• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, November 19, 2009

As an advertiser, how would you like to get instant feedback on an online ad right from questions posed within the ad itself? With its new Adometer tool, Dynamic Logic promises to provide that capability to help marketers and agencies optimize display campaigns at the outset.

The Adometer software incorporates survey questions within ads to give advertisers an early idea of whether particular versions of an ad are making an impact on consumers and reaching the target audience. With that user data, they can more quickly adjust campaigns to focus on the creative executions and placements delivering the best results.

"This is a tool meant for marketers to see whether ads are breaking through and to look across different creative themes to see which are working and allocate impressions toward those with higher recall," explained Michelle Eule, managing director, AdIndex Solutions for Dynamic Logic.

Using Adometer, questions are launched within standard 300 x 250 units right after the ad creative runs, whether a Flash animation or series of frames. Up to four or five questions appear, one at a time, examining how well people remember basic things like the brand advertising or the main benefit of a product highlighted in an ad.

Surveys can also be designed to help determine which sites are doing the best job of delivering the intended audience and results are provided through an online dashboard. A key idea behind Adometer is to provide more detailed data on campaign performance of brand campaign beyond click-through rates or leads generated. "The click-through is not a great measure of branding effectiveness," said Eule, since it doesn't tell marketers much about consumer attitudes toward a brand.

A report released by Dynamic Logic last month also argued that creative quality is more important than more structural aspects of Web advertising like targeting, ad size or format in driving effectiveness.

But the Adometer surveys depend on people actually taking the time to complete them to provide any useful information. Eule said response rates to the in-ad surveys in testing have proven higher than more traditional types because they don't require consumers to go to another page. "It's enough to get the sample sizes we need at the creative and site level," she said.

Instead of a formal panel or focus group survey, Adometer also has the benefit of offering live feedback. "This is definitely more realistic than if you're asking questions in a panel environment. It's a different kind of experience when someone is visiting sites naturally as they're going about their day," she said.

The new offering is also meant to complement Dynamic Logic's core brand metrics AdIndex service, which provides a more comprehensive analysis of brand campaign performance. "This is a quicker response solution that provides a lot of answers to make decisions but doesn't answer the same 'whys' to the extent AdIndex does," said Eule.