Summary Articles | Digital Marketing & Analytics
WEEK 1
Fulgoni (2016) - In the Digital World, Not Everything That Can Be Measured Matters. How
to Distinguish “Valuable” from “Nice to Know” Among Measures of Consumer Engagement
Introduction
Engagement no longer can be considered to be simply a one-way communication from a
brand to the consumer. Instead, it now needs to incorporate consumers’ ability to easily
provide digital feedback of their own, at scale and with the communication being either
positive or negative.
the computerized nature of digital also means that many other engagement metrics—from
clicks, to viewability, to “Likes” and “Shares”—are available today. The challenge for
marketers is to identify the metrics that matter to their return on advertising investment
(ROI) versus those that either are nice to know or downright misleading.
Digital-advertising metrics
Why the ‘click’ matters less:
Research has demonstrated the absence of any relationship between clicks and
effectiveness. It’s likely that simplicity, low cost, and speed are the drivers of the continued
use of clicks.
GfK researchers have demonstrated that consumers’
- … attitudes toward a website
- … motivations for using it, and
- … overall opinion of the site
Are the most relevant metrics that need to be taken into account in evaluating engagement
with brand advertising.
In particular, trust in the site appears to be an extremely important metric for driving
consumer response to advertising.
How viewable is your ad?:
If the advertisement isn’t even in-view to the consumer, then engagement can’t occur.
Digital in-view rates (i.e., the percentage of advertising impressions in a campaign that are
in- view to the consumer) often are found to be lower than 50 percent. Mainly because the
user doesn’t scroll down the page far enough to see the advertisement or because the
“viewer” is a fraudulent computer with no human user.
These view rates are sometimes referred to as “attention,” another valid engagement
metric.
The battle against ad blocking
,Advertisement blocking is a problem across any digital platform, including the viewing of
video content. Publishers view its very nature as threatening the “unspoken agreement”
between content providers and consumers that advertising is necessary because it pays for
the content consumers enjoy for free.
It’s too early to predict how the advertisement blocking issue will be resolved, but because it
clearly represents a serious obstacle to the ability of advertisers to communicate directly
with online users (and to be able to measure that engagement) we can expect it to get
intense industry attention.
Social-media metrics
One of the best examples of how digital technology has changed brand engagement from
one-way to two-way communications (and the related metrics) is the impact of social
networks.
Measurement of the number of postings and whether they are positive or negative, how
many times shared, and how many users reached, have become important metrics of social
engagement with brands that are initiated by consumers.
Brands have learned that they can maximize the impact of their social-marketing programs
by leveraging a framework that helps them move beyond a measurement of the simple
number of fans/followers or “Like” metrics. These metrics haven’t yet been proven to drive
positive business results, whereas measures of actual sharing of content have been shown to
deliver measurable marketing ROI
Mobile-engagement metrics
Arguably the most significant change in consumer engagement has been the result of the
use of mobile devices.
As the use of mobile devices has surged, so have the ways in which consumers can engage
with brands. Because of this, it’s vital for marketers to ensure they capture their “fair share”
of consumers’ mobile engagement.
Research also has shown that the impact of advertising is surprisingly higher on mobile than
on desktop.
Mobile devices have allowed consumers to initiate engagement with branded content
whenever and wherever they choose. There’s a dizzying array of ways in which this can
happen, which Google describes as “micro- moments’’. These unfold through a variety of
common “I-want” scenarios that help people take steps or make decisions.
Conclusions
Marketers have only scratched the surface of measuring new levels of consumer
engagement, given a digital marketplace that remains in flux.
In particular, the “click” on a display advertisement has been shown to have no value in
terms of predicting effectiveness.
,By contrast, the traditional metrics of attitudinal changes or sales lift remain critically
important and useful to marketers.
Digital advertising also is muddled because of a lack of consensus between buyers and
sellers regarding the basic definition of an ad impression in terms of time in-view. Consensus
on the issue might simplify matters. But given the ability to measure optimal time in-view of
an advertisement—and research showing that impact increases with time in-view—it would
not be surprising to see advertisers demand paying only for those advertising impressions
that are guaranteed to be in-view for a specific period of time that they define.
Meanwhile, massive use of social media means that marketers no longer can think of
engagement solely as a one-way communication from a brand to consumers. The reality is
that social media has provided consumers with the ability to impact a brand’s performance
by providing public feedback — positive or negative — at scale.
Because of this, metrics that measure consumers’ comments on social networks are
important. Advertisers need to respond quickly to negative engagement or risk financial
damage. The good news is that social media also provides smart marketers with the ability
to engage directly with targeted consumers in many creative ways that result in
amplification of persuasive messages.
But to reap the rewards of positive ROI from social marketing, it’s clear that advertisers
need to think beyond simple metrics such as “Likes” or “Followers” that have not been
shown to be correlated with improved sales and embrace more powerful metrics such as
“Shares.” However, in computing the total number of people reached by organic shares, it’s
important to de-duplicate the counts of followers and recognize that not all “Shares” are
ever seen by all followers.
