Many e-retailers are rushing into alternative forms of online marketing, often to keep up with competitors’ strategies, without necessarily knowing how to measure and analyze the impact of new marketing tools and advertising channels, experts say.
“We’re seeing retail clients getting into a heavy experimentation mode in alternative marketing,” says Stephen DiMarco, vice president and chief marketing officer of Compete Inc., a company that measures web traffic and consumer response to online marketing. “Once somebody creates a page on Facebook and a rival sees it, it causes the rest of the market to rush to create a Facebook application, regardless of whether it drives results.”
At the same time, he and others say, many retailers are wondering whether or not they should develop a blog with consumer-generated content, which can result in negative as well as positive comments about a company’s brand and image.
Making it difficult to decide on marketing strategies is some uncertainty in how to measure and analyze consumer response, says Andy Fisher, director of analytics for advertising services firm Avenue A Razorfish.
“A good example is social networks, how to measure the marketing impact of those,” he says. Fisher notes that marketers can use consumer panels from audience measurement firms like Compete, comScore Inc. and Nielsen Online, but that they should also look at other sources such as web site analytics tools and third-party ad servers that may be loading online ads into widgets attached to social network pages.
“It’s very important to look at data from these sources altogether as much as possible,” Fisher says. “The knowledge gained through one should be applied to the knowledge gained through the others.”
Indeed, trends among online data-management providers support such combination of data, he adds. For example: web content management company Interwoven buying Optimost, which analyzes how online visitors respond to web page designs in Internet searches; web analytics firm Omniture buying Offermatica, which provides on-demand technology to retailers for testing visitor response to multiple arrangements of product displays and other online content.
Online ad measurement companies, meanwhile, have been expanding their services in recent months. Compete launched recently a new Behavior Match application, which among other things measures segments of consumers according to their interest in particular advertising networks and sections within portals.
Nielsen Online and comScore have also each launched new measurement services for tracking online videos and other content.
Nielsen, for example, launched with Digimarc Corp. the Nielsen Digital Media Manager, which supports the monitoring and managing of digital content across social networks, peer-to-peer services and other web sites specializing in user-generated content. “We believe these services will stimulate the growth of online video distribution, to the benefit of consumers, content providers and distributors,” says David Calhoun, chairman and CEO of the Nielsen Co., the parent of Nielsen Online.
ComScore introduced this fall Ad Metrix Publisher, which is designed to track online ads—and demographics on the people who view them—across all types of advertising platorms, including rich media and interactive ads as well as static content.
BuzzLogic Inc. released last month the public beta version of its Ad Targeting system, which enables marketers to monitor the level of activity at blogs across the Internet and find those most influential for particular brands and products.
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