Attribution in Real-Time Audience Targeting
The minute that marketers use multiple media buying channels for advertising campaigns, they’re faced with an attribution conundrum. At a basic level, attribution is the analytics process of determining how effective each media buying channel is at producing the desired advertising outcome. It drives most of the campaign optimization decisions, such as budget allocation and tuning of campaign tactics. At first blush, the challenge of attribution may seem solvable by simply assigning tags, specifying conversion events, and then letting ad servers report the performances on all the tags. But like most things in digital advertising, it’s not that easy, and in a media landscape of multiple media buying channels with real-time bidding strategies, many marketers are left wondering if their less-than-perfect attribution model is providing sub-optimal performance or even wrong decisions. The current attribution model is the “last-ad wins” model. Basically, the last ad impression before the user conversion event gets 100 percent of the credit. Savvy marketers know that this instant gratification model oversimplifies the consumer decision process. Let’s pretend you see a great ad while watching the World Cup finals online. Chances are that you’re not going to rush to your online store to make the purchase right away. However, the next time you shop online or in stores, the influence of that brand is very likely at work. Attributing this type of delayed influences gives marketers visibility into what combination and sequence of ad messaging leads to conversions. It also provides the needed dials to optimize during dialogs with their consumers.
Read More: ClickZ
Twitter Sees Sizable Ad Business
Twitter is ready to declare success in its initial revenue-building efforts, and casts an even wider net by launching limited-time deals feed @earlybird, which provides time-sensitive offers from advertisers. Disney has signed up for the first offer: a two-for-one ticket promotion for The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which debuts in the U.S. today. The tweet takes users to a Fandango page to purchase the tickets with a discount code. The @earlybird program is the latest addition to a growing set of revenue makers Twitter is trying. Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief operating officer, said it would continue to test concepts that can accelerate activity already happening on the service. Many companies, including deal-of-the-day services Groupon and Gilt Groupe, use Twitter to spread deals. ”There’s going to be lots of iteration and testing,” he said. “So far it’s working.” The company divides its business into two pillars: advertising and commercial services. Under advertising, Twitter is offering brands both Promoted Tweets, which appear in search results, and Promoted Trends, which are on its home page. @earlybird falls into the commercial sector, which includes business tools. Coca-Cola reported that it saw 86 million impressions in a day and a 6 percent interaction rate for its Promoted Tweets campaign tied to the World Cup. Those results, Costolo said, are “not atypical” for ad campaigns on Twitter. ”I’m confident the ad platform already works for big brands in terms of the reach and engagement we can provide,” he said. The key for Twitter’s advertiser approach is finding activities happening on the service and amplifying them, Costolo said. @earlybird, for example, will exist as a regular tweet from Disney’s account. The @earlybird account, which already has 46,000 followers, will retweet the message. Similarly, advertisers can only run a Promoted Trend for something that is already showing momentum on the service. Old Spice, for instance, ran a Promoted Trend yesterday to hype its ad campaign featuring the actor in its “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” commercials sending videos to well wishers in social media.
Read More: AdWeek
