The ability to measure market share in real-time will disrupt the way retailers determine the success of the marketing efforts.  Today, retailers measure performance in various ways including return on ad spend (direct response), and in-store sales (branding, promotional).  By measuring market share, retailers are able to take a macro view on their marketing efforts that expands beyond their brick and mortar walls.

Quantifying performance by market share allows retailers to look at the entire retail ecosystem, versus a siloed approach to marketing.  By using market share as a key metric it allows retailers to optimize to gain share of wallet.  Understanding market share allows marketers to build campaigns to capture the $1.44 spent at competitors for every $1 spent with them.

Placed recently released their 2012 Holiday Retail Insights providing a first glimpse into retail market share, which includes surprising volatility.

Wireless Carrier Retail Stores - Market Share

• Verizon and AT&T wrestled for the top position in terms of wireless carrier store visits in the last six weeks of the holiday shopping season.  AT&T held the lead 4 out of the last 6 weeks.
• T-Mobile started and ended the holiday shopping season 4th in market share, but quickly closed the gap and at its peak came within one percentage point of Sprint (#3).

Big Box Retailers - Market Share

• Nearly 2/3 of visits to the largest big box retailers during the holiday season were at Walmart (65.4%), followed by Target (26.1%) and Kmart (8.6%).

Department Store - Market Share

• 1/3 of visits to the largest national department stores during the holiday season were to Kohl’s (32.3%), followed by Sears (26.7%), J.C. Penney (22.0%) and Macy’s (19.0%).

David Shim is the Founder and CEO of Placed, the leader in location analytics.  By connecting the physical and digital worlds, Placed has created a new class of analytics focused on location.  Prior to Placed, David has held leadership roles in product, marketing, and operations at Quantcast, WebTrends, Farecast, and Razorfish.

After having my eyes opened to the fact that the average billboard receives only three seconds of viewing time, it got me thinking, how can you evoke emotion from someone with only three seconds? 

Naturally, this came to mind while in my car where the most likely interactions to spur emotion arrive from other drivers. It was simple to find three second experiences that sparked my brain. Being cut off, those too close to the bumper of my car, those incapable of using a turn signal. All simple, little aggravations had the ability to tip the emotional scale in my head and imprint my surroundings into my mind. If I were to retell these experiences, I would most likely state where I was located when the occurrence happened.

After I had wracked up a solid list of a thousand things that could anger me within three seconds, I set off on attempting to create a list of experiences that would bring about positive feelings just as easily. Let’s cut to the chase - this is not simple.

In that case, how do you plan for a positive impression in three seconds? All of the examples I came across were deeply personal; a hearty laugh with a friend, a knowing glance, or a touch on the arm. What’s the best way to reach someone so deeply through a three second advertisement that gives the comfort of a hug from a loved one?

With so many factors that we concern ourselves with in regards to marketing and messaging, we need to keep the emotional value for our consumer audience in focus. After all, price is a fleeting thrill, two additional ounces won’t tell a good story, and not many advertisements go viral when they showcase the new shape of a product’s container.

While metrics and analytics remain at the heart of how we measure success, the delicate balance between the “art” and “science” of marketing is not lost in our methodologies. When honing a message, maybe it would be best if we took a few minutes to sit back and think about how the product and its message would make our consumers feel. It’s a great starting and sticking point.

Back in the good old days of advertising, when the Don Drapers of the world launched a campaign for a client, there was only one performance indicator – sales figures. If sales went up, the campaign was considered a success, even though no one really had any idea what truly caused the lift. Then, along came online advertising, which brought with it a whole new, more granular way of looking at campaign performance.

When you run an online campaign you have the ability to track your campaign from day one, in almost real-time. This accessibility and abundance of data is both a blessing and a curse. While it gives us the power to finely tune campaigns to maximize ROI and minimize spend, the online portion of the buy becomes highly scrutinized, while the inherent value of “traditional” tactics such as billboards often go unquestioned.

The danger of simply looking at web analytics in a silo is that you truly miss the bigger picture. Yes, the Google search campaign was likely responsible for the most conversions, but that doesn’t even begin to answer the question of why people were even searching to begin with. Did they see an offline ad? Read an email? See an article in a publication or maybe a banner ad? The marketing analytics give you the opportunity to look at the campaign as a whole, and get a better understanding of how all the pieces work together to eventually culminate in a conversion.

At Star, measurement is a critical component of our approach to client challenges. Be it awareness, perception, lead generation or sales, we are rigorous in determining the impact of our efforts on the consumer’s mind (awareness and perception) as well as their actions (leads and sales).

This article written by a member of the Hubspot team further explains the benefits of examining marketing analytics, and how they could help you learn more about your customer base and their conversion process. While the author makes some very good points about the questions you need to ask in order to fully examine the effectiveness of a campaign, it seems as though offline advertising is still not taken into account. To truly gauge the campaign as a whole, you have to examine all of the parts, (online and offline) and determine how they best work together.

