What’s more, when evaluating video and display side by side, consumers exposed to video advertising were 28% more likely to visit the brand site, and nearly twice as likely to conduct a trademark search.

“Confirming expectations and previous industry understanding, video was able to generate a more immediate impact in the first five exposures than display ads in terms of increases in site visitation and search queries,” report the study’s authors.

read full story here.

Do you often find yourself wondering, “I have money to spend. Why won’t anyone get back to me?”

For those of us trying to assemble online media plans and execute campaigns, when we finally get that rare good rep, we feel like breaking into song.

Unfortunately, according to the survey I’ve been running, most people on the buying end aren’t happy campers. Eighty-seven percent of my respondents are dissatisfied with the online media reps they contact to buy advertising — over 50 percent of the time.

What are today’s online media buyers unhappy about?

Sixty-four percent of buyers who contact sites they have no previous relationship with say those sites are typically slower to respond than sites with which they have a previous relationship. The majority of these buyers say requests submitted to new sites go unanswered or are answered too late. Respondents say their number one source of frustration is slow response time or unmet deadlines when they’re trying to put together online media plans.

read full story here.

One insight I think is very helpful and should be included in all Media/Website Dashboards is what I call ‘digital share of voice’. Since we as marketers do not know how much our competitors are spending online (Search & Display advertising), one method that can shed some light is pulling traffic data from Compete.com. Compete is a powerful tool that can show you traffic and engagement metrics for practically any website. It does a variety of things like analyzing competitor keywords, identify site for affiliate and SEO link building, and helps uncover sources of traffic and more.

So back to online share of voice in the market, what I like to do for my clients is not only compare unique visitor data to competitors (as shown in the example above using Heineken and other beers), but get an idea of how effective and how much budget my competitors are spending in the online advertising space. By simply pulling unique visitor traffic, we can then compare the percentage of ‘online share of voice’

of your client’s brand to its competitors. As you can see from the example above, Heineken was clearly kicking butt in May and June as it had the largest percentage of digital traffic. Corona likely ran some sort of online marketing campaign in August or just spent a huge load of money in paid search. Looking at October and November, Budlight.com seems to be taking over 1^st place as it is now ahead of Heineken in terms of internet share of voice.

Okay, this is cool, but what more is this telling us?

Well for one thing, if your clients think they can get away with spending less in digital or think that offline media is enough to generate website traffic, the digital share of voice chart is a good indicator to show if their decision making was right or wrong as we know as analysts that paid search and online display have the highest correlation with website traffic.

There is much more you can do with Compete Pro, especially if you would like to analyze how your competitors are using search. Feel free to also download my free tutorials on how to use data analysis to forecast online conversions, calculate target rate points for digital, optimize beyond CTR, CPC, & CPA and more.

Eric Melchor

Although panel companies like Nielsen and ComScore have developed demographic and population estimates for digital publishers, traditional ratings and circulation metrics (e.g., Gross Rating Points, Target Rating Points, and Cost per Point) are generally not included in digital plans. Digital media plans are not including the denominators required to calculate brand metrics. Thus, it is impossible to know if a media plan achieves the advertiser’s campaign goals.

With that said, we can apply a shorthand technique to estimate audience metrics for digital media plans. Target audience metrics can be estimated for a digital media plan when the publisher’s site audience composition is known. Starting with a calculation of the expected impressions to the target audience and the size of the target audience on the internet, a planner can estimate a media plan’s Target Rating Point (TRPs) – the standard offline metric for a media plan’s target audience reach and frequency. Download the free tutorial to learn how to apply this technique and calculate target rate points for digital media.

Four Dimensions of Online Media

The ‘Big Challenge’ According To Eric Schmidt — And Other Predictions

Google backed away from managing radio and print advertising networks due to lack of “closed loop feedback.”  In other words, the company couldn’t tell an advertiser IF the consumer actually saw the ad or if they acted afterwards. Efforts to embed unique commercial identifiers into radio ads exist, but are still immature. And in print, it’s still not possible to tell who (specifically) is seeing which ads — at least not until someone places sensors between every two pages of my morning newspaper.

