If you have not heard the term before, you may still be familiar with the core issue: “How valuable is each component of a given marketing communications mix in today’s complex online and offline world?”
It’s a question that bothered me in a previous company where we gave complete credit to “the last click”, as we evaluated our display ads, organic and paid search, referral and email efficacy and the results from a variety of online media placements. What about our print advertising, trade shows, retail presence, distribution vendor days, email campaigns, airport advertising, radio spots, radio show sponsorships and social media? We did not have the budget necessary for national TV, radio, or other more “aggressive” approaches, so those were not in the mix. In fact, the total budget was just between $4 million and $8 million total for all forms of media promotion. Depending upon your company’s size, that might be a lot, the same or a little.
Regardless the issue remains … However, before we dive directly into attribution models, we need to make sure we set an understanding of how media is consumed today.
The Only Thing Certain is Change
Things have changed rapidly over the past few years, especially in high technology industries. Social media has risen in importance (at least in many people’s minds) … see Beware of Headlines about Social Media Use and Social Media is Just Another Version of Word of Mouth for my thoughts. Online seems to have become “king” and traditional offline media has waned.
However Things Still Take Time
It also occurred to me that we “forgot” some of the basics of advertising theory. We had reach and frequency but not time of day. Moreover, because we had daily statistics, it seemed we wanted to make daily decisions which in an online world can be misleading. This is especially so for display. Just as in any other form of media exposure, it takes some time before a given ad placement is seen by a given individual. As in the physical world an ad may appear on a page but they other don’t see it, or they ignore it. It might appear several times before someone looks at it and is motivated to “click”. Evaluating a new ad campaign against one that has been “in market” for a few months is folly.
Key Components of Online Media
For the purposes of our discussion, let’s use seven major categories for overall online efforts:
- Direct – Someone types in the url of your company
- Paid Search – You pay Google for Adwords
- Organic Search – Someone types in a text string describing something
- Referral – You are mentioned on another web property or they link with you
- Display – Classic web ads placed on media sites that your potential customers might visit
- Email – Your outbound efforts to a mailing list
- Social Media – Mentions/links/discussions on theses sites
This post focuses on Display Advertising as a means to connect with potential customers.
Time of Day or Dayparting is Important
In other electronic media (like radio and TV) dayparting is a key component of ad placement decisions. I could not get our team behind understanding that this was an important metric in the online world. They simply did not have the experience to understand why it was important, even though Google had made it available since June of 2006. Hold this thought while we add in the next three considerations.
Where Online Media is Displayed is also Important
The media mix element explosion is not the only complexity in the online world. Display devices have also moved rapidly from desktops and laptops to include large screen displays, smartphones and tablets, making creation, placement and measurement even more complex.
Tablets are key because due to the success of the iPad, they have redefined online use in less than four years. They were aided, abetted and preceded by the surge in Smartphones which started the shift beginning with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. While we could consume ads on our smartphones, mobile websites and specific mobile ads were required. Tablets changed all that. We could browse a full site in a size display, that was much bigger and more convenient than a cell phone.
Today, “responsive” website design tools have made things much easier and eliminated the real need for separate sites for phones vs tablets vs desktops. As an example, this site is based on a responsive design that works seamlessly across mobile devices, laptops, desktops and large screen displays. If your site is not based on a responsive design, make plans to do so as soon as possible.
Flash versus HTML5
The adoption of tablets (dominated by the iPad) introduce another decision. Historically banner ads were Flash-based. The iPhone and iPad do not support Flash, but all devices that support Flash also support HTML 5. The recommendation here is obvious, don’t use Flash; use HTML 5 for any non-static banner ads. Also, since you already have , or will soon have, a responsive website don’t use Flash anywhere.
Lean Forward vs. Lean Back
One of the reasons that TVs and PCs have never merged, has nothing to do with technology. How the displays are used is they key difference. With a traditional keyboard and display on a laptop, the use is “lean forward”. I am primarily creating and secondarily consuming content. TV is “lean back” and relax. It’s also multiple people viewing in most homes, which makes sending emails or texts on the TV rather “hoggish”.
Enter the tablet. It is primarily a “lean back” consumption device, but it can used to create content as needed. In many homes today, multiple devices are in use at the same time. All the members of my family have their smartphones and tablets with them while we watch TV together.
Some More Detail on why Dayparting is Important
In a multi-device user world, purchases can be made from any device for any device, as well as, for work, home or work-at-home. Information may be gathered at work for home use and vice versa. A simple approach simply ignores when display advertising is presented and typically focuses on re-targeting users who have previously clicked on an ad or visited a website.
However, there are benefits to be gained by understanding your target audience(s) online behavior and when they are most likely to purchase or get deep into the sales funnel. If you have an online store use that sales data to tell you when sales are most likely to happen. If not, use it to tell you when to focus your ad placement.
Be careful that you also understand the time zones of those buyers and normalize the data to a common time (i.e. 6 PM in every time zone). Otherwise you will not see the true hourly picture and will be led to the assumption there is no pattern. This was the erroneous conclusion reached by the Marcom and Agency teams in that aforementioned “previous company”. “Mileage will vary”, so just check and do a careful analysis before dismissing dayparting.
What’s it all Mean?
The net, net is that there are multiple physical and virtual touch points and use cases we need to anticipate as we plan our marketing mix. We shouldn’t ignore the physical world or the online world because consumers (businesses too) move easily among them in unpredictable ways.
In our next post, we will focus on understanding the use of attribution models using this conext as a basis.
