Good Read: Drake Morton

Rooting Out Worst Practices

by Sherrill Mane, Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012

Welcome to one of our first New Year’s reminders. Perhaps we can make 2012 the year when “Best Practices for Conducting Online Ad Effectiveness Research� become standard operating procedures.  And, in a year of action, let’s encourage the vendors to do the research on research that the esteemed Dr. Paul Lavrakas recommended in his 2010 “An Evaluation of Methods Used to Assess the Effectiveness of Advertising on the Internet.� The list of issues and items to consider when adopting best practices is rather long, largely due to the inadequacies of the current research methods and the costs of doing better work.

Let’s address some of the most common misconceptions and root out some worst practices:

1.  It is essential that agency buyers work with their colleagues in research and analytics to determine what the objectives of the research are and which methodologies are most appropriate.
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Good Read: Drake Morton

Data-Driven Creative

by Michael Kaushansky, Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2012

As we start the new year, we are entering the age of data-driven creative strategies. Including data as an input into the creative cycle will allow current trends, consumer sentiment, real-time behavior and attitudinal response to be interwoven into creative thinking, thus making a campaign more relevant, dynamic and effective.

Data can enhance creative in major ways throughout the creative lifecycle. Here are three major ways data can help:

1.        Help with design. The science of understanding how brands and products are perceived by the consumer is as old as marketing itself; however, current techniques allow marketers to quickly get a real-time pulse and dive deeper into the consumers’ psyche.  The following tools can provide help with design:
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Good Read: Drake Morton

Nine Steps To Getting The Big Stuff Done

by Loren McDonald, Thursday, Jan. 12, 2012

I urge you to think big in 2012: to identify the most critical aspect of your email program and focus on ways to improve it so that you can drive greater success and take your program to a higher level.

This, of course, raises the perennial frustration among marketers: “How can I work on this big, important project when I’m already stretched thin on the work my boss expects me to do every day?”

Below are several approaches to help you win over management, not just to get them to see things your way, but also to secure the resources you need:

1. Make the case for focusing on a major goal. You know your email program well enough to be able to identify what I call the fulcrum: the point in your email program that drives the majority of your future revenue, conversions, engagement or loyalty.
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You need to understand: Drake Morton

Managing Data For Sales Conversion

by Tim Altier, Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2011
There’s no shortage of data — it’s proven data conversion that is in short supply.

As a data analytics professional, every day I’m faced with finding the ways to make customer data pay dividends with increased sales and improved customer engagement. And I know lots of people who are interested in the same thing but don’t know where to start.

Maybe it’s counterintuitive, but the better the data management, the better the emotional connection with the customer.  A data dive into a customer’s history, purchase habits and channel preferences is like a treasure-trove that can be utilized to enhance the connection with the customer.  And the beauty of that enhancement is that you’re building a foundation for future purchases and even brand advocacy.
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You should know: Drake Morton

Of Principles, Solutions And Pilots

(No, We Are Not Creating PSPs)

by Sherrill Mane, Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2011

The ecosystem-wide initiative, Making Measurement Making Sense (3MS) is now moving from guiding principles and recommended solutions to testing, which is the first phase of implementation.  This is the stage where we will learn what we don’t know.  Moreover, after acquiring information, we will be able to course-correct together.

The ANA, 4As and IAB embarked on the 3MS journey starting in February 2011.  Since then I’ve had the privilege of watching some of the smartest people in marketing and advertising collaborate to create proposed solutions to the challenge of capitalizing on the many metrics available in digital media. In tandem, they are forging a path to cross-platform measurement.