Despite this limitation, Schmidt feels that Google will soon crack the code of massive multivariate modeling of both online and offline marketing mix influences by incorporating “management judgment” into the models where data is lacking. This will enable advertisers to parse out the relative contribution of every element of the marketing mix to optimize both the spend level and allocation – even taking into account countless competitive and macro-environmental variables.

That “everything is measurable” and, according to Schmidt, Google has mathematicians who can solve even the most thorny marketing measurement challenges.

That the winning marketers will be those who can rapidly iterate and learn quickly to reallocate resources and attention to what is working at a hyper-local level, taking both personalization and geographic location into account.

On all these fronts, I agree with him (I’ve actually said these very things in this column over the past few years).

So when I caught up with Schmidt in the hallway after his speech, I asked two questions:

1.     How credible are these uber-models likely to be if they fail to account for “non-marketing” variables like operational changes affecting customer experience, and/or the impact of ex-category activities on customers within a category (e.g. how purchase activity in one category may affect purchase interest in another)?

2.     At what point do these models become so complex that they exceed the ability of most humans to understand them, leading to skepticism and doubt fueled by a deep psychological need for self-preservation?

His answers:

1.     “If you can track it, we can incorporate at into the model and determine its relative importance under a variety of circumstances. If you can’t, we can proxy for it with managerial judgment.”

2.     “That is the big challenge, isn’t it?”

So, my takeaway from this interaction is: Google will likely develop a “universal platform” for market mix modeling, which in many respects could be more robust than most of the other tools on the market, especially in terms of seamless integration of online and offline elements, and Web-enabled simulation tools. While it may lack some of the subtle flexibility of a custom-designed model, this platform will likely be “close enough” in overall accuracy, given that it could be a fraction of the cost of custom, if not free. The tool will likely evolve faster to incorporate emerging dynamics and variables, as the company’s scale will enable it to spot and include such things faster than any other analytics shop.

If Google has a vulnerability, it may be underestimating the human variables of the underlying questions (e.g. how much should we spend and where/how should we spend it?) and of the potential solution.

Reflecting over a glass of cabernet several hours later, I realized that Google’s developments are generally good for the marketing discipline, as the company will once again push us all to accelerate our adoption of mathematical pattern recognition as inputs into managerial decisions. Besides, the new human dynamics this acceleration creates will also spur new business opportunities. So everyone wins.

read article and comments here.

Marketers excited for metrics opportunities from Twitter tool

Email Data Source last week debuted a Twitter monitoring tool at the Ad:tech trade show in New York. The e-mail data analysis firm will incorporate the Twitter measurement tool with its existing e-mail analytics tool.

The platform will be available to clients, with plans to market it to prospects as well.

Bill McCloskey, chairman, co-founder and chief evangelist at Email Data Source, said the tool will enable marketers to measure Twitter’s impact on the traditional brand marketing perspectives of reach, frequency and effectiveness.

Tweeters and re-Tweeters are, in a sense, broadcasters, added McCloskey.

“This will allow you to see who your most influential broadcasters are over time,” he said. “It puts the social media conversation back in traditional terms marketers understand.”

Email Data Source will monitor how many people each brand message reaches, who are the most successful “rebroadcasters” of that message; the overall impact of the message and how it relates to the brand’s Web traffic.

Sean Cummings, principal of SXC Marketing, said that Twitter-monitoring tools will help clients who are not fluent with the platform understand it better.

“The clients understand GRPs [gross rating points], and it is speaking to them in that language,” he said. “Until they’re all replaced by people who understand digital media, you have to talk to people in a language they understand. Not having GRPs online has hindered its growth.” Cummings is a former marketer, logging time at both at American Express and Ask.com.

