• by Kate Kaye , November 3, 2003

Marketers are broadening their definition of online conversion, and new trends in metrics are driving the change.

At today's Ad:Tech New York conference session, "Conversion: Mapping the Buy Funnel - Click Tracking," panelists will consider the growing significance placed on converting users into action-takers. They'll also hash out campaign tracking and optimization technologies, and perhaps most importantly, how to read and use reporting data.

"Immediate click-to-conversion is a small portion of sales," comments Kevin Howard, director of media at Avenue A. "Now we look towards view-based or delayed conversions. If you're not tracking that, you're selling your campaign short. Avenue A's ad serving and campaign management partner firm AtlasDMT will be represented at today's session.

Retailers are probably the most concerned with tracking conversion rates, but travel, publishing and even consumer packaged goods advertisers also are placing increasing emphasis on converting eyeballs to dollar signs. Eric Valk Peterson, vice president-media director at agency i-traffic tracked conversion rates while assessing the success of a packaged goods client's online coupon and registration campaign.

In order to coax traditional advertisers to spend more online, Web analytics companies and agencies have begun speaking the marketer's mother tongue by labeling online data with the familiar terminology of offline metrics such as exposure duration and reach and frequency. Not only has this new approach led marketers to rethink their past obsessions with click-through-rates, it's illuminated the Web's potential for branding as well. PointRoll, for example, is now measuring brand interaction in its FatBoy ad units. Atlas DMT last summer began tracking "brand exposure duration," or the amount of time users view rich media ads. And independent research company Dynamic Logic has long focused on offline and online brand perception metrics. Call it branding, direct response, or an amalgam of both.

Either way, Avi Steinlauf, vice president-revenue management for auto buying and research site Edmunds.com believes a latent response metric, often referred to as view- through, "can prove empirically" that more Edmunds.com users have submitted leads to dealers of specific car models after being exposed to ads featuring those models, even when users don't click on those ads. Steinlauf, a panelist in today's Ad:Tech session, affirms the Edmunds.com advertisers "do consider view-through metrics to be valid proof that action was taken" as a result of viewing the Web ads in question.

Edmunds.com has only recently begun incorporating strategies like search engine marketing into its once organically-driven efforts now that it has implemented SiteCatalyst, a Web analytics tool from Omniture that is specifically designed to monitor large, complex websites.

"Now that we have a degree of certainty through Omniture, we are confident," says Steinlauf, who notes Edmunds.com wasn't satisfied with the third-party traffic performance data it was getting in the past.

Ad serving and campaign management firm DoubleClick has been touting its view- through metric more and more as click-through rates have declined for most standard ad formats over the years. The view-through metric tracks the number of users who take action within 30 days of exposure to an online ad without clicking on the ad itself.

i-traffic's Valk Peterson takes view-throughs into consideration when assessing campaign results, but cautions, "Unless we're only running online advertising or know that a person was exposed to only online ads, then we recognize that online is only part of the mix."

DoubleClick's vice president-general manager for analytics, Nancy Joyce, and Ad:tech panelist Matthew Karasick, DoubleClick's director of product management, agree it's important to look at the whole marketing mix. Many DoublecCick ad clients conduct tests when no other marketing is running in order to set measurement benchmarks.

But it's all esoteric gobbledygook to John Marshall, CEO of Web analytics firm ClickTracks, and another conversion panel participant. He wonders whether online ad exposure can actually make or break conversion, noting the multitudes of influential factors that come into play before consumers take action. ClickTracks aims to make Web measurement data more relevant to marketers, particularly the right-brained creative types among them. Marshall contends that forces such as server speed, site navigation, competitive pricing and clarified shipping policy copy are the things that truly affect conversion.

"There's a big gap from entry to a site to conversion. What happens in- between? It's that stuff the company has control over," concludes Marshall.