Even outside of the web, Star’s approach in all media channels strives to be ROI-based against marketing/media spend, especially when prospect and customer acquisition is the goal. We understand that “moving the needle” – in all its forms - is critical, and that’s why we employ a variety of measurement tools in order to gauge the achievements of our efforts.

We all love Mad Men, but today we need to measure beyond the Don Draper effect. Do you have a measurement system in place that is delivering the right feedback and analysis?

Yet, when it comes to practice, many of us look for the quick fix, the easy way or expect it to just simply happen. We’re all susceptible to this way of thinking. I’ll admit it has failed me a time or two, as well. In fact, I’m still trying to decide how to drop the twenty pounds of sympathy weight I achieved from the births of my two children the last four years. I know the real answer - I just want it to be easier.

Let’s say you are a corporate CMO or VP of Brand Management or an advertising agency SVP of Accounts or Creative Director; you possess great responsibilities to move a company forward, create sales, help the brand achieve a voice and a litany of other objectives. Yet, when it comes to actually doing that, you frequently fail. Yes, that’s right - you (the one reading this), in all your greatness, fail all the time. You are failing right now, and you probably don’t even know it. Why? Three reasons:

1. You facilitate or create false direction
2. You get discouraged
3. You don’t define accountability

FALSE DIRECTIONS

In personal and work life, false directions exist on every corner: the newest fad diet, the work from home and get rich quick scheme, the 'we can get you ranked on the top of Google' pitch, and my favorite – the 'send this to seven friends in the next minute or else' message. In the business world and, specifically, the digital media industry, there are many false directions. These can take the form of a process, another person or your own worst enemy: yourself.

On a weekly basis, I interact with many businesses. Most have a false direction in their midst. For example:

1. The social ‘guru’ that told them they need to get to 400,000 Facebook likes to be successful
2. The lack of analytics and insight from which to make strategic marketing and/or operational decisions
3. A person (boss or yourself) that fails to look beyond the initial obstacle and realize it can be done - and done well - with proper measurement and true accountability

To each of the examples above, I’ll offer you the following:

1. Likes, page views, brand impressions and the sort are not success metrics, they are not goals – they are false directions
2. Failing to implement, assess and mine your data with advanced analytics is relegating you and your business to mediocrity – the failure to realize this is a false direction
3. Applying obstacles - and not options - to challenges is not only misguided strategy, it is (you guessed it) a false direction

False directions lead us down the primrose path. False directions do not teach us right or wrong or challenge the standard. False directions do not hold themselves accountable. False directions misguide and tell you research isn’t that valuable or is always skewed. False directions tell you to focus on Facebook instead of things that are platform-neutral, such as communication strategy and content development. False directions tell you analytics and measurement are too expensive, not valuable or make excuses as to why they are not ready for that data to be extracted and used.

False directions lie, steal and cheat you from success. Now, don’t misquote me - I’m not saying all false directions are liars or will steal intentionally. It is very important to understand that false directions may be sincere, but being sincerely wrong can and does occur. False directions will fail you if you give them a chance.

DISCOURAGEMENT

Ok, well no one ever said life was easy, right? The same holds true for work. Managing the above 'false direction' issue is hard. Actually, it’s both simple and difficult. We are all, on some level, driven to succeed. But if and when we let false directions creep in, we get discouraged.

Discouragement often occurs when something isn’t going our way or doesn’t happen on our terms. It takes perseverance and focus to keep us on track. Referencing one of the above examples, we let a false direction in when we fail to realize that measurement by who ‘likes’ us is not really measurement at all; it is simply a metric of convenience. What we have done in this instance is allow a false direction to lower our standards, make a mockery of our true goals and lead us to a discouraged place. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have people ‘like’ you, but using that as a primary focus will eventually lead you to discouragement. And when that happens, there is no one to blame but numero uno because you didn’t focus on the true goal which, in this case, would be customers taking action, engaging with your messages and ultimately buying your product or services.

Let me provide you a sports analogy. You know you want it - sports analogies are never discouraging.

In 1990, a running back from the hometown of Pensacola, FL was drafted into the National Football League. He was a good athlete; not by any means the biggest, not by any means the fastest (in fact, I truly believe I can personally outrun him in a 100 or 200 meter sprint – I’ll bet a grand on it). The first time he ever touched the ball in the NFL, you know what he did? Nope, he didn’t score a touchdown. He rushed for one yard. That’s three feet for the mathematically challenged – you can spit further than that. You know what he did the second time he touched the football? Boom Jackpot! Another yard. Yep, Emmett Smith ran for a total of two yards in his first game with the Dallas Cowboys. I’d call that a slow start.

So what does this have to do with discouragement? I’ll tell you what: consistency. Over the next 14 seasons, Emmitt Smith would become so consistent, he would eventually break the record for most yards rushed by the one and only Walter Peyton. Taking the time to study, create a game plan and execute it time and time again, coupled with solid intelligence, gave Emmitt Smith the ability to become one of the best ever. Discouragement was not in Emmitt’s repertoire. You can do it, too, by creating real goals (not convenience goals) and by staying consistently focused on the end result. That will keep discouragement at bay.

