisory. The document and the efforts behind it are a monumental achievement in the history of media currency development and change.

Marketing Attribution: A CMO's Best Friend

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 16:30:02 -0500

Today's CMO occupies a challenging and dynamic place in his or her organization's ecosystem. He is accountable to the CEO for producing results - whether these results are leads, sales, brand equity or a combination - that help achieve the company's business goals. He partners with the CRO (chief revenue officer) to implement programs that fuel the sales organization's pipeline and empower it to close business. He is accountable to the CFO for producing those results at an acceptable cost, and must justify future budget spending based on past and predicted performance. And he manages a team that's responsible for implementing a veritable Rubik's cube of marketing channels, campaigns and tactics designed to produce the results that his C-suite colleagues are expecting.For these reasons, marketing attribution should be the CMO's best friend.

It's Time To Toss Average Frequency Into The Bucket

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 14:28:24 -0400

You are building an ad campaign. You've completed vast amounts of research, worked hard on the creative, media plan and set your goals. Now it's time to figure out frequency -- how many times a person should see each ad. This task is extremely important. If your ad gets either too many or too few views, the whole campaign can derail. And once you've set the frequency, what is the actual probability of meeting it? Most premium publishers and ad exchanges claim they'll help advertisers achieve the perfect frequency target, by ensuring that the average frequency meets a set frequency cap. The key word here is average. But is a frequency cap what you need? If you advertise with different premium publishers, how do you choose the cap for each site? How do you avoid overexposure to people visiting more than one of those sites -- or underexposure to those visiting just one?

How To Calculate Attribution's ROI: The Formula

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 13:52:58 -0400

A question that frequently arises when brands or agencies consider an investment in a marketing attribution solution is how to calculate the return on that investment. Of course, advertisers also tend to realize many incalculable benefits once they implement attribution, including (but not limited to) a stronger faith in the accuracy of their overall measurement practice, a third party accountability layer to evaluate all media partners, and installing the cornerstone of a fully data-driven marketing practice, but fiscal decisions do often require fiscal answers.

Three Simple Steps You Can Take Today To Improve Media Buying

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 10:03:00 -0400

Every election year, the topic of dirty attack ads comes up. Pundits chastise candidates about the advertisements and everyone agrees that politics would be better if candidates focused on positive messages. Yet negative political ads live on despite the finger-wagging. Why? Because campaigns have looked at the history of attack ads and carefully monitored their results using very sophisticated approaches. And the data shows they work. Trying to figure out which ads are most effective is not just a goal of political candidates but of marketers as well. But whether marketers are measuring the wrong things or not considering enough factors, media buying has traditionally been based on poor or misleading metrics.

Modeling Behavior To Target Smarter

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 16:17:25 -0400

Most online marketers now embrace behavioral-based targeting. As more and more marketers focused their online budgets to target based on behavior, the price for specific behaviors became more and more expensive. Automakers began paying top dollar for any user who visited an automotive site; they paid even higher premiums if users visited multiple sites on several occasions. The truth is that a lot of these tracked users are well underway to engage with the brand and are likely to convert anyway -- in short, they'll buy no matter what. If that's the case, then marketers focused exclusively on behavioral targeting may be spending their time and money in vain.

Overlap Reporting And Advanced Attribution

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 10:10:00 -0400

In an effort to maximize conversion rates, today's online marketers take advantage of myriad channels and ad types to reach their customers. They also employ a number of cross-channel strategies to reach users at more moments of purchase consideration, increasing awareness and the probability of conversion -- but that also makes managing and optimizing campaigns increasingly complex. This leads advertisers to wonder, "How much is too much?" That question is answered by attribution-based overlap reporting.

Attribute This

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 09:26:23 -0400

To paraphrase the tagline used in commercials by Ally Bank: "Even children know it takes more than a single ad to convert a prospect." When optimizing online campaigns, the overwhelming majority of advertisers still credit only the last ad event that occurred prior to the conversion. That last event is typically in the form of exposure to a display banner or a click on a paid search link. This is usually referred to as the 'last ad' model. Some advertisers will only attribute credit to an ad if it was clicked - the 'last click' model. It's no wonder, then, that every third post on this blog seems to be about "attribution."