Mobile devices represent the most important dislocation in the historical communication
flow from brands to consumers. Not only does mobile usage now account for the majority of
time spent online but also apps dominate that mobile time. And, under such circumstances,
understanding how consumers are using apps to interact with brands is vital.
Mobile devices also allow consumers to engage with brand content whenever they so
choose and in a plethora of different ways. There is an immediacy associated with most of
these mobile communications that provides marketers with many engagement
opportunities, and because of this, brands need to be able to measure and address
engagement “in the moment.” But the very nature of this far-reaching engagement also
means that measurement, for the moment, is a work in progress.
Nisar & Yeung (2017) – Attribution modeling in digital advertising: An empirical
investigation of the impact of digital sales channels
Digital advertising campaigns often are launched across multiple channels. By exposing
consumers to advertisement impressions, these channels help consumers make purchase
decisions or sign up to an advertised service.
, To gauge the effectiveness of such advertising campaigns, one must know which media
channels or advertising formats have contributed to a purchase conversion. This process is
known as attribution.
A better understanding of attribution, or assigning conversion credit to the various relevant
channels, can serve a number of research and industry purposes. Marketing managers may
use such attribution models to interpret the influence of advertisements on consumer
behavior and to optimize their advertising campaigns.
Management perspective:
- At each stage in a consumer’s journey toward purchase, different online channels
feature most prominently.
- Existing credit-assignment methods, such as the last click, suffer from the problem
of attribution— they do not take into account the impact of all those advertising
formats that were visited by a consumer contemplating a purchase.
- Four rule-based models can be used for measuring the performance of an
advertising campaign— the last-click, time-decay, uniformly distributed, and position-
based models.
- Multichannel attribution models have evolved to reflect the growing complexity of
attributing credit with each new advertisement format.
From the last-click method to multichannel attribution
The last-click method of attribution is flawed, because it fails to take account of the
influence of all touch points except the last one and so does not capture the full value of
digital advertising.
Alternative concept… multichannel attribution!
The multichannel attribution framework assumes that more than one channel impression
or touch point can have a fraction of the credit for a sale, on the basis of the true influence
each impression has on the conversion. The underlying assumption is that individual
advertising channels should not be evaluated in isolation, and credit must be assigned
equitably with respect to the campaign goals on these channels.
Attribution in digital advertising
Attribution modeling becomes interesting only when one considers the impact of several
channel impressions together.
WEEK 1
Fulgoni (2016) - In the Digital World, Not Everything That Can Be Measured Matters. How
to Distinguish “Valuable” from “Nice to Know” Among Measures of Consumer Engagement
Introduction
Engagement no longer can be considered to be simply a one-way communication from a
brand to the consumer. Instead, it now needs to incorporate consumers’ ability to easily
provide digital feedback of their own, at scale and with the communication being either
positive or negative.
the computerized nature of digital also means that many other engagement metrics—from
clicks, to viewability, to “Likes” and “Shares”—are available today. The challenge for
marketers is to identify the metrics that matter to their return on advertising investment
(ROI) versus those that either are nice to know or downright misleading.
Digital-advertising metrics
Why the ‘click’ matters less:
Research has demonstrated the absence of any relationship between clicks and
effectiveness. It’s likely that simplicity, low cost, and speed are the drivers of the continued
use of clicks.
GfK researchers have demonstrated that consumers’
- … attitudes toward a website
- … motivations for using it, and
- … overall opinion of the site
Are the most relevant metrics that need to be taken into account in evaluating engagement
with brand advertising.
In particular, trust in the site appears to be an extremely important metric for driving
consumer response to advertising.
How viewable is your ad?:
If the advertisement isn’t even in-view to the consumer, then engagement can’t occur.
Digital in-view rates (i.e., the percentage of advertising impressions in a campaign that are
in- view to the consumer) often are found to be lower than 50 percent. Mainly because the
user doesn’t scroll down the page far enough to see the advertisement or because the
“viewer” is a fraudulent computer with no human user.
These view rates are sometimes referred to as “attention,” another valid engagement
metric.
The battle against ad blocking
,Advertisement blocking is a problem across any digital platform, including the viewing of
video content. Publishers view its very nature as threatening the “unspoken agreement”
between content providers and consumers that advertising is necessary because it pays for
the content consumers enjoy for free.
It’s too early to predict how the advertisement blocking issue will be resolved, but because it
clearly represents a serious obstacle to the ability of advertisers to communicate directly
with online users (and to be able to measure that engagement) we can expect it to get
intense industry attention.
Social-media metrics
One of the best examples of how digital technology has changed brand engagement from
one-way to two-way communications (and the related metrics) is the impact of social
networks.
Measurement of the number of postings and whether they are positive or negative, how
many times shared, and how many users reached, have become important metrics of social
engagement with brands that are initiated by consumers.
