In its early days, Internet advertising offered what seemed to be a distinct competitive advantage over its older, offline kin: measurability.
Throughout the history of advertising, it has been notoriously difficult to draw a direct line from a given piece of marketing -- a TV spot, a magazine ad -- to a sale. "The Net, though, is different," according to one reasonable-sounding argument that was expounded in Wired magazine in 1996.
"The Net is accountable," the Wired article said. "It is knowable. It is the highway leading marketers to their holy grail: single-sourcing technology that can definitively tie the information consumers receive to the purchases they make."
At the time, Procter & Gamble had provided support for that thesis by deciding to base payments for its online advertising on click-through -- the number of times a Web surfer was interested enough in an online ad to give it a click. Suddenly, all those other unaccountable forms of advertising, not to mention the media companies that depended on them, were thought to be in serious danger.
But measurability has not turned out to be the great strength of Internet advertising. It has turned out to be its most conspicuous weakness. The problem is that it is hard to prove that no one is paying attention to a given television commercial. But it is easy to prove that practically nobody is clicking on a Web ad, leading to a perception that most online ads do not work.
The upshot, a recent Jupiter Media Metrix report groused, is that many marketers are still incapable of evaluating online ad spending effectively. Instead, the report said, marketers "focus on quantitative metrics like the cost per click and cost per conversion, not on more qualitative metrics like lifetime customer value and cost per shift in brand perception." A separate Jupiter report argued that "the actual number of customers that Internet advertising generates is often several multiples above what is tracked directly."
Last month, the Web site Marketwatch.com announced that it would no longer even report click-through rates to its advertisers unless they specifically requested them. "It's a meaningless measurement," a company spokesman said in an article in The Industry Standard.
Of course, the actions of a Marketwatch.com are less crucial to marketing trends than the actions of a Procter & Gamble. But still, the click-through has been under assault for quite some time, and the question now is whether an online marketing paradigm will be built around some new, better, more precise group of measurements or will fall back on the squishier evidence that advertising has traditionally relied upon.
Tom Sperry, president of the Atlas DMT technology division of the Seattle digital-marketing firm, Avenue A, suggests that click-through will not go away but will be supplemented by an array of emerging measurements.
Some of the new methods are meant to be even more refined measurements, like so-called view-based conversions. These track, for instance, whether a Web surfer has merely seen -- but not necessarily clicked on -- an Eddie Bauer ad before visiting the Eddie Bauer Web site and buying a sweater. (The privacy implications of all that will have to be examined elsewhere.) This sort of thing is what will continue to add "greater granularity," as Sperry calls it, to the process of figuring out the effectiveness of an online campaign.
Toward the other extreme are new efforts to promote online advertising even when its results are not directly traceable to any sales at all. Recently the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association, released a study conducted by the market research firm Dynamic Logic, along with related research from some of the bureau's member companies. The studies compared the effectiveness of various types of online ads, whether plain-old banner ads or ads with new, larger formats.
The conclusion, not so surprising, is that bigger ads seemed more effective. More interesting is how this was demonstrated: not by measuring click-throughs or any similarly accountable standard, but through an online survey in which respondents simply offered their impressions. The studies found that brand awareness, message association, purchase intent and brand favorability generally increased among those respondents exposed to online ads. For instance, a bar chart shows "purchase intent" rising 10 percentage points among respondents who saw an ad four times.
And what does that mean? There is not space here to spell out exactly how those percentages were put together. But it is fair to say that such data is a lot less coldly indisputable than a measure of the number of people who saw an ad and then bought something. That is not to say that the figures are wrong or that they aren't useful. But there is certainly some wiggle in them.
Robin Webster, president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, suggested that the click-through and its cousins had appealed mostly to the technologists who shaped the World Wide Web in the early going. Their faith in technology's ability to measure the previously unmeasurable, Webster said, meant that "a lot of false expectations were set up."
Sure, it makes sense for retailers to want to track the way interactive ads affect online sales, she said. But Webster figures it makes sense to get "back to basics, the kind of measures we've always used." The squishy kind, in other words.
Another new study makes direct comparisons of certain kinds of interactive ads and television spots but does so basically on the older medium's terms. Unicast, an online ad firm that champions "superstitial" ads (described as TV-like efforts that play in pop-up windows), worked with Harris Interactive, a polling and market research firm, to conduct a survey measuring traditional concepts like brand recall, positive-purchase intent and the like.
The study found -- again, not so surprising -- that superstitials stack up well against TV ads in most of those categories. "What's important is the message ads deliver," said Richard V. Hopple, president of Unicast.
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