Matthew Dodd Matthew is Vice President, Research & Analytics, Nielsen Online, EMEA and is responsible for leading and managing the EMEA research & analytics teams. This principally includes panel and web analytics, Buzzmetrics, ad effectiveness and custom research. Read the full biography here.

Rebooting the Online Ad Metric
- A new way to measure effectiveness.

Matthew Dodd - 30 April, 2010

At long last the top 100 FMCG brand advertisers are starting to invest in online display. In the last 12 months to Jan 10 they increased their spend by 36% (source: Nielsen Media research). However, this is still only 1% of total media expenditure of £2.3bn (source Nielsen Media Research) and significantly less than TV, the mainstay of branding communications.

So why the reluctance to move more branding monies online, when it is the most accountable media? Is it because there is still a question mark over the metrics themselves?

10 years ago the industry realised that the click through metric was limiting its ability to sell to brand advertisers.

As the new kid on the block, the Internet was keen to quickly demonstrate its value to advertisers. As such, the click through (CTR) became the metric of choice (i.e. I directly clicked on the ad after I saw it) which we all agree is a not a realistic assessment of how advertising is consumed or works. However it was fine when the medium was in its infancy and advertisers enjoyed good CTR rates. But as the medium flourished, and attracted more advertisers, response rates fell dramatically to an all time low (average 0.18% AdTech 2007).

10 years ago the industry realised that the click through metric was limiting its ability to sell to brand advertisers. As such a new evaluation metric was born in the form of brand effectiveness studies delivered via a pop up survey, often served as someone left the site on which the ad ran. Unfortunately this has done very little to remove the scepticism since the campaign is measured at the peak of consumption and as per other media.

As such, there is a real need to move the Internet effectiveness measurement debate forward and provide a better assessment of its impact and role in building audience reach and on brand perceptions and behaviours. At Nielsen we believe that there are three things that need to be done to improve the industry’s ability to demonstrate the effectiveness of branding online:

In order to answer this question we first need to embed our tag (1x1 pixel) into the creative of the online ad units. This then enables us to passively capture these exposures at a respondent level on our desk top metered panel. Our metered panel is fully representative and weighted to the country’s online population. It also takes into account cookie deletion as well as filtering out non-resident based exposures to the advertising.

For attitudinal dimension we tag the Research Now (RN) panel, Europe’s leading online research panel provider, to utilise those panellists that have agreed to have the Nielsen cookie placed on their PC’s (400,000 panellists across 7 European markets). We then employ a variety of methods to keep the cookie present on the panellists' PCs - this includes regular email campaigns and placing the same code on high traffic pages on their site.

This then enables cookies to be matched when the panellists are exposed to tagged ad units enabling us to identify respondents who have been exposed to the advertising and emailing them to participate in the survey. This eliminates the need for pop-up survey invitations on the site where the advertising is being conducted. .

By examining the results of 100 studies, based on more than a sample of 400,000 panel observations and 60,000 survey responses, we now have a much clearer picture of online’s role in driving attitudes and behaviours.

As such we are able to determine that online display advertising is able to significantly increase (by 20% from 25% to 30%) top of mind (spontaneous) awareness, the key metric for brand managers suggesting that online works in a much more subliminal way akin to print. And that it is on average 20 times more powerful than the current CTR metric would have us believe (i.e. on average 3.6% went onto visit the advertiser later the campaign period compared to an average “click through” rate of 0.18%).

Brand advertisers need to reassess the real opportunity of online. They need to move away from the “last-click-counts” model to look at the bigger picture that online display plays in the customer journey. Thus gleaning a richer insight into its ability to distil brand messages in the minds of online consumers, stimulate brand engagement and deliver greater ROI than the CTR would have us believe.

Is it time to reboot your online ad effectiveness evaluation metrics?

* GRP (short for Gross Rating Point) is an acronym used in advertising to measure the size of an audience reached by a specific media vehicle or schedule. It is a sum of ratings points per spot placed in a given schedule over a specified period of time. For example, an advertiser places an advertisement in a show that garners a 2.0 rating point in any given demographic universe times 50 spots that ran in that show will achieve a gross rating point of 100 for that advertiser.

Matthew Dodd

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