'Net Features : metrics

Media Management Moves to 2013

Amberly Dressler — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:30:00 GMT

If you are trapped in spreadsheet agony, you are not alone.

When analyzing cross-channel performance data, media buyers can spend hours, if not days, recording performance data from different channels and ad types (e.g. print ads, TV commercials, Internet display ads, mobile ads, etc.) in separate spreadsheets. Then, spend more time manually comparing spreadsheet data to determine which channels are delivering the highest response rates.

This is the problem Integrate specifically details and looks to alleviate with its newly launched AdHQ offering, which, according to the advertising technology partner, provides real-time tracking and cross-channel reporting tools that compare performance metrics across online, offline and mobile paid media campaigns. Additionally, the software automatically consolidates cross-channel metrics into a single report.

“Every day, media buyers waste valuable time and resources using processes from the 1990s,” said Jeremy Bloom, co-founder of Integrate. "Why should today's smartest and hardest-working people in the ad business have to rely on media management methods that came into use back when Jurassic Park was in the theater, Nirvana was on the radio, and I was in junior high?”

“We developed AdHQ to bring automation and simplification to marketing departments and agencies of all sizes," Bloom added. "The increase in operational efficiency gives agencies the ability to manage more clients with their existing staff, and gives marketing departments the ability to manage all of their customer acquisition efforts with their current resources, regardless of scale or spend."

The importance of brands and agencies having a unified advertising platform across channels is multipronged. According to Integrate it helps with:

Efficiency - When advertisers consolidate all of their media spending into a single platform, they yield significant results. Most marketers spend a tremendous amount of time completing tasks in various systems. By combining everything in one location, they instantly gain efficiency.

Quality - Additionally, when all traffic is funneled through a single system, it becomes significantly easier to monitor the quality of the traffic and results coming through.

Integrated Analytics - It’s great to have a system that tracks all your sales and KPIs on the backend, but until that system feeds directly into your Media Buying tool, to execute upon these analytics involves a long process of comparing systems and pouring through excel sheets. Once actions and insight become centralized, marketers can execute hundreds of changes within minutes, allowing for real-time, thorough and effective optimization.

Unified data - When all your media buying occurs in one system, the data collected from each effort feeds all others. Audience data developed from your affiliate marketing can feed your Display. SEM efforts can seamlessly feed your Retargeting efforts, etc. When each is managed as a separate system, benefits like these rarely make it into production. Marketing-centralization is essential to implementing a truly effective cross-channel marketing strategy.

To learn more about Integrate’s AdHQ launch, visit www.integrate.com.

Trendy Metrics for Affiliate Marketing

Michael Garrity — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 13:30:00 GMT

Late last week, affiliate program software provider LinkTrust announced it was including trend reports in its service offering as part of its Summer of Love updates to help monitor an affiliate’s traffic numbers and produce predictive forecasts about his or her performance.

Solutions or features like this have the potential to be very helpful for publishers and merchants, alike. Advertisers can obviously use the data to assess the performance of their affiliate partners and adjust their campaigns to eliminate waste. For affiliates, it serves as both a review of their successes (and hopefully limited failures), and gives them the opportunity to fix problems based on the trend predictions.

But, as always, the way to make information like this actionable (and thus worth your time) is to understand it first. While there are a variety of metrics and trends for you to keep track of, there are some that provide almost universally useful information and have a direct impact on the success of an affiliate marketing campaign.

Here are some of the most important affiliate-related metrics to keep your eye on:

Conversion Rate: I mean, this is without a doubt the most important metric in basically any type of online business or advertising campaign. How many times does an affiliate help a merchant make a conversion, or convince a consumer to complete a desired action. Conversion rate numbers can help parse successful strategies and ensure that those practices are imitated. For advertisers, a massive spike can also serve as an indication of fraud.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR): This is the bread and butter of the affiliate marketing world, and there is no better way to assess performance and predict trends than by observing clicks. Increases in clicks obviously indicate positive performance, while monitoring decreases is the most efficient way to identify a bad campaign and turn it around (or dump it) before it’s too late.

Average Order Value (AOV): After a while, any business is going to have a pretty consistent average order size for the majority of its customers. On occasion, especially around the holidays, this average will see a substantial spike, but at more unexpected times, a big increase can indicate something else, and in these cases it’s important to investigate. One thing it could point toward is affiliate fraud.

Number of Sales: Sales are, by nature, made of ups and downs, and paying attention to the events and strategies taking place during both of these periods can help greatly improve the efficiency of a marketing campaign. So, when affiliate marketing is responsible for a big rise in sales numbers, or is a major disappointment, everyone involved should review the related events to see why, and what both sides can do maintain, or improve, those figures. For advertisers, this could mean altering their creative to be more enticing to consumers, and for publishers, it could mean continuing to produce a specific type of content that is driving sales.

Reversal Rate (RR): Occasionally, an affiliate-referred transaction will get reversed (or refunded) by a merchant, usually because the merchant does not approve of it. This means a direct loss of commission for an affiliate, who is probably going to want to stay away – far away – from merchants boasting an abnormally high RR.

Is Click-through Rate a Meaningless Metric?

Mike Phillips — Fri, 06 May 2011 19:30:00 GMT

How do you measure online advertising success? Chances are good that click-through rate (CTR) is a key component. But should it be?

This week, we talked with Jeremy Stanley of Collective, who shares some fascinating research that just might kick CTR to the curb.

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Facebook vs. MySpace

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:23:00 GMT

While most marketers are gaga over Facebook these days, you may not want to rule out MySpace just yet. While the Web media didn't miss a beat on Facebook matching MySpace in terms of unique traffic last week, MySpace was touting its own achievement - namely, "significant spikes in time spent and page views," according to January Comscore numbers.

These user engagement metrics include all time highs in the "minutes per visitor" and "total minutes" categories. Page views also jumped to the highest level the company has recorded in more than one year. Those are important metrics and should not be ignored.

The average MySpace user spends 266 minutes (4.4 hours) on the site every month—a +15% increase over last month and a +31% increase year over year. January is the highest level of minutes-per-visitor MySpace has ever seen. Page views on MySpace have reached an all time high of 44 billion—more than double that of the company’s nearest competitor.