• by Masha Geller , June 4, 2001

First off, thanks to everyone who has responded to last Friday's Minute. I have quite a debate raging in my inbox, and I'll be sure to let you know the final tally when all the responses come in. For now, let's talk about a new addition to the online ad metric alphabet soup.

Avenue A today released the latest report from their Atlas Institute, which examines the latest online advertising metric, cost-per-revenue (CPR). Avenue A claims the report proves that when added to the optimization mix, CPR -- not to be confused with cost-per-response -- can produce better results than others being used today.

The new CPR metric takes into account the actual revenue generated from particular publisher sites and other digital channels within a media plan. For example, if a given publisher site on a media buy generated a CPR of 0.2, it means that it cost 20 cents for every dollar the site produced in revenue.

In a 15-week digital marketing campaign for Best Buy, the Atlas Institute found that some publisher sites efficiently produced a high number of sales, but had low average order sizes. Conversely, they saw a number of publisher sites that produced few sales, but resulted in high total sales revenue.

The study proved that optimizing a campaign based on cost per revenue can produce better financial results than optimizing solely on the cost per sale metric. In fact, 30% of the sites that were retained based on cost per revenue would have been dropped had they been evaluated on the cost per sale alone.

Simple as all of the above sounds, the only question here is: will advertisers actually use this new metric?

************************************************************* Have you been to the new MediaPost? If not, click on https://www.mediapost.com and check out our new look and features. Since 1996, MediaPost.com has been the leading advertising and media portal providing free tools, news, and directories to help our 35,000+ members better plan and buy traditional and online advertising. It was time for a facelift. The site looks better, works better and serves you better than before. But you be the judge and please let us know what you think.