ACCOUNTABILITY

So, what’s the best way to avoid false directions and discouragement? Being accountable. You know what it takes to be accountable? Two things:

1. A partner
2. A system

A partner: someone or something that can objectively measure and hold you to goals, stretch your goals, challenge your thinking, challenge your focus and help you with proper direction. A partner is an absolute necessity. You may find this in a business partner, a co-worker, a vendor or a mentor, but you must have a partner that can be there with you along the way and question your path critically. And you must listen!

A system: something that will allow you to be consistent all day, every day. A system is practice or putting into practice. In both our personal and business lives, it's easy to get jazzed up and then quickly distracted. How many of us have ever seen or heard something we thought was a great idea, and we tell ourselves, 'I’m gonna do that.' But we never do. Without a system, something you can follow and stress the importance of, you won’t have accountability, and you will miss the opportunities that come your way. I don’t think I have ever heard any successful businessperson simply say, 'I was just lucky.' Even if they did, it’s not the truth. The truth is they worked hard, many times for many years, to put them in a position to take advantage of an opportunity and get lucky. They learned to be accountable. Lucky didn’t just happen.

So learn to do it right. Don’t let false directions guide you. Be consistent so discouragement doesn’t invade your journey, and create accountability in all you do in order to create a strong and true direction. Now, send this to seven friends in the next minute or else you will have bad luck for 10 years… seriously.

Follow me on Twitter: @sparkerjr

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In the past few years, Klout has quickly risen to social media stardom as a provider of analytics measuring a user's influence across social networks (primarily focusing on Twitter, Facebook and Google+). By measuring data from social sites, the size of a person's network, and other factors, Klout gives users an influence rating  (Score) on a scale of 1 to 100. Most Klout Scores are in the 20’s, and reaching the 30’s and 40’s tends to show a good amount of social engagement. This can create, as John Scalzi puts it, “status anxiety” and social insecurity, but the credence you put to what your Score says about you remains up to you.

Like any startup, Klout is still growing and developing. Even though recent adjustments and evolution have brought controversy, Klout as a measurement tool remains an interesting data point for social media users. Of course, the influence measurement is guided by the company’s own definitions and interpretations. Currently, Klout scores are determined by the following in terms of a user’s “ability to drive action”:

• Twitter: Retweets and Mentions
• Facebook: Comments, Wall-Posts, Likes
• Google+: Comments, Reshares, +1
• LinkedIn: Comments, Likes
• Foursquare: Tips – Todo’s and Tips – Done

Klout says that users can also connect Facebook Pages, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress.com, Last.fm and Flickr accounts, though these networks do not impact your overall Score…yet. That last word is very important to keep in mind. Klout says, “The way influence is signaled online is constantly changing. New networks are born and new behaviors emerge overnight. The Klout Score will continue to evolve to support this change….and will always exist in a dynamic state of improvement.”

So what is missing? Klout doesn’t take private messages into context, nor can it measure influence between users in a network if their interaction is taken offline or onto email. That level of engagement is likely to carry many times more weight than conversations happening publicly on a social medium. Another missing piece relates to the importance put on the network size of an individual. Some advice we often give to PR clients when discussing media outlets is to keep the target audience in mind when setting goals for news coverage. The right trade publication with a circulation of 1000 readers has often brought in more new business for certain clients than a general newspaper with 10x that audience. The goal for online interactivity should not be the amount of content, but rather the quality of that content.

As Klout has grown, the data and measurements they pull from their users have added an element beyond the ranking and gamification aspects, and this is where they show the most potential from the marketing side of the equation. Using Klout as a resource to find experts in a distinct category has already caught the attention of some major brands. Agencies and marketers should also be looking at Klout as a directory, keeping in mind that the information being presented still needs to be evaluated rather than taken at Score value as a true recommendation engine.

What it comes down to is this: Klout is growing as an evaluator of the variety of social communities, but it is (self-acknowledging) nowhere near “done”. Those of us engaging with social media professionally (brand marketers, product managers, agency staff) now have another metric to consult with and take into consideration along with measurable KPIs. The fluctuations of an individual Klout Score, however, should be taken with a grain of salt. Use Klout as a gateway or marker in broader research, focusing on the content and conversations on a deeper level than a simple score.

Short term metrics are easily gamed, and it can happen unintentionally. Here are a few common metrics and ways some B2B businesses influence the metric without driving long-term results.

• Is social sharing a success measurement for your content? If so, as Mark Schaefer's post shows, a few more posts about Klout will make you successful on paper.
• Is traffic a key goal? High volume, low cost traffic sources will immediately your metrics, but they may not improve your business.
• Is cost per lead a key metric? Reducing online display and traditional advertising investments based on performance will quickly lower cost per lead, but long-term it will hurt search results and leads from organic traffic.
• Is revenue key? Increasing your use of time sensitive promotions will definitely give you a short-term lift but it also creates a reliance on margin-eroding promotions.

