Performance Marketing Online:

• What is it?
• How does it work?
• How do you get the best results?

In the presentation the following topics are covered;

• Introduction &  History
• Key Aspects of CPM, CPC or CPA
• Why eCPM, eCPC & eCPA are important
• Smart Targeting Options
• Performance Marketing in Action

PDF: What is Performance Marketing

How do you get the best results?

Any questions please post a comment.

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To answer this we need to examine the problem in more detail to find its roots. When people point at performance as the root of all evil what they are really concerned about is;

1. The payout (eCPM) is too low
2. The content is too expensive to produce
3. No one wants to pay for the content

So there is nothing inherently wrong with performance, its just that the initial popularity of CPM has supported online business models and common approaches that are just fundamentally flawed. There is certainly going to be some radical changes in the way businesses approach the internet over the coming years as a lot of ill-conceived models will finally fall over to be replaced by “internet friendly” business models. Google, Facebook, Ebay and Amazon have all demonstrated that there is certainly money to be made online once you figure out a revenue model that is not based on a shotgun one-way broadcast.

We can all understand why marketers were so keen to buy and sell online ads by the week or CPM using the “audience skew” to select individual placements. Its exactly what they had been doing for years with print, radio and TV. But what they failed to accept is that online is not just another mono directional broadcast channel. The way online interacts and reacts to its audience and the level of live feedback available fundamentally changes the way you market, build brands and sell products.

Online Value Chain

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In response to this low creative budget we came up with the innovative approach of using a completely invisible banner ad for the campaign. Very creative if we do say so ourselves!

Now you may feel that an invisible banner would be slightly ineffective at building demand and driving conversions but we are happy to report that thanks to our cutting edge post view conversion tracking technology we were able to track 501 conversions from users who were exposed to this banner.”

Campaign Summary

• Campaign Impressions: 13,849,407
• Campaign Clicks: 0
• Campaign Conversions: 501

Ok, all a bit silly, but this campaign is real. TPN created an invisible banner (a 1×1 pixel) and ran this across a few popular websites on our network. We used “standard” post view (impression) conversion tracking to tag users with a cookie once they had loaded the invisible banner and then the system followed them though to the advertisers site where conversions were recorded using a TPN tracker pixel.

If this campaign was real (visible banner) we would have expected 1000 post click conversions, so 500 for not even displaying a banner is not bad

Why would we do this?

Use of  ”raw” post view conversion data is common place in the market and we wanted an easy way to illustrate the issues using such data.  ”Raw” post view conversions is really a measure of a channels reach and not of its direct influence effect. For example if you exposed 100% of the internet population to a banner then all your conversions could be linked to the banner via raw post view tracking.

Just because something is an industry standard does not mean that it is correct, nuclear testing in the pacific was the “industry standard” but maybe it was not the greatest idea ever.

Now we are not saying that exposure to display ads does not indirectly benefit site traffic and conversions, but we would say that using raw post impression tracking is misleading and is often used irresponsibly just because it generates a big number and ROI.

How should you do it?

It is possible to use post view conversion tracking in a responsible way by working with a network like TPN who can exclude a “control group” who are still tagged with a view pixel but are blocked from seeing any ads from the campaign. The conversion rate of this “non-exposed” group can then  be compared to the “exposed” group with the difference in conversion rates being the post view “uplift” of the campaign. This data allows the real post view conversion to be calculated.

There are still a number of other aspects that need to be taken into account if your mission is to estimate non-direct benefits of your campaign but at least you will be working with meaningful post view data rather than the “industry standard” BS.

“Real Post View” tracking is currently in beta so please contact us if you are interested in trialling with one of your TPN campaigns.

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General Display : Spend by Pricing Model

Does the recent IAB online advertising report start to clear the smoke and reveal what has really been happening to CPM display in Australia over the last few years?

Historical data is limited but if you look carefully at the latest IAB stats it can quickly be seen that non-CPM buys, eDMs and video have been masking the decline in traditional CPM display expenditure over the last few years.

Since 2006 “general display” has increased by $43m per quarter to $121m however non-CPM now represents 25% of general display and as performance display was limited back in 2006 it can be estimated that up to $30m of the $43m is due to the growth of non-CPM buys. If we also include the generally accepted significant growth in eDM and Video which represent $7.9m and $4.7m of the $121m then its possible that expenditure on traditional CPM banners has, at best grown, by a few % since 2006.

With the ongoing growth of performance buys, eDMs and Video ads the poor old traditional CPM banner is looking like becoming a rare beast. Applying some assumptions around the above numbers, traditional CPM banners only represent 17% of online advertising expenditure.

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Jon Ostler Speaks at Search Engine Room 2009

This presentation reviewed the history of performance marketing from its origins in affiliate marketing dating back to 1994, and discussed the recent rise of mainstream performance marketing which has been accelerated over recent years by the success of Google’s Adwords and emerging ad networks like TPN.

It presented the premise that the rising dominance of performance media and the advances in technology are finally overturning the old world view that digital is “just another channel” and are set to turn the status quo of advertising and brand building on its head. Read More.

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