In September, more than 15,000 unique e-mail campaigns contained a brand’s Twitter or Facebook sign-up page, according to Email Data Source’s data. The social media data intelligence could improve a marketer’s ability to evaluate the ROI of marketing efforts through Twitter.

“We’re always trying to understand what our customers are saying, as well as what our competitors are saying to our customers,” said Gretchen Scheiman, partner and associate director for e-mail marketing at OgilvyOne. “This tool gives us the ability to understand both.”

read full article here.

via: eweek.com

Google Dashboard Provides Too Much Info and Yet Not Enough

News Analysis: Google again finds itself in a no-win situation, this time with Google Dashboard. Some claim Google collects too much data in Dashboard, and others say it doesn’t provide enough. Dashboard summarizes the data from the Web services associated with a user’s account. It will list how many Gmail conversations we have going, how many Google Docs we have, Google Calendar appointments and even Web history if we’ve enabled it. But it does not include detail Google collects on us from its server logs, cookies and ads.

News Analysis: With Google Dashboard, Google again finds itself in a no-win situation. In a utopian world, the search engine would be roundly praised for providing a window into the data users generate from using Google applications.

Yet whenever Google puts a foot forward, advertising its action using keywords like “transparency,” “openness” and “privacy,” the company opens itself to a hailstorm of criticism. And that’s what has happened here, with some claiming Google collects too much data in Dashboard and others saying it doesn’t provide enough.

Dashboard summarizes data from the Web services associated with a user’s Google Account. Dashboard, which can be found here or under the Personal Setting section under My Account, will list how many Gmail conversations we have going, how many Google Docs we have, Google Calendar appointments and even Web history if we’ve enabled it.

read full article here.

Just like the title says, I never really knew much about affiliate marketing although I work in digital media. Most of my experience lies in online display, paid search, and traditional offline channels like TV, radio, and print. Back when I was working on the American Express online display direct acquisition campaign, my client was also leading the affiliate marketing team and was going crazy managing affiliate marketing initiatives as well as digital. One thing I do recall is my client mentioning that Amex credit cards were generated more efficiently by affiliates than they were by placing Amex display ads across several different sites. Other than that, I never really knew much about affiliate marketing until the other day when I saw Matt Bailey give a presentation about the subject, and boy was I amazed.

Matt suggested for those who wanted to learn more to check out http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk/. A couple of days later I finally got around to going to the site and there is a wealth of information there. Not to mention, Kirsty McCubbin who runs the site is so friendly and responsive. I sent an email and she immediately responded, and not with just a few words, but rather was genuinely sincere. Most of my questions were geared towards WordPress and she has a great deal of information about how to use WordPress for your affiliate marketing programs. You can read more information here.

via: PR Web

EyeWonder First to Offer Ad Visibility Metrics for Rich Media and Video Ad Campaigns

Atlanta (Vocus/PRWEB ) November 2, 2009 — EyeWonder, Inc., an innovator in interactive digital advertising technologies and services, today announced the global rollout of its Ad Visibility Suite, a set of metrics designed to give advertisers and publishers in-depth analysis of the actual real time an online ad is physically within the viewable area of a browser.

Among the metrics included in the suite are total time (in seconds) an ad is physically visible to users within their browsers, average visible time (in seconds) and visible time by percentage of visible area. Beyond interaction and click-through metrics, the Ad Visibility Suite tells advertisers which parts of their ads are actually visible at any given scroll position.

“As a leading innovator in the interactive digital advertising space, we’re pleased to be the first rich media provider to offer these visibility metrics to our clients,” said Ricky McClellen, EyeWonder’s Chief Information Officer. “They make a great addition to our already robust reporting platform by complementing the ad interaction data we provide. Customers get a more comprehensive view of their ad performance by seeing the exact amount of time users have ads in their browser windows and comparing that with length of engagement. We’re bringing these two pieces of the puzzle together to provide a more complete picture of what constitutes a successful online ad campaign, resulting in more meaningful measurement.”

read full article here.