Commentary

The State of Online Measurement

If you think the digital world represents a sliding landscape, it does. Part of the constant movement is measurement. Online tracking and analytics has been cooed at by most of us for over a decade now. We love to tell clients and prospects that we can track users from online advertising to search to e-mail and the like. We employ all sorts of third-party ad serving (3PAs), including filters, clicks, tracer tags et al. Our lunch hours, dinners, cocktail parties, boondoggles, seminars, and conferences are laden with talk of impressions, reach, frequency capping, click, and conversions.

If you are reading this you probably know I have been in this space since the first online ad was sold. What you may not know is that this is the same banter, rhetoric, and debate we've been having since 1994. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying nothing has changed. Companies have built successful and profitable businesses within the space. Technology has advanced, but the market has splintered a bit. It seems like everyone is offering some sort of tracking and optimization service these days. Sites do it. Third-party ad servers have built businesses on it. Heck, even rich media companies offer it.

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The world of tracking and measurement is so out of whack that marketers and advertisers don't want to pay for it. It's true. Look around. Sites offer pretty good metrics in regard to your campaigns. 3PAs have been beaten up so severely that they have been forced to succumb to offering dirt-cheap prices. Cost per thousand (CPM) pricing is at an all-time low for serving. Agencies threaten 3PAs by saying if they don't rate cut, they will get a lower price elsewhere, and they can. Rich media companies have some of the most robust tools offering metrics. Great you think? No, because of this stigma they have been giving it away. Now that "rich media" has become a de passé term (and all online ads should be "rich"), what do these companies do with all the tools and services they've built for reporting, tracking, and measurement?

Analytics are important, sometimes even critical - but are we splitting hairs? Do we track too much? Well this writer shouts YES from the top of her soapbox. I'm not saying chuck the whole concept. I'm urging advertisers and marketers to be smart about it. Tools and technology providers need to realize the value of what your company has and notice that you may have shot yourself in the foot by giving it away.

According to the 2004 DoubleClick Adserving Research Trend Report, there is still a debate in regard to how performance should be measured. Ad serving data confirms the idea that online advertising, just like advertising in all other media, has both direct and in-direct response potential. It is important to measure beyond the click. Publishers who sell on click performance are not getting the full value of the ad.

Geotargeting has been on the rise as have view-through and conversion tracking. Behavioral targeting is also on the rise.

So tell me what you think. Are we tracking too much? Are we looking at too many metrics? Perhaps we are looking at the wrong metrics? Post your opinions to the SPINboard. In the meantime, we'll be downloading boatloads of data into CSV formats trying to make strategic decisions about it.

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