Even good metrics can be misleading. If you don't do all three items below, your marketing metrics will eventually mislead your marketing.

1. Pick the Right Marketing Metrics
With the wrong metrics, your investment in analysis and optimization is wasted. This should be obvious to everyone, yet we continue to hear about click rates on banner ads, a metric that is easily accessible but wrong for nearly everyone.

The wrong metrics lead to the wrong marketing investments.

2. Do the Analysis
Simply optimizing a campaign based on your success metrics may quickly improve measured results, but you will be left with a subset of your original plan.
Insight into why elements of your marketing performed well or missed the mark is critical. More than driving tactical decisions, insights improve all the marketing decisions that follow.

3. Follow Your Vision
If you are in enterprise B2B marketing, your metrics will never reflect the entirety of your vision and purpose and be granular and timely enough to use for ongoing management. Metrics may inform your vision, but purely following your metrics will lead you away from it.

Or as Twain would likely have summarized it: Lies, Damn Lies and Marketing Metrics.

Your Turn
How have you seen metrics mislead marketing or what other critical steps would you add? Share your views and examples in the comments below or with me on Twitter (@wittlake).

Data on purchase intent does not cut it in statistical models. The analysis must accurately measure isolated campaign impact with valid and industry-proven methodologies.  Measurement at this level is sophisticated and must be conducted by someone without a horse in the race.  Actual purchase data can be collected from retail loyalty cards and third-party measurement firms to provide the validation needed.

Measurement firms have taken proven analytic testing processes and applied them to a digital medium. Since these are proven methodologies, they give marketers confidence in the results that they are going to see.  Here are three ways to measure the sales and ROI of your social shopper marketing program.

1. Loyalty Card Matched Panel Tests

Measuring sales based on actual household purchases made with retail loyalty shopper cards closes the loop and provides data on your sales and ROI.  This household-level view of purchases provides a robust understanding of consumer purchase behavior. Companies like BzzAgent’s parent company dunnhumby manage shopper card programs for many of the world’s largest retailers. When card holders involved in a social marketing program make a purchase, marketers can connect the dots back to their social media activities. This not only measures purchases made by the customer, but it quantifies the influence they had on others around them.

Studies of purchases from households exposed to the social marketing campaign are compared with a control group of households not exposed to it. If the footprint of the retailer is significant enough, tracking social media sales with loyalty card transactions will be an excellent representation of your sales impact and ROI.

2. Matched Market Analysis

Matched Market Analysis looks are store level transactions. Analytic companies like SymphonyIRI use a two-celled test and control approach to measure sales lift between two geographic markets. For a social media campaign, two markets with similar characteristics are selected. People living in one market are exposed to a social media campaign and people in the other market are not.

With this level of detail, measurement firms apply statistical techniques to match store-to-store sales data to isolate the sales impact of the social media effort. Even though social media sharing occurs nationally, there is a sufficient concentration of people in the individual’s local area. Some variables can’t be controlled in the test. One of them is price and promotion. For example, if coupons are tripled at Massachusetts supermarkets but not in Los Angeles, the measurement firms adjust the data for this variable.

3. Market Mix Modeling

Market Mix Modeling (MMM) allows marketers to look at the big picture of a brand’s marketing.  Firms like Nielsen analyze media effectiveness across channels to evaluate every element of the marketing mix.  The analysis is able to distinguish sales volume from marketing compared to just being on the shelf. The results demonstrate the sales volume and ROI from each media channel. MMM studies are usually conducted annually to keep a pulse on the changing trends in marketing and media effectiveness.

With the right data collection practices, social marketing data can be analyzed in these models.  Since social is typically a smaller media investment, it can be obscured by the large footprint of television or other media. Keys to getting social media to register in a MMM study include variation and granularity of the impressions over time. Discussion data must include weekly impression volume on a market level.

The results have been impressive. BzzAgent analyzed the social marketing ROI from a variety of MMM studies and found that for every dollar spent, social marketing returned an average ROI of $1.56. That’s on average.  For some products, the ROI reached as high as $4.19.

A Resolution That's Easy to Keep

Studies show that people who explicitly make resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than those who don’t.  Start the year off right. Resolve to evolve your social marketing measurement practices in 2012 and you’ll develop a habit that can change your business.

Social Media Week’s blogger Kerry Sugrue developed a good summary of the presentation, and we’ve made the slides available as well.

ROI Is Not Always the Right Fit
Our presentation centered on the process required to achieve good social media measurement as outlined in this diagram.

Perhaps the most well-received point of our presentation was the observation that the measurement of ROI is not always the best way to evaluate the value of social media engagement to an organization.

ROI has a clear definition; the measure of financial results against a defined investment. It is also unfortunately a management catch phrase.

Often, when management asks for the ROI on social media, what they are really asking for is the value of social media engagement to the business. Some value can be measured financially, and thus be converted to ROI, but with social media, much value must be measured in other terms.

