Measuring Marketing

Mobile Advertising: A big step forward

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 16:27:00 +0000

Google has been talking about integrating the various acquisitions like DoubleClick, AdMob and YouTube etc. One of the news last week (source: AdWeek) was that mobile Rich Media ads (expandable, interactive banners) can now be served via DoubleClick (Google's ad server) on AdMob media (Google's mobile ad network).

I feel this is a big step forward as we will be able to get consistent metrics from online (desktop based) and mobile advertising from the same system – DoubleClick, assuming DoubleClick is being used as the ad server for Desktop campaign as well.

One of the next things I would hope from Google is utilizing DoubleClick for the video ad (in-stream) across all their properties worldwide including on YouTube.

Dear Match.com online advertising team,

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 17:30:00 +0000

I believe you really want to get users to sign-up on Match.com, but it would be great if you can advertise smartly, especially online advertising.

If you are not aware, there is something called behavioral or audience based targeting. Every day, you target me multiple times as it I am a single guy, but a lot of my internet behavioral clearly shows that I am not.

Either you are using a lot of data (multiple sources) and the combination of all of those sources is not working. Or using no data and just targeting blindly.

My suggestion would be to just use plain audience based targeting and you will hopefully have a better return on advertising spend. Good Luck!

Behavioral Targeting vs. (User Value + Behavioral) Based Targeting

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 03:04:00 +0000

Majority of the targeting on the internet is based on past behavior e.g. a user visited site A,B, did a search on terms C,D and thus he is a perfect target audience for a brand X. Wouldn't it be nice to target audience based on their traits (values, beliefs and attitudes).

Resonate Network claims to have the capability to target based on behavior and also based on audience traits. The network also has a panel, where the users are continuously surveyed and provide information on their traits. The responses to the questions along with past Internet behavior are used to create various audience segments.

I feel these niche ad networks are going to drive the future of advertising vs. plain behavioral targeting that we have been doing for over 4-5 years.

Please visit Resonate's website to learn more.

Optimizing media based on real time attitudinal scores

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 04:28:00 +0000

One of the things that fascinates me about this online advertising industry is innovation every other day. I get the opportunity to meet with a lot of media technology companies ranging from ad verification to video ad-networks to research vendors to ad serving companies.

Most recently the technology that amazed me was the ability to optimize media or generate look-a-like models based on attitudinal scores. Not only will you know the impact of the media, but you would also be able to reach similar audience which is interested in your brand and will show increase in attitudinal scores. If you can scale this, then, there is a lot that one can do from creative message sequencing to driving users to different landing pages based on their responses to …..

Some of the vendors that are able to do this are Vizu and Dimestore working with various ad networks like InterClick. I feel this is a next step in finding similar audience based on survey responses vs. the traditional way that Quantcast has been selling for the last few years.

Social Media: How many fans really view your post

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 04:44:00 +0000

As social media platforms like Facebook are being used by advertisers to reach millions of users, it is critical to accurately represent the impact of posts/comments on Facebook.

Yes, there are 750MM+ unique users on Facebook, but not all of them are active at any given time. Thus, when a comment or post is pushed on your company/brand's Facebook page, not all of your Fans see/interact with them or have the opportunity to see/view them.

According to sources at Facebook, only 5-15% of the fans view the post in their newsfeed. So, if you have 100K fans, only 5-15K of those fans will actually view your post.

The main reason for this dramatic drop off is the fast moving news feed. Typically, a post is active only for about 30-45 minutes.

Also, the EdgeRank algorithm that Facebook uses keeps into account the Affinity, Weight, and Time to pick the stories/post that appears in a user's news feed. So, the more a user or fan interacts with a brand's facebook page and the more fresh/updated the posts are, the more changes of the posts to show up in fan's newsfeed.

It is estimated that this percentage is even low for Twitter as it is even fast moving. Typically, 5-7% is considered as industry norm for Twitter posts or Tweets.

So, please be careful in representing the opportunity to see/view impressions.

If you have 100MM fans and your brand posts a story on Facebook – approximately 5-15MM users will view the post.

Accounting for in-stream video ads

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 04:20:00 +0000

As more and more media dollars are moving towards in-stream video ads, it is important to ensure that the advertisers are only paying for the ads that were actually served. In the past or even currently, a lot of video ad-publishers/networks prefer to serve the ad themselves vs. serving the ads via a 3^rd party like Media Mind or DoubleClick. When the publishers serve the ads, they offer to implement a 1x1 pixel from a third party ad server. Most of the publishers tend to push back indicating that implementing 1x1 is their solution to 3^rd party ad serving.

