• PaidContent.org, Monday, May 11, 2009 1:17 PM

The consensus among online marketers and publishers is that clicks and CPMs don't effectively measure a brand advertising campaign's performance. In the meantime, the online ad industry is searching for a metric to capture "engagement," but so far, none of the various parties have been able to agree on a standard measuring unit. As PaidContent's Tameka Kee notes, publishers are churning out stats like time spent, return visits, and the number of times a brand gets mentioned in social media comments as proof of why advertisers should pay more for their inventory.

Part of the problem, she says, is that most sites that want to measure engagement offer different ways for users to interact with their content. Meanwhile, the fact that advertisers have different goals further complicates the issue. "There's a consensus that engagement is going to be how we hold online advertising accountable from now on, but we're still grappling with how to tie it back to real business results," said James Kiernan, vice president and group client director for P&G at Mediavest. "Like, how many 'engagements' does it take to drive purchase intent? How do we tie it back to sales?"

All big problems. Kee speaks with several execs from different companies to find out which metrics they're using to measure engagement-based deals. Among other things, she finds that time spent seems to be the "go-to" metric. As Neal Sinno, vice president of business development at advergaming firm Arkadium, says: "We can...tell [advertisers] who's playing, how many times they've played and things like whether they emailed a game to their friends -- but they really want to know how long their target is seeing the brand images for."

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