Implementing Attribution Requires Change

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 07:24:52 -0400

For those of you thinking about attribution management solutions, one of the most important things to know before beginning your evaluation process is that marketing attribution measurement will significantly change the practice of marketing within your organization. Unlike other technologies, attribution is not just a piece of software that sits in a corner and is pulled out every now and then to solve a specific issue or meet an ad hoc need. It's a tool that you will live and breathe with every day. But even the easiest to learn, use and navigate attribution software will need to be operationalized within your organization, and that's not necessarily a simple matter.

Facts, Findings, Figures Aren't Enough

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 09:23:00 -0400

Every day new facts, findings, figures, and pronouncements fill my inbox. However, very few insights make it there. So many studies, so much data and so many findings abound, but it seems that it's hard to boil it all down into truly useful intelligence. Even when the findings and figures appear to have been collected using appropriate methodologies, more often than not, my reaction is "This is really interesting -- but what does it mean?"

Hyper-Local & Mobile Data Demystified

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 12:10:30 -0400

For the last decade hyper-local ads were the next big thing. Today, thanks to the proliferation of smartphones and a maturing mobile marketplace, advertisers can reach consumers with a level of location granularity that enables a new form of storytelling. These types of campaigns are now real, but understanding the nuances of location data and the privacy implications are key to running a successful campaign. To understand these nuances, we have suggested four questions you should ask to make the most of hyper-local and mobile marketing opportunities.

Bring On The Social Media Impression

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 11:01:00 -0400

The uncertainty about the future of Facebook has a lot to do with the uncertainty about its metrics. If “social” -- the mentions of brands and recommendations from friends and companies -- is indeed the future of the online advertising business, it is about time we come up with media-like standard metrics to plan and evaluate social advertising.

Although there’s no shortage of measurement companies in social media, such standards are yet to emerge. The increased curiosity of marketers about social networking gave birth to hundreds of "listening" research vendors that perfected the art of monitoring discussion volumes and delivering dashboards centered on posts and mentions of specific issues or brands. The number of times a brand or company is mentioned in blogs, on Facebook or Twitter is generally of interest to advertisers, especially when supplemented with sophisticated sentiment analysis that discerns positive brand mentions from the negative.

Alas, this number cannot be used for planning, buying and optimizing campaigns. It’s time to stop merely counting the posts and bring in the social media impression. The industry is ripe, and all that’s needed is to connect listening tools with metered panel data. While a listening platform records a single post on your brand, that mention is actually read/seen by X number of people. That number is the count of social impressions for that post. Calculating this for all brand mentions will give an idea of the total social impressions recorded for your brand, which we can compare to the volume of paid impressions. By matching that data to the panel for de-duplication, demographics and psychographics, the social media data can complement the campaign opportunity-to-see measures with "social media GRPs."

The "liking" of a brand on Facebook is not an impression; it is an engagement metric. Seeing a "like" posted by someone else, however, is more like being served an impression -- broadcasted by someone who has a high affinity for a brand. Although "liking" is largely unique to Facebook, the same model can be extended to Twitter and LinkedIn followers, along with those who check in with a location based social network such as Foursquare.

The next step would be to discern the value of such GRPs/impressions. One method to assign a value to your earned social media activity would be to estimate how much it would cost to deliver the same volume of impressions through a paid media campaign.

A good average CPM value might be the CPM of ad networks in the paid media campaign, since the site mix could be a good proxy for the earned media site mix.

This calculation could be a useful first step to assess the value of social exposure relative to other media activity. It can sometimes be overly simplistic, however, to equalize social media impression with that of paid media. While a paid media buy comes with various assurances as to where the impression will run, an earned social media impression might be just the 73rd comment on an article. Moreover, while paid media are almost always casting the brand in a positive light, this is not true in social content, where negative consumer feedback is common. So certain adjustments, weights and normalizations are required before a social media impression becomes more like a usual impression.

An alternative method will be to estimate the value of social media impressions in terms of ROI. The most robust (but also most complex and time-consuming) approach would be to create a marketing mix model to explain variations in sales for a brand. This will allow us to understand the impact of all factors that combine to drive sales (e.g., distribution, promotions, advertising, economic factors) and the interaction between them. These results would allow us to see the impact of social media on sales, but also see the dual impact of paid media investment through driving sales directly, and also by driving online buzz.