Brands have learned that they can maximize the impact of their social-marketing programs
by leveraging a framework that helps them move beyond a measurement of the simple
number of fans/followers or “Like” metrics. These metrics haven’t yet been proven to drive
positive business results, whereas measures of actual sharing of content have been shown to
deliver measurable marketing ROI
Mobile-engagement metrics
Arguably the most significant change in consumer engagement has been the result of the
use of mobile devices.
As the use of mobile devices has surged, so have the ways in which consumers can engage
with brands. Because of this, it’s vital for marketers to ensure they capture their “fair share”
of consumers’ mobile engagement.
Research also has shown that the impact of advertising is surprisingly higher on mobile than
on desktop.
Mobile devices have allowed consumers to initiate engagement with branded content
whenever and wherever they choose. There’s a dizzying array of ways in which this can
happen, which Google describes as “micro- moments’’. These unfold through a variety of
common “I-want” scenarios that help people take steps or make decisions.
Conclusions
Marketers have only scratched the surface of measuring new levels of consumer
engagement, given a digital marketplace that remains in flux.
In particular, the “click” on a display advertisement has been shown to have no value in
terms of predicting effectiveness.
,By contrast, the traditional metrics of attitudinal changes or sales lift remain critically
important and useful to marketers.
Digital advertising also is muddled because of a lack of consensus between buyers and
sellers regarding the basic definition of an ad impression in terms of time in-view. Consensus
on the issue might simplify matters. But given the ability to measure optimal time in-view of
an advertisement—and research showing that impact increases with time in-view—it would
not be surprising to see advertisers demand paying only for those advertising impressions
that are guaranteed to be in-view for a specific period of time that they define.
Meanwhile, massive use of social media means that marketers no longer can think of
engagement solely as a one-way communication from a brand to consumers. The reality is
that social media has provided consumers with the ability to impact a brand’s performance
by providing public feedback — positive or negative — at scale.
Because of this, metrics that measure consumers’ comments on social networks are
important. Advertisers need to respond quickly to negative engagement or risk financial
damage. The good news is that social media also provides smart marketers with the ability
to engage directly with targeted consumers in many creative ways that result in
amplification of persuasive messages.
But to reap the rewards of positive ROI from social marketing, it’s clear that advertisers
need to think beyond simple metrics such as “Likes” or “Followers” that have not been
shown to be correlated with improved sales and embrace more powerful metrics such as
“Shares.” However, in computing the total number of people reached by organic shares, it’s
important to de-duplicate the counts of followers and recognize that not all “Shares” are
ever seen by all followers.
Mobile devices represent the most important dislocation in the historical communication
flow from brands to consumers. Not only does mobile usage now account for the majority of
time spent online but also apps dominate that mobile time. And, under such circumstances,
understanding how consumers are using apps to interact with brands is vital.
Mobile devices also allow consumers to engage with brand content whenever they so
choose and in a plethora of different ways. There is an immediacy associated with most of
these mobile communications that provides marketers with many engagement
opportunities, and because of this, brands need to be able to measure and address
engagement “in the moment.” But the very nature of this far-reaching engagement also
means that measurement, for the moment, is a work in progress.
Nisar & Yeung (2017) – Attribution modeling in digital advertising: An empirical
investigation of the impact of digital sales channels
Digital advertising campaigns often are launched across multiple channels. By exposing
consumers to advertisement impressions, these channels help consumers make purchase
decisions or sign up to an advertised service.
, To gauge the effectiveness of such advertising campaigns, one must know which media
channels or advertising formats have contributed to a purchase conversion. This process is
known as attribution.
A better understanding of attribution, or assigning conversion credit to the various relevant
channels, can serve a number of research and industry purposes. Marketing managers may
use such attribution models to interpret the influence of advertisements on consumer
behavior and to optimize their advertising campaigns.
Management perspective:
- At each stage in a consumer’s journey toward purchase, different online channels
feature most prominently.
- Existing credit-assignment methods, such as the last click, suffer from the problem
of attribution— they do not take into account the impact of all those advertising
formats that were visited by a consumer contemplating a purchase.
- Four rule-based models can be used for measuring the performance of an
advertising campaign— the last-click, time-decay, uniformly distributed, and position-
based models.
- Multichannel attribution models have evolved to reflect the growing complexity of
attributing credit with each new advertisement format.
From the last-click method to multichannel attribution
The last-click method of attribution is flawed, because it fails to take account of the
influence of all touch points except the last one and so does not capture the full value of
digital advertising.
Alternative concept… multichannel attribution!
The multichannel attribution framework assumes that more than one channel impression
or touch point can have a fraction of the credit for a sale, on the basis of the true influence
each impression has on the conversion. The underlying assumption is that individual
advertising channels should not be evaluated in isolation, and credit must be assigned
equitably with respect to the campaign goals on these channels.
Attribution in digital advertising
Attribution modeling becomes interesting only when one considers the impact of several
channel impressions together.
