May 2008 Archive

Last week Renee and I attended the Atlas Engagement Mapping conference in Times Square. Atlas is one of the leading ad server platforms, and the conference focused on presenting new ideas about the way online advertising is measured.

Currently, the success of online ads is measured based on the last site someone visited. For example, if I see an ad for Toyota on NYTimes.com and click on it to go to the Toyota site, NYTimes.com gets the credit for my visit to Toyota. While this method does accurately describe the successfulness of the ad placed on NYTimes.com, it fails to look at the big picture of where I may have been exposed to Toyota advertising prior to this point.

Atlas aims to address that issue, and look at the big picture. It asks that when we measure the successfulness of advertising, to also take into account other factors, such as how often a consumer saw an advertising message, the recency of those exposures, and the interaction with an ad.

While Atlas has begun to address the way we measure online advertising through engagement mapping, I think it will take awhile to evolve this process and find a way to accurately and efficiently measure the history of a consumer’s interaction with online advertising. It will also involve qualitative assessment of ads, not just the quantitative aspect to measure success. However, overall it is a good principle to keep in mind not to only focus on the conversion point of a consumer, but to think about the history and interwoven measures that bring them to a certain action.

For more information visit: www.atlasolutions.com/emap