When everything ad-related is happening in real-time, it’s easy to lose track of where a sale actually started. In a funnel, online ad attribution company C3 Metrics says that brand awareness happens at the top, whereas the “lower funnel” is home to the point of sale. While the sale will always be important, C3 Metrics COO and Co-Founder Jeff Greenfield says big brands need to focus on the “upper funnel” in order to survive. Greenfield and CEO/Co-Founder Mark Hughes spoke with numerous experts in the industry to put together a white paper, “The Missing Link in Programmatic Buying for Brands.” These experts include Dave Zinman, CEO of Infolinks, Leslie Singer, founder of SingerSalt, Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys, and more. In the programmatic world, big brands fall victim to repeating actions that hold them back long-term. Greenfield says, “all of RTB is focused on these lower-funnel conversions versus upper funnel. There are no brand metrics that have been inserted into the RTB world.” Greenfield went on to say: “Big brands are not going to be able to exist in the lower-funnel world that digital has built for themselves.” The white paper says real-time digital signals are only present at the bottom of the funnel. C3 Metrics calls it a “systematic limitation” that “creates short-term success” ideal for direct response, but is unable to “deliver sustained brand lift.” In layman terms: In order for brands to continue existing in a real-time media world, they need to shift their focus from the rapid sales to the ads that actually build brand awareness. Here are images of the funnel from the white paper to help paint the picture: What C3 Metrics and their C3 Platform aim to do is trace impressions in real-time to where they originated. Through the C3 Platform, brands can set up their “Upper Funnel Conversion Window” -- the designated period of time they can track a user's path "down the funnel," so to speak. Below is an example from the white paper of an Upper Funnel Conversion Window at work. The first site visit happens at 13:15, but the whole process really started at 6:55. “When [a] user makes their way to the landing page for the first time, we can look back in their history and determine which ad is responsible for bringing them there,” said Greenfield. From there, he says, “[We] fire a pixel to the ad partner responsible for sending [that user] there.” The ad partner gets credit for what they deserve in real-time. By being able to “fire the pixel back to the RTB people,” as Greenfield puts it, those "RTB people" can determine what succeeded and can easily duplicate that success. Who knows how many successful campaigns have been terminated early because the place where it all began never got any credit. “I see a lot of one-upmanship in the digital world,” said Greenfield. “I don’t see a lot of brand education from a measurement perspective. The companies that focus on educating brands are the ones that will be here for the long haul.” To download the white paper, “The Missing Link in Programmatic Buying for Brands,” and to see exactly how C3 Platform works, click here.
It has been a few months since Google announced Universal Analytics, which will provide marketers with greater visibility into people’s interactions with a Web site at multiple levels. Universal Analytics will transform how marketers interpret consumer behavior. Universal Analytics will open doors for more in-depth analysis of brands' Web sites. It is a complete overhaul of Google Analytics. It requires marketers’ immediate attention in order to stay on top of the data revolution that is reshaping much of our economy and society. The most exciting change brought about by Universal Analytics is the inclusion of more data. While a vast trove of data can be overwhelming to some, anyone who has worked with Google Analytics is aware of its shortcomings. Its lack of transparency has led some marketers to assume certain things about how consumers interact with their Web sites. Making assumptions with data is a recipe for disaster, whether you’re conducting a simple science experiment or analyzing a multichannel online marketing campaign. Measuring interactions from different environments changes the very concept of “Web analytics” to “digital analytics.” With Universal Analytics, marketers are finally able to track user activity across multiple devices. This is important as consumers increasingly shift toward a mobile-first, multiple-device shopping experience. The focus is shifting from visits and visitors to sessions and users. The consumer -- not page views -- now rules the ecommerce roost. Universal Analytics gives marketers the ability to analyze consumer data in a far more rich and diverse manner. This will lead to better user experiences on brands’ Web sites, and in turn, stronger lead generation and customer acquisition. Becoming more user-centric requires marketers to track the activity of a specific user across all of the devices he or she uses to research and purchase a brand’s products or services. This level of detailed tracking offers a more complete picture of customers’ buying cycles. In addition, better attribution modeling will be available to both premium and non-premium analytics accounts. Rethinking 'traffic sources' Another important feature of Universal Analytics is that “Traffic Sources” will be renamed “Acquisitions.” While that may seem like a meaningless issue of semantics, it implies an important shift in how brands measure the value of their customers. Using the term “acquisitions” as a site metric reflects the offline methods that may be used (i.e., POS or Call Center) that are playing an increasingly important role in a mobile-first society. These changes are not automatic for Google Analytics users. To begin using Universal Analytics, you need to implement a new tracking code formatted as analytics.js rather than the ga.js code that has been used for much of the last decade. This new code is much shorter than the previous code. Shortening the code means a faster site load time for much of the Web as more than 17 million sites use Google Analytics. Universal Analytics should have data-focused marketers jumping for joy over the ability to closely analyze a consumers’ journey on their Web site from start to finish. The feature offers the ability to upload much of a brand’s own data about the campaigns that brought the user to the site. This allows analytics professionals to make actionable recommendations to campaign managers about the ways a brand can more efficiently and profitably acquire customers. Universal Analytics is currently in beta and only available to qualified applicants. While Google works out some of the kinks before a public launch, consider this: In an age when consumers have so much information and data at their fingertips, isn’t it time marketers have the same concerning how people experience their Web sites?
If column inches and growth rates are any indication, 2012 will go down as the Year of Real-Time Bidding (RTB). Truth is, RTB is great for buyers who want to efficiently acquire cheap audiences at scale. However, by its very nature, RTB shoehorns everyone's inventory into the same mold so that algorithms will have consistent data for decision-making. The problem is that this one-size-fits-all approach actually fits nobody and is the first step in a race to the bottom for CPMs. When buyers are confronted with a flood of inventory that all looks pretty much the same, they will naturally buy the cheapest. This is a disaster for premium publishers, who have invested tremendous resources to build high-quality content and audiences, but get dumped in with everyone else on a public exchange. It's a zero-sum game. When marketers win by finding an audience for less, publishers lose. So how can we create the proverbial win-win scenario? Well, one thing to remember is that publishers are masters at attracting and retaining audience attention. This is the very reason advertisers need them, as they’ve learned when their own publishing efforts generally fall flat. When there are experts available, why not use them to help accomplish your goals? Agencies seem to have lost sight of that in their quest for reduced prices. So the answer becomes back to basics: Publishers and marketers need to work together, to create more value for both. Publishers know their audiences best, and can craft packages and placements that are more valuable than a few cherry-picked impressions. Publishers can take advantage of first-party data, both implicit and explicit, that would never be available on an ad exchange. And publishers can guarantee access to scarce inventory, ensuring that buyers don't lose out to higher bidders. Marketers get higher-quality audiences, and publishers get higher CPMs. Win-win. The challenge to the digital advertising ecosystem over the next few years will be how to preserve publisher value creation while keeping the good parts of RTB -- efficiency and audience segmentation -- alive and well.