Clients tend to ask for my opinion on which landing page to use when linking their banner creative. Of course, my recommendation is going to be based on the campaign type (e.g., branding, direct response) and its objectives (e.g., drive leads, product awareness). I have an idea which existing Web site page will create the best user experience based on continuity of message and logic, but, more often than not, I am not in the campaign's targeted demographics.

I continue to see a number of highly intelligent business editors covering the marketing industry get fooled into running stories based on PR polls disguised as research. And when that happens, everyone in the marketing community gets hurt.

Let's face it, we all want due credit for our work. That's why marketers so eagerly embraced the death of the presumptive "last click." That mythology forced a paradigm of clear winners (the content that ultimately converted) versus losers (everything else). Today, we know that's patently untrue. Enter attribution modeling: giving credit to what happens before the conversion or sale takes place. We don't need this information to establish credit or place blame; we need data to refine our strategy and maximize each dollar we spend. So this brings us to some practical lessons on attribution modeling....

Within the past few months there have been two independent developments that may have a profound impact on measuring site traffic. The most recent occurred on March 18, when the group product manager for Google Analytics announced plans for the development of "a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics."

I attended the Global Retail Marketing Association's annual leadership conference recently and had the opportunity to interact with a few terrific speakers including Ray Kurzweil -- renowned futurist in all matters technology. He bombarded us with scientifically and econometrically based forecasts for where health, computing, and social technologies were headed. Kurzweil has a pretty good track record in predicting these things (as evidenced by his success as an angel investor) based on a simple concept: that evolution in technology is not linear, but exponential. As I listened, it occurred to me how appropriate this concept was in the arena of …

There are two trends in online marketing that are driving the notion of "brand windows." The first is the development of unlimited rich media, also referred to as "websites within a box." Brand marketers now have access to content management systems whereby they can serve unlimited amounts of video and photo content into any available window, whether it's an online ad or into a fan's wall on Facebook. The second shift is that brand marketers are embracing the democratization of the Web and making these Web site-like experiences sharable.

Every couple of months, I turn a corner and find myself smack dab in the middle of a debate about the efficacy of the GRP as an online metric. It usually goes like this. On the one side: "Advertisers need GRPs to place digital media in holistic media context." On the other side: "Dude, whatever. GRPs are, like, totally last century. We can't shoehorn the power of the Internet into an old metric." I'm going to try and get us all past this. GRPs are a necessary, but in no way sufficient, metric for evaluation of online advertising. If …

Two weeks ago I posted a disguised version of an actual email from the CFO of a Global 1000 company to the CMO of that company, congratulating the CMO on doing a good job of improving marketing efficiency, but then raising questions about the effectiveness of that marketing. I invited readers of Metrics Insider to comment on how they would respond if they were the CMO. Here are some results...

I recently moderated a panel at OMMA Global San Francisco titled "Will Online Advertising Ever Deliver on the Promise of Precision?" The panel discussion focused on the growing use of data in identifying and buying targeted audiences. We also touched on the importance of the creative in targeted advertising campaigns, but because of time constraints weren't able to do the topic justice. So I thought I'd add a few personal observations here.

Because it's still relatively new compared to other measurement practices within companies, Web analytics historically existed in a silo and was viewed as a separate "thing" from the rest of the traditional marketing and analysis. These walls are quickly crumbling as marketers engineer drive-to-web campaigns that are both more effective and more measurable than the old ways.