Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

How do you value an introduction?

Posted by: Admin

By Lauren Crane and Gabriel Celis

Social Targeting is a new concept, and because of that, it can be difficult for advertisers to fully evaluate its effectiveness using standard online advertising success metrics. While Social Targeting performs well when judged using standard metrics such as ROI—we have seen that a typical campaign tends to outperform other forms of targeting by 3-5x or more on an ROI basis—measuring performance based solely on standard ROI metrics does not fully capture the full value of Social Targeting.

A Social Targeting campaign not only drives conversions, it also introduces the brand to new consumers and drives them to the brand’s website. These are the consumers who have not visited the marketer’s website previously. They have not been cookied by that marketer and are not being reached via standard retargeting efforts.  So how does one measure the “fuel” that Media6Degrees adds to the “fire” of an advertiser’s retargeting plan?

Another way we need to measure the impact of campaigns is by looking at the path consumers take before conversion.  For example, when we serve an ad to a user who is socially connected to a marketer’s current customers, we may see that user a few minutes later or a few days later through our pixel on the advertiser’s homepage.  Later that week, this “connection” might be retargeted by another advertising vendor, and navigate back to the advertiser’s website to eventually convert.

This very common scenario illustrates how multiple vendors can work together to drive conversions by new customers, and how marketers can succeed no matter which vendor delivers the last impression prior to conversion.  If Social Targeting was responsible for introducing that user to the marketer’s message, then it deserves a major share of the credit for the eventual conversion. In the above scenario, it is highly likely that the customer would not have converted without Social Targeting.  The initial introduction has the potential to yield a lifetime of value for that advertiser – even more reason to assign proper credit to the initial introduction.