ITZ Publishing

Read the original post here: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/175592/beeing-seen-chasing-viewability.html#ixzz1vurOswLn

Being Seen: Chasing Viewability

by Steve Smith

The theme of ad viewability came up again and again at last week’s OMMA RTB event in New York, After a decade and a half of Web advertising, -- and in retrospect -- it seems downright daft that the problem of viewable impressions was not front and center long ago. Now that it is top of mind for many buyers and publishers, the consensus seems to be that proving viewability will be part of the reporting, verification and accountability process in short order. Not surprisingly, products are emerging to address this concern.

It seems to me that viewable impressions are also an opportunity for the display industry to take more seriously a host of other issues about ad impact. Time spent with an ad, page design and clutter are all related issues.  I raised some of these issues with Oren Netzer, CEO, DoubleVerify, which just released its own AdView product that addresses viewability from a number of perspectives. According to the company, one of the leading ad verification platforms that is already evaluating ads on pages, only 54% of the impressions served by 26 media sellers analyzed met the IAB’s standards of a viewable impression. And the IAB sets a pretty low bar, with viewable meaning  50% of the ad for a second. In its study of a select group of advertisers and media, DoubleVerify found that if we used the one second standard, then the best performing media seller had a 83% ad visibility rate, while the worst had an 18% rate. As the time spent standard rises to 3 seconds or more, then only 43% of ads were considered viewable.

There has been a lot of discussion thus far about how changing to a viewable impressions standard over a served impression standard can change radically basic metrics like click-through rates. C3 reported earlier this year that the effectiveness of an ad may be grossly underreported if viewability isn’t taken into account.  In essence the figurative references to the purported “invisibility” of banner ads to many users may be literal. You can’t click what you don’t see. When a viewable impressions only are measured, CTRs can be appreciably higher.

Netzer points out that brand-lift evaluations are also affected. Most post-campaign branding studies assume that the ad-exposed group of people were going to pages where the ad was visible. By culling the surveyed group, “it could reduce the number of people who saw the ads by 30%,” he says. “And then the campaign may have performed better than we thought it did.” Moving to viewable impressions could have a positive effect on many aspects of the online ad ecosystem. “This has been a disservice to the publishers and to the industry,” he argues. “It means advertising may be working better than we thought.”

While publishers who have been tossing as much ad inventory at a page in order to monetize every pixel may demur from measuring viewability, Netzer maintains that the standard will help most sellers in the end. Planning tools that compared sites across a number of different parameters can add another differentiation, rate of viewability. But that metric can include more than a flat rate of ads view and also account for time spent with viewable ads. Hi company is measuring beyond the IAB standard into 3, 5, 15 and 30 second increments. In comparing sites, buyers can set their expectations and placements against the typical page hang times of users of a site or section. After all, one second of viewing time isn’t enough for some of the animated and rich media creative to cycle through their show.  

Measuring for viewability is not a light tech lift, Netzer says. “We have to identify the exact location of the ad on the page and then identify the size of the browser window, scrolling, to calculate if the ad is in a viewable area. And if multiple tabs are open, we have to take focus into consideration.”

Like all aspects of digital advertising, viewability measurement requires an achingly complex process to get at what should be basic accountability. But let’s hope it also moves publishers and advertisers to think harder about other basics like the look and feel of a page. A tech-driven medium in which all interaction occurred within a geeky browser interface left us with a Web with a terrible design aesthetic. The primacy of efficiency and utility over experience, the ability to measure revenue per page, led to Web sites that had all the visual appeal of NASCAR stock cars.

In my mind, there is a very good reason why so many of us have moved our content consumption to mobile smartphones and tablets. The experience is less cluttered and in many cases more enjoyable and engaging. These platforms remind everyone that design and experience matters, that whimsy, engagement and entertainment are all important. They remind us that Web as we have known it was built for business machines, experienced on desktops in offices first and foremost, and lived in an interface designed by engineers. The Web has always been incredibly efficient, useful, informative, deep, flexible and quick. Honestly, it has never been much fun.

 

Steve Smith is the editor of Mobile Marketing Daily at Mediapost where he covers all aspects of the mobile landscape and writes the daily MoBlog and regular Mobile Insider columns. He also programs the OMMA Mobile/Display/Data and Behavioral series of shows and the Mobile Insider Summits. A recovering academic who taught media studies at Brown and University of Virginia, he spent the last decade as a digital media critic for numerous publications and as consultant. He also writes for Media Industry Newsletter and eContent magazine. Contact him here.

