Working Toward the Solutions for Online Brand Measurement
Big Picture: Five Broad Approaches
It All Starts with Marketing Objectives
The Need for Uniform Standards
Integrate Online and Offline Measurement and Metrics
Embrace Traditional Media Metrics
Get Smart About Attribution Modeling
Building New Measurement Models for Social and Video Environments
Unraveling Consumer Engagement Metrics
Big Picture: Five Broad Approaches
After conducting 24 phone interviews, five video interviews, several round-robin Q&As and an online survey among industry movers-and-shakers—not to mention poring over reams of data from studies and surveys—eMarketer sees the following five broad approaches as key to moving forward on the online brand measurement front:
1. The first critical step for marketers when developing any measurement programs must be to identify their brand’s top marketing objectives.
2. Keep in mind that there is no single measurement system that does it all, nor will there be a silver bullet in the future.
“I don’t think the white knight is going to be riding up on his little pony. It’s going to be the industry working together.”
—Pam Horan, president, Online Publishers Association, in an interview with eMarketer, April 27, 2009
3. A hybrid of traditional and digital approaches will be necessary, which will require a dramatic reinvention of measurement as we know it.
4. The Internet must be rolled up within existing media mix models. There is a clarion call for the traditional metrics of reach, frequency and GRPs to be integrated with the Web—but this will only be the starting point, not the end game.
“There needs to be clear and broad industry education so everybody understands what’s happening.”
—Bryan Wiener, CEO, 360i, in an interview with eMarketer, April 2009
5. Connecting all the dots requires collaboration. Key industry stakeholders will need to work closely together to create seamless databases that talk to each other. One top priority: continuously refining attribution models that assign mathematical weights to the various digital footprints captured along the consumer buying cycle.
It All Starts with Marketing Objectives
You can measure many things online, but if metrics do not align with business objectives, you will not go very far (and you’ll likely drive yourself crazy).
In a survey by Spencer Stuart of senior-level marketers, the best way to measure CMO effectiveness—beyond even profitability and revenue measurement—was to make sure that “marketing is aligned with the business strategy,” as cited by 35% of respondents.
“The most important factor is to have clearly defined goals from the beginning. What are you hoping to achieve? Focus on five or six key metrics that serve as your guiding measurement.”
—Chris Thornton, chief marketing officer, Definition 6, as quoted in Adweek, May 18, 2009
As Mr. Gibs of Nielsen Online stated at the Digital Publishing and Advertising conference in New York on May 12, 2009, “Counting is not the same thing as accountability.” When developing online campaigns, one of the hardest challenges is to identify what specific actions or behaviors you really want to elicit from your consumer target, along with any emotional or qualitative levers that enable them.
Supporting the “primacy of objectives” movement is Ms. Horan of the OPA, who told eMarketer in an interview: “It all comes back to what the campaign goals are. If a marketer is looking for engagement, they have to decide what engagement is. Is it the number of views, is it a behavior post-view, is it a registration?…It may be that they’re looking at engagement as hover time…. Or it might be whether a person clicked on something within the ad.”
Brand advertisers are all trying to figure out how online engagement can impact their brands, but the starting point is pinpointing the brand’s core marketing objective.
This was the case with Amy Fuller, group executive, worldwide consumer marketing/global products & solutions of MasterCard Worldwide. In an interview with eMarketer, Ms. Fuller spoke of engagement: “It really starts there—with asking, ‘What is brand health?’ Is it brand opinion, is it willingness to recommend something, is it willingness to pay a premium, is it being mentioned in social networks, is it someone agreeing to receive a MasterCard?”
She added: “Then, and only then, can we start figuring out, ‘OK, if we’re happy with how we’re measuring engagement—which means looking at qualified actions, not simply clicks—how do we capture what effect that has on those eventual brand health metrics?’”
Mr. Mendenhall of Hewlett-Packard put forward a similar perspective in an interview with eMarketer. What brand marketers are looking for, he said, is “very dependent on the strategy and objectives for the specific product launch, service or promotion, and those vary. It really depends on what I’m trying to accomplish. Am I trying to achieve brand immersion, brand preference or brand experience? Am I trying to generate a lead and then manage the lead through to a sale? Am I trying to drive e-commerce or build a lifetime relationship with a customer?”
Mr. Mendenhall also noted: “Then you think about how many people come through your front door. How many of those people stay? How long do they stay? Where do they go? What do they do? If you have a good CRM capability that pulls those analytics, and you look at the behavioral and contextual footprints, it all becomes incredibly valuable to a marketer. These kinds of analytics become a competitive differentiator.”
The Need for Uniform Standards
In television media, advertisers have simple, defined and relatively limited choices for creative executions, such as the standard 15- or 30-second spot. In radio, the standard is typically 30 or 60 seconds. Magazines offer full pages, half pages and a discrete assortment of other choices. The measurement of offline media has become somewhat standardized as well.
