Category Archives: analytics

Welcome Mr. Viewthrough…

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The time has come for Viewthrough.org to be folded into Tip of the Spear blog.

After many years after seeing the glaring problem with ad measurement we now have bigger fish to fry with rampant ad fraud. While clicks are loaded with fraud as a means to keep up appearances viewthroughs are very difficult to fake unless forms are being filled out and logins faked…not impossible but that veers into lead gen fraud.

That said, viewthrough is still an important measure for discerning digital marketers.

Hello world!

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Dawn Over Lake Michigan

Greetings all, it has been a while since the last post and even longer since Google Analytics tracking was removed and replaced by Matomo.

The good news is that Viewthrough.org has now joined its sister site, The Tip of the Spear Blog, and is now published on WordPress…sayonara, adios and ciao Big G and Blogger.com.

More to follow including a new post about Viewthrough and Safari ITP!

Ban the Banner?

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Interesting article on AdExchanger, “The Rise Of Addressable Video And Banner-Ad Bans.” Seems to be the latest in an attempt to kill off banner advertising. Generally, a bad idea and kind of like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

http://adexchanger.com/tv-and-video/rise-addressable-video-banner-ad-bans

Display ad media (banners) are notoriously hard to measure especially if your strategy is an upper funnel one where clicks do not make sense as a KPI. Most banner ads seem to be about awareness or engagement in spite of that. Digital marketers should stick with proven ad research methods, e.g. brand lift studies or dig deeper into analytics using passive brand impact measurement like viewthrough. And of course there is always algorithmic attribution that can help.

A bigger threat to display media’s viability is ad blocking, which prevents display ads and any associated tracking tags from being served up. Yes, that means no potential for viewthrough (or clickthrough) if there are no ads presented to the user.

In addition to the reduced page clutter (what most people seem to want), ad blockers are also a good way to speed up your Web browsing experience. Unfortunately, too many publishers do not use advanced tag management to reduce the strain put on browsers when 25-50-100 3rd party cookies and tags fire in the browser.

http://www.iab.com/insights/ad-blocking/

According to eMarketer this is going to be a 25% de facto tax on publisher audiences. Some are however, asking users to shut off their ad blockers when visiting their site. Here is the official word from the IAB on ad blocking.

The Encima Group Donates Tag Management Referrals, Maintains Neutrality

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The latest from Encima but a long-time in the making….hopefully more digital analysts and marketers will consider Piwik as an open source alternative to sharing their precious customer data with G. And of course, the DAA is doing some great things for the industry and we want to be a part of that. Special thanks to David Clunes for his vision and support on this initiative.

Encima Group LogoNewark, DE – August 18, 2014 – Analytics consultancy The Encima Group, is pleased to announce the donation of several thousand dollars in referral fees earned through the recent recommendation and subsequent implementation of Signal’s technology platform. Signal’s Tag Management system (formerly BrightTag) was chosen by two of Encima’s major pharmaceutical clients as the best-in-class tag management solution. For one Encima client, their prior tag management system took too much time to use and was expensive. It was replaced with Signal and the client is already seeing ongoing tag maintenance now taking less than 10% of the time that it did before. For another client, Signal was deployed together with an enterprise site analytics solution across several high-profile Web sites making ongoing tag maintenance a snap.

David Clunes, CEO and Founder of The Encima Group explains, “With technology vendors often jockeying on new capabilities, we prefer let them do what they do best without getting caught up. We purposefully do not recommend the technology platforms that make us the most money, instead we recommend what is best for our client’s long-term analytics success. Donations like this help us continue to maintain our neutrality – all while doing some good for the industry.”

The Encima Group, known best for its independent analytics and digital operations services often finds itself recommending platforms for clients. Sometimes viewed as another value-added reseller, The Encima Group sees itself as an extension of their clients’ organizations and vigorously maintains its “Switzerland” status. That sensibility extends from the firm’s analytics practice which uniquely eschews agency media buying and creative services to focus on providing clients with both objective performance reporting and unbiased campaign optimization recommendation.

Clunes continues, “When it comes to analytics, more objectivity is always a good thing. We feel that this is a great way of paying it forward and that hopefully other firms get the idea.” By sharing the referral fees that it earned, Encima is simultaneously investing in two worthy causes known to analytics professionals worldwide: The Digital Analytics Association, a global organization for digital analytics professionals and Piwik, the globally popular open source Web analytics platform.

