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Another Stab At Optimizing ROI

Turn released ROI Optimizer Wednesday to help advertisers gain higher returns on investments. The tool optimizes the amount spent on campaigns against online consumer events, and puts a value on shopping cart transactional data by tracking consumer engagement with brands.

Advertisers can measure and optimize multi-event conversion strategies within one campaign. These engagements are defined values fed into algorithms that manage targeting and bid-pricing optimization. Demographic and psychographic attributes help build out a profile to determine the value of the consumer. Measurement traditionally has been hidden in tracking pixels or beacons, but what's lacking is the ability to put a value on the consumer.

Putting a value on consumers might sound a bit creepy, but knowing the consumer segment who can afford, and perhaps spent, $2,800 for a Sony 3-D television, rather than a $1,080 Vizio can optimize budgets and help build out campaigns throughout the marketing funnel.

SEM doesn't live in a vacuum. Mapping the funnel to understand all points along the way, from search to display to video, where consumers touch the brand should become a priority for search engine marketers. It helps to understand options for increasing the success of paid search and SEO campaigns.

Consumers view an ad from an electronics retailer. The ad for a high definition (HD) television attracts the consumer to the retailer's Web site to complete a purchase. But when the advertiser only tracks that the consumer completed the purchase the company doesn't know the value of the sale. Optimizing to the shopping cart value increases targeting by audience segment and allows marketers and advertisers to expand on keyword campaigns that should drive higher ROI. The consumer becomes a more valuable consumer to acquire.

It's all about getting better visibility into the level of engagement, value of consumers, and turnaround the data in real time to make better targeting decisions, similar to the way paid search campaigns allow you to change keywords and messages on the fly. The ROI Optimizer solves these challenges by allowing advertisers to select multiple tracking beacons and assign individual values and metrics to each.

Philip SmolinTurn General Manager Philip Smolin reminds us search and display work together. Display drives awareness at the top of the marketing funnel. Search drives research and conversions at the bottom. The ROI Optimizer lets DSPs track engagement across both display and search, and to optimize display impression targeting and bid pricing for overall performance.

If a consumer sees a display impression and then clicks on a paid or organic search listing, that's significant value to the advertiser, Philip tells me. ROI Optimizer enables them to now track these types of interactions, value them appropriately, and optimize their display advertising to help drive more consumers through that path.

Cross channel attribution and optimization is one of the big pain points in the industry. ROI Optimizer is one feature in many the company continues to work on to solve the problem.

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