How To Best Measure Localized Rich Media Display Ads

Posted on 8 April 2009 by Patrick FlanaganNo Comments

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It’s all about perspective.  To be specific, there is typically a very narrow perspective that is used to judge the performance of localized rich media ads – impressions, interactions & clicks.  Those three metrics are the most understood and most used in today’s digital display advertising world.  But the story should never start and end with these three super high level metrics.

When looking at the subset of rich media ads that are localized (in which PaperBoy ads would be part of this classification), one needs to take a much deeper and broader perspective to fully ascertain ALL of the value that is derived from this type of advertising.

This is the complete reporting framework that Pointroll / ShopLocal encourage all advertisers that are doing localized rich media display ads to use to truly measure total derived value from any given campaign

This reporting framework breaks down reporting into four key levels of granularity.  They are:

1. High Level Ad Metrics: In other words, reporting on the activities that are tracked within the ad server.  This is where most reporting models start and end. This is where the usual suspects of rich media metrics are found such as interaction rate, interaction time, panel expansion rate and count, etc.  These do give a great surface level picture of performance, but do not show the depth very well of things that go on deeper within the ad unit or after a user leaves the ad unit.  (As a side note, custom geographical based reporting segments can be applied to all of these metrics)
2. In Ad Unit Metrics: This level pertains to the user generated activities (or events) that happen within the actual ad unit(s).  Metrics such as unique feature level usage are found within this level.  In addition, a PaperBoy exclusive metric is also found within this level which deals with actually tracking the unique number of user clicks on every single unique product and/or category of interest.  Ultimately most advertisers not only want to know how many products were viewed in a generic sense, they typically want to know specifically (down to the unique product level) how many clicks any given item advertised got clicked on. This product click level reporting is really useful to understand WHICH actual item level offers (eg the dynamic, locallized content within the ads) consumers responded to (or ignored for that matter).
3. Post View Thru Metrics: Display ad value creation is in the shape of a huge iceberg, in that most of the activity and value is created OUTSIDE of any specific click thru or in ad interaction.  comScore has been very vocal at pushing this key point by publishing some very pointed research that the largest part of any display campaign is the latent activities that happen post ad impression / post ad click.  The Pointroll & ShopLocal team could not agree more.  As such, all PaperBoy campaigns come standard with complete post view, post click (eg latency type) reporting (Pointroll calls these SiteEvents while other competitors call this type of reporting Spotlighting – same exact thing)
4. Landing Page Metrics: Finally, these are the activities that happen post click-thru, within the ShopLocal hosted landing page (eg the weekly ad or SmartCircular site that most PaperBoy campaigns drive to on click thru).  This report allows an advertiser to unique assess the difference in the inbound PaperBoy generated traffic from all of the other typical everyday traffic that flows through the online weekly ad site.  Typically PaperBoy users are much more engaged when they hit the landing page, as they have been pre-filtered by the ad unit experience.  This type of metric also report back to the advertiser on all the additional meaningful web2store shopping behaviors that this subset of users are displaying, all post ad unit.

Here are some real sample (.xls) reports that will hopefully help one better understand what actual data is able to be generated by each of these unique reporting levels.

1. High Level Ad Metrics
2. In Ad Unit Metrics
3. Post View Thru Metrics
4. Landing Page Metrics

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