Comments on: Performance, Performance, Performance

By: Judah

Judah — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:16:24 +0000

Toby: Thanks for your astute comment. I agree that the publisher would be made more responsible, and in most cases the agency and client, I think, would also be made more responsible. The publisher, would be more accountable, in the sense of the delivering the qualified, core audience that “converts” to the advertiser via their content/editorial offerings, while the agency would be accountable for optimizing the creative, and the client in ensuring the asset advertised fulfills audience expectation. You make a good point in dividing into “direct response” versus “brand awareness.” I agree that awareness, affinity are challenging to measure (engagement?).

Helen: Thanks for the excellent feedback! Your example makes me think BI would do this. A few WA tools could expose this data if configured to do so, but only at the site level, which would be good for understanding audience in the context of all those dimensions on the site itself, but not across sites. Perhaps Quantcast is the closest to being able to measure segment outcomes/demo/behavior/reach/frequency across sites. You have identified the issue with conversion in a nutshell. Parts of the conversion equation are outside of the site’s control and subject to the agencies creative input, which of course should be provided in a framework that allow for testing to ensure the prediction has a better chance of fulfilling itself during execution. Thanks for commenting!

Helen and Toby: Apologies it’s taken so long to respond, I’ve been on vacay!

By: Helen Vetrano

Helen Vetrano — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:10:02 +0000

Great post =) Surely there is an opportunity to combined outcomes with reach, frequency, demographics, and behavior data as you have described—historical and predictive. It would be great to know if, for example, males age 18-35 of the greater Boston area, who frequent Amazon.com 3x a week and search for the latest Manga are more likely to click your ad on Amazon with a 3% conversion rate compared to another segment or have historically registered this rate.

Considering the very specific elements of this segment, Bostonian-Manga-Loving-Guys, I wonder how this data could be distributed and who would manipulate it to create the segment…Maybe I should have chosen a broader target =)

Regardless, I can see how other elements beyond the above 4 segmentation attributes can affect outcomes and produce dubious stats. Mainly, elements that the advertiser controls—messaging, calls-to-action, landing pages, design, etc. So a vendor may tell me that this segment can generate $xx ROI, but is that really the case in the context of execution?

By: Toby Christophersen

Toby Christophersen — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 03:32:53 +0000

You raise a valid point with regard to the lack of a communal pool for historical ad performance data for Online, however I wonder, in a world where Online competes directly with TV, Radio, Print etc for allocated spend in campaigns whether its measurability is to an extent an Achilles heal, given that for example lead generation rates from radio spots at particular times on particular channels are not easily measured or historically archived, and that this type of uncertainty is traditionally acceptable in other media.

Further, if such a pool existed, it effectively makes the publisher, not the client or its agency, responsible for ensuring that the creative running in all ad spots on its site(s) is of sufficient quality to engender direct response at a rate which would not reflect badly on the site(s) public performance data in the long term.

Finally, this type of performance data still somewhat fails to take into account the effect of ads where brand or product exposure/awareness/perception etc rather than direct response is the campaign objective.