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/175592/beeing-seen-chasing-viewability.html#ixzz1vurvQoiT

48 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

Originally posted on DreamGrow.com. Read the post here:

http://www.dreamgrow.com/48-free-social-media-monitoring-tools/

Priit Kallas 

If you want to know what’s happening in the social web you need monitoring tools. Before you get out your credit card and start to spend money try out some of the free social media monitoring services. This way you get a taste of what is available and if you need paid services.

I have collected 48 free social media monitoring tools. In the Group A are the services that I use regularly or seem interesting to check out immediately. The Group B is an alphabetical list of tools for you to play with. Here we go:

Group A

Seesmic

Twitter account: seesmic
Seesmic is a suite of social media management and collaboration tools that provide everything to build their brands online. Seesmic has applications on every platform, including mobile, and a marketplace of third-party plugins. Seesmic gives you social media monitoring, updating and engaging in real time.

HootSuit

Twitter account: HootSuite
Monitor and post to multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Create custom reports from over 30 individual report modules to share with clients and colleagues. Track brand sentiment, follower growth, plus incorporate Facebook Insights and Google analytics. Draft and schedule messages to send at a time your audience is most likely to be online. HootSuite has the dashboard for your iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android.

PostRank

Twitter account: postrank
Postrank has two tools. The PostRank Analytics (https://analytics.postrank.com/) gives you insight about your sites engagement scores and. Social engagement analytics covers over 20 of the top social networks. Find out who are your influencers, which content drives engagement, what posts are most impostant. And the best part is that you can also monitor your comperirors. You can connect PostRank with your Google Analytics to get even better results. PostRanks top ranked content (http://www.postrank.com/main) helps you to find most important blogs on any topic, use it to monitor your competition

Social Mention

Twitter account: socialmention
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content into a single stream of information. It allows you to track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors over one hundred social media sites.

SocialPointer

Twitter account: socialpointer
SocialPointer is a real-time social media marketing platform for marketing agencies and individuals, It enables them to track, monitor and respond in real-time to relevant social mentions and user conversation. SocialPointer lets you monitor, listen, respond and engage.

SocialSeek

Twitter account: socialseek
Get all the latest tweets, news, videos, photos, and more on any topic you want in one place. There’s a Socialseek site for everything and you can even make your own. I found some of the news sources other tools missed.

Twazzup

Twitter account: twazzup
Twazzup is real-time news platform. It allows you to filter the news out of live Twitter content. It’s useful for understanding who are the influencers on a given topic and what are to trending sources.

TwitterCounter

Twitter account: Twitter
Twitter Counter is the number one site to track your Twitter stats. Twitter Counter provides statistics of Twitter usage and tracks over 14 million users. Twitter Counter also offers a variety of widgets and buttons that people can add to their blogs, websites or social network profiles to show recent Twitter visitors and number of followers.

Wildfire Social Media Monitor

Twitter account: wildfireapp
Measure your performance. Glean insights about the growth of your social media fanbase on the leading social networks. With daily tracking, you have visibility into growth trends small and large. Gauge your social media success against others in your industry by comparing your follower bases across the leading social networks. Alert system will inform you of meaningful trends and activity that’s relevant to your social presence.

Group B

Addictomatic

Twitter account: addictomatic
Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s a tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and get info on what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on. You can personalize your results dashboard and keep coming back to your personalized results dashboard for that search. News pages provide the latest headlines on topics such as entertainment, politics, shopping, sports and more.

Blogpulse

Twitter account: blogpulse
BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. BlogPulse applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the world of blogs. Different searches include basic, advanced, trend, URL and conversation tracker.

Boardreader

Twitter account: boardreader
BoardReader allows users to search multiple message boards simultaneously, allowing users to share information in a truly global sense. Boardreader is focused on creating the largest repository of searchable information for our users. Users can find answers to their questions from others who share similar interests. Our goal is to allow our users to search the “human to human” discussions that exist on the Internet.

Boardtracker

Twitter account: BoardTracker
Discover the influencers, monitor and protect your brand and reputation, find and engage your customers and critics. BoardTracker is a forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it is posted.

CoTweet

Twitter account: cotweet
Free version is for individuals and organizations that manage a small number of Twitter accounts and need only basic features to engage and manage their conversations. Free version includes scheduling, conversation history, email notifications containing your latest mentions, team collaboration tools and access to Twitter follower profiles.

Facebook Search

Twitter account: facebook
Facebook search is notoriously bad and will not find much, but if you have nothing else to do then give it a shot. It relies heavily on your social graph so the results you get may not be meaningful for your target audience.