The Nielsen ratings numbers for television, for example, are so standardized they operate as the buying and selling currency for the $70 billion TV business. Of course, few will admit that the actual measurement process itself is less than perfect.
“People in broadcast sort of chuckle at the Tower of Babel that we in digital provide by way of data, as they all implicitly agree to live and die on a ‘standard’ that everyone knows is a proxy for a proxy, with branding standards that are, well, imprecise.”
—Mark Naples, managing partner, WIT Strategy, in an e-mail to eMarketer, June 2, 2009
But on the Internet, there is a seemingly unlimited number of ad format options available as well as endless choices for the measurement of online ad campaigns.
Consequently, there is now a tension in the industry between locking down standards—including agreed-upon definitions and common measurement platforms—and allowing for innovation, flexibility and creativity. Certainly, most can agree that standards for definitions are an absolute must. For example, stakeholders should all have the same thing in mind when they talk of impressions.
This was emphasized by Jim Meskauskas of ICON International in an e-mail to eMarketer: “We should certainly start somewhere by defining how we articulate the ‘facts’ of our discipline (reach, frequency, impressions, engagement).”
However, Mr. Meskauskas provided an important proviso: “But if what we are talking about pertains to the amorphous (e.g., engagement), then how we talk about it will also be amorphous.”
So what about standardization of measurement platforms? Many worry that a single measurement technology or company will enjoy a monopoly, similar to the Nielsen model for television buying. Others are concerned that a premature, one-size-fits-all measurement model will stifle innovation and creativity in the industry. The latter concern, according to some, is unwarranted.
Said David Smith, CEO of interactive agency Mediasmith, in a June 5, 2009, interview with eMarketer, “Yes, innovation is critical—but only after you’ve run all the numbers, and only as long as you stay within the guidelines.” In other words, the structure imposed by a uniform measurement process will actually provide freedom to innovate and endlessly test creative options.
“[We need] industry standard measures everyone can agree on. Measures that go beyond just standard clicks and traffic measures.”
—Yosi Heber, president, Oxford Hill Partners LLC, in response to an eMarketer poll fielded by InsightExpress, April 2009
In the poll eMarketer organized for this report, 46% of respondents agreed with the following statement:
“Single standards for ad metrics and online performance systems, set by a leading industry group such as the IAB, are the major step needed to boost the growth of brand advertising online.”
Further, only 27% of respondents disagreed, leaving 27% on the fence.
When asked to elaborate on why they agreed or disagreed, respondents were mixed in their opinions on the need for measurement standards. Some felt that the industry needs standards to succeed, while others believed they would be “nice to have,” but would not “make or break” the growth of brand advertising online:
The director of research from the IAB, Mr. Laszlo, supports some level of standardization, as he told eMarketer in an interview. “The market as a whole should start to narrow down the total number of metrics,” he explained. “There are so many different things to measure that it’s hard to say which metrics are the best to use.”
Representing the publisher point of view is Ms. Horan of the OPA. “In the long run,” she noted in an interview with eMarketer, “would it be great for us to have a single standard to measure the brand impact of online advertising—something that’s interchangeable between all the media? Yes. I hope it happens in my lifetime.”
Media agency executives, who are tasked with much of the hands-on work that goes into measurement, were similarly predisposed toward standards. Speaking passionately in favor of consistent standards for brand measurement was Cary Tilds of Mindshare-Team Detroit. “Consistently measuring tactics for digital advertising for their branding effect provides the marketer the most relevant information,” she said in an interview with eMarketer. “Random acts of measurement are OK, but they don’t provide a consistent approach. If you are consistent, you can improve and evolve.”
Ms. Tilds added, “I want to focus on the creativity of the actual media deployment and not argue about audience composition or over how to measure something. I want to debate the next big idea. The industry needs consistent dialogue, agreement on standards of methodology and support from the IAB, the 4A’s and the ARF.”
“[We need] enough standards to establish a strong foundation, but not so many that brands are constrained. [We need] more work on conversion attribution…and advances in social graph measurement and analytics.”
—Jeff Lanctot, chief strategy officer, Razorfish, in an interview with eMarketer, April 28, 2009
Before we jump to the conclusion, however, that measurement standards represent the panacea everyone is hoping for, Mr. Lanctot of Razorfish, who personally believes in the formation of standards, added this sobering perspective: “We tend to put too much weight on standards. There’s this view that once we have some better brand measurement standards in place, the dollars will flow. I think that’s overly optimistic.”
Q&A: Should the industry create a standardized online brand measurement platform?
“There really isn’t a standardized way of looking at brand health, online or offline. Rather than trying to standardize, why not develop a few different ways of looking at brand health?” Full Interview
“I don’t think it would be a bad idea. It could be accomplished through a research consortium or through agency networks. VivaKi and The Pool is an example. (The Pool is a group of online video suppliers, such as Hulu and CBS, and marketers that include Allstate and Purina, that are developing a replacement for the standard preroll video ad unit.) There is an opportunity to share insights and data with other companies. I think standards would help everybody in the industry.” Full Interview
“The market as a whole should start to narrow down the total number of metrics. There are so many different things to measure that it’s hard to say what the best metrics are. You run the risk of having so much data that you can’t draw the story out of it.” Full Interview
“It’s not the industry that would create standards, it’s an independent research firm that would work with the IAB. It’s probably a couple of years off. Nielsen is the likely one to get that going.” Full Interview
Integrate Online and Offline Measurement and Metrics
Beyond developing uniform standards within the online ad measurement world, there is the larger issue of integrating measurements across online and offline media.
