More Bang for the BuckDo Advertisers Really Know What They Get for Their Advertising $$?

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More Bang for the Buck

Do Advertisers Really Know What They Get for Their Advertising $$?Advertising has deep historical roots. As far back as the 17th century, newspaper ads already had become familiar as a widespread tool to get non-personal messages to the public. Over the years, technological advancements have played an extremely important role in the evolution of advertising, adding various mass-media outlets beyond newspapers to serve as advertising platforms.

Measuring Eyeball Hits and Purchasing Behavior

One of the lingering questions in advertising has always been the topic of metrics: Measuring a campaign and assessing its real value in terms of return on investment (ROI). Historically it has been highly difficult to measure how many eyeballs an ad has actually hit and how people’s exposure to advertising influences their purchasing behavior. Access to accurate metrics is especially important with the tremendous growth of advertising options available today, and advertisers increasingly want to know if their ads are effective — and how they can be made even more effective.

Digital advertising in its various forms and mobile advertising specifically provide something virtually unprecedented throughout advertising’s long history: an ability to accurately measure advertising campaigns and assess the buying behaviors triggered by campaigns. This unique ability gives advertisers important information and tools to make their advertising dramatically more effective.

Sharp Shooting: Trigger-Based Advertising Boosts ROI

In a previous column we discussed the razor-sharp targeting abilities made possible by mobile advertising. These mobile advertising capabilities can be utilized not only for targeting but also for assessing and tracking campaigns, all of which can help boost ROI.

One good example of this is trigger-based mobile advertising — promotions that are triggered by the user’s presence at a certain physical location, thus allowing advertisers to create finely tuned and highly effective timely customized offers.

Take Susan, for instance. Highly interested in books, her mobile Web surfing habits include frequent visits to best-seller forums. This information is captured in Susan’s profile at the mobile operator’s network, so when Susan visits her neighborhood mall, a leading bookstore partnering with Susan’s mobile operator leverages knowledge of her preferences and location to deliver a customized ad to her mobile.

Susan is pleased to see that she is being offered a special discount coupon for any of the ten best-selling books in the mall’s bookstore — including a book that she has recently decided that she wants. The chances of Susan responding to this ad are much higher than the chances of her responding to a non-targeted ad. The ability to connect Susan’s buying behavior with her presence in the mall increases the ROI for the book seller.

Multiple Channels for New Profits

Mobile advertising offers advertisers numerous channels to connect with the target audience on the device that goes everywhere with users, 24/7. Touchpoints include WAP banners, ringback tone advertising, in-game advertising and advertising on SMS and MMS — both person-to-person and push. These multiple channels combine to provide strong display capabilities to serve advertisers’ general marketing goals. Additionally, call for action options such as click-to-call, short codes, and links to WAP sites, make it easy for buyers to act on first impulse, which is the moment of greatest opportunity.

Every element of the process is highly measurable, trackable, and interactive. The advertiser can run a synergistic multi-channel mobile campaign with real-time metrics for all channels that not only enable accurate and immediate reporting, but also the ability to constantly fine-tune the campaign according to target audience responses. Low-performing campaigns may become a thing of the past once advertisers can see in real time how ads are being received by the audience and how to adjust the ads to resonate with the audience’s buying behavior.

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Success You Can Count On — and Take to the Bank

Because companies want to spend their marketing money on advertising that they can measure and that can deliver effective results, advertisers are very attracted by mobile advertising’s many advantages, such as:

Metrics• : Precise, real-time measurement capabilities

KnowledgeofUser• : A wealth of information about users and their preferences

MultipleTouchpoints• : A synergistic scope of options for reaching the user

ImpulseResponse• : Users can respond easily and immediately

AlwaysatHand• : The message can reach the user any-time, anywhere

Mobile advertising is an irresistible advertising medium that significantly increases fruitful interactivity between the advertiser and the end user. It improves chances for a much better ROI, and gives advertisers the accurate information they need to more quickly appreciate and enjoy the better return that they get for their advertising dollars — more bang for the buck.

Mobile Advertising: Raising the Ante on Metrics

In the previous column I raised the question of whether advertisers really know what they get for their advertising dollars. The industry is still challenged by the whole notion of metrics and finding the best ways to assess the real value of advertising.

Historically, it has always been difficult to measure the effectiveness of advertising. The first advertisement appeared in a newspaper in 1704. Since then, the main metric used by the advertising industry for measuring exposure to ads is the number of “eyeballs”. In the newspaper business, this figure is derived from the number of readers based on circulation figures.

In the early days of the online world, advertisers used the number of page loads to measure eyeballs and to monitor traffic on a given site. Wanting to keep the content fresh, some publishers started to use scripts that refreshed the page every x seconds, which resulted in inflated numbers of site visitors. In response, the industry started to talk about

“unique users”.

Later on, analytic tools evolved and enabled publishers to know which operating system visitors use, their IP addresses, users’ trail along the site pages and how they navigate through the site. Despite this information availability, it is still difficult to extract exactly who the site visitors are and their level of engagement with the site. Yet, these analytics did enable advertisers to adopt a more advanced measurement than eyeballs for measuring effectiveness — the click-through-rate. If users click through an ad – it means the ad was effective in catching their attention and driving them to action.

But what if clicking is not the answer? Maybe the real metric should be how many users have actually engaged with the brand? Today there are companies like Nuconomy that offer tools to measure user engagement on top of all the traditional online metrics of page loads and unique users. Site owners can track individual actions such as number of users who viewed each millisecond of video, number of users who published a comment, rated a video, interacted in chat, etc. This information adds a lot of value to the clicks-around-a-site information. The ultimate result is the ability to analyze the combination of all metrics described above and deriving meaningful insights from it.

Advertising on the mobile phone matches and raises the ante when it comes to metrics. Mobile operators not only know how many times each banner ad was displayed, but also which users clicked on it, together with those users’ preferences, history and behavior. And this goes for the entire mobile advertising inventory — from WAP banners, ringback tone advertising, in-game advertising to advertising on SMS and MMS — both person-to-person and push. These multiple channels together provide strong display capabilities to serve advertisers’ general marketing goals. Call for action options such as click-to-call, short codes, and links to WAP sites, make it easy for users to act on first impulse, which is the moment of greatest opportunity.

Above all, every element of the process is highly measurable, trackable, and interactive. User profiles are constantly updated based on their behavior, enhancing their value to advertisers. Mobile operators can leverage their rich knowledge base to gain deep insight into consumers’ behavior unlike any other medium, maximizing an advertiser’s return on investment.

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