In-text advertising vs. Display Media

With In-text advertising gaining popularity among various advertisers, it is very interesting to see how they perform. Vibrant and Kontera are the two major players in that segment and have been known to show very high Click-through rate up to 5% at times.

When these publishers are on the media plan, they tend to skew the performance of the overall campaign and also make all the other publishers look not so good.

My thoughts are that display banner ads and in-text advertising comparison is not a APPLES to APPLES comparison. They should not be compared against one another.

My personal belief is that there could be a lot of accidental clicks in the in-text advertising. Site analytics should be used to gauge the business value of these consumers. Specific metrics like page depth, time spent and if there are any specific "call to actions" should be tracked.

I also believe that some consumers, who have get exposed to in-text advertising for the first few times, find it very interesting and a brand new concept. This allures them to click on the ad; however they did not intend to be on the advertiser's website. These kinds of situations cause a lot of accidental clicks.

This is a new medium and with time we all will get better understanding and provide accurate POVs to our business partners to better gauge the value addition from the in-text advertising campaigns.

Very high interactions on the banner, however very low clicks – Why?

Sometimes we notice that there are very high interactions on the banner, however the number of clicks on the banner is very low – how do we explain this? My personal point of view is that the banner could be providing a lot of information to the consumers that they need and thus the consumers are not allured to click on the banner.

A banner having a few videos embedded or a banner with a few tabs, with a lot of information about a specific product or a service would not attract consumers to click on the banner.

Does this mean the consumer is not interested in knowing more about the product – NO; the consumer already got so much information about the product that he or she doesn't need any more information at that time. I would rate this as a perfect consumer experience. As an advertiser, you have been successful in engaging the consumer and providing enough information to the consumer about the product or service.

THEY ALREADY GOT WHAT THEY WERE LOOKING FOR!

 

CIMA Breakfast Bytes: September 18, 2008

CIMA BreakfastByte: Does Research hold any weight within the dynamic digital space?

Time: 7am - 9am
Location: The Westin (909 N. Michigan Ave, 3rd Floor, Governor's Suite)
Member Price: 25
Non Member Price: 35

Join CIMA for an insightful conversation with our industry leaders as we pull back the curtains on this informative topic.

How do marketers, agencies, and publishers justify digital ad spending when planning, executing, and analyzing campaigns?

Listen to how our panel experts recommend how you can partner with your clients to effectively plan and measure campaigns to deliver strong results. The discussion will cover whether panel data and syndicated research should or should not continue to be used in the media planning process. Our experts will debate the validity of 3rd party research analytics and discuss how effective syndicated research and panel data can be in the planning process.

We will cover what marketers can do to answer the challenging questions . . .
Is this data really accurate?
How does this compare to offline research metrics?
Why doesn't all syndicated research report the same numbers?

Agenda:
7:00am - 7:30am Check-In
7:30am - 8:00am Breakfast
8:00am - 9:00am Discussion
9:00am - 9:15am Q & A

Early Bird Registration (July 16 - August 29)
Member Ticket(s) - $25
Nonmember Ticket(s) - $35

Registration (August 30 - September 12)
Member Ticket(s) - $30
Nonmember Ticket(s) - $40

Location:
The Westin Michigan Ave (909 N. Michigan Avenue, 3rd Floor, Governor's Suite)

Moderator:
Blagica Bottigliero, President, Bsolutions LLC

Speakers:
Stu Rodnick, Sr. Director of ADlytics, Platform-A
Kara Manatt, Research Director, Cross Media Research, Dynamic Logic
Amit Prakash, Associate Director, Digital Marketing Analytics, OMD
Karen K. Scott, Interactive Associate Media Director, DRAFTFCB

 

Ad server reports clicks but Web Analytics tool does not show traffic

Often times the ad server would report that the online advertising (Display and Search) is generating clicks but the site analytics tool like Webtrends, Omniture etc does not report traffic. One of the first things to check is if the consumers who are clicking on the ads are actually loading the landing page.

One of the ways to check that is by putting an ad server tag on the landing page and thus be able to track the click to landing page load rate showing the abandonment rate from click to page load. The number of landing page load should match very close to the web analytics tool numbers.

There could be still some discrepancy of about 10-15% due to:

- Webanalytics tool click-throughs are de-duped

- The adserver code could be at a slightly different place than the web analytics tag and will have differing execution times

- Javascript disabled users would count the ad server tag but most of the web analytics tags need Javascript enabled browsers

Why digital ad servers should not be used to track DRTV?

A few weeks ago, I had a post which talked about using Doubleclick or any other ad server tags to track visits to the DRTV page. However, there are a few drawbacks to that:

• The DRTV landing page might get picked up with search engines like Google, Yahoo! etc and consumer would start to get to that page showing more visits to that page thus inflating your data
  
• The DRTV landing page would have links from the main website and consumers which get to that page showing more visits and this inflating your data
  

It is hard to completely isolate a page on your website, thus it would be really hard to measure the affect of DRTV using Digital ad servers.

One of the best ways to track DRTV is the traditional call volume and then tracking the number of orders or completed actions from the call centers.

CUIL is live

A new search engine was launched today, CUIL.
I personally have not used it a lot but I thought it would make sense to post a few links that provide a lot of insights about the new Search Engine.

http://searchengineland.com/080728-000100.php
http://searchengineland.com/080728-024035.php

Let's see if it really hits it big like Google.

Challenges in Online Advertising Measurement

Online Advertising is the only form of advertising that is measurable but there are a few challenges or drawbacks of online advertising that we need to understand. Some of the most common ones are listed below:

· Cookie Window: The cookie window needs to be set based on each business objective. Some businesses might have a longer purchase or research cycle which would mean consumers take more time to convert after they see the ad, example laptops computers. Whereas, there would be some business where the consumers would convert quicker. Thus, we cannot have a common cookie window for all the businesses.
· Cookie, Work vs. Home: Many consumers would see and click on the ad at home but might complete the transaction at home or vice versa. So, the cookie would not be able to close the loop and the advertiser would miss out on counting the revenue or the conversion based on the online advertising.
· Last Click: Typically, the ad servers reporting systems attribute the conversion to the last click and miss out on the multi-touch aspect. For example if a consumer clicks on a banner and then clicks on a Paid Search and then converts, the Paid Search gets 100% credit but the display ad also had some contribution in driving the consumer to the website and increase the consumer’s interest in the product.
· Cookie Deletion: It is knows that consumers tend to delete cookies from their computers. So, if the cookie is deleted, the ad server will not be able to connect the conversion to the ad unit that the consumer was exposed to or had clicked on. There is also an issue of 3rd party cookie deletion vs. 1st party cookie deletion. The 3rd party cookie deletion is more prevalent than the 1st party cookie deletion.
· Tags not firing: Several times the tags stop firing when expected example at the conversion event confirmation page – this could be due to many unexplained reasons and the sometimes all it needs is a tag refresh. It has also been seen that sometimes the IT personnel by mistake change the tag format and it does not work. One way to QC this problem is by using tools like HTTPlook.