Measuring Digital Marketing Success
Every individual has been stripped down to an anonymous cookie
According to Blue Kai, I’m a tech-savvy, social media-using bookworm in the New York DMA, currently in the market for “entertainment.” At least that’s what my cookie says about me. Simply by going to the Blue Kai data exchange’s registry page, you can find out what data companies and resellers know about you, and your online behavior and intent.
In this brave new world of data-supported audience buying, every individual with an addressable electronic device has been stripped down to an anonymous cookie and is for sale. My cookie, when bounced off various data providers, also reveals that I’m male (Axciom), have a competitive income (IXI), three children in my family (V12), a propensity for buying online (Targusinfo) and am in mid-management of a small business (Bizo). I’m also in-market for a car (Exelate) and considered to be a “Country Squire,” according to Nieslen’s Prizm, which is essentially a boring white guy from the suburbs who “enjoys country sports like golf and tennis.” Well, I’m horrible at tennis, but everything else seems to be accurate.
As a marketer, you now have an interesting choice. Instead of finding “Country Squire” or “Suburban Pioneer” on content-specific sites they’re known to visit, now I can simply buy several million of these people, and find them wherever they may be lurking on the Web. This explains why you suddenly see ads for BMWs above your Hotmail messages right after you looked at that nice diesel station wagon on the VW.com Web site.
Read More: ADWEEK
MacWorld Publisher IDG Launches Private Advertising Exchange
Tech Giant Set to Prove Publishers Can Launch Ad Exchanges, Too
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — More publishers are looking to claim ownership over digital advertising to combat the growing dominance of Wall Street-like trading desks they believe are depressing the value of online ad inventory.
IDG, publisher of technology titles such as Computerworld, Macworld and PCWorld, has formed its own private advertising exchange consisting of 450 tech-focused websites into which a select group of advertisers will be able to buy advertising. The private exchange, called TechMediaExchange.com, will launch in February and represent 90 million unique viewers and a billion impressions.
We don’t want just anybody to be a part of this,” said Peter Longo, CEO of IDG’s Networks division. “We want this to be a vetted group of sites that are truly focused on technology — quality sites that advertisers want to be against.”
Read More: AdAge
Cox Merges Adify With Digital Sales Arm
Aiming to reduce redundancy and offer more integrated online ad services, Cox Media Group said Tuesday it will merge its Cox Cross Media and Adify units to form Cox Digital Solutions. The new company will be led by Cox Cross Media head Steve Shaw and promises to facilitate online buys across Cox Media properties and third-party niche content networks.
Adify, which helps publishers build vertical networks and serves ads across the 180 networks it powers, was acquired by parent Cox Enterprises in 2008 for $300 million. The move has helped Cox expand its online ad operations and create vertical networks around its own properties, which include newspapers and radio and TV stations as well as related Web sites.
In 2009, for instance, Cox used Adify to build an auto-related ad network around its AutoTrader.com brand. Now the company will tie the Adify platform more tightly into its own digital ad operations to offer agencies and advertisers more efficient placement across its 1,300 local media sites in 145 markets as well as national reach through the more than 7,000 specialty publishers it works with. That adds up to traffic of about 135 million unique visitors a month, according to Cox.
Read More: MediaPost
New Year, New Attribution Model
A few years ago, marketers discovered that most of the conversions happened without an associated click in display advertising. Then, a little while later, view-based conversions were added to the performance metric. While it was a small step forward, the obvious question is: if the last click is not always indicative of the user’s decision to convert, why would the last view be any better? In short, it’s not.
In an earlier ClickZ column, I discussed the importance of going beyond the last click or last ad impression and described why an incorrect attribution model will lead to suboptimal results. Well, a new year calls for a new model – multi-touch attribution where all interactions within an association window are considered to have influences over a user’s conversion.
The power of digital advertising offers more than just targeting with higher precision; it also provides instantaneous feedback on how ads perform. With consumers exposed to increasingly more ad impressions and interactions of different media types, it’s become harder than it should be to explain how each event along the path to conversion affects the user’s decision. In the analytics sense, the current flawed last-touch attribution model suffers from the lack of a probability framework. Since the last touch (click or view) is defined by the conversion event, it’s difficult to calculate the probability. Therefore, it’s nearly impossible to measure the true influence of the last touch.
Read More: ClickZ
Facebook To Dominate Display Ads The Way Google Dominates Text Ads
It is customary to divide online advertising into two categories: direct response and brand advertising. I prefer instead to divide it according to the mindset of users: whether or not they are actively looking to purchase something (i.e. they have purchasing intent).* When users are actively looking to purchase something, they typically go to search engines or e-commerce sites. Through advertising or direct sales, these sites harvest intent. Google and Amazon are the biggest financial beneficiaries of intent harvesting. When the user is not actively looking to buy something, the goal of an online ad is to generate intent. The intent generation market is still fairly fragmented and will grow rapidly over the next few years as brand advertising increasingly moves online. P&G – which alone spends almost $4B/year on brand advertising – needs to convince the next generation of consumers that Crest is better than Colgate. This is why Google paid such a premium for Doubleclick, Yahoo for Right Media, and Microsoft for aQuantive (MS’s biggest acquisition ever).
Read More: BusinessInsider.com
Q&A: The Internet’s Traffic Cop
As more people go online for everything from video to social-networking updates, Internet service providers have to race to make sure the network has the capacity to deliver what customers expect. Behind the scenes, a company founded by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, works to ensure that that network is running more efficiently. Akamai is probably best known for storing things like videos on its servers, which are located closer to households. The closer the servers are to a user, the better the person’s experience is because the data doesn’t have to travel as far across the lines of the Internet. Akamai also uses algorithms to direct traffic on the Internet in the most efficient way — which isn’t always the way that normal Internet protocols would try to direct it. And the company has been expanding into areas such as security and “cloud computing” — where things like email and documents are handled and stored online rather than on a person’s computer. Digits spoke with Akamai’s co-founder and chief scientist, Tom Leighton, about how information is getting delivered to consumers and what needs to be done to speed up delivery. His responses are summarized below.
Read More: Blogs.WSJ.com
Adify Licenses NetSeer Technology To Lift Ad Conversions
The ad industry continues to automate systems to squeeze every dollar from campaigns to improve return on investments. Ad network Adify will announce this week that it has licensed NetSeer’s Contextual Services and concept-based analysis technology to better predict sites where ads will attract consumers to produce best. Knowing how to sort through the millions of Web sites to discard those with dribble and keep the ones with great content has become an art. NetSeer aims to help Adify find those sites to help clients gain the best ROI. John Mracek, chief executive officer at NetSeer, says contextual signals, when done correctly, can play an important role in increasing performance and understanding consumer intent. NetSeer will help create the “short list” that Adify will use to trim down and present to clients. It will give Adify a sense of the sites that fit specific criteria through NetSeer’s categorization abilities and KnowledgeBank, a concept graph supported by spiders crawling the Web to determine what’s important. It opens up advertising for companies that Gropper refers to as “mid-tail” — companies that fall well below those on the comScore 500 list.
Read More: MediaPost
