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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS

Get Beyond the Click
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Steve Smith

One of the watchwords this season among digital media buyers is measuring display ad effectiveness beyond “last click attribution.” Much to the chagrin of publishers who charge advertisers for Web ad “impressions” or CPMs, marketers continue to interpret the number of people who actually click on an ad as the most reliable metric of the ad’s effectiveness. Worse, much of the ad money flows to search engines because there usually is a direct relationship between clicking on a search ad and converting a user to a buyer. But display advertising often plays a much subtler, less measurable, role in the consumer purchase cycle. New research from comScore in Europe shows that people exposed to an online ad campaign are 72% more likely to visit that advertiser’s Web site later and 94% more likely than the unexposed user to entering that advertiser’s trademark in a search engine to find the vendor.

This so-called “view through” metric measures the longer term or latent effect of an ad on consumers, but until recently the research on this latent impact has been anecdotal. comScore aggregated results from across the major European markets in its new report “How Online Advertising Works: Whither the Click.” According to this research the lift in view through on an ad campaign was strongest in the first week after a user was exposed, but the impact declined only slightly in the next weeks. “Despite the long-held obsession with using clicks to measure campaign performance – which reflect only the immediate impact of an ad -- the comScore studies demonstrate that the Internet is clearly effective as a latent brand-building medium,” said Mike Shaw, director of marketing solutions, comScore.

While various publishing organizations have been making this same case is various sporadic studies over the years, ad agencies have become increasingly convinced that they need more advanced models for understanding how the various online and offline platforms, and the multiple digital marketing platforms themselves, interact with one another. “Attribution modeling” has become a new dark art at many agencies as marketers try to establish how much TV exposure affects Web traffic and search or how much a display campaign can directly influence retail sales or search entries or even TV tune-ins. As budgets shrink for many advertisers, the need to maximize efficiency has been one driver of interest in attribution models. As well, agencies are recognizing that the media landscape is so varied and interdependent that money needs to be allocated strategically across the media and in different ways to reach a range of marketing goals.

If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com

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