WOW! Range Online Media’s President, Misty Locke’s article in iMedia Connection today is fantastic. Think Like a Coach to Improve Your Stats – Bravo! It’s a must read. Rarely do you find someone who can lay it all out there in a way that an advertiser might actually understand. I would say the only thing wrong is that Dawn Anafuso didn’t put it at the top of the home page on iMedia Connection or run it for two days so that it gets higher readership!
Misty talks about the integration of campaign mediums but she talks about the use of data and the cross channel analysis of a campaign to figure out how the impact of one channel may be affecting the response rate of another.
Last year David Smith (www.mediasmith.com) challenged the industry to create a digital dashboard of all of his advertising channels so that he could easily see the performance of all of his campaigns. I remember this article, not just because iMediaConnection ran it again in there string of reruns during the holidays, but because I called David and talked with him about his challenge and needs.
TruEffect built an ad server, TruAdvertiser.xls™ that functions entirely within Microsoft Excel. A user manages planning, proposals, creative, scheduling, trafficking, optimization and reporting all from within Microsoft Excel. <IMG src="/images/44768-40810/CreativeDialog.jpg”> <IMG src="/images/44768-40810/CampaignReportView2___02.jpg”>
It is a thin-client application that connects over the web to the ad server infrastructure at TruEffect and allows an agency or advertiser complete access to all of the expected advanced features of an ad server right from their desktop. As a Microsoft Office-integrated solution, all of the reporting data streams in XML right into pivot tables and graphs and charts that a user formats one time. They build their reports and then simply refresh whenever they want the updated data, never having to reformat a report again.
What’s the point of this plug?
David and I talked about how we could use TruAdvertiser.xls as a platform for his multi-channel dashboard. It is desktop-based and is highly flexible when it comes to reporting capabilities. Our product roadmap at the time already included integration with search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo so not only would he have the ad server reports but the Google and Overture reports too for cross-analysis. Additionally we were working with accounting integration so that he would be able to have that benefit too. Email marketing data could easily be ported in as could other XML-driven feeds. But in the end it represented a lot of custom work and David was going down the path of building something on his own.
Back to Misty’s fabulous article (I really liked it). Misty inspires one to dive in with both feet and, well if not careful, eyes closed. Cross-channel reporting comes in many different forms. There is realistically no platform for seeing every channel in a consolidated format and no perfect way to measure the impact of print on email or walk-ins or direct mail on view-thrus (now there is two hops, a skip and a jump). You can try but at some point you have to allow things to fall into separate buckets and make assumptions.
But what is possible is great consolidation of online data. I have been talking about acquisition marketing data – banners, search and email – with site analytics and will talk about it more. Behavioral targeting’s next generation of customer re-targeting with DirectServe or first party ad serving can fully integrate data that could never be captured before, like measuring the composition of an advertising audience. Now you can know what % of your audience represents existing customers!
Make sure that your technology allows you to get three dimensional views into the performance of your campaigns. Misty is encouraging you to get aggressive and be proactive. Data builds knowledge and that knowledge will make your decision-making powerful. Since my conversations with David, we have proven integration capabilities with a number of unique platforms and data sources. Other companies are doing it too. Find a way to pull together at least your interactive channels so that you can see how they come together.
If you acquire someone through search and they land on a web page and register, make sure that your advertiser cookies that individual so that when you encounter them again you can re-target them as an existing customer through first party ad serving and message to them with relevance to their previous search behavior and customer preferences to maximize future response rates. You can do this stuff!
Behavioral targeting will get you better prospects. Pull that data into a consolidated interface – use XML feeds and build a data repository if you have to or call me and I will point you in the right direction.
Your email marketing will spew out ton’s of response rate data that can be easily ported into a consolidated interface.
I already covered search.
And ad serving data is clear.
Get a consolidated view as to how you acquire people, and then make sure that you are tagging them – or that your clients are tagging them – so that you can continue to target them as customers on an ongoing basis. The worst thing you can do is to waste money re-prospecting and not getting credit for someone who you drove in twice. If an existing customer clicks on a banner and comes to a site, you will not be getting credit for that customer’s return. You could if you were re-targeting. And if they click on a search term and land on the customer’s web page, you could be site-based targeting using first-party ad serving to re-target and product-promote based on preference and known behavior.
Get the data, consolidate it and then make decisions. But most of all, deploy technologies that will enable you to effectively use the data to become strategic in your decision making and execution. The end-game purpose is campaign improvement. My focus is to show that the technology is there to do it.
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