Google Alerts

Twitter account: Google
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (blogs, news, etc.) based on your searches. Enter the topic you wish to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you’ll receive. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include: monitoring a developing news story and keeping current on a competitor or industry.

Google Blog Search

Twitter account: Google
Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice. Your results include all blogs. The blog index is continually updated, so you’ll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results.

Google Trends

Twitter account: gtrendz
Trends allows you to compare search terms and websites. With Google Trends you can get insights into the traffic and geographic visitation patterns of websites or keywords. You can compare data for up to five websites and view related sites and top searches for each one.

HowSociable

Twitter account: howsociable
Free monitoring tool for measuring your brands or keywords using 32 social networking sites. HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.

Icerocket

Twitter account: icerocket
Blog Tools, create your own Trend Graphs with the IceRocket Trend Tool. Enter keywords to see mentions trended over time. Trend Tool, enter items to see mentions trended over time. Enter up to five queries under Trend Terms. Type in the label you would like associated with each query under Display Labels. Search tool for blogs, web, Twitter, Facebook, news, and images.

Klout

Twitter account: klout
Klout’s mission is to help every individual understand and leverage their influence. Klout measures influence in Twitter to find the people the world listens to. It analyzes content to identify the top influencers.

Mentionmap

Twitter account: asterisqdataviz
Explore your Twitter network. Discover which people interact the most and what they’re talking about. It’s also a great way to find relevant people to follow. The visualization runs right in your browser and displays data from Twitter. Mentionmap loads user’s tweets and finds the people and hashtags they talked about the most. In this data visualization, mentions become connections and discussions between multiple users emerge as clusters.

Monitter

Twitter account: monitter
It’s a twitter monitor, it lets you monitor the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying. Just type three words into the three search boxes and within seconds you’ll start seeing relevant tweets streaming live.

NutShellMail

Twitter account: NutshellMail
NutshellMail lets you organize, monitor, and interact with all your social networks from a consolidated email digest delivered directly to your favorite inbox on a schedule that you choose. Nutshellmail supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Ning.

Omgili

Twitter account: omgili
Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. The Buzz is the percentage of the term out of the total number of discussions Omgili covered on a specific date.

Quarkbase

Twitter account: quarkbase
You can find out how good a site is, get comprehensive website details, discover competitors and analyze them. One can call Quarkbase ‘whois on steroids’ or ‘imdb for websites’, which provides detailed website information like people, traffic, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity and much more.

Samepoint

Twitter account: samepoint
SamePoint.com tracks millions of conversations, taking place across in blogs and social media sites. SamePoint converts discussions into web pages, or permalinks, and organizes them within a tag cloud. SamePoint can serve as the nexus where the conversations meet, providing a single place for all discussions on a specific topic.

SharedCount

Twitter account: yahelc
Track your shares, likes, tweets, and more. Enter a web address of a page and find out how much it has been shared in different social networking and bookmarking sites. Currently includes Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and StumbleUpon.

SocialOomph

Twitter account: socialoomph
Schedule tweets, track keywords, extended Twitter profiles, save and reuse drafts, view @mentions and retweets, purge your DM inbox, personal status feed — your own tweet engine, unlimited accounts.

StepRep

Twitter account: steprep
StepRep provides an overview of the conversations people are having about your business online. Anytime your business is mentioned, anywhere on the web, you’ll hear about it. Sources are scanned continuously to bring you the most complete and up-to-date data on how your business is perceived. The data is broken down and analyzed in reports that can help you target your marketing and increase your online customer engagement.

Surchur

Twitter account: surchur
Surchur is the ultimate dashboard to right now. The surchmeter shows you how popular a keyword is on different sources: surchur, blogs and twitter.

Technorati Blogsearch

Twitter account: technorati
Search Technorati and note the authority and rank of the blogs listed in the results. Authority measures the site’s standing and influence in the blogosphere. Rank shows what position this authority gives the site. It is not a very good tool for lesser known blogs as it misses a lot of great sites.

Tinker

Twitter account: tinker
Tinker helps you stay on top of your favorite events by showing you the latest buzz from Twitter and across the social web. Create or follow an event stream by choosing a keyword. An event could be anything: the Oscars, a new iPhone release, a movie premiere, a book launch, or a Superbowl party. Tinker also lets you search for the top news, topics and places people are talking about.

TipTop

Twitter account: twittiptop
TipTop Search is a Twitter-based search engine that helps you discover the best and most current advice, opinions, answers for any search, and also real people to directly engage and share experiences with. A search on any topic reveals people’s emotions and experiences about it, as well as other concepts that they are discussing in connection with the original search.

