Lotame

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Lotame Preferences Manager, now available at www.lotame.com/preferences.html.  As part of our ongoing commitment to consumer privacy and transparency, our preferences manager enables people to both delete and add cookie-level information, including age, gender, and interests, so that Lotame can serve them ads that better match their expressed preferences.

With the introduction of its preference manager, Lotame continues to take steps to establish and adopt responsible privacy practices.  Lotame retains the non-personal information it collects for up to nine months, and was one of the earliest companies in its industry to adopt a fixed, unqualified retention policy.  For those consumers who do opt-out, Lotame also promotes (on its opt-out confirmation page) an aggregated set of third party tools for extending and maintaining their opt-outs.

We encourage you to visit and use our preferences manager today, and look forward to your comments and feedback on our ongoing efforts to provide the best ads and most sensible privacy solutions.

At Lotame, we are constantly striving to stay ahead of the curve and innovate. Since our inception, we have aggressively sought out and developed new, valuable metrics to measure the success of individual online advertising campaigns, as we do not believe (and have never believed) that clicks and conversions tell the complete story.

After much exploration, research, and analysis over the past few years, we have also realized there is no “magic metric”. In other words, there is not one individual metric that has the capability of measuring success for all campaigns. A key reason for this is due to each advertiser or campaign having a different goal. Some advertisers just want users to become familiar with their brand; others want users to purchase their product; while others want users to watch their television show or movie. One metric cannot accurately accomplish measuring each of these goals at the same time.

A year ago, we created our own single, unified metric for every campaign. It was a combination of every metric we look at in measuring the success of the campaign. However, there was an issue with creating such a metric – how does an advertiser compare the performance of their campaign by media buy/site? If only one buy/site uses the metric, then you cannot compare it across all buys/sites. Since the metrics we use incorporate our technology, it is not always easy to reproduce for other buys.

As a result, we measure the performance for each campaign individually, which also allows us to customize what we measure and report on for each campaign/advertiser. At Lotame, we have always prided ourselves on being 100% customizable for advertisers. We create completely customizable targets – no buckets. Therefore, creating completely customizable performance measurements seemed like a natural progression. While there are typically only a few possible end goals of a campaign (awareness, conversions/purchases/intent to buy, intent to view, buzz generation), many advertisers have smaller, intermediate goals. These smaller goals are fairly unique to each campaign. Therefore, we measure each of these goals as well as analyze the other metrics we deem to be valuable for their end goal. We want to stress that the smaller goals only exist as a means to measure the larger, end goals. And that is where our knowledge and experience at measuring the end goals comes into play. For instance, an advertiser may run a campaign asking users to upload photos for a contest. The likely reason behind running such a campaign is to generate awareness of the product/brand. We will not only measure the performance of the contest entries, but also various other metrics (i.e. Lotame’s patented Time Spent metric, the amount of time a user spends on the micro-site and/or the number of pages consumed on the micro-site, the responses to one-question in-banner surveys, and various engagement metrics with the creative) to get a more complete picture of awareness. The advertiser should understand that their contest is only one small portion of measuring the awareness of their product/brand. Lotame will complete the story with our knowledge, technology, and customized performance metrics.

We will continue to strive to identify and evangelize the best metrics possible to enable our clients to set appropriate goals for their campaigns and gain optimal insight into campaign performance. In doing so, we may find our way back to some uber-metrics, entirely new metrics or most likely, combinations of metrics which can be customized to match the specific requirements of each campaign. We’re fortunate to have great partners in this quest – our forward-thinking brand, agency, and publishing partners and companies including Vizu and Dimestore. Ultimately, the continuous development of new and scalable metrics will provide our clients with the best approaches for guiding and measuring their online advertising campaigns.

