Three Tools for Understanding Ad Reach: Did my display campaign rea...

Today, we’ll have two presenters. My name is Damian Roskill and I am the Managing Director of Marketing here at Compete. I’ll be leading the webinar.Our supporting presenter today is Dan Pflock. Dan is a Product Manager for Media Products here at Compete

But before we begin, some webinar logistics.Today’s webinar will be recorded – we’ll email a link to the recording after the webinar.If you have any questions during the webinar, please enter them into the questions box on the right. We’ll work through all the questions at the end of the webinar and try and answer as many as we can.If you’re having technical difficulties viewing the webinar, try using a different browser such as Firefox.Finally, we’ll be tweeting during the presentation, so, as a reminder, the Twitter hashtag for today’s webinar is #CompeteRF.

Well thanks Damian – and welcome everyone. It’s great to see you could all join.O: So, let’s get right to today’s topic. We’ve broken it down into 4 parts.We’ll start by covering:Why we need to pay attention to reach and frequency metrics.Next three sources for these metrics and what each provides.Then we’ll go into a brief demo of how Compete can help you measure reach and frequencyFinally how to optimize reach and frequency to minimize wasted ad spend.P: Each of you has your own reasons for joining today, and we welcome all of you. We expect this webinar will be particularly useful if:-you’re involved in media buying and analytics specifically around display advertising.or -you’re just curious to learn more about reach and frequency analytics and how they can be optimized.You’ll see we’ve oriented this to be most relevant for advertisers and agencies, but if there’s folks from the publisher or ad-sales side, that’s great as well.T: Alright, let’s get started.

O: To set up today’s conversation about advertising measurement, I first want to go back to where it starts. The reasons for Why we pay for advertising in the first place.P: And that will lead us into the importance of understanding campaign reach and frequency.T: So why do we advertise?

P: To move the needle! I’m sure we canall agree we advertise because we want to drive some kind of action. Maybe it’s acquiring new customers or simply to drive awareness.By moving that needle we anticipate more sales. It might be from new customers or continuing a relationship with existing customers.T: So you know you want to move the needle and your going to do that through advertising. Before you even create your ads you likely decide on a target audience. Unless you’re representing a ubiquitous product like Coca Cola where everyone with a wallet is your customer you’d be wasting your money just trying to blanket massive audiences.For most of us in order to maximize ad spend, that means advertising to a targeted audience.

P: We have an idea of who we want to reach.Many of us conduct focus groups or run surveys to learn about who our target audience is.You may already know who buys your products the most or maybe you want to grow your business and sell to a new audience.Whatever the case may beyou’ll likely utilize a media planner, information from an ad server, a publisher, or an agency to find out where your ads are most likely to reach that target audience.T: After deciding on a target audience, next you decide how loud you want to be. How many times do you want that audience to see your ad?

P: Do you want to reach individuals an average of 5 times, 10 times, 20 times… Trial and error and some analysis will help you determine the most effective frequency.It’s interesting to note that even if you try to control the frequency, chances are some individuals will see the far more times than others. It’s not uncommon to even see exposures of 50, 100, even up to 1,000 times online.T: Now that you’ve painstakingly made these key decisions for target audience and frequency, and the campaign is running. Everyone wants to know how it’s performing?

P: There are lots of questions to ask:Do you know how many people the campaign reached and through which web sites?What is the composition of the audience?Are they converting at a sufficient rate?Are they seeing the ad enough times?Is the campaign having any impact?These are all key questions we’d all like to have answers for at our fingertips. T: And that brings us to the next part of the webinar. A discussion of the core metrics for measuring a campaign. Reach and frequency.

Not all analytics platforms provide the data we need to fully understand reach and frequency to minimize spend. So next I’ll talk about the three main sources for our reach and frequency data and what each one has to offer.T: But first we’d like to get the audience involved, so Damian’s going to ask our first of 2 audience poll questions.

Here’s our first poll question– What tool do you trust to measure your campaigns’ reach?Please use the voting section on the right side of the screen to register your vote and you’ll instantly see the results from you and other participants in the webinar.Answers:Web analytics systemAd server reportingPublisher campaign reportingI don’t currently use a tool to measure reachResults in line with what we might have expected. It’s great to see that only a small percent don’t currently use a tool.

