"MEASURING THE NET"

Online - The BIG Idea - March/April 1997
by Bayard Saunders

Four blind men decided to measure the elephant. Each man reached his arms around one of the animal's legs. They all agreed that the elephant was about as thick as a tree. Then they tried to pick the apples...

The Coalition for Advertising Supported Information & Entertainment (CASIE), an American Association of Advertising Agencies and Association of National Advertisers joint committee, and the Internet Advertising Bureau, a new group representing sellers of online ad space, which spent a good part of 1996 coming up with standards for web page banner advertisements, has announced that their next trick will be standards for measurement for the internet.

And so we celebrate, like the blind men we are, happy that someone else will assume responsibility for this daunting task. But since we will be the ones responsible for picking apples from the new media, now is the time for all creative professionals to speak up, before our hands are tied and forced by this replacement of the old TV ratings points scheme.

Unlike broadcast media, interactive is inherently more complex. Not only can we advertise and build brands online, but this new media allows us to practice relationship marketing and begin "consumer management," actually the management of information about our consumers individually which helps us speak directly with them and influence their individual purchase decisions. So true measurement will not be complete without measuring all of these parts of the elephant.

How should we measure these "four horsemen" of the interactive world: Advertising, Branding, Relationship Marketing, & Consumer Management? Let's look at what is important and necessary to measure from a creative standpoint...

Online, advertising has about the same meaning, but can be measured more accurately than it is in other media. Number of exposures to a web page or banner advertisement or sponsorship is counted by the software. New "ad server" systems count the number of times a banner ad is shown (exposures), and count the number of times a banner is selected by the consumer for more information (the "click-thru" rate). "Reach and frequency" has long been the measure of exposures in broadcast, but this clicking business is new; the closest comparison might be the number of calls to a toll-free telephone number or business reply cards returned.

Brand building can also be measured more accurately here, but there is opportunity for so much more. Brand awareness is more a factor of advertising as above, but measuring the effectiveness of brand communications online involves measuring the accessibility of information (site navigation) and changes in an individual's perceptions or change in perception about the brand because of that proprietary information (content value). Due to "hyper-link" technology and content aggregation, there is also a measure of the brand's extension into communities of interests (association value-added).

Relationship marketing online should be measured by the quantity and quality of dialogue with individual consumers. Measure the total number of e-mails received and responded to (count); but also measure the "depth" of the e-mail: Is it comments, requests, questions, conversation? And the number of times the same or similar subject e-mail was exchanged with each individual (depth)? Likewise, measure the number of messages posted to bulletin boards or newsgroups, but also measure the quality of the posts and depth of threaded discussions, and the range of topics (breadth). Sites offering chat or net-telephone conferencing should measure count, depth and breadth of those, as above, as well as wait-time, quality of service, and all those other data which telemarketers hold so dear, with good reason.

Consumer management (or customer information management) measurement should be the number of individuals in a company's database (population), and the depth/breadth of the information about each of those individuals including: sales, repurchase intent, lifetime value, associations, lifestyle, lifestage, etc. (share of customer vs. market share). We should measure the age and rate of change of the information (dynamic) as well as the "groups" and patterns of similarity of answers (organic categories).

Got it? Exposures, Click-thru Rate, Site Navigation, Content Value, Association Value-Added, Count, Depth, Breadth, Population, Customer Share, Dynamic and Organic Categories. And just because we can, we should measure continuously, for the sake of perpetual process improvement. Measure your elephant carefully, and you will have your interactive marketing by the apples.