“The Digital Analytics Association is thrilled by the Encima Group’s donation,” said DAA Board Chair, Jim Sterne. “The funds will be added to our general fund to benefit all members of the DAA. We hope that others in the space will follow Encima’s leadership in this area.” For Piwik, the funds will be used to facilitate continued development of this open-source platform. Available as an alternative to sharing with 3rd parties, Piwik allows digital marketers to control their Web site behavioral data. Maciej Zawadziński, of the Piwik Core Development Team says, “This is great and will help us to further develop an alternative free Web analytics platform.”

About The Encima Group

The Encima Group is an independent analytics consultancy that was recently recognized for its successful growth in the Inc. 5000 (ranking in top 25%). The Encima Group’s mission really is about actionable analytics and flawless execution. Offering an integrated suite of services around multi-channel measurement, tag management, dashboards, technology strategy consulting and marketing operational support, The Encima Group pioneered the notion of Data Stewardship. The Encima Group is based in Newark, DE with offices in Princeton, NJ and Chicago, IL. Its client roster includes leading pharmaceutical companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb, Shire Pharmaceuticals, Otsuka, AstraZeneca and Novo Nordisk.

For more information about The Encima Group, visit www.encimagroup.com. For more information about Signal visit www.signal.co, for Piwki visit www.piwik.org and for the Digital Analytics Association visit www.digitalanalyticsassociation.com.

Media Contact(s)

Jason Mo, Director of Business Development (jmo AT encimagroup DOT com); phone (919) 308-5309; Domenico Tassone, VP Digital Capabilities (dtassone AT encimagroup DOT com); Phone.

 

Piwik: Alternative Analytics Presentation in Chicago

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Yours truly will be presenting, “Piwik: An Analytics Alternative,” a short presentation at this year’s Open Analytics Summit at the City Winery in Chicago on March 27th.

OAS is for Developers, Engineers, Data Scientists, CMOs, Data Analysts, CTOs, Architects, Brand Managers, and anyone passionate about open source technologies, big data, or data analytics. My presentation will be particularly interesting to digital marketers, enterprise technologists, Web analytics practitioners and others that are interested in a viable way to provide solid measurement while removing Google from their Web analytics stack.

Full Schedule and Register

If there is interest, I’ll post the presentation here as well.

IAB Recognizes Viewthrough

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Interactive Advertising Bureau -- Dedicated to the growth of interactive advertising 

From their annual meeting in Pam Springs, CA, the Internet Advertising Bureau published its Defining Cross-Platform Engagement White Paper. While there are plenty of interesting metrics to be found, we’re excited to see a short and sweet definition of viewthrough. Positioned as one of the three categories, Display Viewthrough is included among behavioral metrics.

Definition: Number of Brand site visits that could have been influenced by display media within a particular look-back window.
Measureable Today: Yes, Web Analytics

While this is a small victory for the cause of viewthrough measurement, there is plenty more to do to get the word out about VT. We’d like to advise the IAB that the prior metric included in this section of their study, “Video Completion Viewthrough Rate” ought to get a different name – perhaps “Play-through?” It is bad enough that Viewthrough and Viewability,  are routinely confused but this could actually obfuscate the different kinds of post-impression behavior, e.g. VT Visits, VT Conversions, etc…Also, the following metric listed, “Searched for More Information” could also use a better name – Viewthrough Site Search?

Other considerations:

  • VT does not have to be at a branded site although this is most likely, e.g. related microsites
  • Any high-value task that can be measured in a Web analytics platform could have a VT source
  • Look-back windows are usually set by the ad server not Web analytics systems
  • Like the “could have been influenced” but no mention of how to understand incrementality

Scroll down to Page 10 of the Defining Cross-Platform Engagement White Paper, to read it for yourself.

TagMan Finds Google Analytics Discrepancies

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Quick thoughts on the recent findings from TagMan



Perhaps advertisers and agencies will start thinking more about the rampant data collection and measurement conflicts-of-interest rampant in the Googleplex…or maybe just more shrugs.

    Solutions to the Privacy Debate: Lemons, Carrots and Potatoes

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    After reading the How to Prevent the ‘Do Not Track’ Arms Race  by Peter Swire, the inanity of it all becomes more apparent.The premise of this Wired piece is that users should have a choice…they do. They can visit a site and are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) agreeing to receive free content and services in exchange for being presented with targeted ads.

