Inside Intel’s Effectiveness System of Web Marketing

A click is just click. And as most sophisticated online marketers have realized, it’s a really poor indication of whether online marketing is working. But if you can start to understand the value behind certain online behaviors, you move much closer to making sense of the efficacy of your spending. That’s why Intel has launched an internally developed program it calls the Value Point System to measure marketing effectiveness online. The system, developed with its media agency, OMD, assigns a pre-determined number of points for every action consumers do online with Intel. Watching a certain online video may garner 40 points, while a site visit is worth only two points. As the online visitor moves about the site, they accumulate points, which Intel uses to evaluate its marketing.

Read More: AdAge

Putting Display in Search Terms

The other day a group of us at Efficient Frontier gathered in a conference room to discuss display optimization. We met to dig into the comparative ROI for various audience segments, including site-driven retargeting and 3rd-party purchased segments. One of our lead engineers developed an interesting analogy that mapped audience targets to search term types. The search term to audience segment analogy is an interesting way to think about relevance and tactically design portfolios of targets for display campaigns.  Before jumping into display, let me set up the analogy by talking about term types in search. We tend to think about search terms in three buckets: head, torso, and tail. Head terms have mass amounts of queries but are less specific in query intent, torso terms have decent query volume and some specificity in intent, while tail terms tend to have little volume but have very clear intent. Additionally, in search marketing, we typically isolate brand terms into their own category. With that in mind, the display to search analogy goes like this: retargeting is like search brand terms, 3rd party data buys are like search torso and tail terms, and site or content targeting is most like search head terms. Let me play it through with you in more detail.

Read More: AdExchanger

How to Power Your 2010 Media Plan With RTB

By now, many media planners have heard about real-time bidding (RTB) and understand at a high level how this new way of buying display ad media can improve the campaign’s operational efficiency and performance. But the question I get asked all the time is: how do I get started with real-time bidding and where is the low hanging fruit? Before delving into some quick wins, let’s briefly review the major benefits of real-time bidding. First, real-time bidding puts buyers in the driver’s seat, because they can bid on each individual ad impression to optimize yield against their campaign goals. (See my first column for a more detailed introduction to real-time bidding.) Second, buyers can reach close to 100 percent of Internet users through a single buy because there are now over 10 “mega suppliers” of real-time bidding, and most of them have massive reach. (A review of these suppliers appeared in a prior column.) Finally, buyers can execute against their message frequency goals, even with tight audience constraints, because there are in excess of a trillion real-time bidding impressions available per month currently!

Read More: ClickZ