Measuring It Right – An ROI Perspective: Part I

Hari Shankar, Business Director, Starcom IP India
How have the online measurement metrics evolved in India? What is the state of the industry in terms of performance based online media planning and buying? Have we started to incorporate the CPC/CPA model in India yet or will impression based media will continue to be the norm?

“Make the important measurable, not the measurable important” – a very insightful statement inscribed somewhere in the annals of Web analytics history but how much of deep delving is conducted in to the real life application of this maxim?

Performance assessment driven Internet advertising models started evolving during the dot com bubble era when the WWW was a totally urban, up-market phenomenon and many an early torch bearer of the Web could be heard lamenting in the sidelines about the challenge in monetizing the WWW. A low audience base compounded by issues such as lack of awareness, constricted pipes that spewed out the bytes, low PC penetration, resistance to change and over and above everything, the lofty expectations that were set for the medium that ultimately led to a melt down just didn’t help the new kid on the block to show off the hidden prowess.

The fall out of this scenario was the positioning of the medium, as a totally sales led channel and this eventually led to the scenario whereby the branding & consumer engagement potential of the medium was totally sidelined while in the other parts of the globe, a variety of industries such as Automotive, CPG, Financial, Sports, Aviation etc were experimenting and perfecting the art and science of making the medium accountable from both branding and demand generation perspective.

Performance Metrics – Best Practises:

CPC, CPA, Click-through, View through, Latent conversions, Repeat visits, Click stream, Last mile conversions, lift in brand metrics, Stickiness index, – there is no dearth of terminology as far as online performance measurement metrics are concerned. Matching the measurement metrics to campaign objectives is pivotal to ensuring that “important is measured” and not that the “measured is important”

At one side of the scale are branding measurement metrics practiced by brands such as Nokia whose core objective is to provide immersive consumer experiences online for N-series devices which rest on pit-stops such as Music, Pictures and Videos. The sticky experiences created Online for N-series devices are measured purely from the perspective of user interactions with the brand driven through metrics such as View-through (users who visit the brand zone as a result of exposure to advertising, Stickiness index (number of pages viewed/session, time spent on site, interactions with interactive experiences on the site), the Repeat visits (users who return to site after initial brand experience online) and tracking “brand conversations” online through qualitative methods such as blog-tracking to name a few.

At the other side of the spectrum are brands within the financial vertical whose key priority is only to track the efficiency of the Web purely from the perspective of the number of leads generated through various online marketing tactics such as display advertising, email marketing, Affiliate marketing, Search marketing and performance based delivery models irrespective of the branding effect provided by the medium.

Within this spectrum, special mention goes to brands such as Dell, which have perfected the art of “trial and error perfection” whereby genre/site/channel/ad unit/creative/time band mix have been arrived at in such a fashion that the demand generation funnel can be forecasted with significant accuracy contributed by historical performance data. The forecasting model also considers factors such as recall / view through /repeat conversions thereby leading to a robust sales funnel fabrication which is then fed in to allocation of human inventory in to the sales queue and ultimate sales closures.

Then there are brands such as Dove, which give importance to lift in key branding metrics such as brand awareness and recall, message association and purchase intent through pre and post campaign measurement techniques. There are also brands such as Singapore Airlines which track metrics such as ticket bookings, revenue generated per ticket booking tracked back to placements, ads, sites, channels, markets divided across click-through and view through streams, thus allowing near perfection of a long term model of Web marketing delivery to aid business objectives.

Next week, the Indian Scenario..