Measuring It Right – An ROI Perspective;The Indian Scenario

Hari Shankar, Business Director, Starcom IP India
The Indian scenario: Cut back to the scene in the Indian Online media arena today - the scenario is that of a largely disorganized market, (a factor of the market development life cycle) whereby implementation of performance-led models and the sophistication of tracking is driven by the understanding & initiative taken by both the brand as well as the interactive agency that drives the initiatives.

Global brands share the common streak of performance measurement across markets while home grown brands largely function based on the evolution of internet marketing know-how within the organizational fabric itself. What this means is that brands such as Intel which pioneered brand tracking Online as early as 2000, still lead the pack from a balanced measurement perspective while brands within verticals such as finance still deliver the judgment of Online efficiency based on how many users online are “ready to contribute leads” to the products that they promote in the market. In order to cater to the demand generation fetish of brands, publishers also have structured CPC (Cost per Click) and CPA (Cost per Action) models over and above the monetization of “consumer-generated product / service search” behavior in Search engines (commonly known as Search marketing, performance based content /contextual targeting).

An interesting model that Google has conjured up recently is the PC and mobile based search marketing model whose output is driven by “telephonic calls by users” who are interested in the advertised product. Another trend that is proliferating currently is the “performance based ad network” model followed by a lot of ad network companies. Companies such as Tribalfusion aggregate a large network of niche sites which may be otherwise too small for setting systems to monetize their inventory/users.

Ad networks negotiate with such sites and classify them under defined industry verticals and the advertisers have the option of choosing any vertical genre they like either based on a low CPM model or a purely CPC model. In case of the latter, it provides the marketers with the dual advantage of free rich media ad exposure across a long tail of niche sites (thus addressing the media fragmentation issue that exists in a diverse market such as India) while providing a purely “pay for performance” (read: clicks) model.

Measuring them right:

It is an oft-repeated conclusion that “last click” or “last view” of an ad provides the path to a subsequent sale or conversion but while this methodology was sufficient during the first decade of online advertising, it ignores ad exposures that occurred prior to the last view. Avenue A/Razorfish research in the U.S has found that custom attribution research (attributing value to several ad exposures, not just the last one) improves performance significantly.

In short, brands need to define clear success events at the outset itself against which performance needs to be monitored and measured continuously and over a time period. It is a very myopic approach to measure branding campaigns with “reactive click effect” because a large part of branding effect comes from the “recall effect” (post-view /impression visits, latent visits and repeat visits). In the same note, a last mile conversion should be traced back to metrics such as “optimal frequency corridor, exposure pattern across user path etc” which triggers the visit and subsequent conversions.

In sum, the Indian Online market is still to reach the maturity phase as far as media planning and performance measurement are concerned and the attainment of this phase will be largely driven by factors such as market size, market evolution, broadband adoption and quantum of efforts by the advocates of the medium to educate brand marketers.