Tuesday 6 October 2009

Measure for Measure

In the past, advertisers have followed the gold standard of campaign measurement: impressions, clicks and click through rates. This has been a perfectly acceptable approach as it gives us an indication of immediate response rates, (i.e. clicks) and where they originated from . Ideal for DR campaigns.

The question is: is that enough? The answer is no! Not when we’re in a time where users are online for an average of 16 hours a week, have a multitude of channels to tune into, be it social networking, shopping, banking, travel planning, TV on Demand, gaming etc, and the number of page impressions has increased 5 fold in the last 5 years. This means that users are exposed to a higher number of advertiser messages; consequently more messages to ignore, giving way to the ever feared ‘decline of the click’.

This year it became a little clearer as to the real story behind the declining click rate. Both Eyeblaster and DoubleClick’s recent studies show that although the click through rate on standard ads has indeed slowed, conversion rates via rich media assets has increased. This means that although most advertisers raison detre is to drive traffic to their brand site, most users are happy to provide details, watch videos, download content etc, directly from the banner ad unit. This way they don’t have to leave the site they are currently on to engage with the brand. They can happily multi-task – which is a win-win solution for all concerned.

I know I keep banging on about it, but the main drivers of change in the way we measure, lay not only in improvements in technology, but in the ever evolving social media spaces. The need comes from advertisers trying to keep up engagement with self publishing users in social networking sites; or creators and spectators of viral activity from video footage and online ad funded programmes; TVonDemand, application downloads; user reviews, comments, syndication and communities.

So it stands to reason that we need to embrace new methods of measuring campaign success and combine this with more sophisticated approaches to tracking a users activity on the brand site. We will then build up a 360’ picture of all levels of engagement, response and actions both on and off the site.

New metrics would include level of brand sentiment; number of video plays; number of downloads; data-capture names; viral spread rate; overall brand interaction rate; referrals from content; content driven conversations etc; as well as clicks and CTR; cost per engagement; cost per lead, cost per brand interaction minute; number of site actions; drop-off point; dwell time etc. This means that way we look at ROI now has to change the way we approach our buying models. Why just buy on a CPM basis when cost per conversation (for example) is more appropriate (another topic for different post me thinks!).

Moving from click only based measurement to 360’ measures will dramatically improve the quality of the results and the subsequent planning and dialogue with consumers.

However I recognise that this is not an overnight transfer. It will take a month or 24, to make this kind of step change across global brand sites and a multitude of simultaneous campaigns. But we should bear the change in mind and deem it necessary if we mean to keep up with the evolving digital media space and the consumers who dictate the pace of change.

2 comments:

  1. AMEN. I think an overhaul will require a pragmatic approach towards an extreamist ideal. IT IS TIME !!!

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  2. it sure is Caleb. We just have to use whatever means necessary to demonstrate to clients that there are other ways to measure success...and lots that we can do with results (improve search, R&D, customer service)...need I go on.

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