the metrics you should be using

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The metrics you should be using

y Jarvis Mak

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y Web Analytics Posted on Februar y 15, 2012

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"You can't manage what you don't measure," is an old management adage. However, by the same

token, just because you can measure something, does not mean you should manage by it.

I authored a previous iMedia ar ticle about why clicks are the wr ong metric. In that ar ticle, I

alluded to the view-thr ough eff ectiveness of display adver tising despite the absence of clicks. In



the spirit of that conversation, I want to discuss the relevance of other metrics in deter miningcam paign success.

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enter tainment? Attend the iMedia Video Summit, Mar. 25-28. Request your invitation today.

Use: Brand measures like lift in awareness or consideration

You can't click on a bill board, radio, or TV ad but we k now they im pact awareness,

consideration, even purchase intent. Of course, the same is true of online ads. If the cam paign has a branding o bjective, then o ptimize to it, ideally with a real-time data-driven appr oach.

Brand marketers want solutions that demonstrate im pr ovement over time, transf er lear nings

acr oss cam paigns f r om to p of the f unnel to mid-f unnel, and f inally, result in sales. Ever yoneloves search f or conver ting in-market f olks but don't always remem ber to widen the f unnel. As a

marketer, if you rely on off line media (namely, TV) to be your lone awareness vehicle, then

you're subject to over -saturation in television and missing out on cr oss-media o ptimizedexposure. Com plement off line with a digital awareness initiative.

Use: Ideal customer composition

Most adver tisers k now their customers inside and out, or at least they think they do: They havedetailed customer pr of iles, even personas of Jim the Techno phile or Susan the Savvy Bargain

Sho pper. However, when it comes to reaching those audiences in media deliver y, the richness of the Jim and Susan personas are of ten lost to become coarse gender and age descriptions of "men

25 to 54" and "women 18 to 34," respectively.

Publishers that have personas that per f ectly match adver tisers' personas are one step ahead of thegame. For adver tisers, you trust that the targets those publishers claim to have are good pr oxies

f or your ideal customers. If there are no publisher persona targets, then we've seen agencies of ten def ault to the age and gender target as the next best pr oxy.

Why use a pr oxy though? Optimize segment com position in real-time. How? With a survey-

based appr oach. We tried this with a couple CPG brands, with excellent results. The f irst adver tiser wanted to reach previous brand customers. Utilizing real-time survey in put to o ptimize

segments, targeting of previous customers increased by 50 percent over the course of thecam paign. The second CPG adver tiser wanted to reach f requent users, and the same technique

resulted in the target com position of this audience gr owing by 40 percent during the cam paign.Results were validated with an off line sales im pact study f r om Nielsen with a 250 percent retur n

on ad spend.

Use: LTV (Lifetime value) of acquired customers

For direct response adver tisers, especially in f inance and retail, customers acquired cheaply areof ten low-value customers, especially when pr omotions are involved. The value of more



expensive leads (as measured by account balances or subsequent basket size and purchasef requency) ends up much higher than cheaper direct response leads. An agency that is maniacally

f ocused on low CPA without regard to LTV is doing their adver tiser a disservice.

To adver tisers, this means ar ming your agencies with visibility into these LTV measures. It

means you need to do homework about customer behavior and transactions so that agencies can also pass inf or mation about customer value along to publisher par tners, even anecdotally. Weonce executed a cam paign f or a bank but we didn't have access to back -end metrics like deposit

amounts. As the cam paign slowly auto-o ptimized toward the metric we had, CPA, the agency pr ovided us f eedback that we should go back to what we had been doing bef ore day 45 because

af ter that point, although CPA im pr oved, the average star ting balance amounts star ted shrinkingconsiderably. With that bit of f eedback, we were able to rejigger settings to pre-day 45 and go

back to acquiring higher value customers.

Ignore: CTR

See the af orementioned iMedia ar ticle. We almost always pr ovide data about how o ptimal segments are negatively correlated with CTR. For many agencies, they are glad to get thisanalysis to pr ovide back to their adver tisers as par t of ongoing education.

For exam ple, we demonstrated to a customer that pursuing segments that demonstrated higher CTR f or the cam paign would have led to incorrect o ptimization. Tr ying to maximize CTR would



have led to a lower quality audience, since "clickier" segments were not the ones with the highest target com position.

Ignore: Ad interaction rate

It is not universally true that ad interaction rate doesn't matter. When the rich media unit has rich f unctionality like lead capture or submit, some other transactional f eature, or a pr oduct catalog

based on recently sho pped items, then interaction is highly relevant. This is usually accom plished with dynamic creative and an XML f eed.

However, when ad interactions are really o ppor tunities f or an expanded canvas that tell a more

elaborate brand stor y, the benef it is dubious at best. At R ocket Fuel, we repeatedly see that the simpler ads are, the better. In f act, we have run static ads f or a cam paign alongside the long-

loo ping Flash versions and f ind that per f or mance is 50 to 300 percent better with sim pler creative.

If adver tisers want to understand im pact of ad interactions, work with your publisher par tners to instrument their pixels in ad unit expansion f rames. Get ahead of the game and work with your creative par tners bef ore the assets are f inished. Then the publishers can do the same ty pe of

correlation analysis with a brand metric, as well as o ptimize in-f light if there really is a positivecorrelation.

Ignore: Video completion rate

This is in the context of in- banner video. It is a natural extension of the other two "unim por tant"

metrics. Does it matter that a video plays all the way thr ough to com pletion? How much does

auto-star t inf late the metrics? It really doesn't matter what percentage o

f ads went all the way to the end unless it was all reaching the desired customers. As a marketer, I'd be happy with static

ads shown to the right audience over a 75 percent video com pletion rate to the wr ong audience.

A ver y notable exception to this is when video com pletions are well-documented to correlate

directly with sales, like movie trailers f or theatrical releases.

Conclusion

In general, we almost always see that metrics about online ad engagement or interaction (alone)

not translate to bottom line results as eff ectively as lif etime value, ideal customer targets, and

changes in brand measures. Ad metrics can def initely be a par t of the overall stor y of thecam paign; however, I wouldn't recommend them in isolation. It happens too of ten that an agency measures (and eliminates) par tners along a single dimension like ad interaction rate.

Instead, the adver tiser and agency should com pare par tners along a multitude of dimensions.Better yet, go the extra step and attribute value along all these dimensions. Here are some

thoughts to get you star ted on attribution. It is im por tant to review and com pare par tners but measure in ways that give you a com prehensive view of their overall cam paign im pact.



J arvis Mak is VP of analytics for Rocket Fuel .

On Twitter? Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet .

"Successful people are standing" image and "Social media, communication in" image via

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