Aussie Web Analyst

An interesting combination of articles were published through the ClickZ Network yesterday, offering slightly contrasting views of the future for online display advertising.

I first read this article by Gary Stein on How Can I Best Use This (Ad) Space? It is about the rise of rich media ads and how JupiterResearch has predicted that by in 2009, the spend on rich media ads will be greater than for static media ads.  The downside is that he still expects there to be more ads on the internet in the future (makes sense with more websites trying to make money from selling ad space) but the hope is that we will start to see more relevant and engaging ads.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a fan of the banner ad.  However I have been forced to recognise that an ad that is relevant to the website and to the people who are viewing that page is a worthwhile use of marketing budget (thanks Xenia).  Extending this through creating relevant ads which directly offer value to the viewer (Gary suggests games, currency converter, list of interesting blog posts, etc) is a definite positive, for internet users, website owners and for the people paying for the advertising.

However I still have issues with the marketers who have landed in the digital online world but whose heart is still with TV and believe that TV commercials are the best advertising medium for all situations (ROI/accountability are restrictions on their creativity). Which brings me to the second article Microsoft Makes Case for Display, Pushes Engagement Mapping by Zachary Rodgers.  This article is about how Microsoft is tackling one of the big challenges in web analytics, that of attributing credit/revenue across the different marketing sources that contributed to the sale or conversion.

This issue is just going to become bigger in the future and the current common methods of either last touch or first touch are not going to be accurate enough.  Microsoft has a new tool it is testing, Engagement Mapping, that allocates weighting to different ad elements based on a variety of factors.  This all sounds good to this point but I then read that marketers will have the ability to give a higher weighting to ad elements they deem more powerful, basically overriding to a degree what the data is saying.

Unless I have got this wrong, this basically means that marketers get to choose which channels they think are more important and the data will then show that those channels actually are more important.  From the data collected so far, somewhat unsurprisingly, it appears marketers believe the channels where they get to be more creative are more important.  This sounds contrary to the idea behind web analytics, which is meant to result in decisions being made based on data, not opinions.  And it makes the hope of a future with more engaging relevant online ads less likely, as marketers will instead be able to safely focus on making ads they like, not those that will appeal to the viewer, because that is what the data will say is driving the conversions and sales.

My hope for the future is that we will develop a system for fairly and accurately attributing sales and conversions to the different marketing elements.  While I can see why allowing people to tweak this based on their own opinions may aid in this process, it can never work in practice as everyone is biased.  I hope that online display advertising gets smarter, that it is not simply a print ad or a tv commercial moved onto the internet but that the advertising is designed for the internet and takes full advantage of the features of the internet.  And that these ads appear where and when the viewer might be interested in them.  I think if that is the case, everyone wins.

Tags: Attributing Conversions, Display Advertising, Online Marketing