Advertising is Drowning in Metrics
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You'll have to pardon the cynicism - it stems from more than a decade of working with the internet and trying to draw conclusions based on the numbers which are driving internet advertising. Click through rates (CTR), Cost per Action (CPA), Page Views (PV), Absolute Unique Visitors (AUV), Visits (Visits)... fact is we could go on for another few lines with this absurdity, but I haven't the time and you don't have the inclination to learn about all the variations on what's being measured within an advertising campaign.
Radio industry vets should pay attention to this, in particular, because the whole system of over-measuring everything is creeping down your hallways. You've only begun to hear the footsteps in the form of Google Audio Ads and Bid4Spots radio auctions, which will soon show up on eBay. And, you may take this to the bank, the radio industry will soon be hounded into accepting these metric variations. Agencies are leading this charge.
I've just returned from a conference on the latest craze in internet advertising, "Behavioral Targeting." Those who are sure they have a handle on all of the above mentioned metrics are now casting their eyes on another set of metrics for BT: building user profiles, tracking "funnel" movement, frequency of visits, and testing campaigns.
If ever there was a classic example of the adage "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit," this continued increase in internet advertising metrics proves the point.
Don't get me wrong. The internet is most effective when you take analytical programs and digest what they offer. Only, the whole of the online advertising industry - at this stage of growth - is enamored with placing as many stats in front of clients as possible so as to prove there is validation in assimilating all of this data into one pile of information. The problem is, it doesn't work.
The difference between a novice and a pro in the internet advertising game is that the latter chooses to disregard many stats as non-relevant, while the former chooses to use as many as possible because they don't know which to ignore.
So, what is relative? Ask any of the pros today and you'll find a remarkable array of answers that boil down to "there is nothing cast in stone." Nothing, to date, has proven to be magic numbers that give a focused definition of what the client determines as success.
#1 Problem - What is success? Answer: It's whatever is decided by the client. The metrics needed to determine success shrink, or expand, considerably depending on what is used to define the term. Did you sell more widgets? If the answer is yes, look to your shopping cart and its abandonment rate; but, also include the CTR generated by pages linking to the shopping cart and what their Time Spent Viewing (TSV) reflects. A too high TSV may indicate there's too much information on that lead-in page. With the caveat of "that's unless you're converting a high number of orders," with every answer there are many exceptions.
With any metric used to determine success, you'll find two other metrics that disprove the logic.
Example: I recently ran a banner ad campaign across nine web sites. Besides the fact that no two sites served the same sized banners (resulting in my having to create 11 different banner ads), only one of these web sites made available to me metrics from their own servers to confirm
how many ads were served and how many ads were clicked on.
No problem, you'd think, because a knowledgeable buyer would simply turn to their Google Analytics, Web Trends, or similar web site tracking program to quantify where visitors came from, how many there were, and how long they stayed on your web site. And, they'd also use numbers generated from their own server logs. More statistics create their own set of analysis problems because these varying measurement tools won't deliver the same numbers... ever!
Somewhere along this line of internet advertising growth someone has to stand up and call for everyone to crawl onboard and begin using the same numbers to measure results. They just won't, or can't, because of a large disagreement within the internet advertising community as to what are valid numbers. It's like choosing from a Chinese menu: select two items from column A, one from column B, and a third, fourth, or fifth from whatever other metrics are being offered.
Use Google's keyword ad buys... where you can also consider impressions, Average Position, Cost/Conversion. Then, move on to add the effects of an individual campaign's text ad wording (creative), and the percentage of that ad's serving within the campaign.
I strongly believe that using analysis to better understand the effectiveness of a campaign is a wonderful tool. It's just that after having been involved with nearly every form of analytics, and multiple online ad purchasing programs (Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN's new "Live," which is an itineration of its older "Merchant Solutions" program), the one item that keeps staring me in the face as I laboriously pour over page after page of statistics is that the variations on response are so wide as to make much of what is staring back at me melt into a pile of numbers.
Determining which to follow can easily be upset ten steps down the road when you uncover yet another metric that will change the outcome.
We started this off with an adage so let's end with one, too: Those who don't keep up with the future are destined to become the past. The radio industry showed this to be true by not keeping up with the rest of the world in new media.
The major problem with getting to tomorrow is that it's very likely you'll drown in detail before realizing it's not the numbers you pay attention to that matters, it's what you ignore.
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