Anyone who is asked to evaluate the ROI of their social media effort should ask back in return if ROI is really the right measure, or if management is really seeking the most relevant measures of value available. If the true interest is around understanding the effectiveness of engagement, then many alternative measures can be used.

If however the interest is truly on getting to an ROI number by any means necessary, then – returning to the title of this post – getting to ROI for firms that cannot directly link social media activity to sales may require investments in primary research that will allow accurate estimates of value on measures not directly related to financial returns. The cost of that research (which may be significant) will need to be factored in to the “investment” variable in the social media ROI calculation.

Awareness as a Value Metric
An intuitive perspective on social media almost always results in the sense that social media should be a very effective as a channel for building awareness. However, an accurate measurement of levels of awareness and the resulting benefit (or harm) of this awareness on a business are more difficult to develop than most managers would think.

Most of what is called “measurement” of awareness is actually an estimate rather than a measurement, since awareness, being a cognitive state, is hard to measure at a distance and without direct response.

Doesn't it sound a little less self-serving when we look to the information itself for an answer? It isn't the person who wants something for nothing. It's the information itself which, like a living organism, has a need to be disseminated freely and not be associated with any nasty credit-card stuff or invoices or anything yucky like that.

Of course that's what it is!

And so it goes with web analytics. Apparently there is no human drive to seek better value--no human desire to have both great analytics and no bill to pay. It must be web analytics that wants to be free, because it keeps getting harder and harder to ignore "free" in the marketplace (see: Google Analytics) even if you're deploying for an enterprise. And of course Google has a paid version for those that really don't want web analytics to be free, but want to make sure that if Google Analytics goes down, they get to freely call GA and complain until they have delivered themselves from the urge to freedom.

Next up: the logical conclusion. What happens when web analytics becomes so addicted to freedom that it somehow becomes not simply free, but offers you a chance to own your own data because the tools you use are not even owned by anyone? In the relatively new field of Open Source Analytics, there are tools out there that may give pause even to the mighty Google. From among small players like Piwik and Open Web Analytics there will probably emerge a leading platform that is totally free and totally yours.

Look what happened with web design. Once, it cost a million dollars to put up a really great looking web site. Now you can download a million templates and have at it for almost nothing. What about Content Management Systems? There is Sharepoint and there is Websphere and there are others in the race. But coming up very fast on the outside track are technologies like Drupal and Joomla, both opensource solutions to the problem of keeping web sites fresh with new content.

Combine this natural tendency to move from proprietary/expensive to opensource/free with the advent of massively distributed cloud computing, and you've got a cocktail of information freedom that will blow down the walls of many tool vendors/creators, including those in the web analytics space.

Of course, the usual caveats apply. As you move to opensource, you move away from accountability (on an organizational level). In a way, it's like being taught to fish. And if you learn to fish, you'd better catch some, otherwise you're not having dinner. As always, "free" does not imply "easy"; and in fact implies "get friendly with an expert on this".

Conclusion: rather than toying with Chef-of-the-Future, anyone for paying to enjoy a nice healthy prepared meal? Any hands. . .?

That is, except for the five reasons listed below.

1. There is no comparable organization for the web analytics professional.
Can you say "only game in town"? If so, then you will understand why it's critical to put yourself in a position to enjoy the benefits of membership. It is the premiere organization in the field. It is now several years old and has, I believe, at least a couple of thousand members. Can you walk into an interview regarding a web analytics position and gain credibility by wearing a WAA pin (hopefully because you are a member not a pretender)? Or demonstrating your involvement in the organization? I think that is a "yes". Really, there is no other group devoted to your success as a web analytics pro, and how many more reasons do you need [except the following 4]?

2. Education and Certification.
For several years the WAA has offered courses through the University of British Columbia and UCIrvine in California. Would it be a great idea to get certified for educational achievements in Web Analytics? Would it be helpful to receive a Web Intelligence Certificate? If you're not a member and are looking to make a move into this unusual, burgeoning industry, I would think either of these options might be of tremendous help. Plus, there are no small number member-only webinars, base-camps and other knowledge-enhancing events, all available to the member, that round out the skill-set of the web analytics professional.

3. Networking with the Right Crowd.
It's one thing to get to an event devoted to web analytics only (much like Jim Sterne's own E-Metrics confabs), which are rare enough. It's another to meet people in your own community who share your concerns, can enhance your knowledge of latest trends, share with them plenty of useful scuttlebutt, and trade business cards as colleagues in the fight for analytics truth. You will be amazed at how similar many of the stories are, especially the simmering frustration of having to work with so-called "practitioners" and "agencies" that say they do web analytics but really don't or can't. No doubt attendance at each one of these events (for instance Web Analytics Wednesdays--these days loosely affiliated with the WAA--held in places as diverse as Philadelphia and Estonia) will send you back with a nugget of information or a contact that will be most helpful.

