081118 - Tracking Performance

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TRACKING PERFORMANCE

DIGITAL

Waggener Edstrom Worldwide |Ged Carroll |November 19, 2008

2TRACK PERFORMANCE:

• What is it that you want to achieve

• Getting it wrong

• On Network Measurement

• Off Network Measurement

• Cookies

• Tracking codes• Online advertising• Inference

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3WHAT IS IT THAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE?

• What Gets Measured Gets Done – Tom Peters (Borrowed from Booz Allen Hamilton)

• Allign your measurements to the business objectives– Clear objectives

• Think about brand as well as transactional measures– Buzz – Sentiment analysis

• Just because something can be measured doesn’t mean that it should be measured

• Consider inference• Beware the Law of Unintended Consequences “any purposeful action will

produce some unintended consequences.” Credited from anybody from Robert K. Merton to Adam Smith

4QUICK CASE STUDY

Yahoo! Answers launched in December 2005 in the US

– Knowledge search: relies on audience participation

– Based on successful Korean business model championed by Naver

– Rewards points to question responders

Measurement fell down in two areas:– Focus on unique user numbers, rather than the

economic value of the user

– Struggling to get the points system right for

participants

Non-virtuous circle ensued– High community management costs– Harder to monetise ad inventory as it attracts the

wrong people– Move to reduce community costs by flipping

management over to users (weighting based on points system) brought in further criticism

5ON NETWORK MEASURES

Unique visitorsNumber of returning vistorsLocationPage viewsTime spent on siteAverage cost of acquisition per userTransactionsValue of transaction

6OFF NETWORK MEASURES

Google Adword account information• Cost per click• Relative performing words

Inferred meaning• Click through rate (advertising /

SEM)• Track variations in SEM copy

• Value of your brand as key words over time

Benchmarked data• Unique users• Page views• Traffic growth

Brand data• Brand mentions• Community authority• Sentiment• Tone of voice• Inbound links from social media

7OFF NETWORK MEASUREMENT: SILVER BULLET (OR NOT) 7

• NNR

• ComScore

• Hitwise

• Cision

• Attentio

• Market Sentinel

• BuzzMetrix

• Cymfony

• Biz360

• Factiva

• Brandimensions

8DASHBOARDS

• Google Analytics and many of the measuring tools provide dashboards– Very PowerPoint friendly

• How does the dashboard map to your objectives?– If it doesn’t map to your objectives what is its value?

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www.gregstuart.com 9

BACKBONE OF MEASUREMENT AND TARGETING – COOKIES

• HTTP cookies, or more commonly referred to as Web cookies, tracking cookies or just cookies, are parcels of text sent by a server to a web client (usually a browser) and then sent back unchanged by the client each time it accesses that server. HTTP cookies are used for authenticating, session tracking (state maintenance), and maintaining specific information about users, such as site preferences or the contents of their electronic shopping carts. The term "cookie" is derived from "magic cookie," a well-known concept in UNIX computing which inspired both the idea and the name of HTTP cookies.

• Cookies have been of concern for Internet privacy, since they can be used for tracking browsing behavior. As a result, they have been subject to legislation in various countries such as the United States, as well as the European Union. Cookies have also been criticized because the identification of users they provide is not always accurate and because they could potentially be a target of network attackers. Some alternatives to cookies exist, but each has its own uses, advantages and drawbacks.

• Cookies are also subject to a number of misconceptions, mostly based on the erroneous notion that they are computer programs. In fact, cookies are simple pieces of data unable to perform any operation by themselves. In particular, they are neither spyware nor viruses, despite the detection of cookies from certain sites by many anti-spyware products.

• Most modern browsers allow users to decide whether to accept cookies, but rejection makes some websites unusable. For example, shopping carts implemented using cookies do not work if cookies are rejected.

10TRACKING CODES

• Doesn’t rely on cookies• Requires data-capture and cooperation at both ends

– Data loss does occur

• Only works to a point:– Very good for tracking coupon response rates– No good for shopping carts

11EXERCISE: NEW YORK TIMES

• The New York Times Online is one of the most trafficked English language news sources

• It is the most linked-to web site by English language blogs

• Its news feeds are ‘pumped’ into search indexes of all the major search engines via an XML feed

Why does it need to buy key words?How would you recommend that it

measures success?


ONLINE ADVERTISING

13ONLINE MEDIA MEASUREMENT DATA IS NOT GOOD; AND YET ITS WORLD CLASS

Good News Lots & lots of data It’s all digital and networked Can track directly to sales online First medium to measure the ad

(not just content) Immediate insights

Bad News Lots & lots of data Do we have the systems to handle

data There is Fraud and manipulation Consumer has control BIG privacy issues Huge discrepancies creates mis-

trust

14Main Terms of the Medium

• Uniques– A unique visitor is a statistic describing a unit of traffic to a Web site, counting each visitor only once

in the time frame of the report. This statistic is relevant to site publishers and advertisers as a measure of a site's true audience size, equivalent to the term "Reach" used in other media.

