Future of Online Measurement: Beyond the Click
So, the future of online measurement! A question for quants and marketers alike. Moderator David Hallerman, Senior Analyst at eMarketer, opened the session with a perhaps obvious if not provocative question: “What techniques or metrics have made measuring campaigns online so effective?” Essentially asking, what the hell have we been doing for 10 years with regards to online measurement?
Moderator
David Hallerman, Senior Analyst, eMarketer
Panelists
Konrad Felman- CEO, Quantcast
Jon Gibs- Vice President, Neilsen Online
Marc Johnsn- CMO, Hitwise
Gian Fulgoni- Co-founder, ComScore
Young-Bean Song- Director of Analytics, Atlas Institute, Microsoft
Well, to that Jon Gibs, Vice President at Neilsen Online, answered, “One central piece that has made all techniques effective is the transparency and quality of the data.” Young-Bean song, Director of Analytics at Microsoft Atlas Institute concurred but with some caution for the future, “What we have done well is measurement for the bottom of the funnel…clicks, conversion, sales, revenue,etc. But we’ve turned the purchase funnel into a purchase spoon. We look at metrics that point to those literally at the bottom of the purchase funnel. We are now in a situation where online is still experimental for brand advertisers, we don’t have great metrics for brand advertisers. We need to go beyond those touch points”
With these opening statements, the conversation quickly turned to the future and the potential to capture brand advertising dollars, budget that is still largely the domain of traditional mediums like television and print. “It amazes me that we have gone ten years without providing basic brand advertising metrics like reach and frequency.” Song commented.
Gian Fulgoni, Co-founder of ComScore noted, “The industry has done a good job to date of measuring display advertising, but there is no way CPG is going to move their brand dollars over to online if the key online metric is the click. Just because something can be measured doesn’t mean it matters, for example, the Click. The click doesn’t mean anything to brand advertisers. The click needs to change to something like view-through, for example.”
Gibs offered that while there has been much success with online measurement, from a traditional measurement standpoint (for brand advertisers) there is opportunity to grow, and that one key area of research and growth is understanding better the relationship between online impressions and offline sales. The panel acknowledged that there are obvious challenges to this, but that is still a huge a area for discovery. Fulgoni noted, “We’ve got to be able to show that the dollars are going to generate sales, we need to sync with off-line databases, and we need to do a better job with measuring against ad delivery to individuals.”
This comment sparked a bit of a debate between the merits of cookie metrics vs. people visits, as Konrad Felman, CEO of Quantcast added, “We should be able to tell advertisers not only how many people they reached, but who those people are.”
The session rounded out with a bit of discussion around online video and how it will begin to bring more traditional metrics of reach and frequency online, “Video is going to force this issue of bringing traditional metrics to online. The nature of video is very upper funnel, its not going to get credit for direct sales, but its an excellent branding piece” Song noted. But again, as we know, online video faces its own challenges including limited inventory, no standardized metrics (including CPM rate), and syndication.
What surprised me was how little mention there was of conversation data’s ability to provide metrics around brand recall, awareness and engagement levels. Gibs briefly touched on this concept with a mention of Neilsen’s BuzzMetrics tool which captures such conversation data, but its is still largely a new an untouched concept. Surely while it is true that “conversation data” seems very soft and fuzzy, there are meaningful metrics which can be extrapolated from it, including volume of brand mentions, tonality, frequency and location of mentions (not to mention it provides rich insight into customer pyschographics, preferences and online habits).
One thing was clear, however, that while online measurement has functioned very well for its purposes over the past ten years in driving ad spend, there is much room for growth and improvement. The next few years will be a very interesting and exciting place. And if you ask me, some key places to start exploring are online conversation data and the use of social graph data as sources which can provide rich insight and robust metrics around consumer engagement online.
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