E-MARKETING METRICS: Deliver the Right Messages for the Right Audience

By Dora Shankman

In today’s highly competitive and cost-conscious environment, advertisers must be innovative and creative in their approach to the Web. We must maintain dialogue, and branded content—whether in the form of branded Web sites, banner ads or sponsorships—is the most effective way of maintaining awareness and connectivity with your customer target audiences. Search campaigns are also an efficient way of testing a marketing venue, since they are flexible and can be changed with minimal notice.

Internet advertising, whether it’s Search-Engine Optimization, Consumer-Generated Media, or Performance-Media Planning, has grown significantly more than any other communications tactic and will continue to be the focal point of pharmaceutical and biotech companies when defining marketing objectives and media plans. Online media advertising by the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry will surpass the $1.3 billion mark by early 2009, according to the forecasters at eMarketer. By 2011, it’s forecasted to reach $2.2 billion. The pharmaceutical category alone accounted for 5% of the total U.S. online ad spending.

KNOW THE (EVOLVING) RULES—AND BE ACCOUNTABLE
With this huge investment also comes accountability. There needs to be a generational shift in media habits. Everyone is used to Reach and Frequency, but with the Web, there are more complex issues. We want performance metrics that are more than just an exposure, or cost-per-click. Performance for a product ad message to a client may be defined as controlling the cost of a program by a CPA (cost-per-action).

Lead Generation, also known as CPL, can be used for initiating a direct lead, building a customer database or ongoing marketing to a target audience. Performance media is tricky. When buying, be cautious, since the rules are not all defined. Ask for transparency, understand how many times the lead you’re buying is sold to another advertiser, etc. Establish buying thresholds. Figure out the cost-per-click and what this is really worth to your sales. In summary, determine how many visitors who click on your ad actually convert to a sale, as well as how many times this lead goes on the ad or clicks before it becomes a customer.

You also need to make sure that the creative is appealing and converts the viewer to a customer. When a client develops a communications campaign for the Web, the images must be easily read and strategic to the target. This includes images that are more text-based for a quick read and customized by age, gender, location and other demographic components.

We want to optimize the ads for our clients and then be accountable to them by providing quantitative metrics. If a company won’t supply metrics, or they are not as detailed as you want, get another partner. Unlike other media, the Web is one of the few platforms that’s completely transparent and visible via numbers. This allows us to optimize every one of our advertisements.

We can track our progress with real time reporting and then react to the results by modifying content to the message or action items. We also can gain insight into who’s clicking on our ads. 

Advancing the important issue of accountability, the Interactive Audit Bureau now provides audience measurement as part of its commitment to achieving an open and transparent process for gauging Internet audiences. This will help marketers determine what works, when, and why. There is also a Click Quality Council that was formed to provide guidelines to ensure click quality. These are very basic guidelines that were developed with input from marketers and can help all of us in the communications field.

PRINCIPLES TO ENSURE CLICK QUALITY:

• Advertisers should never pay for double clicks from the same session.
• Advertisers should not pay for traffic from bots.
• Advertisers should have control over where, when, and to whom ads are distributed.
• Domain and IP exclusion lists from search providers should be easy to use and maintain.
• Search providers should offer advertisers detailed referral information on all traffic that is billed.
• Advertisers should not pay for traffic originating outside the targeted audiences we identify.
• Search engines should adopt third-party validation for click quality as other companies do for media validation with audiences.
• Search providers should provide an easy mechanism to reconcile paid clicks on a monthly basis.

The above rules will also help eliminate click fraud—which is another real issue facing marketers today. There are programs that will actually provide metrics showing great results on reports to companies, when in fact the numbers are inflated and staged. This is illegal (but done daily).

THE MESSAGE STILL MATTERS
In summary, we want our online marketing efforts to capture the responses from our key targets, generate relationships with our audiences, and be able to measure the ROI. I also cannot stress enough the importance of creativity. Regardless of the medium, you must have the right message. The most persuasive messages won’t be seen or heard if they aren’t developed in the right manner for the right audience.

When identifying a true electronic program, first consider the audience and your objectives, before deciding on the particular media. ROI and accountability are required by clients, and rightly so for all the dollars invested. On the Web, we can easily assign accountability and swiftly modify our tactics as needed.

DORA SHANKMAN President, SMMR Interactive, a media communications division of Shankman Marketing and Media Resources, LLC. She welcomes comments at 908-470-0413 or smmrllc@aol.com.