What's The Most Important Number In Online Display Advertising?

AdBean makes effective display advertising campaigns online easier, but the job is never exactly simple.  It's a combination of creative and analysis that uses charts and tables in equal measure to colors and fonts. We put the right tools in your hands to streamline workflow and expose the measurements you need - but what measurements are those?  It depends.

The click is still the trick: Omniture ROI study

No matter how you approach it, an advertising system leaves a lot of numbers in its wake. You pay for creative, then you pay for more, optimized creative.  You pay to plan out the media plan, then you pay to execute it - buying just so many impressions here, just so many there.  Then you pay to stay on top of the job and watch like a hawk as the results arrive in real time.  As the ads do their stuff, clicks come back through the door into what we call the funnel: a big number of clicks leading to a smaller number of sale or conversions at the other end of the funnel.  At every stage inside that funnel, numbers pile up in different ways.

Everything in online display advertising is measurable, but not every measurement is equally important to every campaign.  To get a sense of what marketers think is important, we need a little analytics about analytics.  Enter eMarketer's piece Stepping Up To ROI Measurement.  Omniture asked: you put the money and time in -- how do we best measure what you get back out?  Long story (and chart) short, more marketers think the two most important measures are the dollars going in, and the orders coming out.  If that seems somewhat crude, you'd probably be right  - as it turns out, most marketers complain they don't have the analytics talent to drill deeper and pull out more nuanced measurements.

Asked which analytics would give them the most actionable insights, marketers said the importance of marketing cost, orders, average order size and conversion rate. But they had the greatest ability to measure visits, page views, page views per visit and click-throughs.

The biggest challenge was talent. Marketers indicated they did not have staff with the expertise necessary to get the most out of the data available, and budget was the top reason they lacked the talent they needed.

Mikel Chertudi, senior director of global media and demand marketing at Adobe Systems, Omniture’s parent, said many survey respondents did not seem to have a full-time staff member devoted to Web analytics. About 60% of marketers said they spent less than 20 hours a week on online analytics.

The takeaway: the online display advertising business is still wrestling with ROI standard measurements - and the slender number of PhDs working in the industry probably isn't helping.