In the previous section, we reviewed survey data from the 4A’s and ANA that showed clients and their agencies are not where they’d like to be in terms of integrating measurement data from their offline and online advertising efforts. In their related white paper, however, the 4A’s and ANA offered up some concrete advice for dealing with the integration issue, including these six tips:
1. Educate yourself. Become as educated as possible on digital media; network with others who have paved the way by successfully incorporating digital into their campaigns.
2. Set goals and objectives. Set clear goals and understand your business objectives upfront.
3. Understand your consumer. Think about the consumers you are trying to reach, and understand where they go online and what they do there.
4. Be willing to test and learn. Understand that early pilots and “failures” can lead to big wins later. Reserve at least a small portion of your budget for experimentation.
5. Integrate your planning. Digital and traditional media must be planned together, not in silos. Do not regard digital as a separate “add-on.” Keep in mind that no media vehicle or marketing discipline succeeds on its own.
6. Measure. Commit to metrics and analytics, and use them to make your business case. Agree upfront on the definition of success.
In an interview with eMarketer, ANA CEO Bob Liodice underscored the need for marketers to look at the whole media pie when assessing online brand measurement. Said Mr. Liodice, “Our concern is about brand measurement in total, online or offline. The vehicle or approach to brand measurement is far less relevant than what it is we are trying to accomplish.”
He continued: “As we bundle and integrate marketing, rather than asking whether online, television, radio, print or outdoor advertising is working, we should ask, how the heck are all of these things working together? It’s not effective to look at digital in isolation from the rest of the marketing mix.”
Many in the online ad industry, from all different vantage points, feel strongly that measurement success will only come if the Internet adopts the very same metrics used by traditional media.
“The best thing would be to measure online branding the way we measure offline branding: awareness, reach, impact, recognition—coupled with response all the way to purchase.”
—Jim Sterne, founder of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit and chairman of the Web Analytics Association, in response to an eMarketer poll fielded by InsightExpress, April 2009
Embrace Traditional Media Metrics
Having established that standards for online measurement would be helpful and that there is a growing need to integrate online and offline metrics, this raises a serious question: Would it make sense for the Internet to adopt the standard media planning and buying metrics of the traditional world—namely reach, frequency and GRPs? There is a growing consensus in the industry that yes, it does make sense.
“[We need] basic reach, frequency and GRP forecasts for planning and post-campaign analysis that have some semblance to reality, [so there is an] ability to reconcile.”
—Young-Bean Song, senior director of analytics and the Atlas Institute for Microsoft Advertising, in an interview with eMarketer, April 16, 2009
In the interviews eMarketer conducted with industry leaders for this report, a strong majority conceded that it is now time for the Internet to embrace the GRP, reach and frequency metrics long used by television, radio and print advertisers. But there were also a few dissenters.
The resistance thus far to GRP adoption has been twofold. First, those pioneers who helped create the market for online advertising—envisioning its limitless possibilities for interaction and engagement—are loath to shackle it down with the old metrics of the past. Second, formulating and applying GRPs to the online space is just plain difficult. As David Smith of Mediasmith told eMarketer in an interview, “The [GRP models for online advertising] already exist, but most people just don’t understand the math.”
But now the tide is turning and the pressure is on. GRPs are making their way online.
“You will never see P&G and Unilever and those guys spend more than single digits [millions] online unless we give them reach, frequency and GRP numbers. Their business models are based on media mix models where those are the inputs and outputs.”
—Young-Bean Song, senior director of analytics and the Atlas Institute for Microsoft Advertising, in an interview with eMarketer, April 16, 2009
Without doubt, the strongest proponent of GRP adoption was Mr. Song of the Atlas Institute (part of Microsoft). A pioneer in the field of online measurement and analytics, Mr. Song argued that adopting GRPs is “fundamental” to the Internet’s growth as an advertising vehicle.
“[In the branding world], we don’t have a perfect view of ROI,” he explained. “So we revert back to something that we can all latch onto, something that makes apples-to-apples comparisons—fundamental metrics around reach and frequency. So marketers ask, ‘Am I reaching my target audience and am I doing that cost-effectively?’”
He added: “As soon as…we give advertisers the reach, frequency and GRP numbers they want, they’ll plug those into their regression and media mix models and they’re going to say, ‘Wow, I should be spending 12% of my budget online.’” (Note: The current industrywide allocation is just under 10%.)
