Measuring advertising performance can mean different things for different brands – and different campaigns. In the digital space, as with offline media, a vital part of the process involves defining from the start what results a campaign should achieve. When it comes to measuring advertising performance for these outcomes, digital media offer a degree of insight and tracking that no other channel can match.
Much attention has been rightly given to the immediate effectiveness measures that online advertising provides in the form of click-throughs, open rates and viewing times. Beyond this, conversion-per-click rates provide a valuable measure of ROI. However, measuring campaign performance solely through clicks does many areas of digital marketing an injustice: engagement and deep brand interaction can all take place online without any registered clicks.
Microsoft Advertising is leading the way in researching new approaches to measuring digital campaign performance, with a selection of reports highlighted below.
Aligning online and traditional media metrics
Greater with Data, a new Microsoft Advertising white paper advocates new techniques for measuring online advertising effectiveness to enable brand advertisers to compare campaign performance across media.
Dwell times show brand benefits of online ads
Online measures of brand engagement show that the longer users spend interacting with online brand ads, the greater those ads’ positive impact on the brand.
Attributing conversions through Engagement Mapping
Engagement Mapping seeks to attribute conversions, not just to the last ad clicked on, but to all online ad exposures encountered throughout the purchase funnel.
Measuring social media
As social media marketing increases in importance, so too does measuring social media buzz around your brand. Microsoft Advertising’s innovative new Looking Glass tool, being piloted in the US, monitors a broad range of social media platforms in real-time and provides rapidly actionable data.