    Canny Web browsers are in a mad dash to curry favor with the genteel “Information should be free” crowd visible in the user comments. It seems that this end-run was done to pre-empt negotiations through W3C, most likely in an attempt to gain market share. However, it is surprising that for an attorney that Swire missed the opportunity to articulate the above quid pro quo argument missing in the discussion. Then again, so did the IAB. See Digital Media Lesson in Shooting One’s Foot (Part I).

    The Dead Weight Web Audience (DWWW) consists of variety of ad/tracking dodgers. The size of this audience and their habits can be measured by most major site analytics tools and ad servers out-of-the-box or with some customization. Common methods include:

    1. Browser DNT
    2. Cookie blockers
    3. Ad blockers
    4. JS rejectors
    5. NAI opt-outs
    6. Likely cookie-deleters
    7. Others…

    While the politicians posture and the debate rages on, sometimes it is necessary to turn these lemons into lemonade. The good news is that, solid ad analytics (or adverlytics) can inform the decision-making process about which kinds are most prevalent in your target Web audience.


    Advertisers
    It all starts with digital marketers and their agencies paying attention to the details of ad delivery. The growing interest in ad viewability is encouraging. For those that really want to reach a tech-savvy entitled audience that wants nothing to do with their ads  they will need to first measure it, in order to monetize it.


    • Carrot. Demographics on this audience may skew higher education and higher income; this  audience spends a lot of time online and believes in getting something for nothing and not afraid to post about it. Measuring the performance of this specific audience for your ad campaigns however, may require a concerted effort by digital media planners and analytics professionals – but that is their job.
    • Stick: Time to get up off the couch and start asking questions of your media suppliers, agencies and analytics team. Advertisers wasting impressions on an audience that doesn’t want any ads and is actively blocking your efforts to show them an ad is kind of masochistic. Ignorance is no longer an excuse as the money being wasted on targeting into the unappreciated abyss, could instead be heavied-up with more receptive audiences. Again, analytics can help refine targeting.

    If existing agency analytics can’t measure the Dead Weight Web Audience, then consider adding an independent analytics consultant.

    Publishers
    For site publishers that really want to attract the free-riding tech-savvy audience that also wants nothing to do with supporting their business model, the same advice applies: measure it and monetize it.

    • Carrot: Allow them to consume content for free, but find a way to sell advertising against this special audience. Free-riders can become its own targetable segment by definition – no off-site tracking or ad network is even needed. Anyone with DNT header activated, rejecting 3rd party cookies, blocking JS, etc…Most larger pubs already have an audience research/analytics and ad ops teams that can help do this and if not, additional consultants can be engaged.
    • Stick: Just say no to the content free-riders. While this has been really difficult for sites that have historically been in search of bulk ad impression delivery, the writing is on the wall considering the drive for ad viewability. When these literally dodgy people visit a site, send them a pop-up that advises them to pay for the session, subscribe, register or add site to the targeting white list. If the users choose not to, show them an empty page, very stripped down content or allow an annoying freebie cap. BTW, the pop-up can carry an ad, too.

    Ad Networks
    The real question is what to do with the DWWW that expects free content to be there when they arrive at a network Web site. These users can be sized up and once this is done, it is a question of monetization:

    • Carrot. Though anecdotal research suggests a small percentage of users are actually opting-out and that the size of the audience is relatively small, it does represent a valuable tech-savvy segment. Simply enable ad targeting of the DNT, NAI Opt-outs and the 3rd party cookie blocking crowd. Many ad networks have a means to even exclude likely cookie-deleters from their targeting. Folks, that sounds like a new segment to sell.
    • Stick. Develop or implement ad/pay wall technology. This will force the quid pro quo. For users that want to read their favorite bloggers, they will need to pay up with cash or a small slice of their attention. Smaller long-tail publisher partners will need help pulling this off but ad networks could easily deploy this technology.

    Conclusion
    Whether using the carrot, the stick or both, the solution is that advertisers and publishers need to take action on their own to stop getting ripped-off. Don’t carry this sack of entitled potatoes on your back. Now is the time to measure and monetize this otherwise mass of Dead Weight Web Audience.

    Leveraging an incremental approach that leverages solid adverlytics, these strategies can boost the bottom-line and shape the digital media industry for the future. In doing so, many of these regulatory problems will solve themselves.

    Learn to Say No to Free-riders.

      Facebook Acquisition of Atlas: Sad Day for Digital Advertisers

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                                                            The Funeral of Santa Fina”, Domenico Ghirlandaio, 1485

      Facebook just announced the other day  that it would acquire Atlas Solutions, a long-time competitor to Google’s DFA in the agency ad server business. As an adverlytics practitioner, many are asking about this and still more discussing the implications. Though the trade press will gush, investors may cheer and Atlas employees may be breathing a sigh of relief, it is truly a sad day for digital advertisers. Why? The choices available for independent third party ad serving (3PAS) just got much thinner. 

