Mobile Advertising: A big step forward

Google has been talking about integrating the various acquisitions like DoubleClick, AdMob and YouTube etc. One of the news last week (source: AdWeek) was that mobile Rich Media ads (expandable, interactive banners) can now be served via DoubleClick (Google's ad server) on AdMob media (Google's mobile ad network).

I feel this is a big step forward as we will be able to get consistent metrics from online (desktop based) and mobile advertising from the same system – DoubleClick, assuming DoubleClick is being used as the ad server for Desktop campaign as well.

One of the next things I would hope from Google is utilizing DoubleClick for the video ad (in-stream) across all their properties worldwide including on YouTube.

 

Measuring Reach of Paid Advertising on Facebook

As social media programs are getting more and more popular, it is important to understand how to measure the effect of the paid advertising. In this post, I will like to talk about the basic concept of reach, as ad exposure or reach is the first step in the game of placing ads.

Typical, Facebook campaigns are done to increase the fan base of a particular page or brand. In these campaigns, there are three types of ad impressions placed on Facebook:

1. Paid Media – Paid ads with the message of "Become a Fan" of the particular brand
   
2. Earned/Paid Media – Paid ads with the message of "Become a Fan" but with the social element showing a blurb with the name of a few of your friends who are fans of the particular brand. Since, these ads have the social component these are classified within the earned media category as well.
   
3. Earned Media – These are the instances of ads which show the list of friends who are fans of the brand and have a link below "Become a Fan". Since, the advertiser didn't pay for these impressions, these types of ads or impressions are termed as Earned Media.
   

Thus, measuring reach from all these impressions is not an easy task. It is impossible to measure it using third party ad servers like DoubleClick as the Earned Media is not served via any ad servers. It will be interesting to find out if Facebook can provide information on the number "Earned Media" impressions served for a particular brand. The next step will be to provide the number of unique impressions seen by each user; this will be the reach from the earned media impressions.

Another way of estimating this reach is based on the number of users who become fans from the paid media. On an average, each user might have 50 friends (this is not an accurate number, just for calculation purposes) thus, if a campaign generated 200 fans, the additional impressions generated will be 200*50 = 10,000. However, then some of the users who are exposed to these 10,000 impressions will become fans, thus generating more earned media. Thus, it is a cycle which goes on – beauty of social media. A good estimate will be to use 3 iterations in social environment like Facebook.

A recent study by Facebook and Nielsen shows that the Earned media impressions are the most impactful in driving awareness, ad recall and also purchase intent. Thus, it is very critical to drive these impressions. Though less in volume, these are the ones which have the biggest bang for the buck.

Do you know where your Ads are?

As advertisers and media agencies, we sign the Insertion Orders (IOs) and then assume that the publishers are placing our ads at the correct placement and also targeting the right audience.

What goes on in reality? Obviously, a certain percentage of these ads end up in areas of the Internet where it doesn't make any sense (Adult content, areas not relevant to the brand etc) or might get served below the fold or even get served to out of the country audience.

What if you are an e-tailer in UK and your deal of the week ads are being served to people in India or USA or Brazil. It's a waste of media i.e. waste of money. There will hardly be anyone in India, USA or Brazil looking to buy from your online store in UK.

Similarly, if you are a technology company targeting your ads towards gamers but your ads appear within parenting section. The likelihood of conversion in parenting section are really slim.

There are now audit services available that can audit your online media buys and tell you exactly where your ads are being served. Are your ads being served to an international audience, are your ads being served in the areas that are not relevant.

DoubleVerify is a service which can provide you this information. They claim to have relationships with majority of the publishers and seem to be well known. It seems to be pretty simple to use them if you use third party ad-serving like DoubleClick, Atlas.

DoubleVerify provides you screenshots of your ads in inappropriate content, international traffic, below the fold ads, multiple impressions on the same page. All this information can be used by advertisers or media agencies to renegotiate the media buy with the publishers. Net net bringing additional savings to your client or your own business.

Calculating View-Through attribution: Challenges

After analyzing the Google Analytics "Content Report" for my blog, it became evident that the "Post-Impression" attribution post is the most popular post so far. So, I thought I would expand a bit more on that same topic, some of the common challenges that could be faced during the test set up and also interpreting the results.

If this test is being done for a very large advertiser, delivering in the range of billions of impressions in a month, then it is virtually impossible to create a test and control group as the reach of the campaign would be so high. It is highly likely that all consumers will be exposed to the advertising.

1. If all the ads are not third party served, it is impossible to create a test and control, as if there is a x% of Ads which are site served, creating a control group will be hard across the entire advertising network
   
2. Even with all the ads being served via third party ad servers, consumers could get exposed to the Ads on different computers, example work vs. home
   
3. After the results if the lift is negative i.e. it shows that showing the ads did not increase the conversion rate vs. control group – this indicates that the "Brand" has very high brand awareness
   
4. Interpreting the results could be another tough nut to crack; DoubleClick in one of their studies has shown that for Continental Airlines that there is a 67% post-impression attribution. Lately, it has been seen that the post-impression attribution has been pretty low due to increase in online advertising.
   
   1. One more variable could be seasonality, the post-impression attribution has been seen to change based on the different times of the year. The consumer mindset changes based on the seasonality for example it could be very high during the back to school season for school products like laptops, ipods etc

How to measure lift from any marketing effort?

It is very important to measure the lift from the marketing campaign. This is essential to understand how much more products or consumers are converting due to the marketing/advertising efforts.

A basic test/control methodology should be used to find out the lift in conversion rate due to advertising. This is easy to understand with an example of the grocery store - how likely is someone to buy a product if he/she has not seen any advertising and then how likely is someone to buy a product if he/she has seen advertising. The % difference between the two is the lift from the advertising.

In simple words you found out the purchase intent without the advertising (Control group) and then with the advertising (Test Group). The % difference between the two provides the lift.

How easy is it to implement or execute this?

For Online marketing, it is not hard at all. Comscore has a panel of over 1MM consumers whom they monitor their online behavior. Their solution creates a test/control group based on Ad exposure and conversion.

DoubleClick also has a cookie based solution to segment consumers who saw the ad and those who did not and then calculating the lift due to advertising.

For offline marketing, there are mathematical models which have been used in the past to calculate the lift.