So our resident analytic’s expert Loch Rose did this analysis back in early March and I totally forgot about it until a few days ago. In this analysis, Loch and his team aggregated all retailer print promotions from Jan 6, 2008 through February 28, 2009 in an attempt to better understand which specific brands were the most promoted via retailer’s print ads. The results were somewhat shocking to the team. Drum rollllllll please.
Top Ten Most Promoted Brands Within Retailer Print Advertisements:
- Nike
- Sony
- Samsung
- HP
- Sketchers
- Craftsmen
- Columbia
- Adidas
- GE
- LG
Wow, there are a lot of colossal global brands that are NOT on this list like Coke, Apple and Nestle. This analysis is not intended to replace any of the other brand rankings (sales, brand equity, consumer recognition, etc) but it does tell an interesting story in regards to which brands use print co-opt marketing to promote their products via the retailer circular channel.
Here is the summary level data set for the top fifty (50) brands in Excel 97-2003 format Note that ShopLocal has a lot more data and insight available on this topic of brands / manufacture promotional tracking. This is just some free teaser content to showcase the type of reporting content that ShopLocal produces.
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:
- 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)
- 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).
- 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)
- 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.
- High Level Ad Metrics
- In Ad Unit Metrics
- Post View Thru Metrics
- Landing Page Metrics
Here at ShopLocal, the technology team’s top line metric of choice for accessing the volume or load of much content is being presented to web visitors is the page view. Unlike all of the doom and gloom that has surrounded this measure being outdated in an age of web 2.0 technologies (such as Flash/Flex and AJAX), the ShopLocal team has instead made some innovative adjustments to what we consider to be a page view so that this important metric stays relevant and accurate.
The page view metric is NOT dead here at ShopLocal, it just needed to be re-tooled to keep up with the latest web technologies.
At the original core of the page view metric, the idea was simple. It was to be a measure of how involved web site visitors were. The more web pages they looked at, the more engaged they were. Nothing has changed in regards to what we are all trying to measure. The only that has changes is the web technologies used to build web pages.
With these new (web 2.0) technologies, the web pages themselves are getting more efficient and pulling in and refreshing data and displaying this new content to the user without requiring a page refresh. This is a great move forward, as it results in smoother and faster user interactions. But this causes some really tracking issues that must be dealt with.
So in order to create an apples to apples comparison of our older “web 1.0″ SmartCircular 2.0 site (static HTML web pages that would require a complete page reload to display new content) to our newer “web 2.0″ SmartCircular 4.1 sites (which utilize Flash/Flex technologies that only actual record one actual web page being loaded regardless of how much user activity, engagement or actions occur) the ShopLocal team now equates every user initiated click (or event in web analytic speak) or action taken that results in different data being displayed on the screen as a unique page view. In the older web 1.0 days, each of these clicks would have caused the complete web page to reload, so even though the actual web (HTML) page itself does not refresh, the principle and metrics recorded are the same within the newer web 2.0 application.
Yes, at the 50,000 foot level that comScore and other measurement firms looks at sites, the page view is (and has been) dead. If comScore is measuring the page views on a ShopLocal SmartCircular site like Target’s for example, I would fully expect them to register only one page view per visitor regardless of how much true activity the user performs within this Flash/Flex rich internet application (RIA) site.
But at the individual publisher level (which ShopLocal is), within web analytics systems (such as WebTrends or Omniture), page views can still be a very useful measure. One must however implement very specific, granular event based tracking into all of the various web 2.0 RIAs one’s site so as to capture all of the user initiated actions that happen during a person’s visit to the site. If this key and important step of tagging all of the intra-site activity is missed, then yes the page view metric for your organization is either dying or dead already.
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