• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 6, 2010

Dotomi will soon begin to offer an advanced advertising campaign attribution service it has been testing for the past year. The service puts the last-click method to rest and relies on finding the exact value contributed by each piece of media used in a campaign, such as display ads and paid search. It also ties into the company's behavioral targeting service.

About 18 to 20 of Dotomi's more than 200 clients have been testing the service for the past year. Dotomi will provide the service free of charge, offering the in-house service along with its personalized media programs from behavioral targeting to analytics. The attribution technology enables advertisers to measure the impact of display advertising on other media, according to Brian Pozesky, the company's general manager.

In the most recent 90-day period of testing with several brands, Dotomi measured an average increase in performance of 22% for all online media when run at the same time as a display advertising campaign.

Analyzing the effect on specific channels, Dotomi found display increased performance by an average of 20% in paid search, 26% in natural search, 25% in affiliate marketing, 16% in CRM email and 26% in direct load, where the consumer goes directly to the retailer's Web site.

The service can measure the impact of display on a brand's offline advertising performance, too. It has measured the average increase of 8.1% for offline ad media, including catalog, call center and retail.

The preparatory analytic package gets integrated into the company's Web site. The company has its own ad server, purchases ad space, and manages behavioral targeting. "We know the referral source, similar to a Coremetrics or Omniture, of the traffic going into a client's Web site," Pozesky says. "So, we can tell that 20% of the Web traffic came from paid search. About 7% of the people who came from paid search ads and received a personal ad converted. Those who didn't receive a personal message converted at 5%."

Dotomi relies on cookies to target consumers. Advertisers supply the company with a catalog list, about two to three years worth of data, according to Pozesky, who insists the company doesn't hold any personally identifiable information. Instead, a unique identifier is used, provided by multichannel retailer using the service through a third party provider.

The unique identifier is matched to the cookie dropped on the Web site. The cookie matches a purchase history and behavior while at the site. All this information gets processes to render a dynamic display advertisement. The ad targeting is based on offline and online behavior.