4. Best Practices.
Web Analytics should not be a tossed salad of random reports, incorrect tagging exercises, tool-switches, inaccurate minutiae, vendor blather, tomato, scallion and lack of follow-through. While this space is too small to get into what Web Analytics Best Practices looks like, be assured that the WAA "gets" that WA is a process that roughly corresponds (in laypersons' terms) to: knowing what your business needs to know about web activity; making sure experts are involved in getting the tools to work; communicating the success/failure of whatever is being measured; changing the content that didn't work no matter where it came from or who might yell about changing it; and repeating the measurements again to confirm success. The folks you'll encounter in the WAA may have their own take on which flavor of best practices they prefer, but they won't tell you to just drop a tag in the header and take a nap.

5. Community Resources.
On the WAA web site there are links to valuable research papers, blogs, books, white papers and even a Career Center. Another sidebar links to WAA symposiums, webinar calendars and more. The more you are immersed in critical WA resource data, the more likely you will grow your own organic sense of how to build a web analytics practice inside your company--or you may make a decision to move to a company that embraces web analytics more thoroughly than the one you're currently at. Deep involvement in the most up-to-date information, plus peer-knowledge-sharing, plus education, plus hanging out at cocktail hour with industry heavies, all adds up to the type of three-dimensional experience that builds a professional not just in web analytics but any field.

Finally, the entire WA effort is about making digital marketing a better and more accountable success story. Would you like to be on the side of the people who know how it's supposed to work--and can execute? Or would you prefer to watch your less-well-informed colleagues or managers run the analytics express off the rails and into the ravine? How many times have you wondered what would happen if the world really woke up to using web analytics the way it ought to be used--as a holistic system for improvement--rather than just a "checkmark" on a list of rote tasks?

If you would like to be on the side of good web analytics, go ahead and join. Often enough your employer may even pay for it (just a suggestion!). And even if you have to pony up yourself, it makes perfect good sense to do so, since then your membership travels with you wherever you end up.

When you do join, tell them I said hi!

I have a lot of respect for Mark Suster, an entrepreneur who turned venture capitalist and now is investing out of GRP Partners.  He writes a terrific blog called Both Sides of the Table and his posts are picked up on TechCrunch and other major outlets.

He recently wrote a declarative post called The Future of Advertising Will be Integrated.  The post went up on April 29th but I’ve been noodling it ever since. Due to some personal obligations, I’ve not been able to respond, but finally, here it is.

As an entrepreneur turned ad agency guy, when I hear the word “integrated,” I immediately think media and creative under one roof, such as my firm, kirshenbaum bond senecal + partners.  I personally believe this is really the only way to go if you want to get to a big platform.  With media and creative all under one roof, under one P&L, and with a cohesive team, you can create big ideas that know no creative or media boundaries.

We have a saying internally at the agency, E=(MC)2, which is obviously repurposed, but it means a “[brand] experience” is exponentially greater when media and creative work together.

Enough agency speak for now but keep this last sentence in the back of your mind as you read the rest.  I hope you do.

Mark came at his post a bit differently and took the above tenants, whether he realized or not, and applied them to the digital media ecosystem today.  He highlighted a few companies such as my buddy Ari’scompany, Solve Media, along with Adly and Kontera (amongst others).  The creative is the media in most of these, along with the media being the creative.  I’d argue Paid Search links play here as well.

The Elephant in the Room

One of the largest issues that the digital advertising ecosystem faces today is that we as an entire industry, are not setup to measure the “integrated” nature effectively. Because of this, at scale, this is not a near term reality.  There, I said it.  The elephant is in the room.

The digital advertising ecosystem by default rewards the intent harvesters, not the intent generators.  The primary reason why is that many agencies and marketers are using 3rd party ad serving systems that reward the last click or last action.  In the world of rewarding the last click or action, generally, the ad networks are the ones who win out.  There are 400 (or 700 depending on who you talk to) or so ad networks in the world who have nice businesses.  Just look at ValueClick or InterClick’s financial statements as they are public.  Not too bad.

THE Digital Opportunity

Because of the above, therein lies an opportunity.  If we believe what Mark wrote last week and I’ve been saying for years, then an opportunity lies in being able to create a measurement platform that allows us to understand intent harvesting and intent generation/creation. Piecing together a DART (3rd party ad server) report with a ComScore or Knowledge Networks study is inefficient and frankly, annoying.   There needs to be an evolution here.  This is a big opportunity.

Where We Are Today

Many readers of this blog don’t work in advertising agencies but are awesome entrepreneurs looking to figure out the next big idea to go and tackle.  Being that you are not in the walls of agencies on the daily basis, I thought I’d take the remainder of this post to outline where the industry is in terms of advanced analytics and then open this up for commenting in the thread below.

I highly request that you engage in the comments as group knowledge will benefit the community at large, you might find your next co-founder, and I love open conversations.