Mr. Song continued, “Ten years from now we’re still going to be buying media on a CPM basis. These foundational metrics aren’t obsolete and you can reconcile them on the back end with ad-serving data. It’s something both publishers and advertisers can look at and agree on together.”
Many in the research field agree that GRPs should be adopted for online.
“I think one would be crazy to not continue to use that [GRP] metric,” said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore. “What it’s telling you is how many times you reached the person with an ad, and how many people you’ve reached. I mean, if you don’t have that, I don’t see how you can really understand the intricacies of your media plan or compare it across media…. That’s the way media is sold. We produce GRP measures directly analogous to TV today, directly analogous to print, to radio.”
Or, as John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen Online, put it in an interview with eMarketer: “Advertisers have to say, ‘I don’t care how many impressions I buy, I need to reach 10 million women age 18 to 24.’”
Mr. Hecht of VivaKi was also adamant that GRPs are necessary from an agency perspective. “Yes, I think reach is relevant,” he said in an interview with eMarketer. “The form in which you measure it isn’t as relevant. GRPs keep things simple. Going out and reaching a lot of people is relevant.”
Representing the online publisher’s side, Jim Spanfeller of Forbes.com and Ms. Horan of the OPA agreed that GRPs are needed online.
“In the offline world, GRPs are the metric,” said Mr. Spanfeller. “In the online world, most of the major online spenders have come up with their own methodology for online GRPs, but currently, there is no fully realized version of gross rating points for the Web. We should measure reach, we should measure frequency and the four basic brand metrics.”
Ms. Horan noted, “Ultimately, I think [GRPs] is where we need to get to. We need a metric that will allow marketers to mix and match and to allocate dollars across whatever the platform is.”
Marketers also seem to be on board. As one brand marketer expressed it in the eMarketer/InsightExpress poll: “We need to be able to model online along with other (traditional) media channels in a standardized fashion to create reach and frequency. Digital providers continue to resist this. We believe that until this is done there won’t be the kind of scale online providers are looking for. This does not replace the other valuable and distinct measurement options currently available; it simply provides the tools needed to plan at the brand level.”
Dissenting Opinions on the GRP Issue
Not everyone agrees with the GRP position. In an interview with eMarketer, senior marketer Ms. Fuller of MasterCard stated her reasons for taking the opposing view.
“I’m not looking for the same metrics,” such as GRPs, Ms. Fuller explained. “We have different expectations…. We use digital media to tell more complicated stories and drive engagement. The expectation for offline media is to deliver reach and frequency. I think they operate differently; I’m not looking for identical metrics [online].”
From the research side, Mr. Gibs of Nielsen felt the GRP had lost its relevance in the highly fragmented media world in which we live.
“The GRP metric is like a 50-year-old metric,” he said. “It’s very well-designed for when there was a world of three TV networks. It’s less well-designed for a world where there are hundreds and hundreds of TV networks and millions and millions of Websites.”
Instead of reverting back to traditional GRPs, Mr. Gibs argues that the industry should seek to build a new type of currency model for Web measurement, one based on quality of data and transparency: “Transparency means that the clients need to know exactly what goes into it [the model] so they can trust the numbers that are being used for the buying [process].”
Another problem cited about GRPs is that they are too limiting. A marketer relying solely on reach and frequency would fail to capture the whole picture of exposure to online advertising, particularly the potentially rich information that comes from online searches, social sites, mobile activity or video streams. Speaking with eMarketer from the agency perspective, Mr. Lanctot of Razorfish indicated that traditional media mix models, including the reliance on GRPs, are falling apart.
“Looking beyond measurement within a specific media channel, the media mix models begin to break when you include digital in the mix,” said Mr. Lanctot. “Consumer behavior online and on mobile devices is all over the place. Senior marketers are opening their eyes and saying, ‘OK, it’s time to forget everything that I knew.’”
He suggested that the solution lies with a hybrid approach, using both panels and server-side data. He anticipates that the aggregation and merging of different data sets will get us closer to the truth and increase the trust advertisers have in the data results.
Also from the agency perspective, Yaakov Kimelfeld, vice president of digital research and analytics director at MediaVest USA, worried that GRP metrics overemphasize demographics at the expense of potentially more meaningful determinants such as attitudes and behavior. Mr. Kimelfeld wrote in an August 1, 2008, article in MediaPost, “Focusing on reach and frequency limits a digital campaign’s ability to serve ads based on specific audience characteristics other than demographics, such as previous purchases and online behavior. In the end, these narrower criteria may be more effective in predicting future purchase behavior than demographics.”
Finally, in an interview with eMarketer, Jim Dravillas, senior partner-executive director of analytics at Neo@Ogilvy, posed a question for proponents of the GRP: “Why does the Internet have to model itself on traditional modes of measurement? The offline media has to adapt to the digital environment. My end goal is not the GRP itself, my end goal is the impact.”
However, Mr. Dravillas conceded that traditional metrics do have a place at the table. “The GRP is still very helpful from a planning standpoint, but not as a success measure. I want to try to reach as many of my target audience as I can in the most effective way possible.”
