When it comes to measuring the impact and effectiveness of online ads, seems like everyone’s talking about ‘engagement’ these days.
Measurement and ROI from engagement will be two themes we explore in our upcoming Sports Marketing 2.0 VIP Summit (May 6 at AT&T Park in San Francisco). Featured panelists include: Young-Bean Song, VP Analytics from Microsoft’s Atlas Institute and John Broady, Executive Director, Omniture Test&Target consulting division
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From Brandweek:
Marketers are finding themselves on the receiving end of a pitch right now that goes something like this: Forget about “uniques” and page views. The online metric that really matters is engagement.
And as banner ads maintain their 0.1-0.2% click-through rates, marketers at Procter & Gamble and Dell are listening, though the deal is hardly closed.
Now, engagement through online communities, video sites and other methods offers the potential to measure more. Social media companies like Slide and Bebo are adding to advertisers’ branding methods with a growing list of widgets to virtually toss at consumers for further engagement. But getting advertisers to embrace them is another story.
“The groundswell and popularity [of widgets and other engagement tools] depends on existing media buying ecosystems,” said Sonya Chawla, senior director of advertising at Slide, which has worked with about 25 Fortune 100 brands so far. Chawla added that if you’re creating new metrics that no one’s thought about, and “they don’t really make sense for the vast majority of advertisers,” they can be hard to push through.
That’s why Slide has created measurement tools (counting the number of widgets a consumer sends to another through an ad campaign, for example) so that advertisers know what they’re getting for their efforts. “Seventy-five thousand SuperPokes a day means something,” to advertisers, she said.
But what? Skeptics say engagement metrics are too amorphous. “I think people are starting to feel that those metrics are somewhat loose,” Hinz said. More to the point, few engagement measurements to date lead to sales.
Microsoft attempted to tackle the issue in February with its Engagement Mapping service, which not only tracks the last site a consumer clicked on to get to a brand’s Web page (a banner ad, for example), but a history of pages a person has traveled through on which a brand has advertised, prior to landing on that brand’s home page. The ultimate goal is to measure how effectively a campaign creates recall for someone. “For brand managers, success is less about hitting a page and more about things like brand recall and favorable impressions,” said John Chandler, principal analyst at Microsoft.
