frankly speaking
The Illusion of Web Privacy
Let’s be clear - web privacy is important. When you’re surfing at 2am, you really don’t want to be concerned with who might be tracking what you’re looking at online. For centuries, people have expected what they do in the privacy of their own homes wouldn’t be publicized to the outside world, and for the most part, that’s the case. In general, people at parties don’t know what kinds of websites you visit, your colleagues at work don’t know that you spend two hours a day playing Farmville, and your girlfriend probably doesn’t know about your match.com account.
But let’s be honest with ourselves - the advent of the internet has changed everything, including our expectation of privacy. Recently, there has been a bit of an uproar about online privacy, not just on Facebook, but with certain ways that advertisers and agencies target consumers with ads. These two incidents, while generating a lot of press, are not new to those who are familiar to how the web works and how advertising on the web is becoming more and more sophisticated.
Facebook (which is has been in hot water with consumer advocacy groups regarding privacy since it launched) was recently criticized for the way data is handled on its site by third party app developers. Here’s the smoking gun:
Many of the most popular applications, or “apps,” on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.
Seriously. Read that again, your name and maybe your friends name. First of all, this is ridiculous. Secondly, any ecommerce site that you visit on a daily basis probably knows more about you than the innocuous experience described above. For example, most ecommerce sites track the following”
- the time you visited the site
- the total amount of time you spent on the site
- the site you last visited before you came to the ecommerce site
- how many clicks you make on the ecommerce sites
- what products you looked at while you were on the ecommerce site
- the likelihood of making a purchase in the future
And the interesting thing is they can do all of this analysis without you even logging in.
Another recent practice by advertisers and agencies that has drawn a lot of ire from consumer advocacy groups is a practice known as retargeting or remarketing. At the most basic level, when you visit a website like eBay, Overstock or Zappos and then navigate away from those sites, those companies will retarget you with ads that promote products that those companies sell. Some people in the baby boom generation feel this is just too creepy for them and are trying to sue. It’s doubtful that any of these lawsuits will get anywhere. Why? Simply because of the amount of data involved.
If your a consumer and you don’t want your data passed around, what do you do? Well, one answer is don’t surf the web. However, that answer is becoming more and more illogical, given how much the web is becoming apart of our daily lives. The other answer is to clear your web cookies and flash cookies often. Also, be sure to install an ad-blocker.
It will be interesting to see how all the litigation of advertising data collection issue sorts itself out. The ultimate reality is that advertisers and data collection companies will always find new and inventive ways to show consumers more relevant and interesting ads. What’s more, the economic law of “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” applies to the web as well.
Online Display Advertising Technology Landscape
I saw this Online Display Advertising chart a while back and I just found it again (thx to datainsightsideas).
It’s complicated looking at first, but it does show who the biggest Online Display Advertising Technology players are and groups them into handy boxes.
via digital-diva
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If and when advertisers on facebook can integrate and target via Places, the LBS game is over…”
Proper Revenue Attribution in Online Marketing
Part of he problem with today’s social media ROI model is it doesn’t properly take into account how to properly attribute incremental traffic, conversion and sales. This is a microcosm of the online marketing landscape at large – many companies do not properly attribute each respective marketing channel with their due credit for driving traffic and ultimately revenue.
Why don’t companies do this? When you ask advertisers they come up with a variety of excuses ranging from simply not having enough time to do the proper analytics to limited internal resources. Commonly, most companies use what is generally referred to as the ‘last-click method’ of value attribution, that is which ever channel was the last channel that drove the customer to convert is the one that is credited for the sale? Unfortunately, this doesn’t provide the entire truth as to the true effectiveness of an advertisers online marketing efforts.
How should companies properly attribute revenue to the marketing channels? Opinions on this are a dime a dozen. I find the most effective way model of revenue attribution to be as follows:
- The last channel that touches the customer should get the most credit for the conversion. Usually, a customer is touched by 3 to 4 marketing channels before they make a purchase.
- After crediting the channel that drove the channel with the conversion with a majority of the credit, the rest of the credit should be evenly distributed across the rest of the channels that touched the customer.
Let’s walk through an example. Let’s say customer x comes through paid search and makes a purchase of $100 on your website. Further, let’s say that customer X saw a retargeting display ad, an email, and an affiliate ad before eventually converting after coming through on the paid search ad. How should this be broken out? I would suggest that $50 of the revenue be attributed to paid search, and the rest of the $50 should be divided up and evenly distributed among the email, affiliate and display channels.
Proper channel attribution is important in any online marketing campaign and will enhance the effective ROI of your overall marketing efforts.
This is a good deck on assessing the ROI of social media. The thing that I think is missing is on slide 26 as it implies that in order for one to get a full understanding of ROI on a company’s social media activities, you need to take into account interaction and influence. I couldn’t disagree more.
While interaction and influence are important at the end of the day, they probably did not close the sale (though, you can rightfully argue that they helped lead to the sale, which leads to the age old problem of value attribution in the digital space).
Return on Investment for any channel in the digital space is easily measured by knowing the dollar value of sales generated for every dollar invested in advertising. It’s that simple. While I think social media is valuable and at some point in the future may be even more valuable than search (in terms of ROI/ROAS), right now it’s still under-performing for a lot for a lot of companies in terms of driving actual sales.
Come ‘on Gilt Groupe - get your retargeting together. #retargetingfail
New Twitter Business Model - Yeah, I called It…
Twitter announced their new business model last week. Basically, it’s a sponsored tweet model where advertisers can sponsor tweets that will be inserted when someone does a search on twitter. Eventually, sponsored tweets will be integrated into users normal feeds that they look at on a daily basis.
Interestingly, I guessed that this would be their model almost a year and a half ago. Want proof? Well, let’s take a look.
Initially, John Battelle posed the following question via twitter:
I, in turn (and probably many others) answered with the following response:
Wow, sometimes I amaze myself. Wondering if twitter now owes me a rev share…
10 Essential Rules for Brands in Social Media 
Taddy Hall (former chief strategy officer for the Advertising Research Foundation) posted an article in AdAge - 10 Essential Rules for Brands in Social Media.
I liked his 10 rules, so I thought I’d shorten and re-blog:
1. The 1% Rule
A small fraction of site visitors are responsible for a…
via digital-diva
This HP takeover of ESPN.com is awful and useless. The Call-to-Action across the top just takes the user to a little game that HP is sponsoring deeper in ESPN’s site. The 300x250 graphic on the middle right is confusing, has no Call-to-Action, the font at the bottom (in gray) is unreadable and the logo doesn’t mesh well with the background.
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Welcome to my blog. My name is Ben Wilkinson. I work in online marketing and advertising. I'm also a rabid Red Sox fan. This blog is dedicated to everything from sports and politics to business and pop-culture. Sit back, relax and enjoy!
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