Topsy

Twitter account: topsy
Topsy is a real-time search engine. Topsy indexes and ranks search results based upon the most influential conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain. Topsy’s algorithms identify influencers for any searchable criteria, using these influence calculations to rank results. It displays results for related terms and articles, trending topics, identifies experts (influencers) and shows you trackback pages for everything in its index.

Trendistic (formerly Twist)

Twitter account: trendistic
Trendistic allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals. This way, it shows how the frequency of one to four-word phrases fluctuate over time. The result is a visualization of what’s popular Twitter users. You can enter a phrase in the search box to see how its frequency varies over time, or several different topics separated by commas to see how they relate: try comparing “skype” and “microsoft”(http://trendistic.com/skype/microsoft), to see how powerful it can be.

TweetBeep

Twitter account: tweetbeep
Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything, with hourly updates. You can keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL, Great for online reputation management, catching all your @replies and @mentions.

TweetPsych

Twitter account: TweetPsych
TweetPsych uses linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. The service analyzes your last 1000 tweets. It works best on accounts that are operated by a single user and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than simply a content distribution platform. Created by Dan Zarrella.

TweetReach

Twitter account: tweetreachapp
TweetReach measures the impact of social media conversations. Use it to understand how many people were reached by tweets about a topic on Twitter.

Twendz

Twitter account: waggeneredstrom
The twendz Twitter-mining Web application uses the power of Twitter Search, highlighting conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in. Using the twendz application gives a glimpse into what’s on people’s minds and their emotional reaction. Mining Twitter conversations alerts you to brewing trends, conversation topics and points of view.

Twitalyzer

Twitter account: Twitalyzer
Analytics for social relationships. Twitalyzer knows who is in your social network and where they live, allowing you to be more targeted in your outreach efforts. Twitalyzer provides Twitter’s most robust benchmark reporting, ranking Twitter users ten different ways. Authored by Eric T. Peterson author and blogger.

Twitrratr

Twitter account: twitrratr
Twitrratr built a list of positive keywords and a list of negative keywords. It searches Twitter for a keyword and the results are cross-referenced against adjective lists, then displayed accordingly.

Twitter Grader

Twitter account: grader
Twitter Grader lets you check the power of your Twitter profile compared to millions of other users that have been graded. Just enter your Twitter username and you’ll get an instant grade and report. It looks at a variety of factors including the number of followers, power of those followers and the level to which you are engaging the community.

Twitter Search

Twitter account: twitter
Use Twitter Search if you need to find out what’s happening in the world beyond your personal timeline. Twitter Search lets you search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through our service. Advanced Search allows you to create your queries using many advanced operators.

Twitter StreamGraphs

Twitter account: JeffClark
A StreamGraph is shown for the latest 1000 tweets which contain the search word. You can also enter a Twitter ID preceded by the ‘@’ symbol to see the latest tweets from that user.

Twitturly

Twitter account: twitturly
Twitturly tracks the URLs flying around the Twitterverse and provides a real-time view of what people are talking about on Twitter. When someone tweets a URL, Twitturly applies it as a vote for that URL. The more votes a URL has in the last 24 hours, the higher it ranks on Twitturly’s Top100.

WhatHashtag

Twitter account: whathashtag
WhatHashtag is service that allows you to find the most used Twitter hashtags for the keywords you enter. Search for the keyword and you will automatically get the most popular hashtags used worldwide to discuss your topic. The result retrieves the last 1.000 tweets related to your keyword, and orders hashtags by frequency of use. Using WhatHashtag you will gain visibility when tweeting your opinions, being read beyond your followers in the most effective way.

WhoUnfollowedMe

Twitter account: whounfollowedme
Who.unfollowed.me is a service that helps you track your unfollowers, in real time, without waiting for a DM, or email. It allows you to check your unfollowers on your schedule, every 15 minutes, without waiting for an email or a direct message.

That’s all folk. If you know of a great free tool then please let us know in the comments.

 

The metrics you should be using

Read the original Post at Imedia Connection here:

http://www.imediaconnection.com/article_full.aspx?id=30946

 

• Jarvis Mak
• Contact

Web Analytics Posted on February 15, 2012

"You can't manage what you don't measure," is an old management adage. However, by the same token, just because you can measure something, does not mean you should manage by it.

I authored a previous iMedia article about why clicks are the wrong metric. In that article, I alluded to the view-through effectiveness of display advertising despite the absence of clicks. In the spirit of that conversation, I want to discuss the relevance of other metrics in determining campaign success.