O: As I talked about in the first segment, we set precise audience targets when purchasing online media. So we would expect to hit those targets right?P: Unfortunately it’s not that easy. We have more data and more tools than ever before, but when it comes to understanding who we really reach with our advertising it’s often difficult to say.You wonder, as a media professional, can you see everything you need to see? Some tools are more helpful than others.T: I’m going to cover the three main analytics tools used for measuring display ad campaign reach.

Local Analytics Google AnalyticsOmnitureSiteCatalystAd Server ReportingDoubleClick Atlas DARTPanel Supported Campaign MeasurementThese tools utilize direct measurement of impressions through a pixel or tag much like google analytics but they also incorporate data from a large panel of online consumers.Some examples includecomScoreAdEffx Campaign Essentials Nielson Online Campaign Ratings Compete Ad R/F

Let’s start with your local analytics. These are the analytics tools you’ll most likely use to analyze your website traffic, but they can also be used to look at traffic from ad campaigns.From local analytics like this screen shot of google analytics you’ll be able to see:# of visitors (people who clicked or converted on the ad and landed on your site or a landing page)What sites those visitors came fromAs well as how much time they spent on your site and how many pages they visitedGoogleAnalytics can also be handy for tracking visitors through a product purchase or a sign up The one thing you won’t see here is how many people the campaign reached, you just see the yield.T: Let’s take a look at OmnitureSiteCatalyst which is another local analytics platform.

Here’s a SiteCatalyst Dashboard showing metrics for an ad campaign. Compete actually uses both Google Analytics and Sitecatalyst for some of our own sites and campaigns.In the center here is a daily tracking of impressions and clicks in a nicely laid out funnel chart.SiteCatalyst gives a little more information showing the number of impressions.But again there’s no indication of who your ads are reaching.T: Next we’ll move on to Ad Server Reporting

O: These are some screen captures of reporting from Ad Server DoubleClickThrough an ad server you can also see the # of impressions# of clicksandConversion rateFrom an Ad Server you might get the number or unique visitors and a frequency calculation as well, but not always.T: We’re getting there now. The pieces of the puzzle are coming together, but we are still scratching out head looking for a few more pieces.

O: You’re still probably asking yourself, do I really know who my campaign reached?P: With the metrics from those two tools, not really. So, why is audience info necessary? Because without it you can’t optimize your campaign and could be over or under spending. I’ll talk about optimization techniques shortly.Think about it this way though. If you called up Clear Channel to place a billboard ad and they asked you who you wanted to reach and you said, I’m not sure, just put it wherever. You’ll have a hard time finding out who you actually reached. How would you know where to begin optimizing if the campaign performed poorly? T: That’s where the deeper reach and frequency analytics of panel supported reporting comes in like comScore Campaign Essentials or Compete’s Ad R/F. Since this is Compete after all Damian and I are going to give you a quick demo of Ad R/F in a couple minutes.But before that we have our second poll question for the audience.

Do you know the demographics of the audience your campaigns reach?AlwaysSometimesRarelyNeverNow I hope it’s not never, but that’s understandable if it is.Those of you that said always, I’m guessing already use panel supported analytics to measure campaign reach.For those of you that said sometimes and rarely we want to see you move up to that always answer.

O: Now we’re moving on to Compete’s Ad R/F product which offers panel supported reach, frequency, and audience demographic measurement for ad campaigns.P: Ad R/F measures display campaigns and provides weekly and post campaign reports to clients. In Ad R/F several actionable metrics are available:UV’sImpressionsReachExposure FrequencyDemographic CompositionDisplayed by Age, Income, and genderT: Okay Damian let’s open up a live Ad R/F dashboard now and I’ll walk you through a quick demo.

