eMarketer: What is the IAB working on in terms of measuring the effectiveness of online campaigns?
Joe Laszlo: One of the IAB’s major initiatives for this year is reinforcing the value of the Internet for brand advertising.
“In a bad economy, there’s a biased view that all the Internet is good for is direct response advertising.”
In a bad economy, there’s a biased view that all the Internet is good for is direct response advertising. More people need to know that you can measure brand effectiveness online and there are going to be more ways to do that.
It’s all well and good for us to be evangelizing and educating around the value of the Internet for building brands, but if there are any problems with measuring how well to do, it becomes a deterrent to marketers and agencies.
While we don’t have a program to assess brand effectiveness research, we do realize that it’s an important part of our larger strategy of promoting the Internet for branding.
One thing I think that’s lacking is a way to assess the effectiveness of a campaign if it runs across a broad swath of the Internet. For example, say it runs across 15 different sites and in conjunction with a search engine campaign, plus some social media.
eMarketer: There is a lot of discussion about the “last click” on an ad, site or promotion receiving all the credit for online campaign performance, and there is a number of solutions being tested. The last click becomes a zero-sum game for online brand advertising. What’s your take?
Mr. Laszlo: That “last click” credit makes it look like search performs spectacularly well. And that’s not to imply that search doesn’t perform well. But some of the credit that search gets probably belongs to display advertising campaigns that somebody saw earlier and other things that have an influence on a consumer’s ultimate decision.
“Some of the credit that search gets probably belongs to display advertising campaigns.”
For example, you could have an online campaign and spend half of your budget on search, 30% on display and 20% on video ads. A marketer wants to understand how each of those things influenced consumers that followed through on the message. Effectiveness shouldn’t be measured based on the last thing that inspired a user to click.
eMarketer: Is the IAB working on that issue?
Mr. Laszlo: In the past, we’ve done research on cross-media effectiveness, known as the XMOS studies. We’re not going to set standards or decree what the best methodology is for doing that, but we’re looking to leverage some of those methodologies ourselves.
I have a research project that I’m hoping to get underway this summer. We want to create public case studies based on online ad campaigns that look at how each piece of the campaign contributed to its overall success.
There are several vendors that do this type of cross-media research. We haven’t yet chosen a vendor. We’d want to take into account search, display, video and social media. I’d like to test a campaign with a mobile or in-game advertising component as well. There’s no ideal methodology for doing this kind of cross-platform research.
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