How successful are online ads?

One of the big challenges for marketing executives is tracking the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns. It can be done, by combining measurements of click data, surveys and actual purchasing information, said Matt Pace, managing director for retail products at Compete, a web measurement firm that's part of Kantar Retail, a division of global marketing firm WPP.

Pace gave examples of various ways to combine different types of data to assess a particular campaign in a session today at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition entitled "Everything you wanted to know about your competitors' ad campaign—or your own."

One example he cited was for yogurt maker Yoplait's introduction in March of its Greek yogurt. The brand promoted the new product through several online channels, including web portals such as Yahoo and Live.com, paid search, Facebook, and food and health sites.

The diversity paid off, as consumers came to YoplaitGreek.com from several sources. The top referral source was Coupon.com, where consumers picked up discount offers, accounting for 34.8% of traffic. Next was the web site of food manufacturers General Mills, which provided 20.0% of referrals.

Pace noted that Yoplait did a good job of making its sales pitch consistent in both online display and paid search ads. Of the 90,000 visitors to YoplaitGreek.com in March, 26% came from online display ads and 6% from paid search.

The ads clearly targeted women, and 81% of those who downloaded Yoplait Greek coupons were female.

By way of contrast, Pace examined an ad campaign from an unnamed consumer goods manufacturer. Using survey data, the advertiser could determine that awareness of the campaign was much higher among younger consumers exposed to the ad campaign compared with a control group of consumers who had not seen the ads. Those exposed were also more likely to consider the advertised product, by 29.9% to 28.4%.

In addition to being able to combine click data with survey data, Pace said Compete works with its sister company Kantar Retail to compare actual in-store purchasing by some 80 million consumers to further measure the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns.