Interactive Media Education: Value of the View-Through

In the last couple of weeks, I have talked to agencies and clients alike about the value of how Microsoft's Atlas utilizes Engagement Mapping and MediaPlex' MOJO utilizes Path to Conversion. Both products are fantastic, and they help you establish the number of online touch points it takes from start to finish of a conversion cycle (among many other things of course). But when I try and talk to people about it in "plain English", I find myself referencing View-Through Data - which seems to instantly draw a red flag.

For those of you relatively new to the industry, it might not conjure up negative connotations, but for those of you that have been in interactive media for a few years, it probably takes you back to the early days of publishers claiming credit for everything. A great example is when you are running ads on an ad network like Advertising.com that has approx. 90% internet market penetration, and at the same time you are running ads on a search engine. When an ad is displayed by advertising.com, a cookie is instantly set and when the conversion happens, that cookie pings the ad server letting it know a conversion has happened. If the ad was only served, and not clicked on - it is considered a view-through conversion. The problem is, the last click may have occurred on the search engine you were running on, and now your publisher (advertising.com) is taking claim for a conversion and your search engine is taking claim for a conversion - but you only have one conversion. So naturally, the view through got discounted in the past and was instantly labeled a black sheep.

Jumping at least 14 years ahead (FYI - Internet years are the equivalent of dog years), the view through still has a negative connotation, and when I speak to people about it now - they immediate stop me and say "oh no - I'm not paying for view through conversions again!" The reality is - a view through is just another metric that helps me do my job better. If we know that 12 people viewed your ad on Yahoo and eventually converted on a google search term - then we know our ads were targeting the correct people - but the offer just didn't immediately resonate to the "buy" mode. That being said, we have started to compile frequency data through the help of our ad servers that let us know exactly how many view-through's or touch points it takes our clients to convert an offer.

Imagine if you knew that it took your ad being displayed 12 times before someone actually purchased your product or service. You could tweak your messaging and work to get that down to 6 times, and essentially cut your advertising costs in half. Then imagine if you were able to insert an offline ad right after your first touchpoint... Imagine what your media mix could do if it all worked together seamlessly!

So before you cringe when I talk about view-through's... Just know that like everything, the view-through has evolved as well, and its making our job of defining the media mix all that much more enjoyable.

Thoughts on Media Optimization

I was glancing over one of my favorite Marketing & Advertising publications, Adrants, and I came across this article with an interesting perspective on media optimizations. The name of the article was Media Optimization Has Trumped Creative Optimization. The theme of the article spoke about how we, as online marketers, are forgetting the importance creative plays on the success of our campaigns with flaws in our campaign implementation, thus limiting our ability to gain learnings from a creative standpoint and act swiftly to optimize based on those results.

This brings up a good point, but before I give you my perspective on the subject, let's quickly define what it means to optimize an online campaign and some best practices. The definition of optimize means to "make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible". So, as direct marketers, we are responsible for driving desired actions as cost-effective as possible. We look at "Cost Per" metrics (CPA, CPC, CPM). We look at frontend and backend response rates (CTR, Conversion Rates). We also look at post click activity volume and traffic trends. As mentioned, based on these learning, we swiftly make adjustments.

Getting back to the article, technology has come so far to do some of the work for you. By setting rules within an adserver, the campaign will be delivered and optimized in real-time based on the aforementioned factors. This still does not cut out the manual aspect of going in and using your expertise to make the necessary tweaks.

In an ideal world, the online marketer can let the campaign ramp up and gain data to evaluate. Again, in an ideal world, the progression of optimizing a campaign would start on a creative level, then placement level (even certain creative on the placement level), and then if that fails, then the optimization would be done on a site level, which is another way of saying cancel the site.

Unfortunately, we may not have the luxury to follow this progression. A site is going from bad to worse, and your campaign goals are dots in your rear-view mirror as you head towards CPOutofcontrol. So, getting back to the question, Has Media Optimization Trumped Creative Optimization? Unfortunately, I think it has, and in many cases, by necessity to keep our promise to our clients. The promise as direct marketers to deliver conversions as efficiently as possible, and as a result, it requires us to skip steps one and two, and have the conversation that nobody likes to have with our new test partner. Let's face it, it's more work for us to start and cancel a campaign, then to start a successful campaign and let it run. But, if all campaigns were a success, then Media Two wouldn't need 48 hour out clauses.

Lastly, the article fails to mention two addition factors to rolling out a campaign with "10 or more versions of a creative unit" to go along with the incremental cost. Good design is time-consuming, which can easily become a bandwidth issue. The benefit of Media Two versus other shops is our ability to meet agressive deadlines, but creativity doesn't happen overnight. And once the concepting is done, getting your assets through the client's legal team is a full-time job in itself. My best advice is to plan ahead. Start concepting for Q3 now...sound crazy? Save yourself the headache and trust me.