Use: Brand measures like lift in awareness or consideration

You can't click on a billboard, radio, or TV ad but we know they impact awareness, consideration, even purchase intent. Of course, the same is true of online ads. If the campaign has a branding objective, then optimize to it, ideally with a real-time data-driven approach.

Brand marketers want solutions that demonstrate improvement over time, transfer learnings across campaigns from top of the funnel to mid-funnel, and finally, result in sales. Everyone loves search for converting in-market folks but don't always remember to widen the funnel. As a marketer, if you rely on offline media (namely, TV) to be your lone awareness vehicle, then you're subject to over-saturation in television and missing out on cross-media optimized exposure. Complement offline with a digital awareness initiative.

Use: Ideal customer composition

Most advertisers know their customers inside and out, or at least they think they do: They have detailed customer profiles, even personas of Jim the Technophile or Susan the Savvy Bargain Shopper. However, when it comes to reaching those audiences in media delivery, the richness of the Jim and Susan personas are often lost to become coarse gender and age descriptions of "men 25 to 54" and "women 18 to 34," respectively.

Publishers that have personas that perfectly match advertisers' personas are one step ahead of the game. For advertisers, you trust that the targets those publishers claim to have are good proxies for your ideal customers. If there are no publisher persona targets, then we've seen agencies often default to the age and gender target as the next best proxy.

Why use a proxy though? Optimize segment composition in real-time. How? With a survey-based approach. We tried this with a couple CPG brands, with excellent results. The first advertiser wanted to reach previous brand customers. Utilizing real-time survey input to optimize segments, targeting of previous customers increased by 50 percent over the course of the campaign. The second CPG advertiser wanted to reach frequent users, and the same technique resulted in the target composition of this audience growing by 40 percent during the campaign. Results were validated with an offline sales impact study from Nielsen with a 250 percent return on ad spend.

Use: LTV (Lifetime value) of acquired customers

For direct response advertisers, especially in finance and retail, customers acquired cheaply are often low-value customers, especially when promotions are involved. The value of more expensive leads (as measured by account balances or subsequent basket size and purchase frequency) ends up much higher than cheaper direct response leads. An agency that is maniacally focused on low CPA without regard to LTV is doing their advertiser a disservice.

To advertisers, this means arming your agencies with visibility into these LTV measures. It means you need to do homework about customer behavior and transactions so that agencies can also pass information about customer value along to publisher partners, even anecdotally. We once executed a campaign for a bank but we didn't have access to back-end metrics like deposit amounts. As the campaign slowly auto-optimized toward the metric we had, CPA, the agency provided us feedback that we should go back to what we had been doing before day 45 because after that point, although CPA improved, the average starting balance amounts started shrinking considerably. With that bit of feedback, we were able to rejigger settings to pre-day 45 and go back to acquiring higher value customers.

Ignore: CTR

See the aforementioned iMedia article. We almost always provide data about how optimal segments are negatively correlated with CTR. For many agencies, they are glad to get this analysis to provide back to their advertisers as part of ongoing education.

For example, we demonstrated to a customer that pursuing segments that demonstrated higher CTR for the campaign would have led to incorrect optimization. Trying to maximize CTR would have led to a lower quality audience, since "clickier" segments were not the ones with the highest target composition.

Ignore: Ad interaction rate

It is not universally true that ad interaction rate doesn't matter. When the rich media unit has rich functionality like lead capture or submit, some other transactional feature, or a product catalog based on recently shopped items, then interaction is highly relevant. This is usually accomplished with dynamic creative and an XML feed.

However, when ad interactions are really opportunities for an expanded canvas that tell a more elaborate brand story, the benefit is dubious at best. At Rocket Fuel, we repeatedly see that thesimpler ads are, the better. In fact, we have run static ads for a campaign alongside the long-looping Flash versions and find that performance is 50 to 300 percent better with simpler creative. 

If advertisers want to understand impact of ad interactions, work with your publisher partners to instrument their pixels in ad unit expansion frames. Get ahead of the game and work with your creative partners before the assets are finished. Then the publishers can do the same type of correlation analysis with a brand metric, as well as optimize in-flight if there really is a positive correlation.  

Ignore: Video completion rate

This is in the context of in-banner video. It is a natural extension of the other two "unimportant" metrics. Does it matter that a video plays all the way through to completion? How much does auto-start inflate the metrics? It really doesn't matter what percentage of ads went all the way to the end unless it was all reaching the desired customers. As a marketer, I'd be happy with static ads shown to the right audience over a 75 percent video completion rate to the wrong audience.

A very notable exception to this is when video completions are well-documented to correlate directly with sales, like movie trailers for theatrical releases.