Ad Serving:  The Madison Avenue ecosystem basically uses one of three third party ad servers to “serve” and “track” different pieces of creative.  We use Microsoft’s Atlas, DoubleClick’s DART, and MediaMind.  In Q1 2011, we moved the majority of our clients off of Atlas and onto MediaMind because I personally have a strong viewpoint of independence of my ad-server and it’s relationship to media. (should be separate)

Data Warehousing:  This is a relatively new area and somewhat unchartered territory for many agencies.  Many agencies rely on their third party ad-server to be their main data warehouse for tracking. This is good, as you’d be surprised how many people don’t use a 3rd party ad server, but this is not great. Using a full on data warehouse such as VisualIQ, Neteeza, Artemis, or others allows for a larger capability to manipulate data and understand the relationships between touchpoints beyond “last click.”

At the agency, we’ve been using VisualIQ with some of our most progressive clients and the reports and results we’re seeing are fascinating.  One of the biggest questions we’re tackling is “optimal touchpoint analysis” and we’re seeing the relationships between display, video, search, social, and beyond.  We can now determine a value to each one.

Brand Lift Studies:  While I’ve argued time and time again, that “brand” advertising for the sake of brand advertising online is dead, many marketers continue just spending on “brand.”  Agencies use 3rd party brand study vendors such as ComScore, Knowledge Networks, Vizu, and others that help measure the “lift” (or change) associated in any one of many categories including but not limited to awareness, intent, and consideration.

Opportunities

·     The basic ideas behind today’s ad serving systems were conceptualized in the mid to late 1990s.  Online video, social, search, etc were not around then.

·     Product placement and integration into online video and social are hard to quantitatively measure with a 3rd party ad serving system as the only metrics you can pull back to your ad server are by using a click-tag.

·     The Display ecosystem is being fractured into traditional display (i.e. banners on ESPN) and social display (i.e. creative/textual units on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc).

·     I see Paid Search and Display converging on each other within the next 12 months. In some cases, they already are: Google Content Network.

·     I challenge you to ask your 3rd party ad-serving vendor to recommend an attribution model – report back what they tell you.  Not much – there is no standard yet.  It’s unchartered territory.

Next Steps

I would obviously love to hear your feedback.  Please post it in the comments section below or shoot me a note.  I believe that we won’t see large integrated opportunities that get their portion of the measurement/attribution credit until there is a way to measure these.  While we might try one or two of these integrated opportunities on each media plan, if you ask the agency how they really performed, the agency won’t have much to tell you because the tools for measurement are ancient.  With the data warehouses mentioned above, we get much better, but not perfect.

While we don’t need perfect to make the industry move forward, we do need better tools.  If you are building them, I’d like to speak to you.

Enter the complex world of tracking mobile advertising. Tracking online advertising including unique exposure to ads can be accomplished using cookies. However, there are countless mobile devices and browsers (along with different carriers), which may not support cookies, enable cookies, or persistently keep cookies. This poses a major challenge to the industry on accurate measurement, in particular on anonymously identifying unique devices.  Therefore, following a device through to a post-view behavior or identifying ad exposures that occurred among a survey sample is hard for marketers and their partners to do.

There are a number of mobile companies that claim to have their own unique id or "mobile cookie" technology.  Some of these companies use standard mobile browser cookies, HTML5 technology, data from http headers, mobile operator data, or a combination of these pieces of information to create a unique id for each device. Other companies may be able to use actual device ids which they turn into hashed or encrypted ids for use with partners. The ways in which these techniques are used vary, the accuracy of these techniques vary,  and privacy policies and opt-out solutions also may vary.  The point here is that there is not yet any consistency or standardization in mobile ad tracking.

Similarly on the the mobile ad serving front, a lot of  fragmentation also still exists. Third party ad serving is not prevalent and many mobile publishers use any number of (or even multiple) ad servers from DFP to AdMarvel to Ringleader Digital to proprietary solutions. This adds to the complexity of tracking things consistently and many of these ad servers aren't yet uniquely tracking ad exposures.

One thing that the industry needs to be very vigilant about in this process is privacy. A recent study by TRUSTe found that nearly three-quarters of US smartphone owners indicated that they did not like to be tracked by advertisers on their mobile phones. Phones are a very personal device so extra caution needs to be taken in how data is collected and used.  We need to educate consumers about tracking and be as transparent as possible with them to get this right.

In my opinion, the mobile industry and all parties in the ecosystem (advertisers, agencies, publishers, technology, and measurement companies) need to work together to decide on or develop the right tracking and ad serving solutions and standardize these practices to move us all forward. We also need to put the right privacy policies and education in place and be very open and transparent about our practices. I challenge us all to be willing to work closely together on this and make the investments necessary to get the technology and privacy right.

Much of this investment is based on the gut of good marketers rather than on hard performance data.  Measurement in social media has lagged consumer engagement.  That is about to change. 

Companies are now requesting and social media companies are delivering control-group studies to evaluate the impact of social media campaigns.  They want to understand precisely how these campaigns make the cash register ring.  Consider this example of a campaign we just completed on Gather.

Client Goals:
The campaign objective was to build awareness, purchase intent and trial of a new mass market consumer packaged goods product. 

