Advertisers Favor Studying Effects to Improve Online ROI

By Abbey Klaassen

Marketers should be looking at more-qualitative tests of their online advertisements if they want to improve their online return on investment, according to an online advertising report out today from MarketingSherpa.

The survey, whose findings are part of MarketingSherpa's 2008 Online Advertising Handbook, polled a variety of marketer clients and agencies about their online advertising tactics, what they found worked and what they found didn't work as well.

Measuring effectiveness
When asked which tactics most improved ROI, 25% of respondents said online ad effectiveness studies increased their online ad returns significantly. That was followed by online focus groups at 23%, upgraded site analytics software at 21%, eye-tracking studies at 20% and multivariate ad testing at 19%.

"It comes down to good advertising is good advertising," said Tim McAtee, a MarketingSherpa analyst who wrote the report. "Good advertising works at a psychological level. When we asked people what tests most drastically affect ROI, it was qualitative tests that affected that."

Marketers, he urged, should focus on ROI rather than clicks, be more aware of how creative elements encourage actions, and match up design tactics with those objectives. For example, if a marketer has a complicated message, video should be used to convey it. Or if the goal is to have people sign up for an e-mail providing more information, then an in-banner registration box should be provided.

Context counts
The report also polled advertisers on the kinds of targeting and placement tactics that were working best and found that contextual targeting was the most effective, with 41% reporting that it delivered great ROI, followed by behavioral, with 37%. Almost 30% of respondents reported great ROI from text-link ads and another 23% endorsed affiliate marketing.

"When you mix the quality with the best of targeting -- behavioral or context -- that's when you really see quite an extraordinary potential for the medium," said Stefan Tornquist, research director at MarketingSherpa.

Still, one of the barriers to marketers using more qualitative measures is figuring out how to marry them to the quant-based measures.

"We're not seeing marketers mix the two and create dashboards that show both the qualitative and quantitative side of things," said Mr. Tornquist. "Part of that is people who have been trained to do these tend not to be trained in both sides of it. They're either the crunchy granola ethnographers or math-based analytics data cruncher."
NEW YORK (AdAge.com)

Search Marketing

Want to rank better on Google? There's a company you might want to check out, since it might know a thing or two about that. It's called Google.
To be specific, it's called Performics, a division of DoubleClick, which you might recall was acquired by Google earlier this month. While all the attention on the DoubleClick purchase has been on whether it would make Google too dominant in the online-ad space, some search marketers have worried about a different issue: Is it right for Google to own a company that works for better placement on Google?
Think about it. What if the New York Times Co. owned a PR firm that touted getting clients prominently positioned in The New York Times? More than a few eyebrows would rise. And that's exactly the situation with Performics and Google. It's a Google-owned business that aims to get clients better ranking in search engines, with the most important search engine being, of course, Google.

Google says it will run Performics as a "stand-alone business unit" and spend the next few months assessing it and all of DoubleClick's products and services before deciding on future plans. Me, I feel like it should have assessed from the start that operating its own search-engine-optimization firm wouldn't be compatible with maintaining the important trust consumers have in its flagship search engine. I still hope the company will quickly come up with a divestiture plan for Performics.

Let me stress that I have no beef with Performics. The company has been a leader in search marketing. It just doesn't belong in the Google family -- not if that family also contains the search results Performics works to influence.

Google's not alone in this tricky situation. When Microsoft bought aQuantive, it gained Avenue A/Razorfish, which also does search-marketing work. Just like with Google-Performics, that doesn't sit well with me.

If Microsoft gains Yahoo, as many expect, it and Google will have the biggest shares of search inventory out there. It seems enough that they should earn directly by selling their own inventory. They don't need to also earn indirectly by selling services that place listings into those pages. Leave that to the third parties, avoid the conflict-of-interest perception and get out of the search-marketing business. It's no place for an actual search engine to be.
by Danny Sullivan