• by Michael Froggatt , June 6, 2013

No online display campaign is complete without analyzing results. Brands and agencies both need to understand performance, but assessing how your campaign fits into the rest of your marketing plan can be very complex. So what can marketers do to understand how all their diverse campaign components work together?

Wes Nichols, CEO of MarketShare, in a March 2013 Harvard Business Review article, talked about how brands can begin to piece together their media plans and attribute real dollars to advertising by using "big data" to count clicks, interactions, dwell time and myriad other performance and engagement metrics. Sure, these are all very important in determining the effectiveness of your creative and each individual ad, but how do you evaluate how display ads fit into the overall campaign?

According to comScore’s “Natural Born Clickers” studies, less than a fifth of Internet users ever click on online banner ads. Just as TV ads aren’t measured solely by in-store visits or sales, comScore and others have long maintained that online display ads have branding value beyond clicks and should not be measured only by performance metrics.

For branding, interactions, dwell and now viewability metrics are better suited to indicate the impact of online display ads, but when it comes to attribution conversions are still the best indicator available to brands.

Conversion tags, when used effectively, can tell advertisers when, where and how users interact at different points in the purchase path – be it a landing page visit, a video preview or e-commerce check out – within and outside of the ad. Users don’t even have to click an ad, because conversions can be counted after an impression is served.

Our research found that only 14% of conversions occurred post-click, while 86% of conversions were post-impression, mirroring comScore’s findings in “Natural Born Clickers.” Looking at conversions is essential for direct marketers and custom conversions like landing pages, form completes, video completions and others that can be even more powerful tools to assess branding effectiveness.

The key to applying conversions as an attribution metric is latency, the ability to continue to track a user’s activity for thirty days beyond the initial impression or click. This can be normalized and applied in approximate to traditional media marketing models.

There’s no need to disregard engagement metrics when evaluating your campaigns in favor of conversions -- simply combine them. When you’re setting up your campaign, don’t leave conversions until the end. Start by prioritizing what you want the viewers of your ads to do, and assign values to them respectively. In that way, media planners can enable brand clients to evaluate effectiveness during and after the run of their campaign.