Nate Hallowell’s

Channel Conflict and The Value Combo September 19, 2009

Online marketing and advertising isn’t always the only marketing vehicle. Often it’s part of the organizations marketing and promotions mix. As new technology emerges and different Internet channels become available, however, online marketing itself can have a number of channels. Further, online marketing might involve different vendors within channels – such as ad networks. One main problem facing all of these scenarios is tracking progress and value within different channels. Lets assume that a marketer uses 3 online channels – one e-mail marketing vendor, one search vendor and one ad network. If a user is served an ad 3 times by the vendor, then gets an e-mail which reminds her to do a search on the product where it comes up at the top of the results page a problem in tracking arises. When the effectiveness of each channel is measured, the only one that is guaranteed credit for the sale is the search channel. However, if a marker assumed that this was the only channel that should be renewed in the next campaign she’d probably be wrong because the conversions are also related to the other channels.

This issue isn’t only a problem for the client. In ad networks it’s become a great hurdle as campaigns run and clients see performance metrics. Until only recently – conversions were only credited to the clicks with which they were associated (it’s important to realize that “credit” here refers to a clients analysis after the buy,  it’s not associated with the initial billing). Now, clients are starting to find new ways to credit advertisers for impressions. In some cases – clients are spreading credit evenly across vendors based on impressions served. This isn’t always fair because it doesn’t discount credits to long tail (tier 2, 3) ad vendors that serve below the fold ads that never get seen.  The advertiser can also credit only the ad vendor that accounted for the click, and in the last scenario the ad vendor can base the performance on a “last cookie wins” scenario, in which situation the last impression served gets credit for all of the ads performances. Though ad networks may often dispute which tracking and performance metric the client should use when evaluating the campaign the client always has the final say.