Conclusion

In general, we almost always see that metrics about online ad engagement or interaction (alone) not translate to bottom line results as effectively as lifetime value, ideal customer targets, and changes in brand measures. Ad metrics can definitely be a part of the overall story of the campaign; however, I wouldn't recommend them in isolation. It happens too often that an agency measures (and eliminates) partners along a single dimension like ad interaction rate.

Instead, the advertiser and agency should compare partners along a multitude of dimensions. Better yet, go the extra step and attribute value along all these dimensions. Here are some thoughts to get you started on attribution. It is important to review and compare partners but measure in ways that give you a comprehensive view of their overall campaign impact.

Jarvis Mak  is VP of analytics for Rocket Fuel.

 

ROI, or the art of counting monsters -

Originally posted on BlockbyBlock. Read the original post here: 

 http://www.blockbyblock.us/2012/01/09/roi-or-the-art-of-counting-monsters/#

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Sally Duros

 

 

Next time you’re puzzling over the return on investment, ROI, of advertising for a neighborhood business, first consider the monsters.

“If you look at Facebook as the little monster in the corner you have to feed every day.  And Twitter is another one. And the business’ website is another one. And email is another one,” says Greg Swanson, CEO of Itz Publishing,  a strategic consulting partner for online media, “the neighborhood business  now has 15 monsters in the room.”

“The question is not what is the ROI on each one, it is how the heck do I feed 15 monsters?!”, he says.

A history lesson on small business marketing will clarify why this is relevant to advertising.

In 1990, if you were a small business looking to win customers in your local market, you spent 70% of your total marketing budget buying ads with legacy media — radio, TV and  newspapers. That means you spent the bulk of your money —  $7 out of $10 —  buying the audience from someone else who had one  – i.e. buying ads on radio, TV or in newspapers.

“You were basically renting an audience,“ Swanson says.

The small business spent the other 30% of its marketing budget reaching the audience it had built itself. It used marketing tools that included signage, posters, direct mail, discounts and a few other bells and whistles.

But now it’s 2012, and those numbers have reversed, Sawnson says. Today small businesses are spending only 30% of their total marketing dollars buying ads with a publisher, i.e. renting an audience —   including your website audience. And they are spending 70% of their dollars reaching the audience that they have built themselves.

“70-30. Which means that all media companies — whether you are talking about indy online media or legacy media — are fighting over an ever-shrinking part of the pie,” Swanson says.

The advertising/rental pie is very small.

This has been a 30-to-40 year movement on the part of small business owners, Swanson says.

That’s why Swanson thinks it’s time for local media to find a way to participate with small business owners and help them focus their 70% of self-built marketing dollars.

Today, the flavor-of-the-day for much of that self-built audience includes Facebook, websites, Yelp, Twitter, Groupon and other social sites that small businesses are compelled to participate in.

Using each of these tools poses a slew of questions. For instance, if  a small business works with Groupon, it has bought 1,500 new email addresses. It’s got a new audience to market to as well as a lot of questions. How often should I talk with my audience? What should I say?

In addition, every tool is measured by a different metric, Swanson says.  Social sites count likes, and clicks and views and opens and none of them compare well with each other. Social media marketing consultant Brian Solis has written extensively about this problem and has developed a rough system of measurement.

“The small business owner doesn’t have a clue how to manage this,” Swanson says. “A company like AT&T has highly sophisticated tools for managing social, but if you are the local advertiser, you are blindfolded in a dark room with a dart in your hand throwing it against the wall hoping the dart board is on the wall.”

In short, the small business owner faces more things to do with no greater budget, expertise or time.

That’s why to Swanson’s way of thinking, for the local indy publisher the sweet spot might be to ease the pain for the small business rather than trying to sell on a traditional ROI model.

The indy publisher could say “Let us provide you with a service where you can enter your information once and we will distribute it. And one of the distribution streams will be an ad on our news site.”

And so the ROI quickly morphs.

Though an unproven and controversial idea, Allen D. Mutter, who writes Newsasaur came out in support of the idea of publishers serving as social media managment boutiques in December, citing Forrester Rsearch.

 A recent survey by Forrester Research, the market research company, found that 77% of the mangers of small and medium businesses are concerned about building their social-marketing presence. But nearly all of them say they are so bewildered about what to do and so overwhelmed with the ordinary chores of running their businesses that they want someone to help.

Swanson says that online publishers have an added quandary in that they often choose to sell banner ads – which are outmoded as an advertising model — coupled with selling to a news organization’s demographics. In Swanson’s opinion, neither takes advantage of the true capacity of the Internet to match buyers and sellers, but that’s another tributary we won’t go down just yet.