How to Make the GRP Work for Online
The GRP metric is basically a blunt measure for how many people your advertising reaches, and at what level of frequency.
Mr. Song of the Atlas Institute said it best in his interview with eMarketer: “The problem with the online impression—which is the closest thing to a GRP right now—is that it doesn’t have a denominator. What I mean by that is, how many impressions did I deliver to the universe of women 18 to 45? That’s the denominator. The GRP is just the numerator. How many gross impressions did I deliver? [Online,] it’s hard to know what the denominator is. It’s hard to know how many of those impressions that you served actually went to women 18 to 45. This is an area where the TV and print folks actually have an advantage.”
From a branding perspective, Mr. Song sees marketers knowing more about their audience in traditional media than they do online. “You actually know less in the online space with the same amount of data than you would in the offline space. You don’t know what the frequency is going to be. You don’t know what percentage of the target audience you’re going to reach. The only thing you know that’s in common is the number of impressions.”
In his interview with eMarketer, Mr. Song went on to say that Atlas and other groups, working in collaboration, are figuring out ways to measure the elusive denominator—the total universe of the target population.
“We’re not the only ones working on this. It’s also Google, Yahoo!, AOL and online networks that have large, registered user bases and ad-serving technology to track everything on a census level and all the gross impressions. They will combine data sets to provide traditional advertisers reach, frequency and GRPs. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the foundation,” he explained.
Taking another tack on the GRP front is Ms. Tilds, senior vice president at WPP’s agency Mindshare-Team Detroit. Based on the notion that online and offline measurement platforms need to “talk” to each other, the agency has developed a new metric called the iGRP, or Internet gross rating point. This metric was built to allow for cross-platform measurement between television and online video buys. Said Ms. Tilds, “The iGRP’s purpose is to confirm how to go about determining audience reach and frequency…planning against audience composition.”
She views the iGRP, currently only used for online video, as merely a starting point in a long evolution: “The GRP is still very relevant. However, we need to evolve the GRP/iGRP as we evolve the media delivery and accountability across multiple screens and channels.”
Get Smart About Attribution Modeling
Attribution modeling is all the rage in the marketing community. Essentially, it seeks to attribute different quantitative weights to the various consumer touchpoints in an advertising campaign, from banner ads and sponsorships to online video ads, brand Website interactions and search activity.
As such, attribution modeling is essentially an offshoot of the media mix modeling that traditional advertisers have been doing for years. Media mix modeling helps advertisers determine which media inputs will have the most effective (and efficient) impact on sales. They rely heavily on databases, which must be synced up to provide a holistic view of results.
But attribution models need to go beyond the limited data-capture capabilities of today’s media mix models and capitalize on the unique information provided by digital platforms, particularly data relating to intent. As Mr. Kimelfeld, analytics director at MediaVest USA, explained on a phone call with eMarketer, the Internet offers up digital footprints that can imply intent to act leading to purchase.
In his February 1, 2009, article in MediaPost, Mr. Kimelfeld brought up the example of consumers looking to purchase a car. He wrote, “The Internet [opens] up a world of searching, price comparison, consumer reviews and other user resources that have generated hard data proving that consumers are actively considering the advertised model—long before they start showing up at the dealership. Captured on a daily or even hourly basis, these events…point to the next level of the campaign effects hierarchy, a more advanced one than branding: They indicate consumers’ intent to act toward the purchase.”
“Marketers need to understand not only what works retrospectively, but how they can use data proactively to make better decisions about the audiences they buy and the way they deliver messages,” said Konrad Feldman, CEO and co-founder of Quantcast, in an interview with eMarketer. “When you have a programmatic way of using that sort of insight across a broad range of media, you begin to break down barriers.”
“In the case where search has to compete for a budget against other activities, it wins, as it generally delivers the most efficient returns. Only companies that do attribution modeling and look at media spends holistically can allocate budgets appropriately across search, display and other activities.”
—Anonymous agency executive respondent from eMarketer/InsightExpress poll, April 2009
The absolute level of ad spending behind interactive has typically been too small to meet the thresholds required in large and complex media mix models. As Mr. Fulgoni said, “I don’t think [media mix models] are sensitive enough to pick up the impact of online. As time goes by and Internet spending continues to grow, these models will become more relevant.”
Another challenge with attribution models is the sheer complexity introduced by digital variables in an already complex modeling system.
“When models begin to approach the complexity of the reality they’re trying to explain, they become just as difficult to interpret—and insight is lost.”
—James B. Ramsey, renowned mathematician and economics professor at New York University; father of eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey
As Mr. Kimelfeld of MediaVest put it, the biggest challenge with attribution models is devising methods for “attributing consumer intent manifestations to individual media platforms and campaigns.”
Exploring Solutions
The bottom line: Mastering how to build effective attribution models is going to come down to plain old hard work.