The issues causes by the publisher serving the ad and implementing a 1x1 pixel are as follows:

This leads to reliance on media publishers to correctly implement the tracking pixels (1x1 to measure impressions and click-commands to measure clicks)
The use of 1x1 tracking provides no insight on how the impressions are counted
The 1x1 pixels are implemented by the publishers and they can implement the pixel to record an impression at their liberty e.g. at page load or pre-buffer or incorrectly

In order to accurately count the number of impressions, as per IAB, it is necessary that the impression is counted "post-buffer" and not "pre-buffer".

IAB recommends that the video ads are served using a VAST/VPAID standard. Not only does this allow the 3^rd party ad servers to serve the ad but also provides more metrics like % video viewed, so advertisers can know what % of video was viewed by the end users.

Utilizing VAST/VPAID standards to serve video ads helps drive higher accountability for in-stream video advertising.

Utilizing mobile banners ads? Do you have a mobile ready destination?

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Mon, 17 May 2010 03:42:00 +0000

As having a line item for mobile in the media plan is becoming more and more common/required by the management, it is very important to have an end to end mobile experience. It is a very bad user experience if the banners appearing on mobile phones are being used to drive users to a desktop website.

One thing that is for sure is that your site will experience a very high bounce rate (users will leave the site as soon as they land). OR if you still notice that the users are taking actions, be assured that if you update your destination website to a mobile based website, you will see a huge jump in performance.

Driving users to a desktop based application will also take a long time to load the website, which can be frustrating as well.

All the issues mentioned above, will not only lead to bad user experience but can also lead to a negative impact on your brand. Essentially, users click on banners to get more information about your brand but due the website not optimized for the mobile they will not be able to get any information that they are seeking.

Mobile Applications vs. the Mobile Web

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Fri, 14 May 2010 19:43:00 +0000

The question of using mobile applications vs. the mobile web is getting a lot of attention recently. One of the key questions that need to be answered is – “Is there a fundamental difference in how the users make use of these two sub-channels within mobile devices?”
Based on my knowledge from industry trends, newsletters, talking with experts – the mobile applications are utilized by users who know exactly what they need to do. Example: Paying bills, making a purchase from Amazon, ordering tacos from Chipotle, connecting with a friend on Facebook, looking for recipes, playing music for your toddler etc. On the other end, users utilize the mobile web to search for new things. Example: finding a FAO Schwarz store in NYC, trying to learn more about a new product, trying to find a customer service number.
Thus, net net – Mobile web is more useful for searching the web vs. the Mobile Applications are used by used when they know exactly what they need to do.

Launching an Mobile App and Keeping it alive

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Thu, 13 May 2010 18:09:00 +0000

Most of the major marketers already have a mobile device app or are working on getting one live soon. The marketers should think very seriously on why they want to launch an application on the mobile devices. Does it fit the overall strategy of the campaign, brand. How will they be able to maintain it?

Most of the successful applications like Fandango, Facebook, Chipotle, and Amazon have provided a medium for users to utilize the mobile web in their day to day life. For example: Fandango, Chipotle and Amazon have made e-commerce easy. They have literally provided transactions on users fingertips. This shows how mobile devices are helping drive mobile commerce or mobile retailing. Facebook, as most of you know has exploded in terms of the user base with the mobile technology – revolution in social networking.

One more important point to think about before launching an application is how the application will survive in this world of new applications launching every day. Like any other marketing program – the mobile application also needs to be kept upto date, refreshed with new features, content etc. If the user is going to go through the exact same experience multiple times, the chances of the user re-visiting the application are slim. Even if it is a mobile commerce application, the user feedback needs to be addressed in a very pro-active fashion.

Use of bloggers for social media: Social Influencers

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Sun, 09 May 2010 04:42:00 +0000

Many advertisers are starting to use bloggers to write specific articles about their company to help increase the awareness or product advocacy. But the key question is how to find these bloggers.

There are a few key common rules that should be followed to find relevant social influencers for your brand:

Read what he/she writes about – A blogger will typically not change his/her topic, if he/she doesn't write regarding your brand or industry, move on.
Make initial contacts: Post comments/links of their blog to catch their attention
Reach out to the person for advice or questions on how you can improve your business
Provide incentives example: Free visit to your plant, samples of your new product etc

Also, please don't feel that a marketer needs to connect with each and every blogger who writes relevant posts. A blogger with a very small following and who doesn't update often is not that important vs. a blogger who has a huge following and provides update every often. These bloggers are similar to the media companies. Consider being close, connected to the bigger companies or bloggers who have the biggest impact.

