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Previously, the impact of un-clicked online marketing has proven difficult to measure, and therefore, difficult to optimize. However, with visitors and buyers taking longer than ever to complete an online transaction or purchase, they are being exposed to myriad online marketing campaigns before converting. Businesses are under extreme pressure to measure the efficacy of their online marketing campaigns, justifying investments based on results and adjusting accordingly. With Impression Attribution, companies will now be able to obtain a complete understanding of online visitor behavior and conversion patterns by tying online marketing exposure to website behavior.
Although the algorithm behind Impression Attribution is complex, the solution is fairly simple for customers to implement. Coremetrics clients tag their display ads, widgets, syndicated videos, micro-sites and other content with the Impression code, which then maps the visitor’s impressions to activity on the Client site. This mapping forms the basis for multi-session attributed metric calculation and analysis, such as sales, orders, conversion events, and page views.
“Users of Web analytics tools constantly struggle with the question of attribution,” said Bill Gassman, Industry Analyst at Gartner, Inc. “New approaches are needed to increase the visibility of how content that is delivered off-site, such as advertising and video clips, drives behavior on-site.”
That’s pretty nifty, but how would a Coremetrics client “tag” a static display ad?
How technically are they doing this? How about some details to prove the methodology is sound so the experts can weigh in if it is a vialbe method.
The only options I see they have:
1. They would have to import data from all the ad server networks pushing ads to variosu publishing networks for viewed Ads. how cumbersome for the customer and pretty much not worth it.
2. They have to piggy back on all the Ad and publishing networks JS scripts.Not happening.
3. They would have to cookie the user across all networks and leverage relationships with those vendors. Not happening.
I just do not see any of these happening except #1 which is severely difficult to do let alone maintain accuracy for the 1 visitor across multiple sites viewing differnt ads or the same ad. Dblclick has a hard enough time and they have been doing it since 1997.
My intuition tells me the the analytics customer would have to comproimise on what types of campaigns they are if the technology is not described as above in order to get impression data not just CTR data.
Importing is the only way in Coremetircs case because of lack of DEV resources, money and bizdev relationships with all AD networks and publishing entities – probably all smoke.
Scenario to prove my point:
1) Visitor A goes to sites A,B,C my ad is pushed via Google ADsense on A – they do not click; SiteB is my video on YOUTUBE – They watch it but don’t click thru to my site., Site C – My ad is a banner on Yahoo – I do not click.
Do you really think that any of these sites are going to let CoreMetrics set a cookie or ad scripts on the page for a View-Thru metric. Right. haha. They barely let Doubleclick do it. For that matter think of the pain it would take to download and massage GoogleAd sense data – I am pretty sure there still isn’t an API for it — even if you could, or YouTube viewer data — how will you map all three views to 1 visitor — the Cookies are different — there is no single cookie tracking that visitor to all 3 sites – let alone back to my site if they type the URL in direct.
Unless they publish how they are doing this methodology then I am skeptical. The IAB has been hounding Hitwise, Comscore and Nielsen for the last 3+ yrs to standardize on this and several other metrics. How does CoreMetrics think they can do a better job after these 3 can’t agree to agree for the last 10 yrs even after being harassed by the IAB.
Don;t let Coremetircs fool you.
Just to clarify how Coremetrics Impression Attribution works: the client requests the ad network or publisher to fire a new Coremetrics impression tag when the display ad is served. This can be done in parallel or in sequence (via redirect). The new solution sets a cookie on a user machine each time the ad is viewed. It sends comprehensive information about the ad to the Coremetrics server.
When the end user finally gets to the client website, the new solution ties all the impression-based cookies to the user’s website cookie, thus mapping impression information to onsite behavior and conversion.
We have several clients actively implementing the solution with various networks and publishers.
More information is available at http://tinyurl.com/cakclh
Best,
Boaz Ronkin
Senior Manager, Product Marketing
Coremetrics
Soooo…..number 2.
Hi Boaz-
Would it be possible to load the CM tag inside a DFA Ad Tag? Which would essentially piggyback off of the DFA tag each time the tag is served.
-GT
I think this solution must work with adserver 3rd party tags. Coremetrics must have some code that goes inside of those tags so when the ad call occurs, it calls the display ad as well as some coremetrics code or a pixel that sets the cookie and counts that impression.