      The Rationale

      To be sure this is a canny move for Baby Google, just as Google’s DoubleClick acquisition engorged the dataplex with rich user-level behavioral data that spanned both both buy-side (DFA) and sell-side (DFP) – it was brilliant. And after several years, the folks at Google decided to invest in the DFA reporting interface and we now have a Google Analytics like wrapper (except it is now green). Not much improvement on core functionality like reach and frequency reporting, but hey – it is better than ReportCentral.

      The fact that DFA has maintained such a large market share since the Google acquisition suggests that client’s aren’t paying close attention to ad serving details. The very notion of pushback from advertisers and agencies is so unlikely that now, Google will also tell you how many of their ads were viewable, too. The Facebook deal is banking on it. For that matter, MediaPlex was absorbed into ValueClick way back in 2001 – they also own an ad network, an affiliate platform and Dotomi.

      For Facebook, this is a very smart move although it relies on digital marketers being easily distracted and not looking too closely. In this deal, it is not really about “closing the loop” for advertisers. FB could ostensibly do this now with the much heralded unicorn called the Conversion Pixel or View-Tags. What they are “closing the loop” on is their understanding and ability to datamine what many other advertisers campaigns are doing, and the targets of those ad campaigns and those behaviors across client sites via the Atlas Universal Tracking Tag infrastructure. It probably won’t be long before Facebook offers their own Analytics platform or maybe a Tag Management System. Like its hero, FB is often times ethically challenged when it comes to who’s data is it any way. Just recently, it was revealed that Facebook has manipulated their advertisers’ campaign performance reporting.

      That said, Atlas as a platform has faded over the years and needs investment to compete. It’s once advanced approach to attribution Engagement Mapping and stream of research from the Atlast Institute was a favorite among the analytics-minded. Yet, under Microsoft this pioneer of ad serving suffered from functional obsolescence as more site-centric and advanced algorithmic measurement has become more available. At the same time, Pointroll and MediaMind pivoted from rich media platforms to full-bodied ad servers. Many digital ad ops people that used Atlas regularly liked it, but later complained about lack of support. The upside is that Atlas won’t be shutting down anytime soon.

      However, digital advertisers and agencies should be on notice now more than ever.

      Recommendations

      1. Don’t Buy Technology and Media From the Same Vendor – In a world of digital marketing and an endless stream of bright shiny objects, it should give client-side marketers and savvy agencies pause that this is a serious conflict-of-interest that work against them. Since these ad serving tools are often counting ad impressions and clicks that they themselves sold – there is an incentive for self-serving manipulation.
        • For a better idea of how campaigns are performing leverage tools like Omniture, ComScore’s DigitalAnalytix. Coremetrics and WebTrends.
        • For more advanced attribution measurement look at independent tools like Adometry, Visual IQ or C3.
      2. Don’t Share your Behavioral Data – For the pleasure of sharing your valuable behavioral data, you are probably paying $0.04 oto $0.08 CPM to Google (through your agency and this may be marked-up). In this respect, far too many digital media agencies are dropping the ball on data stewardship and going with what is expedient. Ultimately reflects on them, but it also speaks to rampant client-side advertiser ambivalence or worse ignorance. 
        • For those that insist are intentionally looking to harness their user data, at least get something in return for example by joining a data co-op like Akamai ADS (now part of MediaMath). Privacy policy implications may vary.

        Advertisers and their agencies need to understand the very high proce they are paying. Time to look away from the Google, ValueClick and now the Facebook ad stack and consider other choices toute suite. In terms of ad servers left, the remaining major independent ad servers include MediaMind and Pointroll (though it is technically owned by Gannett, a newspaper company this is not as big a data play).

        Final Thought: Where is the FTC?

        Not sure where the FTC will come down on this but they essentially rubber-stamped the Google-DoubleClick acquisition back in 2007. Arguably this deal really does limit choice for digital advertisers but don’t count on the FTC doing much to scrutinize this. That digital advertisers and their agencies don’t value independent ad serving (and free of back-door data siphoning) is their problem and eventually it will sort itself out. To be sure the digital media ecosystem is complex and constantly-changing and federal bureacrtas are more focused on other more important matters. Plus, ad-serving just doesn’t make headlines like nefarious cookie tracking and consumer privacy.