Measuring Reach of Paid Advertising on Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 02:45:00 +0000

As social media programs are getting more and more popular, it is important to understand how to measure the effect of the paid advertising. In this post, I will like to talk about the basic concept of reach, as ad exposure or reach is the first step in the game of placing ads.

Typical, Facebook campaigns are done to increase the fan base of a particular page or brand. In these campaigns, there are three types of ad impressions placed on Facebook:

Paid Media – Paid ads with the message of "Become a Fan" of the particular brand
Earned/Paid Media – Paid ads with the message of "Become a Fan" but with the social element showing a blurb with the name of a few of your friends who are fans of the particular brand. Since, these ads have the social component these are classified within the earned media category as well.
Earned Media – These are the instances of ads which show the list of friends who are fans of the brand and have a link below "Become a Fan". Since, the advertiser didn't pay for these impressions, these types of ads or impressions are termed as Earned Media.

Thus, measuring reach from all these impressions is not an easy task. It is impossible to measure it using third party ad servers like DoubleClick as the Earned Media is not served via any ad servers. It will be interesting to find out if Facebook can provide information on the number "Earned Media" impressions served for a particular brand. The next step will be to provide the number of unique impressions seen by each user; this will be the reach from the earned media impressions.

Another way of estimating this reach is based on the number of users who become fans from the paid media. On an average, each user might have 50 friends (this is not an accurate number, just for calculation purposes) thus, if a campaign generated 200 fans, the additional impressions generated will be 200*50 = 10,000. However, then some of the users who are exposed to these 10,000 impressions will become fans, thus generating more earned media. Thus, it is a cycle which goes on – beauty of social media. A good estimate will be to use 3 iterations in social environment like Facebook.

A recent study by Facebook and Nielsen shows that the Earned media impressions are the most impactful in driving awareness, ad recall and also purchase intent. Thus, it is very critical to drive these impressions. Though less in volume, these are the ones which have the biggest bang for the buck.

Social Media

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 20:46:00 +0000

The key objectives of Social Media are to listen, answer consumer's questions, embrace the thoughts and respond.

Respond to convert the negative sentiment into positive. React fast enough to negate any crisis like the McAfee anti-virus situation, a few days ago. McAfee reacted really fast by apologizing for the issue that helped control a negative impact on their brand. Do not wait like Dell, a few years ago when the battery explosion issue was out in social networks. Dell responded by saying it is a single isolated incident but then in a few days, the entire internet was full of complaints.

Embrace your user's opinions and then present it to the world, like Microsoft. Microsoft is utilizing this strategy in the "Windows 7 was my idea" campaign.

Each of the above mentioned tactic probably needs to use a different platform – Facebook, Twitter, Consumer forums, Review sites etc.

How to measure the impact of social media activities?

Some of the key metrics (monitored over time) that can be used to measure the impact of social media are:

Brand mentions vs. competitors
Brand attribute mentions with the brand
Sentiment
Correlate the changes in mentions or brand attributes to media/PR efforts

There are a few tools in the industry which can help gather the above metrics like Radian6, Nielsen Buzz. These tools might have additional widgets, reports which can provide additional insights about your brand.

How to prevent ads from appearing at places where you don’t want

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 18:47:00 +0000

In the previous post, I mentioned how verification companies can help monitor where your ads are appearing. But that is a cure to the problem after the fact; your ad already appeared on inappropriate section of the internet.

There are services available which prevent your ad from appearing at pre-determined section of the internet.

Companies have the technology to monitor the section of the internet where the ad is about to be served and stop it if it is not appropriate. These companies have very extensive algorithm which rates almost all the pages on the internet and then use this rating to make the decision of preventing the ad to be served.

Essentially, they create a firewall in between the publisher and the consumer before the ad is served.

I haven't used these technologies but feel that using them will really make the publishers accountable in terms of content and geographical location. It gives more and more control in markets/agencies hands.

Do you know where your Ads are?

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 04:36:00 +0000

As advertisers and media agencies, we sign the Insertion Orders (IOs) and then assume that the publishers are placing our ads at the correct placement and also targeting the right audience.

What goes on in reality? Obviously, a certain percentage of these ads end up in areas of the Internet where it doesn't make any sense (Adult content, areas not relevant to the brand etc) or might get served below the fold or even get served to out of the country audience.

What if you are an e-tailer in UK and your deal of the week ads are being served to people in India or USA or Brazil. It's a waste of media i.e. waste of money. There will hardly be anyone in India, USA or Brazil looking to buy from your online store in UK.

Similarly, if you are a technology company targeting your ads towards gamers but your ads appear within parenting section. The likelihood of conversion in parenting section are really slim.

There are now audit services available that can audit your online media buys and tell you exactly where your ads are being served. Are your ads being served to an international audience, are your ads being served in the areas that are not relevant.