So as to ROI, how does this add up?

If you are a local publisher trying to sell ads to small business, and this small business conundrum jibes with your experience, you might try to understand the small business marketing mix of “rental” vs. self-build and see how you can work with the business to help maximize its channels, with your news site serving as an included channel.

Some might find following the small business money and easing the pain a more fruitful route than the more traditional path.

Let us know what your experience has been.

Google to Unveil Web-Measurement Service

By Editor&Publisher Staff

Published: June 24, 2008 2:30 PM ET

NEW YORK Google is in the works to roll out Web analytic tools that will compete directly with measurement firms like comScore and Nielsen Online (owned by E&P's parent company).

Google's data will be partly based on information from servers. Google's service, unlike comScore and Nielsen, will free. In addition, Google will offer marketers demographic information about users in a similar strategy to Quantcast (another measurement company that uses a mix of server and panel-based data to capture Web usage).

According to The Wall Street Journal's Emily Steel, "Google's approach aimed at bolstering its ad-sales business, could pose a major threat to the Web measurement services that are available now, ad executives say."

Read more: Google to Unveil Internet Usage Gauge 

Quantcast Applies For Media Rating Council Accreditation

MediaPost
by Joe Mandese, Tuesday, Jun 17, 2008 7:00 AM ET

In an important next step toward building credibility in an increasingly crowded online metrics and analytics field, Quantcast Monday said it has applied for Media Rating Council accreditation.

The MRC is a self-regulatory group created by the media industry in the 1960s following congressional hearings and a Justice Department probe into the TV ratings process, and in recent years has expanded into auditing and accrediting ratings systems and related processes for most major media, including the Internet.

"As the digital media landscape continues to grow and change, the transparency and accountability of audience measurement has never been more important," acknowledged George Ivie, CEO and executive director of the MRC.

At the core of the accreditation is the use of third-party CPA firms to ensure that measurement services are performing all the processes they claim to.

Quantcast provides near real-time traffic and audience characterization for more than 10 million online media assets, including Web sites, blogs, games, widgets and videos via its free Quantified Publisher program...

Read More: Quantcast Applies For Media Rating Council Accreditation

Metrics Insider » Blog Archive » Attitude Check

Link: Metrics Insider » Blog Archive » Attitude Check.

Attitude Check

Posted April 18th, 2008 by Jim Sterne       

       

Measuring click-throughs, pageviews and revenues is revealing, but it's a bit like asking an in-store shopper how well they like your store based on the time of day they came in, which aisles they went down and how much they bought. Figuring out if they enjoyed the experience is a different story.

Recency and frequency can give you some insights about loyalty and time on-site might be indicative of a positive visit, but you won't be able to measure whether your visitor thinks your site is great or ghastly unless you ask them.

Classic Web analytics data (what did they click on?) has been referred to as data-rich but information-poor.  You can tell exactly where people dropped out of a purchasing process or where they stopped reading a long story, but you're never going to know why.

Larry Freed, President and CEO of ForeSee Results, puts it this way: "When you read log file or sophisticated analytics reports, you surmise where to focus your attention. But when you look at actual customer comments, they'll tell you where you need work. Then use the analytics to figure out how well you're fixing the problem."

Jerry Tarasofsky, CEO of iPerceptions,  thinks attitudinal metrics are important enough to give away for free. His company's 4Q program (4q.iperceptions.com) is a free pop-up survey that asks your visitors:

 

      What is the purpose of your visit to our website today?

      Were you able to complete your task today?

      If you were not able to complete your task today, why not?

Very simple and very insightful. No, this is not going to give you in-depth, rolling satisfaction scores. That's what iPerceptions does for a living. No, this is not going to give you in-depth, industry comparisons between your firm and others. That's what ForeSee Reults does for a living. But i4Q will give you a little bit of the all-powerful Voice of the Customer that will tell you where to start fixing things that you may not know are going wrong.

Attitudinal information is not the alternative to clickstream data. Visitor complaints give you a clue about your site's effect on visitors, but you have to look at clickstream data, see where visitors went on the site, and what they did. That combination is critical. "I couldn't find your phone number." is a strong message that there's something wrong with your Contact Us page. Unless they never got to your Contact Us page. In that case, there's a problem with your menu system.

How did people who had successful visits get from the home page to the shopping cart? Where did the unhappy folks bail out? Where did the unhappy people get flummoxed? Of those who deemed themselves successful, how many are likely to return and buy again? How did their clickstream differ from those who were successful but said they were unlikely to return? Did the happy/successful people click on something more often than those who left unfulfilled?

