One of the first things I learned about the great benefit of online media campaigns (as compared to traditional media campaigns) was that it was measurable like no other media. Apparently the adage about half the advertising money being wasted, and one not knowing which half that was, was to become a piece of folklore with the advent of Online media.
5 years of selling this medium and I am not too sure.
For starters, most of the time, we do not know what to measure - Pageviews? PageRank? Hits? Misses(Bad Requests)? Visitors? Visits? Repeat visits? Unique Visitors? Click Through Rates? Cost per Click? Cost per Milieu? Cost per Lead? Cost per Sale? Positive comments on the guest book? Average time spent on the website? Alexa rankings? Brand recall?
And then again - do we measure the effectiveness of the entire campaign, of particular channels, of the landing page / website or of individual creatives?
There are simply too many parameters. And it is made worse by the typical bane of Indian business managers - shifting goalposts. A simple caselet: At the time of setting deliverables, they may want a campaign that gives them a large number of leads at a relatively low cost. When it comes to paying, they will not be happy if the campaign gives them a very large number of leads along with high visibility, they will also ask
1. Why their site is not ranked #1 on Google (and the search engine just launched by their third cousin's sister's daughter-in-law's friend's tech start-up)
2. Why a site like carwale.com was used to generate leads for a BFSI product ("loss of branding on customers not looking for a house loan")
3. Why did we drop sites like Rediff & Indiatimes in favour of relatively unknown sites ("We would have got a lot of visibility"-"But you may not have got lea..."-"But our competitor just did that and they got very high sales in the last month"-"Was it measured as being a result of the online cam..."-"No point arguing now... just keep it in mind for the next campaign"
Over the past few years, portals have been shying away from giving CPM based or CPC based campaigns. The most famous case was probably that of MSN trying to sell space on a time band basis. Typically page captures are sold on a time-contract basis irrespective of the number of impressions or clicks. There are of course cases like Rediff.com offering mail open based campaigns, or Ad networks like Google, Komli, DGM and others offering the options of CPC or CPL or CPA campaigns exclusively.
Today I came across this story on Alootechie. Its regarding a study carried out by Komli for BIG TV in association with Vizu. The BIGgest takeaway from the study appears to be that CTR's and brand impact in case of an online campaign are poorly corelated.
According to me, it is wrong to generalise the metrics of success of any brand campaign, or any campaign for that matter. Various campaigns would have various objectives, while some may be looking for increase in brand awareness, others may be looking to drive traffic to a particular webpage while still others may be hooked onto sales.
I am not familiar with Ad Catalyst's capabilities, nor am I privy to the results of the survey other than what has been posted in the public domain, but if I assume that the survey has or Ad Catalyst is capable of telling planners which banner positions are best suited for brand awareness or clicks or driving registrations, then this would help planners tremendously to create plans focussed on the needs of the marketeer.
If there are multiple parameters that can be measured in case of online media, rest assured that each of them can be put to good use, we just need to keep in mind that not always is it feasible or correct to measure all the parameters together. Not everything will tango in sync. Some parameters will go up, while others will go down - its important to set objectives correctly and measure how these objectives are being met for the success of any brand in the online space.