DoubleVerify is a service which can provide you this information. They claim to have relationships with majority of the publishers and seem to be well known. It seems to be pretty simple to use them if you use third party ad-serving like DoubleClick, Atlas.

DoubleVerify provides you screenshots of your ads in inappropriate content, international traffic, below the fold ads, multiple impressions on the same page. All this information can be used by advertisers or media agencies to renegotiate the media buy with the publishers. Net net bringing additional savings to your client or your own business.

Improve your SEO rankings

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 16:27:00 +0000

There are a few key elements which can help in improving your SEO rankings. This post will talk about a few of the key things necessary for improving and also helping your site getting indexed by major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing.

URL: Make sure that the URL is short and friendly to read. Including keywords within the URL, it is easy to index these pages. For example: www.xyz.com/desktop/OEM-name
Web site design: It is known that if frames are used within the pages, it is not a good user experience and also hard for the search engines to index the content.
Navigation: Avoid flash based navigation categories. Search Engines are not able to go and read the content within flash, causing issues and lower SEO rankings. It is a known best practice to use the navigation lists as HTML links.
Link similar pages: If you know that users will be reading similar pages, link them to each other.
Add keywords within the content: Make sure there are a lot of keywords within the content of the website; this enforces that the site is about a particular search engine category.

Using Web Analytics data to understand the user behavior

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 03:52:00 +0000

There is a lot of data available in the web analytics platforms like Omniture, Webtrends etc. One of the key reports is the click-stream report. Having access to raw data can help understand the differences in the site browsing behavior in the first visit vs. the second vs. subsequent visits.

Analyzing the above mentioned data can help understand the patterns where in the process do the users' drop-off the website before converting. Also, how different is the behavior from first to the second to subsequent. This information can be used in multiple ways:

Optimize the site content – make the content more easily accessible that the users are reading in the later visits
Using cookie tracking – optimize how the site is presented to the users in the first visit vs. subsequent visits

These small changes can definitely lead to high conversions rates especially for e-commerce sites.

This technique can also be used in the way how ads are served to users who have dropped off the process before converting. Dynamic ad serving companies like Tumri and Teracent can be used to change the color, messaging to first visit vs. a user who has been to the web site.

Promoted Tweets – Twitter Paid Ads

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:50:00 +0000

Twitter just announced today it will be starting advertising in form of paid tweets. These tweets will be known as Promoted Tweets.

From a targeting perspective, it is a great opportunity for Twitter to start text mining the current tweets or conversations and then serve the ads. This can become a very well targeted advertising network based on conversations, user profiles etc.

For example: Many companies have twitter handles which promote/provide information about their products. Thus, profiling the users based on their interest and posts will be a great way to target ads.

Instead of relying on any 3^rd or 4^th party database to profile users, Twitter has the ability to segment users based on its in house data – the past and current tweets.

It will be interesting from a measurement perspective, to measure how these ads will work.

I hope to see some webinars or research papers coming up soon on Twitter ads.

Audience Segments

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 04:14:00 +0000

A lot of technology companies like Bizo, Audience Science are helping advertisers target the valuable user segments. These companies have access to huge databases containing information about these users. This information can be used to target B2B users for example – industry segment, functional area, size of companies.

Information to these companies comes from registration information at various places over the internet. Based on the cookie tracking, these users can then later be found & targeted with the ads on other sites throughout the internet like Yahoo!, MSN etc.

It does seem like a simple ad network but with what I will like to stress is that these networks have the information about these users. Of course, this information might not be a 100% accurate but it is still better than using an ad network to target users with no information except their behavior a.k.a. BT (behavior targeting).

Increasing acquistion share from Online Channel

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 06:21:00 +0000

I bumped into a marketing professional and he mentioned that one of the objectives of his product was to increase online use of the tool on his website. My first question was - how are you driving traffic to the website i.e. display vs. search vs. others. His response was - "We are not driving traffic to the website via any online advertising". My jaw dropped....

I thought how is he planning to achieve his goal? By asking the current users who use the tool to use it more OR by asking them to sign-in with a differnet name everyday? None of these are going to help achieve his objective.

I drew a funnel and explained you need more people to enter the funnel, that is how your usage with increase i.e. new customers. Your current customers can help increase by word of mouth efforts but that might not be enough to reach your goal.

Thus, if you are trying to increase usage of online tools or increase sign-ups on you website - have a strong marketing program which drives users to the website that is easy to navigate.