– The Unique Visitors statistic is most accurately measured in two ways with current technology:• by requiring all Visitors to log-in to the site, thereby capturing the identity of each Visitor on

each visit, or • by placing a cookie on each Visitor's computer, writing the cookie ID to a database, and

checking for the cookie on each Visitor's computer each time they visit. • Visits– A series of requests from the same uniquely identified client with a set timeout. A visit is expected to

contain multiple hits (in log analysis) and page views. • Page Views– A page view (PV) or page impression is a request to load a single page of an Internet site. On the

World Wide Web a page request would result from a web surfer clicking on a link on another HTML page pointing to the page in question. This should be contrasted with a hit, which refers to a request for a file from a web server. There may therefore be many hits per page view.

• Impressions or Ad Views– Same as Page Views, but for the advertisements. Defined as communication

Please never use the word “Hits”Please never use the word “Hits”

15ONLINE MEDIA RESEARCH OVERVIEW

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GLOBAL GUIDELINES HIGHLIGHTS

Refined definitions and standards1. Client side measurement

Via a beacon/clear gif or client side call (i.e., 302)2. Spiders & Bot Filtering (database)

2 step process, via 1) short list of bots (20-25), 2) known browser 3. Behavioral Filtering to remove non human activity

Might not be relevant if we use 2 step process above4. Internal Traffic

Do not exclude as it is insignificant5. Cache Busting

Agree to header based cache busting

17GLOBAL GUIDELINES CONTINUED

Internal Controls– Shared “Areas of Auditing”– Asked to Communicate Internal Control Best Practices

Disclosures– Goal is Transparency– Description of Measurement Methodology

• Definitions• Data Collection Methods• Editing, Data Adjustment, etc.• Calculation Explanations• Reporting Standards• General Reporting Parameters• Certification and/or Auditing Applied

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A B C

1: User requests content from publisher web server.

2: Publisher web server calls Publisher Ad Engine to retrieve ads.

3: The Publisher Ad Engine logs that it has served an ad. Publisher Ad engine returns an HTML blob to Publisher Web Server. Some of these ads may actually be pointers to a location on a Third Party server.

4: The Publisher Web Server receives the HTML blob.

5: The Publisher Web Server returns the page and the page begins to render on the user’s machine.

6: While rendering the page, the browser determines that it needs to pick up an ad from a Third Party server. The browser fires off a separate thread to get the ad from the Third Party server.

7: The Third Party server logs that it has served an ad.

8: The Third Party server receives the request for the ad and returns a pointer to the location of the ad image by instructing the user’s browser to pick up the ad from an image server.

9: The user’s browser makes a call to the image server where the creative resides.

10: The Image server logs that it has served an image.

11: The image server returns the image.

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THE OLD WAY: SERVER-SIDE SERVING AND COUNTING

Publisher Web Server

Publisher Ad Engine

Publisher Ad Engine

Log

Third Party Ad Engine

Log

Image Server Log

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Causes of discrepancies

• Network latency– Publisher count is higher

• Caching– Publisher count is lower

• Crawlers– Publisher count is higher– Filtering techniques may differ

• Implementation errors– Typically cause extreme discrepancies

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A B C

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THE BETTER WAY: CLIENT-SIDE SERVING AND COUNTING


Publisher Ad Engine

Publisher Ad Engine

Log


Log

Image Server Log

21THE WAY IT’S BEING DONE NOW: SERVER-SIDE SERVING WITH CLIENT-SIDE COUNTING

AB C

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Publisher Ad Engine

Publisher Ad Engine

Log


Log

Image Server Log

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Publisher Beacon Server

Publisher Beacon Log

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22HOW GOOD IS NNR AND COMSCORE DATA?

• NetRatings and comScore Page View and Unique Visitor data trend together (are positively correlated) for less than half of websites examined. – NetRatings and comScore trend together for both Page Views and Unique Visitors for only four

of the nineteen sites– Overall, the lack of consistency between the two services is no worse (and no better) in the

second half of 2006 than it was in late 2005– The average NetRatings/comScore monthly difference for Unique Visitors across the nineteen

sites ranges from 15% to 25% over the 13-month period, with no particular trend. For Page Views the average monthly difference has settled around 40%

• There is a tendency for a majority of individual websites to be significantly (and consistently) higher in either NetRatings or comScore.– In those cases where differences are significant, NetRatings and comScore are each higher half

of the time– In most cases, the two services are not close, and are reporting different “realities” regarding

usage of specific websites– Differences in websites where one service is consistently higher may be related to the

demographic make-up of the panels

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SAMPLE NY TIMES - UNIQUE VISITORS

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SAMPLE: NY TIMES - PAGE VIEWS

25INFERENCE

Think about a transaction that involves multiple customer touches offline and online?Credit card:•Direct mail•Visit to the website •Inbound telemarketing

How do you measure the performance of this interaction? What value do you assign to online from the new customer?

081118 - Tracking Performance

Business

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