I-COM worldmeasurementnews

In US, New IAB and BAIN & Company Study Poses New Organizing Model for Online Publishers

New York, NY (November 12, 2009) — Interactive sales teams with category and relationship expertise, services that provide solutions to marketer challenges and better measurement are just some of the organizational and systemic challenges that inhibit online ad growth revealed in “Building Brands Online,” a study released today by Bain & Company, the global business consulting firm, and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The results were presented in New York at a meeting comprised of senior marketing, advertising and media industry executives.

“Unmet marketer needs create a major opportunity for media companies to collaborate directly with marketers,” said John Frelinghuysen, a partner in Bain & Company's media practice and lead author of the study. “But few media companies currently have the capability to fill the gaps in online sales and service. Ultimately, marketers are looking for media companies to offer a true triple-play service model from direct response to awareness to high impact brand engagement,” said Frelinghuysen. “This model is the key to staving off continued price erosion of online inventory.” More...

Microsoft Sites Captures Largest Share of Time Spent Online Worldwide

Facebook and YouTube Combined Account for Nearly 10 Percent of Time Spent Online Globally

RESTON, VA, November 6, 2009 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a study of online engagement at the top worldwide properties based on data from its comScore World Metrix service. The study found that Microsoft Sites captured nearly 15 percent of time spent online worldwide in September, making it the most engaging global property, followed by Google Sites and Yahoo! Sites. Facebook.com, which continues to see significant growth on a worldwide basis, was the fourth most engaging destination with visitors spending 1.4 billion hours on the site in September, up 193 percent from the previous year. More...

P&G is trying to set the agenda for Engagement based campaigns

Suzanne Bearne from New Media Age writes: new media age revealed the FMCG company’s pioneering move to introduce an engagement ad rate across publisher sites, which means P&G will pay publishers more money for a user who does more than merely view an ad but takes actions such as signing up for newsletters, listening to a podcast or entering a competition.

Procter & Gamble’s move to pay more for engaged users is worrying for publishers, who are asking: how do you measure engagement? How do you define it? It seems P&G is defining what engagement is and this could potentially shake up the measurement landscape. The industry has been fixated on CPM and CPCs but it needs to move quickly to define engagement rather than allow an advertiser to set the standard. More...

Tameka Kee writes: "There's a consensus that engagement is going to be how we hold online advertising accountable from now on, but we're still grappling with how to tie it back to real business results," said James Kiernan, VP and group client director for P&G at Mediavest. "Like, how many 'engagements' does it take to drive purchase intent? How do we tie it back to sales?" More...

Using data to optimize your marketing budgets

Seow Ping Tan writes for iMedia: Marketing spend, now more than ever, needs to be measureable and tied to quantifiable end results -- driving incremental sales. How? One area of focus is customer data and the means of acquiring or developing meaningful customer information. With a foundation of thorough and accurate data, data can be analysed more effectively to understand customer behaviours better and used to improve customer engagement through channels that they will most likely respond to. More...

Don't ignore the data

Rob Stanley, Managing Director APAC at Responsys writes for iMedia: This real-life example of poor data use shows just why it is so important for you to gather the right information to win over your customers. Nevertheless, in this case data developed a fantastic relationship for one bank, while ignoring data destroyed the relationship for another. And don't get me started about the word-of-mouth impact! More...

Task Completion: Why It's The Most Important Metric

Jonathan Levitt, Vice President, Marketing at iPerceptions writes for Mediapost: Only about 20% of visitors come to an e-commerce website to make a purchase - so why do most marketers cling to the conversion metric as the Holy Grail of success? The truth is, measuring task completion is a much more valuable metric. People have taken time out of their busy days to come to your site for very specific reasons, and yet many marketers assume everyone who arrives at their sites is there to make a purchase. We know this isn't true...More...

Buyers: Sites Gaming Up Page Views?

Mike Shields writes for MediaWeek: Most plying the online media trade say they’d be happy to see the page view disappear as a metric. But for all the talk about engagement and time spent, and the adoption of nifty publishing technologies like XML and Ajax, the page view just won’t die. Indeed, many publishers deliberately still use every trick in the book to drive up their page view numbers—from posting news stories that run across four pages to driving users to endless slide shows. More...

Will the IAB's [US} Social Media Metrics Definitions Help Crack The Engagement Code?

Catharine P. Taylor writes for Mediapost: The great thing about putting these definitions down on paper is that they create a road map for advertisers on how to make social media purposeful, measuring a wide variety of user interactions and monitoring online dialogue, and putting numbers around it that marketers can understand. Compared to old-time metrics like reach, frequency and the click-through, these metrics are deep, not only measuring whether people are engaged, but how they are engaging. It's like being able to measure the temperature with a thermometer rather than opening the front door and declaring it either hot or cold. More...

In US, VideoEgg Ties Ad Placement To Attention Metrics

San Francisco, CA. May 6, 2009 – VideoEgg, a new kind of rich media ad network, today announced AttentionRank™, an innovative ad delivery approach to optimize the placement of brand advertising and maximize user attention and engagement. AttentionRank is a systematic approach that identifies when and where users are most receptive to a brand’s message—evaluating media not on an impression basis but on its ability to capture attention. By analyzing three key factors—engagement with the ad, time spent with a brand message and secondary user actions such as click-through rates—AttentionRank enables VideoEgg to understand where to place brand messages to capture user attention, increasing the time users spend with an advertisers’ content by an average of 15 percent.
"Brands are fighting harder than ever for time and attention, as consumers rapidly shift to new media platforms they’re able to control, like DVRs and the Internet. This cultural change in how messages are consumed makes it more important than ever for brands to connect with their audience when they are the most open to considering a brand message," said Matt Sanchez, CEO of VideoEgg. "We’ve seen dramatic differences in the value of media placements across the Internet and feel that traditional media buying approaches create unacceptable risks for advertisers.
AttentionRank improves campaign results on three key dimensions:
• Engagement: The user voluntarily opts into the AdFrames advertising experience
• Time with brand message: The time user spends engaged with the ad content
• Secondary user actions: Clicks-through rate, location inquires, data submissions, etc.
More...

Online Engagement Deepens as Social Media and Video Sites Reshape the Internet

Charlie Buchwalter writes for Nielsen: We also know that in the last six years, the Internet has changed dramatically as people seek more personalized relationships online. Today users gravitate to sites that contain more and more specialized content, as seen in the fact that video and social networking sites have become the two fastest growing categories in 2009.

It is rare to see segments significantly grow from BOTH an audience and an engagement standpoint, but we are seeing this very thing for both video and social media sites. While social networks have been garnering impressive audience numbers for the last six years, growing 87 percent since 2003, unique visitors to video sites have been growing at meteoric rates, 339 percent during the same time period. More...