Please do not overuse rich media – it might not perform

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 04:55:00 +0000

Lately, there has been a lot of innovation in the rich media industry. It started with expandable banners, moved to dancing, jumping banners, then we got peel overs and now it seems like we have microsites built into the banners. Building microsites within the banners is an innovative concept to capture the user's attention in the banner, however, is that too much information in the banner?

Some of the banners have next buttons within them which move from one frame to the other, it is critical to evaluate the number of frames within the banner which is still keep the user engaged.

If the rich media technology is overused with the intention to capture user's attention, it should be tested within a focus group (usability testing) to understand the user's likes and dislikes.

It is the job of creative agency to ensure the banner load times and user likability to help achieve the purpose of advertising.

Ever heard of <1 Pageview?

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:45:00 +0000

Yes, you read it correctly, have you ever heard of <1 pageview? Mr. Google Analytics reports that in their depth of visit report.

I really am looking for someone (Mr. Google Analytics) to provide me a definition of <1 pageview.

If someone knows about it, please let me know.

Power of Contextual Advertising

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:42:00 +0000

We all have heard about Vibrant, Kontera contextual ads. The ads that are based on the text in an article, the keywords are double underlined and once rolled over, the ad pops up.

I have been analyzing and measuring a lot of media plans globally with contextual advertising and it seems to pay off a lot. I have seen differences in response rates (CTR) and post-click engagement of upto 200%. Prior to being able to get post-click engagement data, I always used to question the viability of the high number of clicks on these ads. But with the post-click data, I feel that these ads really work in capturing the audience.

It is very interesting that they work for almost all lines of business – B2C, B2B and continue to provide increased response.

One more thing that I have noticed recently is that placing ads on a homepage vs. a targeted page with relevant creative also helps a lot. For example: placing a creative which connects with the audience on the publisher's website also drives higher engagement.

Thus, it is very critical to use contextual advertising for higher response rates and improved ROI.

Banner Expansions – What do they tell us?

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:50:00 +0000

With the evolution of the creatives – from standard to rich media expansion banners, there are issues in how to track metrics that make sense. Expansion is something that can have a lot of issues can the metrics can be a bit deceptive:

Accidental Expansions – A lot of times, consumers tend to expand ads accidentally. Thus, counting those numbers is not an accurate representation.
Auto Expansive Banners – Banners are built now a days that auto-expand i.e. consumer does not need to take any action and the banner expands. The ad-servers tend to count these expansions, which is also not the correct way to measure the expansions and the interactions within the banner.

Thus, it is important that the measurement teams should be cognizant of these factors while reporting results of the creatives.

If the banner objective is to drive expansions, then the creative format and functionality should be kept in mind to make sure accurate metrics are reported.

Evolution of Display Ads

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:24:00 +0000

I still remember seeing the jazzy flashy static ads and react as "Ouch! What was that?" I would tell my friends, why are there even ads on the internet, who really views them or clicks on them. Then, as time progressed, the ads got better and less jazzy and more interactive. Then few years later, when I started working in the Ad industry, my love for the online ads started growing. In a very short period of time, the ads became more attractive. I wanted to play with them or, rather play games within them. I remember playing the baseball game within the Orbitz ad. I loved it a lot!

One of the other cool ads I remember is an ad in which there was a live chat happening about a product. I was like Wow! This is Evolution. This industry R-O-C-K-S!

Today on March 10, 2009, I was sent a link to IGN.com and watch the Apple itouch ad. I was like ok, let me check it out. It probably took 10 seconds to load, which was not good, but when it loaded. MAN! It was one of the coolest, sexiest ads I have ever seen. I have put a screenshot of the ad below, but it does not do any justice to the actual user experience. I wish there is permanent link where that ad will be stored and users could see/listen to it again.

Hats off to the creative agency and the ad serving company serving the ad (I clicked on the ad, and it looks like it is Pointroll).

I would really love to hear about the buzz and metrics about this ad tomorrow. I am really looking forward to seeing more and more of such great ads.

Go Online Advertising!

Measuring Local Advertising Efforts

noreply@blogger.com (Online Marketing Analyst) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 20:15:00 +0000

A lot of advertisers do local advertising to increase the awareness of the product. Local media is also used to launch a product in some particular city. Various media forms can be used like print, newspapers, radio etc.

If the advertising is driving to a vanity URL or website, it is very easy to measure the lift from the advertising efforts. With the use of web analytics tools like Omniture, Webtrends, Google Analytics it is possible to measure the number of visitors to the site from a particular geo (country, city etc). So, if there is a lift in the number of consumers visiting the site from the city where the advertising is live, it is a clear indicator that the advertising is working and driving consumers to the website.

As mentioned in my previous post, a pre-post visitors/day would help evaluate the effect of the online advertising.