The attitudinal part of all of comes from asking people whether they were successful in accomplishing their goals, instead of focusing exclusively on your own. Those who were happy about their Web site experience show up at once end of the spectrum, those who were not, at the other end.

Attitudinal metrics give you a little more view into the hearts and minds of your marketplace. That's just what we've been hoping for.

Yahoo! buys Indextools: 80% of the functionality of Omniture for FREE!

Link: OX2 Web Analytics blog » Blog Archive » Yahoo! buys Indextools: 80% of the functionality of Omniture for FREE!.

The information just fell in my mailbox as Charlie Holbrech send out a communication to IndexTools partners & Dennis Mortensen blogged about it: IndexTools (Yahoo!) Web Analytics goes FREE!

Boy oh boy Dennis, for a mindblowing (r)evolution, how’s that for a treat?

So, what does this mean? some paperwork for us, IndexTools partners, to accept the Yahoo! agreement in order to continue using the service for our clients, who will now be able to use the service for FREE!

I wonder when this quicks in exactly? As IndexTools usually prices per month - one of their great flexibilities - does this mean that for clients, as from the May 1st, their product budgets can already be reallocated… to consultancy services? I’m not complaining and it would align nicely with the philosophy of May 1st
I’ve got this Style Council music in my head now: Walls Come Tumbling Down

The excellent IndexTools support wil remain unaffected but new creation of accounts & projects will have to go through your dedicated account manager in order to avoid a deluge of accounts. Furthermore, Yahoo! does not intend to add any new partnerships or direct clients so let’s make the best of what we have today in terms of accounts set-ups and let’s really start optimizing!

How will this affect the rest of the market? Eric Peterson already blogged about that one in his How Yahoo! buying IndexTools changes Web Analytics post a couple of days ago that you might want to read again, in the light of this official annoucement. Seems that you’re money’s in Eric, it’s free before Xmas 2008

There are 2 breads of Web Analytics out there that will have to react: the other freebies - Google Analytics & Microsoft’s Gatineau - and then the other ones, the paying ones. And I didn’t say expensive however it seems that this definition has kind of moved in the last few hours now! Seems the 10/90 or 10/80/20 rule got also somewhat shifted once again with the reallocation of budgets

One can only stress once again that IndexTools has nothing to be ashamed of in terms of functionalities, goes way beyond Google Analytics, which was already pretty darn good in terms of price/features ratio and the question is open to those paying solutions about how they will react.

Happy, happy times for data driven decision making. Thank you Yahoo! thank you Dennis, let’s shake up this sector we all love & live for because many challenges lay ahead in order to report even better & make those decisions even more accurate.

Marketing Attribution Models » Marketing Productivity Blog » Blog Archive

Link: Marketing Attribution Models » Marketing Productivity Blog » Blog Archive.

Marketing Attribution Models

Interesting article in MultiChannel Merchant about sourcing sales across catalog and online using fractional allocation models.  I’m pretty sure “allocation” and “attribution” are really different concepts, though they seem to be used interchangeably right now.  Let’s just say from reading the article allocation sounds more like a gut feel thing and attribution, from my experience, implies the use of a mathematical model of some kind.

I know Kevin rails against a lot of the so-called matchback analysis done in catalog and I have to agree with him; that practice is a whole lot more like allocation then attribution in my book, particularly when it is pretty easy to measure the real source from a lift in demand perspective by using control groups. Take a random sample of the catalog target group, exclude it from the mailing, and compare the purchase behavior in this group with those customers who get the catalog over some time period.  That should give you an idea of what the incremental demand from catalog is - just look at gross sales per customer.  We did this at HSN for every promotion, since the TV was “always on” and creating demand by itself.

So does a web site.

Small number of users responsible for most click throughs

                                                             

New Study Shows that Heavy Clickers Distort Reality of Display Advertising Click-Through Metrics
2/12/08
Starcom, Tacoda and comScore’s “Natural Born Clickers” findings suggest “the click is dead” as go-to measurement of effectiveness for brand-building display advertising campaigns

CHICAGO – Media agency Starcom USA, behavioral targeting network Tacoda, and digital consumer insight company comScore collaborated on a research study whose results call into question click-through rates as a primary source of accountability for Internet display advertising aimed at brand-building. Called “Natural Born Clickers,” the study reveals that a very small group of consumers who are not representative of the total U.S. online population is accountable for the vast majority of display ad click-through behavior.

Full findings of the study, its methodology and results are being presented this afternoon at the iMedia Brand Summit in Coconut Point, Florida.