Tuesday was OMMA’s NYC version of its Metrics and Measurement conference. Like Digiday on the previous day, this was another sold-out conference – and not just filled with vendors either. In the OMMA crowd were company managers looking to better harness the mountains of data that increasingly makes their jobs one of the most challenging in online advertising and publishing.
On “The Analytics Food Chain” panel, Jodi McDermott of Clearspring Technologies ably quizzed fellow panelists on how they “use audience measurement, campaign analysis tools and web analytics to plan and measure the efficacy of your marketing campaigns.” She was joined by Chris Maher of Hitwise, Dennis Mortensen of Yahoo!, Judah Phillips of Monster, Greg Smith from Neo@Ogilvy (see today’s Q&A) and Vivian Zhu of Razorfish.
In particular, Judah Phillips provided insight on how he and his Monster team are dealing with the data potpourri:
“At Monster, we have a wide range of favorite tools to use from Omniture Discover OnPremise to WebTrends or in external tools we have access to Comscore and some of the other tools that are publicly available on the Web. And for campaign measurement we use Atlas and DART.
How you divide access to those tools is interesting. It depends on product group or functional area within the company. So, for audience measurements tools, for Comscore generally, we tend to provide that data to Finance, we provide that data to competitive intelligence and external stakeholders. Marketing and sales teams use that data.
For internal consumers, we tend to shy away from some of the audience measurement tools because we didn’t feel like it accurately represents the reach and frequency and total breadth of our customers. So we provide our web analytics tools. Specifically, we get down to the visitor level where we work on segmentation and we can also look at various conversion points and value-generating events on the site.
When it comes to campaign measurement, we look primarily at Atlas or DART. We understand from those tools how different campaigns are performing. We’ll also correlate the performance of those campaigns at the business level in our analytics and tools and we end up finding some really valuable insights.
For example, we did a campaign recently with a series of banners across different sites. We noticed that the conversion events that were [registering] by Atlas were a bit different than what we were measuring with Discover OnPremise. We found that some of the visitors that we thought were actually performing value generating events through Atlas really weren’t the types of visitors that we wanted to engage. So, we altered the campaign. We took a look at how and where we were purchasing and where we were really executing. Through some changes in the campaign, we boosted conversions.”