“There’s a lot of heavy lifting to be done in terms of making the appropriate attributions and setting up rules because too many marketers are crediting the last click,” said Bryan Wiener, CEO of 360i, in an interview with eMarketer. “The main complaint is that the last click is getting a disproportionate amount of the credit, and the earlier paid clicks—from display advertising, e-mail and other things that contributed to the consumer reaching a decision—are not getting appropriate credit.”
Several key players in the online advertising ecosystem are rolling up their sleeves to develop and refine solutions for modeling, including the Atlas Institute (part of Microsoft), comScore and Nielsen Online.
Mr. Gibs refers to Nielsen’s version of the concept as “media allocation modeling,” which applies weights to “each creative or placement or whatever. And what’s important is then you can start saying, ‘OK, so what’s the role of search?’ and you can layer search on top. You can say, ‘What’s the role of that microsite I built?’ OK, then you can layer the microsite on top. ‘What’s the role of video versus rich media versus standard display?’ OK, then you can layer them on top.”
Ultimately, attribution models should be designed to tightly align data results to the marketer’s key objectives, which in many cases are some sort of sales activity.
“Remember why you’re advertising. You are not advertising for clicks or [gross rating points]. What you’re advertising for is to sell me stuff or change perception, and that’s what we need to be measuring against.”
—Carrie Frolich, managing director, digital, Mediaedge:cia, as quoted in Advertising Age, May 18, 2009
As an example, Nielsen, in a partnership with Yahoo!, is able to match online ad exposures to a panel of shoppers through its Homescan unit. Said Mr. Gibs, “If a person saw an ad and they bought a product, it means the ad made them buy the product. So, it’s a fairly straightforward connection between the two.”
Mr. Hecht of VivaKi has a slightly different view of the problem and, therefore, the solution. “The most broken part of Web [measurement] today is the attitudinal piece,” he said to Advertising Age on May 18, 2009. He believes “the killer app will be a sort of always-on brand-health meter” that he could dive into on a regular basis to gauge online ad effectiveness.
“If everyone used a transactions-based model, we would have a more accountable, defensible advertising model, which in turn would create more stability and confidence in the interactive industry.”
—Scott Knoll, general manager and vice president of display media, Datran Media, in an article on iMedia Connection, May 5, 2009
Scott Knoll, general manager and vice president of display media at Datran Media, said the ultimate solution is to marry three sets of consumer data into a single database that captures:
Mr. Knoll provided an example from one of his clients: “A national tourism agency wanted to run a new advertising campaign and needed direction on campaign targeting. Drawing on transactional and anonymous demographics data from a variety of sources, we found that consumers who responded the best to the agency’s advertising were single couples, with no children, incomes in the $100k range, and between the ages of 26 and 45. Better data means marketers can make business and creative suggestions with new data insights. With this information, the agency was better armed to target their future campaigns to consumers who would be the most receptive.”
Another example of successful attribution modeling comes from Chrysler and its ad agency, Organic, which designed a media modeling system that helped the automaker allocate its marketing dollars more efficiently, including between digital and offline media. A key insight making the model possible was the fact that 70% to 80% of consumers typically research car purchases online.
“In refining the model, Organic learned how certain ads spur people to visit the Web,” reported The Wall Street Journal in May 2009. “It then figured out which Web activities translate into actual auto sales. Some actions, such as scheduling a test drive online or entering a ZIP code to locate a dealer, are a good predictor of sales…. The result was a system that predicted 2008 sales within one percentage point of actual sales figures for its Jeep brands.”
Partnerships Are Proliferating
Partnerships between multiple industry players are rapidly emerging with the objective of amassing and statistically fusing tons of data culled from numerous touchpoints. Such collaborations are designed to get a holistic picture of consumers, and the impact advertising has on their attitudes and behaviors, all the way down to the transactional level.
Panel-based measurement firms such as comScore, Nielsen, Quantcast and Compete, for example, are all working on multidisciplinary databases that can be mined to connect advertising exposure with behaviors such as search, site visitation, video-viewing and, ultimately, purchases.
“We don’t think there is one magical metric. You need to triangulate across several data points.”
—Stephen DiMarco, chief marketing officer, Compete, as quoted in Advertising Age, May 18, 2009
As another example, Datran Media, a digital marketing technology company with a large database of e-mail and postal addresses, is able to append offline information through its collaboration with numerous offline data sources, including Acxiom (household data), IXI (financial data), MindSet Marketing Solutions (healthcare data) and NextAction (retail data). This bundling of third-party verified data, packaged under the product name Aperture, allows marketers to better understand and measure the audience seeing and responding to their ads, whether those ads are banners, rich media units or video ads.
Similarly, Omniture and WPP’s Kantar Group are launching a joint effort that brings together data and analytics assembled from e-mail, search, display ads and traditional forms of media, creating a “multichannel view,” according to John Mellor, executive vice president at Omniture. Also involved in the partnership are Dynamic Logic and TNS Media Compete.
Finally, research powerhouse Nielsen is combining information from its recently acquired IAG unit with its Homescan data to evaluate the link between attitudes and sales.
