Digital Media Buying
Identifying Sound & Effective Digital Media Buying Strategies
Throughout Asia – specially Hong Kong, Singapore & China, I hear of Advertisers need for transparency in an objective online measurement metric. The issue businesses in general have had since the beginning of times was how does one measure the quality and frequency of visitors to a shop or a website?
When the web came to be in the early 1990’s the only statistics available were the ones that the Internet Service Providers Web Server Logs measured. However we all know that is far from being accurate.
Other providers of Site Centric measurement are notables like Omniture and Google’s Analytics products where the latter is incidentally “free”. However, did you know that depending on where the Site Centric measurement Tool places the Java Script Code or 1×1 Pixels to determine/count a visit can significantly alter how many Page Views are registered? Working previously in that field, I was surprised to hear of stories where a client had place 3 site centric tools on their pages and came out with totally divergent results??
However no matter how well they measured A site’s traffic, one could not get information about a competitor’s traffic or for another website that one does not control either.
The Hitwise Way is different. They take care of all of that comparative measurement by tracking internet users at the Country level. In Singapore for example, it is close to 1.5 Million internet users and globally it is 25 Million users. Hitwise is by far the only Data provider Tracking several Millions of internet users in this region and indeed Globally.
Reporting on visits, Page views and Session Duration of ALL sites, they provide for an “objective” means of comparing websites’s performance.
Not only can we rank sites that offer similar content and benchmark them according to their relative number of visitors, page impressions generated and timed sessions logged but they can also look at where are all those local online users are going to from website to website. This means they can assess the actual effectiveness of an online advertisement by looking at how much more traffic it generated for the advertiser. They can literally map this out using Hitwise’s Clickstream product by assessing/charting the surge of traffic following an online campaign.
Hang on, you might think that Double Click or Ad Serving Companies can do that too. Well, not quite. The data they have is based on ad that actually ran. It only tells you when someone has clicked on an Ad. It does not say anything about the number of visitors to that page, page impressions generated or time sessions. Hitwise on the other hand does give you that intelligence. Hitwise does it for virtually any site that registered a significant number of visitors.
When it comes to measurement and those who profess to provide data on how Internet users are surfing the Web, there are also other providers like Comscore or Nielsen’s market intelligence. They have a vastly different methodology. Nielsen’s tracks a few of the major publishers while Hitwise tracks 1,000,000 + websites globally and Comscore gathers data via opt-in panels.
This means that an internet user would have to willingly allow a Panel Based measurement organization to install software on their Computer so as to track their online activity. Activities such as Googling, checking the weather as well as visiting Banking sites and financial institutions are in theory being tracked for the willing panelist. I cannot speak for everyone but I for one prefer to remain anonymous online especially when researching and/or doing sensitive transacting online. This raises the question of why would a Panelist agree to have monitoring software on their personal/work computers.
As you can see there are many, many ways one can measure internet consumption. The problem is that they all have their advantages and in many cases, disadvantages. Especially in those tumultuous financial times dubbed “Financial Tsunami” in Hong Kong, Marketers cannot afford to be complacent and simply advertise on what had worked in the past. Make those marketing dollars count and generate R.O.Is dollars and Branding outcomes that can give you the biggest “bang” for your buck.
Cheers,
Dan
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