Next Step in Ongoing Effort to Provide Marketplace Guidance Across a Range of Methodologies.

With the online advertising industry in need of more rigorous tools and systems for understanding campaign performance, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has unveiled “Best Practices for Conducting Online Ad Effectiveness Research.” It provides online ad market stakeholders with a practical set of recommendations for standard operating procedures with respect to the use of ad effectiveness studies.

This new document is a follow-up to the groundbreaking 2010 IAB report “An Evaluation of Methods Used to Assess the Effectiveness of Advertising on the Internet” by Dr. Paul J. Lavrakas. That study examined the strengths and weaknesses of online ad effectiveness research methodologies.

The new report looks across the widely available methodologies to assess best practices in each phase of online ad effectiveness research and examines the challenges the industry faces within each phase, as originally outlined by Dr. Lavrakas, and proposes prescriptive remedies to each.

“Marketers are always looking to understand how their campaigns perform, and ad effectiveness research is one of the key tools in doing so,” said Sherrill Mane, Senior Vice President, Industry Services, IAB. “But there are still so many questions about the methodology itself that hamstring the validity of this research and undermine the industry as a whole. For our industry to continue to grow and realize its full potential, it is essential that we invest in the necessary advancements described by Dr. Lavrakas. In the interim, the ‘Best Practices’ document illuminates the planning, thresholds and decision parameters for working the existing tools.”

Some of the recommended IAB Best Practices for agencies and advertisers, as well as publishers, include:

Planning:

• To use online ad effectiveness surveys appropriately to make optimization decisions on an individual site, a study will optimally include at least 200 respondents.
• A 15-million impressions campaign should be the minimum before a site should consider running a study on behalf of advertisers, while a suggested “rule of thumb” is that the cost of an effectiveness study should be less than 10 percent of the overall buy.
• Agencies should include training and education for their media staffers not just on the mechanics and math of planning and buying, but also on the basics of research methodologies and implementation.

Recruitment:

• While the use of panels to recruit respondents may be an attractive alternative to live intercept recruitment, provided that the panels are validated, there are certain types of campaigns and circumstances that lend themselves more easily to the use of panels: high volume campaigns, multi-platform campaigns and customized ad placements.
• Publishers need to take some responsibility for declining response rates, and publishers should try to limit the frequency of survey invitations to protect the user experience and reduce clutter.
• Agencies and publishers should pressure vendors to undergo independent, third-party evaluations of their statistical methods and recruitment methodologies.
• Vendors should weigh results to actual campaign delivery, using third-party audience verification companies as a benchmark.

Deployment:

• All survey questions should be asked in an environment where the measured brand ads are not visible.
• Surveys aimed at business professionals should take less than 10 minutes to complete; four minutes or less is ideal and will improve completion rates.
• For consumer-targeted products, a longer survey may be possible, though advertisers should be wary of exceeding seven minutes; the “sweet spot” for survey length seems to be five to seven minutes, or approximately 20 to 25 questions.

Optimisation & Analysis:

• When feasible, marketers should marry their campaign effectiveness research to salient online and offline metrics to get a more comprehensive view of their advertising efficacy.
• Even as optimisation has been trending towards real time, brand marketers should be wary of making optimisation decisions based on real-time ad effectiveness data.

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Facebook has introduced a raft of changes to its user functionality to ward off the increasing threat of Google+, in the pitched battle for social media dominance. The changes will allow Facebook users to see who can view content on their profile page, and approve any images they are tagged in before it is visible to their friends.

Vice president of product, Chris Cox, indicated in a post on the official Facebook blog that users will now be able to command who among their “friends” list can see their postings. It will allow users to create smaller groups of people from their main friends list.

The function is similar to Google+’s “Circles” feature, which allows a user to designate their contacts to different lists, or “Circles”. Since the launch of Google+, Facebook has hit back with several new changes to the site. A week after Google+ launched with group video calls, Facebook announced a partnership with Skype to introduce video calling on the site.

Facebook also introduced instant group mobile messaging earlier this month, a feature rolled out with Google+ at the end of June. Cox wrote on the blog:

“Today we’re announcing a bunch of improvements that make it easier to share posts, photos, tags and other content with exactly the people you want. You have told us that ‘who can see this?’ could be clearer across Facebook, so we have made changes to make this more visual and straightforward.”

Last week, Facebook launched Check In Deals in Australia with launch advertisers Westfield, Commonwealth Bank, KFC and 7-Eleven.

Yesterday, AdNews reported Google+ branded pages have been delayed until the end of the year due to high demand from companies which wanted to join the beta testing stage originally planned for late September.

cited from Adnews, 24th August 2011

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Recent findings have shown that Email continues to be the backbone of cross-channel marketing in Australia despite the clear emergence of multi-channel and segmentation trends.

The Mobile channel use has grown by over 300% and social marketing now has 10 times more activity than a year ago, according to the ‘Big Australian Report’  on email, mobile, social and web marketing.

Despite this, email remains the central and most used channel, and the highest volume by some considerable margin.

Of the marketers surveyed, not surprisingly 100% are sending emails to customers and members. The report found, however, only 14% of marketers send according to customer preferences.

“16% of companies send all messages via all channels,” the report read. “We would expect this will drop as sophistication in targeting increases.”

Much like email being the spine of multi-channel, data is emerging as the centrepiece of converged web-focused marketing, with 2010 seeing a major breakthrough in targeting according to the report.

“For the first time a majority of marketers engaged in segmentation to target the more
relevant members of its data base with certain messages or offers.”

More than half the marketers surveyed incorporate data metrics into their measurement, and around 40% feed it back into CRM systems, so the insights and results can be fed back into the database and applied across many channels.

The findings were based on the analysis of more than 1 billion email, mobile and social messages sent between 1 July 2010 and 30 June 2011, and survey of 350 enterprise marketers in Australia.

cited from B&T, 23rd August 2011

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