• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 20, 2012

Marketers understand that having the tools to analyze clicks and conversions across search, social, display and other media can improve campaigns. To capitalize on the need, Adometry has released features in its Ad Analytics Suite that enable online advertisers to tap advanced attribution and optimization tools.

The features support trends that are emerging in online marketing, such as the need to discover workable strategies across online media campaigns, determine how different channels and campaigns interact to drive action and identify specific placement-level optimization recommendations to improve overall performance.  

That is prompting marketers to get educated on how they look at attribution, and how modeling gets done. Most continue to move beyond the last click and subjective and simple analytics, to data-driven methods that improve results and ROI.

Paul Pellman, Adometry CEO, believes audience targeting remains strong, but now the focus has moved beyond simple lookalike modeling to more detailed measurements of how different audiences respond to different media. To aid that effort, the company built features like Value-based Audience Reports into the analytics platform.

As online ad spending increases, marketers will need data and attribution models to support online ad campaigns and prove that budgets are allocated correctly. U.S. online advertising spending will grow 23.3% to $39.5 billion this year, compared with 23% to $32.03 billion in 2011, estimated eMarketer.

Pellman said as more advertisers use attribution and begin to see tangible improvement in their results, they will look for more specific insights and reporting capabilities.

The reporting system pulls audience data from multiple partners, including Nielsen, Acxiom, TARGUSInfo and DataLogix -- allowing advertisers to identify the audiences that perform best; where they perform best; and the real value of demographic, interest and in-market data. This allows advertisers to identify the worth of a target segment, based on how it is performing on various sites.

Clients also want more ways to view their data, so the platform has expanded options. The platform allows advertisers to view and organize reports into multiple layers. They can access the data through groups applied to campaigns, sites, placements, keyword groups, or creative.

Platform providers supporting search, social and display are not the only industries that are focusing on attribution modeling. In November, Encore Media Metrics released tools related to the supply side, enabling publishers, ad networks and demand- side platforms to close the gap on allocating budgets.

The Encore analytics platform gives media companies the tools to show advertisers the attributable impact of their media through reports. Seeing actual data drives demand -- a task that usually is credited to search, and should accelerate growth in demand for display advertising while helping marketers to justify the time and investment in new metrics and attribution.