Measurement Methodology:

• Reach: measured by the unique users exposed to some aspect of the campaign.  Individual activities like reviewing and commenting were broken-out separately. 
• Impact: measured based on a control group study.  Responses compared those exposed to some aspect of the campaign with those not exposed on the same site.  Similar studies were completed on traditional media sites running media campaigns as well for cross site comparison. 
• Studies were completed by third party surveying groups and analyzed by the media buying agency.  We also operated our own internal study to calibrate results of our internal tools against those of our partners.

Engagement Methodology:
Gather engineered conversation about the product through product sampling and reviews by approximately 100 members.  Because members are connected to friends on the site, their conversation was seen hundreds of thousands of times by others on the site in their content and conversation feeds.

• Sampling by Influencers: Gather identified 25 influential Gather women to try the product in place of substitute goods.  Members were identified based on algorithmic analysis of their standing within the community.  These members then came back to the site to write about their week long trial and discussed the experience with other members.
• By Request: Gather distributed additional product samples to Gather members to try when they needed a break during their busy days.  Members requested product samples by discussing their busy days and why they need the break.
• Take-a-Break Chats: Gather created a series of weekly online chats for women to discuss their busy lives, tips for relaxation and their short-term and long-term goals.  Chats were held in the afternoon when people tend to need a break. Product samples were given out during the chats.
• To-Do Surveys: Gather posted regular surveys throughout the program to engage members in discussions and to produce member-generated content for the group.  Members filled out surveys discussing their long- and short-term goals, they submitted to-do lists and playlists, and they shared motivational tips with each other.
• Member Submissions: Members were allowed to submit their own content and start their own discussions in the group as well, and the community was moderated to ensure that all content aligned with the theme and focus of the community.

Ker-ching…er…I mean "Results"
I'll admit, we were nervous about what the numbers might say.  We had observational and anecdotal information about the power of product sampling on the site.  We had seen members truly engage in conversation around a product.  But we had not measured the mass-market impact of these conversations.  We didn't know if they moved the needle for the friends and friends-of-friends that were discussing products they had tried.  Then the cash register rang.

Gather's social media campaign showed a 30% increase in purchase intent by those exposed to the campaign.  According to the measurement data collected by both Gather and the media buying organization, the social media campaign operated on Gather outperformed other sites involved in the campaign.  It significantly exceeded results seen in these types of studies on traditional media sites.  People who were exposed to the program on Gather performed 15-20% higher across every campaign metric than the control group. 

Of course, this is just a single test with good results.  But it suggests the potential of engagement marketing for building purchase intent for consumer packaged goods makers.  Over time, we will need a series of campaigns that demonstrate similar progress to prove the medium.  As marketers increasingly require improved measurement and we in the industry come together to standardize the methods by which we measure, I suspect social media campaigns, done right, will continue to demonstrate good results.

As we move into this brave new world, let me close with a couple of questions: How do you measure the campaigns you run?  What metrics do you find most credible?

The first article offers a different perspective to the steady stream of Direct Response focused press which seems to suggest that performance-based and/or online-only metrics are the only important ones to consider in managing online advertising spend.  I agree that measurement is important and that whenever possible we want to drive toward direct metrics (e.g., ROI).  However, here's our collective challenge: the vast majority of retail commerce--nearly 90% overall in 2008 and much higher for key Brand categories like CPG and Automotive--still takes place offline. Thus, for the majority of marketers evaluated based on their success in driving offline sales, online-only metrics are likely to be less useful than proven tools like brand awareness/favorability, purchase intent or even reach and frequency, for that matter. 

These metrics certainly are not perfect, but they are tested, well-understood and are useful across media.  The Internet can increasingly facilitate the accurate and economical measurement of Brand metrics and there continue to be exciting advances in online measurement capabilities, but there are still some real limitations when it comes to measuring offline impact.  Brand marketing fundamentals remain critical to overall marketing success, even online, and Brand marketers cannot afford to ignore the obvious value available online today.  

The second article cites specific evidence to show how critical it is to work the full advertising funnel versus focus only on metrics which are easily measurable and quantifiable.   I use two examples to support this point of view: (1) research published by the Atlas Institute and (2) an example from my past experience running pricing and yield management for Yahoo!’s global display business.  These examples illustrate why value can be difficult to measure and also how models cannot substitute for domain experience and common sense. 

He cites that most marketers don't understand or can't keep up with the constant change and increasing complex equations being used.  Who's fault is that?  Not the people making advancements to our industry!  He then compares this to modern medicine, to which I wonder if the chairman of the AMA would tell those on the brink of devising a cure for a terrible disease, "STOP - your work is too complex.  Others won't understand it!"

There's obviously a huge difference between audience measurement and modern medicine.  The most obvious as it relates to his AdAge-proclaimed "rant" is that with medicine, the average patient doesn't care to understand why the cure works, they just want it to work.  In marketing, everyone wants to know exactly why the new algorithm works better than an old one.  Fair enough, but put that on the folks who devise the algorithms to explain their work more clearly and effectively, not on the industry to stop improving the quality of our measurement because "it's too hard."