Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

Tribal Brand Index

Posted by: Nick Ehle

Today, Media6Degrees is launching Orbit, our client-facing reporting tool. Orbit contains basic campaign reporting metrics (including impressions, site-visits, clicks, conversions) and a set of unique tools for audience measurement that we call Social Brand Metrics (SBM). The SBM portfolio includes Tribal Brand Index, Social Media Profile, and Audience Validation. In today’s post, I will explain some of the insights that Tribal Brand Index provides to our customers.

Tribal Brand Index (TBI) measures how densely clustered a marketer’s existing customers are relative to a random sample of Internet users, where clusters are formed around commonly visited content on the web. We have found that TBI generally correlates with campaign performance, and can be a leading indicator of how well our Social Targeting™ technology can be deployed.

A high TBI indicates that we have derived a unique targeting signature from a marketer’s existing customers. The higher the TBI, the stronger this unique signal. A strong signal generally enables better Social Targeting™, because the audience is more distinctly identifiable, which enables scalable advertising campaigns and correlates positively with high performance.

Tribal Brand Index alone does not tell us anything about the size of the audience. In the TBI report, we include site visitor data and plot TBI vs. size of audience for each marketer or marketer segment.

The plotted data falls into four quadrants, each associated with a unique marketing insight:

Tribal Nations are marketers that have high TBIs and high site traffic. When you combine a strong targeting signal with a high level of site traffic, the conditions are primed for a Social Targeting™ campaign that can perform well and at scale.

Tight Bands are marketers that have high TBIs and relatively low traffic. These marketers have a strong, distinct targeting signal but a smaller base of customers to expand upon. They present a good opportunity to use Social Targeting™ to scale site traffic through advertising.

Mass Brands are marketers that have high site traffic and low TBIs. In order to reach their extended audience effectively, Mass Brands should look at ways to segment users into groups that establish stronger signals, either through targeting customers in areas of their site associated with distinct product segments or perhaps through the use of social media strategies.

Loose Links are marketers with low TBIs and low site traffic. Marketers should revisit their customer targeting strategy to cover areas of their site that have higher traffic. Alternative data sources may be needed as seed data to kick-start campaigns.

Rather than using TBI as a metric to necessarily be optimized, we believe that marketers can use this report to better understand their audiences and determine how Social Targeting™ can help them achieve their marketing objectives.