Travel Trends: Tracking You, Engagement Mapping & Click Thrus

The Web is Watching You: The NY Times reported recently on a new analysis of online consumer data thats shows that large Web companies (i.e Google, AOL, MySpace, Microsoft & Yahoo) are learning more about people than ever from what they search for and do on the Internet. The analysis conducted by comScore analyzed consumer touch-points on these networks (searches, purchases, etc.) and then looked at how many times this consumer data was sent back to the servers. Not surprisingly, Yahoo came out with the most data collection points in a month on its sites; about 110 billion collections, or 811 for the average user; on the other side of the spectrum, publishers such as Condé Nast only recorded 34 data collection events for the average site visitor.
www.NYTimes.com

Engagement Mapping: Digital marketers everywhere rejoice! Seems like Microsoft wants to try and take a stab at figuring out how to put a value and measure online advertising. Microsoft recently announced the launch of "Engagement Mapping", a new approach to "managing and measuring the effectiveness of online campaigns". The tool attempts to give advertisers a holistic view of how to plan a campaign online and tries to convey of how the sum total of a consumers' exposure to your brand—be it display, rich media or search, seen multiple times on multiple sites and across many channels—can influence the desired result of the campaign. "Engagement" as we've written many times on this blog is obviously the ultimate metric for digital media; Microsoft's intentions are of course far from egalitarian given their recent acquisition of aQuantive, the digital marketing/ad serving network. Nevertheless this will be interesting experiment to watch. For another viewpoint on this topic, check out this article from Seeking Alpha.
www.Microsoft.com

Please Stop Asking About Click Rates! If you've ever been in one of those meetings where someone is always focused on the proverbial "click rate" this is a great read! The writer laments about our obsessive love for the "click thru rate." My favorite line from the article has to be this one:

In the offline world, how many times have you seen someone hop into a taxi cab as a result of seeing an ad on the cab, and ask to be driven to the store featured in that ad? This is the functional equivalent of tracking click-through rates — and if you look at it in those terms, it sounds a little silly.

Blogs.Mediapost.com