ChoiceStream

Note: The following blog submission was contributed by Range Online Media's VP of Strategy & Media Dustin Engel. Dustin will be presenting a Webinar on Thursday, July 16th with ChoiceStream's Cheryl Kellond entitled "Attribution: Proving Online Display Ads Drive Sales for Retailers".

As an avid professional basketball fan, I am watching the frenzied free agent market and teams looking to put the right pieces together to make a run at the NBA championship next year. Disclosure: I am an avid Lakers fan since birth so I wish all of the other teams the best of luck.

It does make me think about our industry though and how the NBA has a big edge. The role of each player is very tightly defined and the amount of statistics on each player and how they affect the team performance when they are on the court is a huge edge for General Managers trying to get ahead. In the online advertising industry, the majority of advertisers tend to focus on the last ad (87% of advertisers according to a 2008 Jupiter Research report). This is the equivalent of basketball statisticians only looking at who threw the ball in the basket. No assists, no second chance points, and no turnovers. Can you imagine the job of a basketball General Manager if that's all they tracked? It would be a guessing game with big leaps of faith on where to spend their budgets...wait, this sounds familiar.

The question that plagues online marketers is "how do I know which marketing activities are generating results if I'm only looking at what puts the ball in the basket?"

There are many answers to this question, but they all center around the concept of attribution — that is the exercise of understanding the proper valuation across your "team" of advertising to make the most of your entire marketing mix. It is about collecting the right data and making that information actionable. It is about focusing on the most measurable and ROI-friendly activities without starving your upstream channels.

Take display advertising as an example: I've been in the online media business for more than a decade, and the potential for display ads is still largely untapped — especially when you look at how display ads interact with other marketing channels and how the emotional connection opportunity in display ads can not only increase the education level of the consumer in regards to the brand...but also intent.

Recent research by the Online Publishers Association, in conjunction with Comscore, in a presentation entitled "The Silent Click: Building Brands Online" (PDF), underscores the power of display ads have on driving sales:

• 18% of consumers actually search on an advertised brand while nearly 30% visit the advertisers site as a result of seeing branded display ads;
• Branded display ads actually improve advertiser site engagement as consumers spend more time on those sites;
• Consumers exposed to display ad campaigns spend on average 7% more than those consumers not exposed to online display ad campaigns.

Furthermore, my colleagues at Range Online Media's parent company, iProspect, recently released a study that showed that more than two thirds of online users respond to display ads in ways other than clicking on the banner.

So, there are some of compelling reasons why display ads are getting a closer look these days by smart marketers. If you're out there re-building your team, this is the free agent you can pick up to play a variety of roles in your marketing mix.

I'll be hosting a Webinar on July 16 with ChoiceStream's Cheryl Kellond on the subject of online display ads and how smart online marketers can use actionable attribution, to determine how each advertising source, campaign and individual ad impacts your bottom line by properly assigning the conversion credit across the series of ads that contributed to a sale or conversion. If you seek to gain a better understanding of how to create an attribution model that works for your unique business goals, or are even just looking for case studies to prove to those in charge of budgets how intricate yet actionable the new media landscape is, I invite you to attend.