“It’s going to take a truly concerted effort on the part of publishers and other intermediaries to create inventory that is truly attractive to the creative community and can be exploited effectively by the creative community.”
—Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations, The New York Times Co., in an interview with eMarketer, April 2009
Championing the View-Through
Another form of attribution modeling is the view-through conversion—a metric that captures what happens after the consumer is exposed to advertising, without the consumer necessarily clicking on any ads. Unlike immediate clicks, view-throughs allow for the lag effects of time.
Mr. Song of Atlas describes it as follows: “People [are] exposed to ads, don’t click on them, but actually end up on the advertiser’s site to convert. We refer to them as view-through conversions…. There are about 10 times the number of view-through conversions as there are click-through conversions. [But] the view-through conversions, as much as people want to add them to their ROI metrics, are not a measure of direct response. They’re a measure of whether you’re reaching the right audience.”
Mr. Song continued, “I call it behavior-based target reach analysis. So instead of a reach analysis that’s based on demographics, it’s actually based on the behavior of people coming to your site, people who are turning into leads.”
View-throughs are helpful because they account for the fact that branding takes place over time. Many advertisers attach zero weight to view-throughs—often simply because they fail to measure them. Others give view-throughs all the credit for whatever results are seen. However, sophisticated tools are being developed to identify the ideal weight—between 0% and 100%—for any given campaign.
View-through measurements are offered by a number of players in the market, including Google/DoubleClick, Microsoft/Atlas and comScore. In one study, comScore measured the impact of view-throughs over time and found that they lifted the likelihood a consumer would visit the advertiser’s Website. The average lift was highest (up 54%) in the two weeks after exposure; however, even after four weeks, the lift continued (up 45.7%).
Building New Measurement Models for Social and Video Environments
Advertising on social networks and certain video sites can provide marketers with new and exciting opportunities to actually listen to consumers and find out how their brands and advertising campaigns are perceived in real time. While the measurement of these interactions is still in its early stages, there is a huge payoff for those willing to invest the time, energy and money to innovate. Moreover, the benefits go way beyond the confines of the social media platform.
“I view listening as an important analytic,” said Mr. Mendenhall of Hewlett-Packard. “As you employ listening and other analytics, they start to drive your strategy at a macro-level. They either reinforce your strategy or correct it, and give you opportunities for ideas, products, services, segments and/or geographies that you’re not even in.”
Doug Weaver, founder and CEO of the Upstream Group, said social media can be like a Richter scale for marketers wanting to gauge the impact of their entire marketing efforts.
“For perhaps the first time ever, marketers can put a campaign or a message out into the public consciousness and then really hear and see its impact,” wrote Mr. Weaver in his May 2009 newsletter. “A brand can throw rocks into the pond and then measure both the quantity and quality of the ripples that follow. By all means, pour your time, money and resources into this channel to really understand the full ROI of all your marketing activity.”
Such listening efforts conducted online can provide marketers with a sort of inexpensive “sounding board” for creative concepts they might want to run offline. This can help advertisers save money by testing creative concepts online to see what works before investing in far more expensive television commercials or magazine ads.
Effective measurement of social media activities requires a new, expanded mindset as well as a means to integrate data gathered from all types of media. In an interview with eMarketer, social media guru at Nielsen Online Pete Blackshaw summed it up well: “On one side, you’ve got paid media and on the other you’ve got earned media. Put consumer-generated media, social media and a lot of indirect marketing on the earned side, and paid media—offline and online—on the unearned side. The two kinds [can] synergize [with] one another because paid advertising can help stimulate the conversation. What we need is a measurement model that can look at the two—both in distinct buckets, but also as an ecosystem where one is feeding the other. Brand equity is heavily impacted by the way in which the two interact.”
Mr. Blackshaw concluded, “Brands need to figure out models for looking at all of this in totality. It would be the ultimate brand dashboard that can look at ad measurements plus consumer perceptions through social media, and do it in real time.”
Just as standards are needed for measuring online advertising programs in general, many feel standards need to evolve for the social world, as explained by Ms. Tilds of Mindshare-Team Detroit: “There is a lack of standards on the data-mining aspects of social media. It hasn’t evolved because everyone wants to make their standard a competitive advantage, but that is the worst thing to do for the industry. There should be a call for a standard and an open dialogue.”
Marketers are also excited about online video ads. Why? Because they can offer the sight, sound, motion and emotion of television ads, and provide better potential targeting and measurability. The digital nature of online video ads also means they can instantly be shared with others. For brand marketers looking to engage with consumers, online video ads provide a variety of metrics, including time spent. According to LiveRail, consumers watch, on average, more than 80% of a 30-second online video ad.
“With online video, there is time-based media buying where time is one component of the mix. The advertiser is buying a person’s attention. I’ve seen very few standards on what time means.”
—Cary Tilds, senior vice president, Mindshare-Team Detroit, in an interview with eMarketer, May 2009
When it comes to measurement of social media and video, advertisers are in the very early stages of connecting the dots.