This is no small task.  It has taken giant minds and courageous souls to get us to the point where testing can begin.  As a matter of fact, nearly 40 business leaders and functional experts, all senior executives, participated in 3MS.  And the members of the ANA, 4As and IAB were joined by NAA and the OPA in supporting the work of these executives as facilitated by Bain & Company and MediaLink LLC.
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Good Read: Drake Morton

In Search Of The Golden Metric

by Dave Carpenter , Friday, June 24, 2011

“We know our digital advertising works,” a client recently said, “because when we stop running it, our site traffic and revenue drop.”   His company spends over $100 million each year on digital advertising; they are sophisticated marketers who want to use data to improve results.  If you ask him what the stacks of reports on site traffic, ad impressions, etc. he gets actually tell him, he’ll tell you, “not much.”  Why?  Because he and most digital marketers are accountable for getting results, they want specific, actionable information — what to run with and what to change — about creative, site and page placements, position, size, frequency, and other factors they can control.

Measuring web sites and online marketing campaigns has kept marketers, agencies, and others busy for years.  Web analytics report visits, page views, visits and other counts of site activity.  Ad server analytics report impressions served, clickthroughs and other silo-specific measures.   Once upon a time, each delivered the “hot metric.”  But, as soon as we begin to understand what each “hot metric” tells us, we begin to understand where it falls short, and we begin again to search for the “Golden Metric” that we can confidently use. (more…)

Good Read: Drake Morton

Putting Insights Into Action: Operationalizing Attribution

by Anto Chittilappilly , Friday, May 13, 2011

I recently spoke to an audience of search marketers on the topic of operationalizing the valuable results and insights that marketers and their agencies can discover through the attribution management process, and how frustrating it can be trying to translate these into repeatable, ongoing processes if you don’t know where to start.  Here are a few highlights from the advice I shared with them.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

You undoubtedly have a set of critical success metrics or key performance indicators that you already use.   These could include revenue, ROI, CPA, ROAS, LTV - any number of business performance measures that are important to you and other stakeholders within your organizations. You’ve not only operationalized the ability to track these metrics and report on them, but to make changes to the systems that impact their performance in order to optimize them.  You have processes in place for changing bids, pausing keywords, channeling more funds to one publisher/network/search engine than another, etc.
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Need to Know: Drake Morton

Intergrate The Online Marketing Experience

by Laurie Sullivan

Search will remain the core structure, feeding data to all other media. It is the highest-converting medium, but only 2% of the conversions occur from engines. Optimizing and integrating “the experience” will become a focus for online marketing in 2011.

Joshua Palau, vice president of marketing at Comcast, finds it ironic that 86% of consumers skip through commercials, but many of today’s television shows talk about advertising. Since very few consumers convert online, how do marketers market to the 98% of consumers who won’t click on an online ad? Maybe it’s not the click that needs optimization, but rather the metrics behind the media. (more…)

Interesting Information: Drake Morton

Audience Measurement Ain’t Easy

by Josh Chasin , Saturday, May 7, 2011

In the digital space we have something that no other medium has ever had before: the ability to collect empirical census data on the behavior of machines.  Boy, is this an incredibly helpful thing to have!  Since consumers access the Internet by using one of these machines (like TV or radio, but unlike print or place-based media), the ability to empirically track machine behavior has been one of the lynchpins of the success and growth of the online medium.

TV companies are only now coming to grips with the fact that they too have the ability to track the behavior of some machines (those with digital set top boxes). The development promises to throw TV audience measurement into its greatest period of flux and uncertainty ever (well, that and C3.)  Fortunately in the digital space we’ve grown up with it.
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Good Read: Drake Morton

 More On The New Time Lag:

Not Your Father’s Metric Any More

by Anto Chittilappilly , Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Today’s more sophisticated online consumers — coupled with today’s more multichannel marketers — have created a marketing ecosystem where the traditional definition of “lag time” is no longer sufficient.   Simply put, limiting one’s analysis to the time between the last interaction with an online display ad and an eventual conversion, is like putting blinders on — effectively ignoring other “time factors” such as:

·       Time lag from First Impression to First Conversion

·       Time lag from Last Impression to First Conversion

·       Time lag from First Click to First Conversion

·       Time lag from Last Click to First Conversion

·       Time lag from First Website Visit to First Conversion (more…)