Demo link – https://insight.compete.com/views/Newco_demo/RFDashboardUVdpflock / dpflockO: Here’s a live version of a Compete Ad R/F dashboard.This is web enabled so clients can login anytime and view their data.The data here represents an ad campaign that ran for several weeks and has several million impressions.The first thing we want to look at is the time period adjustment on the left side. We offer the ability to view data on a weekly basis or for the campaign in total. Let’s go ahead and select the entire campaign time period.Next in the campaign component we can decide if we want to view the data for all of the campaign ad placements, just placements on certain publishers, or even a single ad placement if there were more than one on a certain site.Let’s look at MeeboOver on the right side of the screen you see the Summary Metrics.On the left side we’ve divided the impressions up by age, income, and gender.The gender one is the simplest and can be very valuable. For example this campaign was targeted at women. If you look at the gender pie chart you see the audience for the ads run on meebo was split fairly evenly.Let’s look at another publisher and see if there is a difference. Try Yahoo Damian.Now the placements on yahoo seemed to have reached more woman than on meebo.That’s great data. That lets us know that to reach our goal we could run more flights on yahoo, or knowing that Meebo does have a significant female audience we could talk to them about running the ads next to different content to improve.Now we’re looking at the full campaign time period right now, but what if you knew that information three weeks into your campaign? Well during the campaign if you looked at the report as soon ad the third week data came in you could have optimized right away to improve the rest of the campaign.

O: Now that you’ve seen the demo you might be wondering how Compete collects campaign data and builds the Ad R/F dashboards. P: We take an approach that unifies our panel and tag based measurement.Compete has a panel of over 2 million US consumers who have opted in to let us follow their online behavior.For Ad R/F we place a tag on a clients ads to get a census count of impressions. Once we know how many people saw the ad we can use our panel to project the audience composition, essentially organizing all those impressions into demographic groups such as age, income, and gender. T: Hopefully you enjoyed the demo of Ad R/F. Let’s move on and discuss optimization.

T: Now that you’ve seen what reach and frequency measures are available, let’s talk about the levers you can pull to optimize.First we’ll look at optimizing without reach and frequency data.

O: Here’s what you mightsee with your local analytics and ad server reporting on a campaign.In this example you see two ad placements, both are banners on two different publishers. Combined they have 100,000 impressions that resulted in400 visits to your site and 40 conversions.Some local analytics and ad servers will also make demographic data about your customers available. In this case you see 80% of the impressions were male.P: Given this data, what are your optimization options?You could try and increase conversion through trial and error, testing various publishers and placements. This data does not provide the metrics you need to optimize your audience though.T: In the next slide we’ll look at optimizing with audience data.

O: With panel supported analytics like Compete’s Ad R/F you will get a demographic breakdown of the audience you reached.In this example 10% of the impressions we male and 90% were female.Note that the conversions on the website were 80% male though.P: With this information you can tell it might be beneficial to seek out a more male leaning audience since they seem to be converting at a much higher rate. In this case your product is most likely tailored to men and thus the target audience likely should be as well.You could adjust the publishers you advertise on or perhaps your ad itself needs better targeting.T: Lastly we’ll optimize for frequency.

O: Again with panel supported analytics you’ll see the reach and the frequency.P: If you know the frequency, with some trial and error or comparisons with other campaigns you can start to infer how many times your audience needs to see the ads to be effective.The ideal frequency is the lowest level that yields the highest conversion. So efficient reach and less spend. T: By taking advantage of all the opportunities you have for optimization, over time you should be able to move the needle even faster and farther. At the same time you will likely even save on ad spend that was wasted on the wrong target audience or incorrect frequency in the past.Now let’s recap what we’ve learned.

O: Let’s recap what we learned.P: Read slideT: That concludes the presentation portion of the webinar. I want to thank you all for attending and now I’ll turn it back over to Damaian for any questions from the audience.

Thank you – here’s our contact information – feel free to reach out to either Dan or myself with any questions or comments.

Where does the data come from? Compete operates a panel of two million US consumers who have opted in to letting us anonymously follow their online behavior. As an online analytics and market research company we’re able to use that data to support products like Ad R/F and several other research based products. Will my data work in X country?Right now Compete provides US data only.Where do you get the demographic data from?A. That’s a great question that goes back to our panel of 2 million US consumers. In the case of Ad R/F we can look to our panel to see who among it was exposed to the ads and make a projection of the overall campaign audience. We have a team that ensures the panel is an accurate representation of the US population..