• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 21, 2016

A deal between Adobe and Conductor that the companies plan to announce Tuesday allows advertisers to measure organic marketing campaigns that include content running on search, and some social with their key performance or business performance metrics.

The partnership provides tools through an integration between Conductor Searchlight and Adobe Analytics to measure any type of organic content that doesn't come from paid advertisements, according to Seth Besmertnik, CEO and founder, Conductor. 

The integration aims to solve three challenges faced by advertisers: the value of the content, the type of content needed to drive performance, and the reasons why content doesn't perform.

Companies struggle to measure return on organic marketing -- especially compared to paid media, which has much better measurement tools.

The data integration will give advertisings information on the types of content consumers seek whether a car, a shirt or a tablet, as well as where they find it such as on a search engine or site like YouTube. The advertiser then ties "what" and "where" to their key performance and revenue metrics on specific media channels.

For instance, a person in Munich on a smartphone was looking for a men's shirt. They went to an ecommerce store on a German-based Web site and bought it. The data also provides what drove the search and sale.

It took twelve months to create the integration between Adobe and Conductor, according to Besmertnik, who admits that a lot of work went into bridging the gap between the way Adobe and Conductor look at data.

When the project came to an end, the integration provided a way to answer complex questions from advertisers, such as what content should be created to increase revenue in Japanese marketing, how to get early-stage mobile visitors to convert, and if I'm losing traffic in Dusseldorf, so does my content match the way customers in that region search.

To answer these questions, Conductor's engineers built out in a variety of metrics and measurements to account for campaigns running across mobile devices and desktops worldwide.

For instance, in the case of Citibank -- which has different metrics and KPIs in each country of the world in which they operate -- the biggest challenge was tying back the data from local search engines like Baidu in China to KPIs in that region, Besmertnik said.