Q&A: What are the measurement challenges with respect to online video?
“There are a lot of different kinds of metrics being captured, analyzed and used to support the effectiveness of video campaigns. I would hope that the industry starts to whittle down the sheer number and decides that complete views are great, but midpoint views don’t necessarily give you a lot of useful data.” Full Interview
“The instinctual reaction of advertisers to try and show the sales impact of a video campaign is really misguided. We have studies showing that video, photo-sharing, weather and social media placements look horrible in the online ROI equation because they are upper-funnel. People don’t see ads on Facebook and then go buy something. But we are doing engagement mapping which is the ability to associate sales credit or ROI to all of the digital touchpoints in a person’s history.” Full Interview
“Identifying scalable ways to track online video can be complicated and there are special ways to track exposures. There’s also a proliferation of different formats and then there are proprietary players. Did people turn the sound on, did they stop the ad, did they rewind or repeat it and if so, how many times?” Full Interview
“There’s a lot of experimentation going on as to ad placement and format—be it preroll or postroll. I’m not sure anybody has figured it out or what counts as engagement with an online video ad. We’re running video ad tests looking at the impact on brand metrics and impact on sales.” Full Interview
Unraveling Consumer Engagement Metrics
Although few in the industry can agree on a common definition of “engagement” in the context of online advertising measurement, clearly the Internet offers unique opportunities here given its interactive nature.
Marketers, their agencies and a plethora of other industry stakeholders are working hard to develop engagement metrics that can act as proxies for attitudinal or behavioral changes they want to influence.
“We are in the process of trying to figure out the most effective way of attributing shifts in brand health to online activity,” said Ms. Fuller of MasterCard Worldwide, in an interview with eMarketer. “The easier part of the equation is measuring engagement. The question is: How do you get more sophisticated about measuring the quality and impact of brand engagement?”
Ms. Fuller added, “We look at time spent on our site and whether or not people engaged with the games we have there, how much traffic we’re able to drive and viral/social activities we are able to generate.”
As Mr. Hecht of VivaKi said in an interview with eMarketer, “What we need to do is focus more on the outcomes and outputs of digital media. We’re focused more on brand engagement metrics that enable us to have better proxies for behavior and attitudes.”
Those in the research field have their own ideas about what constitutes engagement. Nielsen, for example, is a big believer in time spent as a measure of engagement and brand impact. Mr. Gibs of Nielsen put it this way: “The single biggest problem is that the current measurement methodologies are insufficient to deal with the complexities of online advertising. The solution we believe quite strongly in is that measures of advertising online should be time-based measures, rather than impression-based measures. Instead of buying 100 million impressions on a Website, it would be buying X% of a person’s time.”
Mr. Gibs went on to explain that time-based measures align publisher incentives with advertiser goals. When time spent is the metric advertisers are paying for, Web-based publishers will want to create an engaging environment so visitors stick around and interact with the advertising.
From the agency side, Cory Treffiletti of Catalyst:SF argues that time is not only a key measurement online, but that marketers should be adding up all the pockets of time spent with the brand as a kind of overall engagement metric. As he said in his June 3, 2009, Online Spin column in MediaPost, “Time spent across the entire campaign is the only metric that truly covers all the bases.”
Others argue that time spent is insufficient.
“The key is to compare more than time spent, utilizing the interactive nature of the engagement unit,” wrote Joe Marchese, also for Online Spin, in April 2009. “Marketers should look to tie engagements directly to changes in brand perception, purchase intent and, in the end, purchase decisions.”
Mr. Wiener, CEO of 360i, likes the idea of a cost-per-engagement metric, but he also advocates a restructuring of disciplines within marketing organizations and a concerted effort to stop conflating direct response and branding measurements.
“I believe that coming up with a cost-per-interaction or cost-per-engagement metric is an important component for a solution,” said Mr. Wiener. “There is no panacea. One of the challenges is that people are looking for the Holy Grail.”
Q&A: What is the potential game-changer for online brand measurement?
“We’re looking for deeper analytics and to tie them all the way through to retail. In five, maybe 10 years, consumers will receive custom messages for specific retailers on their phone. They’ll store their preferences and the information will go right into their loyalty card. They will choose where they want to shop and the offers will follow them there.” Full Interview
“Media allocation modeling, which analyzes all the elements in a campaign that contributed to an action, sale or behavior and not simply giving the last click all the credit. Marketers buying or planning digital media on time-based measures rather than impression-based measures.” Full Interview
“I don’t think there’ll be a single game-changer. But I think the most important thing is that chief marketing officers need to give clear mandates and reorganize internally and externally around making digital a priority as a brand-building medium. There needs to be a clear delineation between brand objectives and metrics and direct response objectives and metrics. I think everything else follows from that.”
“Marketers need to understand not only what works retrospectively, but how they can use data proactively to make better decisions about the audiences they buy and the way they deliver messages. When you have a programmatic way of using that sort of insight across a broad range of media, you begin to break down barriers.”
