How can you use advance advertising reports?

Advance Reports Are For Losers. Yes, I said it, advance reports are for losers. Those advertisers who are obsessed with acquiring or building advance media or performance reports either have no clue what they're doing or are just giving in to the latest hype. Technology providers continue to roll out new advance reports as additional dimensions of competition, features that will distinguish them from other technology providers, though these reports provide little if any true incremental value to advertisers. The only reporting metrics an effective advertiser will ever need to review are cost, impressions, clicks, and conversion (CPA and CPC can be easily derived). Any other metric is statistical noise that will only distract you from what is really important, acquiring and retaining customers.

Quite often I will be asked to help an advertiser or agency scope out some new advance report that combines their data in a way that has never been done before. Invariably I will ask the client why, what's the purpose of this report. The answer, 80% of the time, comes from the belief that the new report will help them optimize the performance of their campaigns. Those advertisers for whatever reason believe in the notion of audience consistency, the idea that at any given point in time the audience of a website is relatively homogenous and behaviorally consistent with all other points in time. This notion is the bedrock of current online media buying and the guiding light behind audience aggregation. However, a close look at the empirical performance of any online advertising campaign will completely disprove this belief. If you run the same campaign, with the exact same ads, on the same site for the same length of time at two different periods you will see two completely different rates of performance. The audience of a website, their affinity, behavior, and propensity to convert is extremely fickle and changes from day to day without warning or visible cause. Using an advance report to optimize your online advertising campaign is like driving along a winding mountain road while looking out the rear window. In short, it's a recipe for failure.

Advertisers need to be forward looking when it comes to designing their advertising campaigns and leave history to the historians. Stop shuffling those silly spreadsheets that nobody can understand. Focus on what you know about a user, an individual, and not what you know about an entire site. Individual behavior doesn't change much. What a person likes and wants stays relatively consistent across time even though the sites they visit don't. Get rid of the practice of audience aggregation and denounce the notion of audience consistency. Target ads to users based on their expressed behaviors and make sure those ads are as relevant as possible, something that I’ve preached about tirelessly in the past. Focus on the inputs to your advertising campaigns because those are what decide its faith.

Campaign optimization should be about changing the target profiles of your campaign, adjusting the individual users who you are targeting, or adding more behavioral data to your current profiles. It should be about trying new creative variations with your profiles to get a better understanding of what resonates. If the performance isn’t what you would like then get more profile data. Build and nurture a better understanding of your prospects and manage your relationship with them. Technologically this is no simple task but then winning at online display advertising may never be simple.

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So Many Channels, So Many Paths.

It seems that most of the 3pas technology providers are squarely on the Path-to-Conversion (P2C) band wagon at this point. Last year DoubleClick revealed their Exposure to Conversion report to much acclaim by agencies and marketers alike. Not to be outdone, Atlas soon after revealed a similar offering called engagement mapping. To add to the mix Mediaplex, a ValueClick company, also started pushing their P2C data and analytics service. All of these products try to solve the same problem, which is how do you get beyond the last click or last impression conversion attribution methodology.

Most conversion reports give credit for the conversion to the last banner a user saw or clicked on prior to converting. In other words, all of the previous interactions that a user may have had with an advertising campaign prior to converting are completely discarded when it comes to conversion counting. This assumes that only the last click or last impressions matters, but not so says the 3pas technology providers. Mediaplex claims that 70% of conversion events are influenced by multiple channels.

In analyzing aggregated results from campaigns conducted for clients over the past seven months, Mediaplex found that 70% of conversions were preceded by exposures or interactions with two or more online channels prior to the final conversion event. The analysis also revealed that 45% of the conversions credited to paid search were preceded by an exposure and/or interaction with at least one of the client's display advertising banners prior to converting.

Atlas claims that

typically, between 93-95% of audience engagements with online advertising receive no credit at all when advertisers review campaign ROI. That presents a substantial margin for missed opportunity.

Each 3pas P2C offering tackles the problem in a slightly different way. While none of these offerings are perfect, the fact that all of the major 3pas providers are playing in this space means that most advertisers are looking for a solution to this problem. Further, the 3pas players need a way to show that display advertising is still relevant in the face of mounting pressure from Google and the likes. The best way to prove the value of display is to show that customers are typically exposed to, and sometimes interact with, a banner ad prior to making a search conversion. With this tool in hand, marketers can now feel justified keeping or adding to their display advertising budgets.

All three offerings provide a lot of data for advertisers to use while analyzing their conversion paths. However, none of them provide the answers that advertisers need. Advertisers will be best served by deciding what attribution model best suits their business and going with that. It will be a long time before any of the 3pas providers produce a system that can formulate a unique attribution methodology perfect for each individual advertiser. And if any of them does, then it probably doesn’t work.

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