Written by: Doug Pollack is a Senior Business Analyst with Lotame Solutions. Doug has been responsible for the development of leading, and innovative Key Performance Indicators as well as new metrics for digital media. Prior to Lotame, Doug worked for a division of the Army where he leveraged his statistics background to analyze the aging of tanks operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. Doug is available at doug [at] lotame [dot] com.

one-question in-banner surveys: Surveys have gotten a bad reputation recently – mainly due to poor response rates and inaccurate results. However, the surveys we run are not affected by these issues. The types of surveys that are affected are the long surveys that force users to stray away from the website they were on. Users, especially those on social community sites (like Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo), do not want to be taken away from the websites they are on. These long, in-depth surveys do just that. They take the user away from the sites for a very long time, as they typically have 10 to 20 pages of questions. Therefore, the response and completion rates of the surveys are quite poor, leading to limited responses. With limited responses, results are typically inaccurate. However, the quick, in-banner, one question surveys we run solve these problems. Users can quickly take the survey without leaving their community. This leads to higher response rates, more responses, and more accurate results. In fact, Lotame has just finished a study testing the accuracy of the results of the surveys. We ran a survey measuring intent to view, which asked users if they planned on watching the season premiere of a popular TV show. We then re-surveyed the users who responded with a 2nd survey asking if they actually watched the premiere. 83.3% of users who responded to the 1st survey saying they would “Definitely” watch the premiere, did tune-in and watch the premiere. 74% of users who responded to the first survey saying they would either “Probably” or “Definitely” watch the premiere, did tune-in to the premiere.

For a full screen view, click here

A recent study came out by Knowledge Networks titled: “Internet users turn to social media to seek one another, not brands or products.” Without even looking at the numbers, I think it’s safe to bet that it is in fact true that “Internet users turn to social media to seek one another, not brands or products.” There are two parts to every statistical experiment: 1) The design and 2) the analysis. In the case of this study, it is a bit troubling to see how biased the experiment is without even reading past the title. What do you think the results would be if I put out a report titled: “Music lovers turn to radio to seek music, not brands or products”, or “Movie lovers turn to movie theaters to seek great new movies, not brands or products.”

The reason marketers are so concerned with “Social Media” is because they realize that this is where users spend most of their time. This is where they “seek one another” to connect, engage, and share (in many cases about brands and products). According to a report from The Nielsen company, which, was distributed at San Francisco Ad tech:

“The Internet remains a place of continuing innovation, with users finding new ways to integrate online usage into their daily lives,” said Charles Buchwalter, SVP, Research and Analytics, Nielsen Online. “In recent years the Internet has changed dramatically as people seek more personalized relationships online. In particular, time spent on social networks and video sites has increased astronomically. Advertisers are starting to positively re-assess the value of the online experience and create more meaningful relationships with consumers.”

And this data cannot be ignored.

Some major highlights from the Global Online Media Landscape report (pdf) regarding online video and social networks:

• The number of American users frequenting online video destinations has climbed 339% since 2003. The unique audience for online video surpassed that of email in November 2007.

• Time spent on video sites has shot up almost 2,000% over the same period.
• In the past year, unique viewers of online video grew 10%, the number of streams grew 41%, the streams per user grew 27% and the total minutes engaged with online video grew 71%.
• There are 87% more online social media users now than in 2003, with 883% more time devoted to those sites.
• In the past year, time spent on social networking sites has surged 73%.
• In February 2009, social network usage exceeded web-based e-mail usage for the first time:

It is a marketer’s job to penetrate the most popular mediums, and make their brands or products visible in the most efficient fashion. In today’s world, Social Media is the most popular medium and it is stillgrowing. So indeed, while users go to Social Media to “seek more personalized relationships“, it will still be a marketer’s job to try and penetrate this medium in efficient and meaningful ways. If a marketer can be successful in creating brand affinities with products in social media (which Lotame has had much success in doing - one example), then everyone wins as the consumer is able to find relevancy and the marketers are able to reach their target audience.

Our friends at MySpace just released a study, featured in AdAge, on the impact of Social Media from an ROI perspective. They partnered with an offline tracking program, Dunnhumby, which runs loyalty programs for supermarket retailers and has access to loyalty-card purchase data from 59 million people in the U.S. The campaign in question was for an unnamed personal-care brand that ran a $1 million campaign on MySpace last year, including a contest in which members submitted videos of themselves and friends for others in the network to vote on. (I think that this was P&G’s Crest promotion, but that is just an educated guess.) The study which described the reach and click thru rates as being below average, also uncovered the most important statistic:

It produced $1.28 million in offline sales, as measured by Dunnhumby, which compared purchases among shoppers not exposed to the campaign with purchases among those who were. That amounted to a 28% return on investment, not counting returns from repeat sales among consumers the brand won via the campaign.

This is good news for those people who searching for answers surrounding effective measurement tools to understand the value of a social media marketing campaign.

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