Lotame

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.

Here are a quick 5 reasons why you should build a Facebook Fan Page:

1) Reach over 200,000,000 users

According to Mashable, “Twitter and Facebook Post Huge Growth Numbers in March,” Facebook grows about 23% every month and just below 200% in one year. Your Fan Page will continue to gain exposure to more and more users as time goes on.

2) Instantly send news updates regarding your company/industry

With the click of a button, your updates will be posted to the infamous Facebook “minifeed” for everyone to see. Besides the “minifeed,” the news can be sent directly to your fans alerting them that you have updated information.

3) Make your company more social with photos and videos

Clients want to be comfortable working with you. The photos and videos will allow them to get to know your company easily enabling them to put a face to the voice.

4) People who are not on Facebook can still find your Fan Page through online searches

This is a huge benefit to the Fan Page. For those few online users who do not have a Facebook account, they can still read all of the information on the Fan Page.  People who do not have an account will not have the ability to receive updates.

5) For consumer goods, you can upload coupons or other types of discounts to those who are only a Fan of your company, potentially increasing your following

This can be a tool to reward those customers who engage in your product and decide to follow your company. It can be as small as a weekly discount to a chance to win prizes. This benefit is only for those Facebook users that are your fans.

The Facebook fan page is a free and helpful tool for every company, regardless of your industry. It will increase your reach allowing you to instantly alert your fans of important information. Make your Fan page today. If you have found any other reasons to make a Fan, please share them in the comments section.

This week Michael Lazerow - Chairman & CEO of Buddy Media, will be joining me to give his unique perspective on using Social Media successfully for brands.

Michael, along with his wife, Kass Savarese Lazerow founded Buddy Media. Buddy Media helps bring brands and social networkers together in meaningful ways to drive social brand loyalty. Some of Buddy Media’s social solutions include: App-vertisements (social branded applications), Facebook Profile Pages and Management, Facebook Connect, MySpace Profiles, iPhone Applications, Widgets, and Social Analytics

Listen in and ask questions as Michael share some of his secrets of Social Media success.

Join us @11:30 EST on Thursday June 18th over at Blog Talk Radio.

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• Buddy Media Named AlwaysOn OnMedia 100 Winner (seomashup.blogspot.com)
• The business model behind social apps (vator.tv)

This week we will be speaking with the COO of peer review Movie community Flixster. Under Steve’s leadership Flixster has grown into a

Steve Polsky

big consumer interest site with 25 million global users, successful iPhone and FaceBook applications, and widgets programs for dozens of other communities. Join us as we explore how to set up a community around a specific topic, how to effectively monetize that audience, and what today’s ad economy means to deliver value to a marketer and consumer.

Join us @11:30 EST on Thursday 4/23 over at Blog Talk Radio.

People have been asking me what I think is the best Social Media Marketing Campaign so far this year. I have a few favorites; Burger King, Skittles, and Flight of the Conchords…but who cares what I think…I want to hear from you which one do you think worked best.

The criteria you should think about, before casting your vote:

• Did the campaign generate buzz?
• Was the campaign groundbreaking?
• Did the campaign sell product?

I have highlighted 3 campaigns that I believe are the best of the best, please vote on which one you think was best (or add your own.) If the Campaigns are unfamiliar to you I have provide written descriptions and links to the campaigns below the poll module

TAKE THE POLL

Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice:
Whopper Sacrifice, a Facebook application also for BK that encouraged users of the social networking site to ditch ten friends and receive a free burger in exchange was being heralded as an innovative step forward in digital advertising (despite being quickly banned by Facebook itself for breaking its privacy rules). (Link here)

Skittles - Social Media Takeover
Skittles, the colorful candy brand owned by Mars, transformed its home page into an online portal featuring a live Twitter feed alongside Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube content. Instead of the usual corporate propaganda, the home page and “chatter” section became the brand’s Twitter page, the video media and images pages became the brand’s YouTube page and Flickr stream, respectively. (Link here)

Flight of the Conchords - Social Media Contest
Flight of the Conchord’s micro-site - “Lip Dub Video Fansterpiece.” The concept is to learn the lyrics of one of the songs the two main characters sing, and then users videotape themselves lip-synching the song, and then upload it to the website - where you might be added to a final “Fansterpiece” that will air on HBO. This viral content was advertised only on social channels like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Digg and many others. (Link Here)

The winner will be announced on Friday in a short post. After the winner is announce I will try to get the creators of the winning campaign to join me for a podcast to give us the inside story of the campaign and the results!

Vote Hard!