comScore Reach Rankings: Whither RTB? (Part 2)

by Madhu Vudali
November 15th, 2011

Previously, I discussed how comScore’s reach rankings are not keeping up with the emergence of RTB. Agencies use these rankings for planning and to help select media partners. Hence, it is critical for them to figure out how RTB potentially affects this measurement. Until everything is nicely squared away in measurement land, here are the five key questions that agencies should ask their media partners when deciding which ones are the most RTB-fluent.

1.  Do you have your own bidder?

• Having a bidder gives the media partner control over scale (potential inventory and unique  reach) and operational efficiencies. It is also an indicator of their level of technical investment and sophistication. With the expected growth of RTB and its applicability to all ad formats, owning a bidder is “table stakes” for any media partner that wants to offer scale.

2.  Which exchange platforms are you bidding on?

 • Publishers are increasingly testing/using multiple exchange platforms for monetization. To get the broadest inventory and reach coverage with the best economics, it is best to be bidding on multiple exchange platforms. Alternatively, access to a meta DSP such as AppNexus can provide RTB access to inventory on multiple exchanges, although at somewhat less attractive economics (for both network and end customer) relative to direct exchange integration.

3.  What level of QPS (queries per second) do you have visibility to?

• QPS translates to “potential inventory.” So, higher QPS means more visibility and access to inventory and reach. Total exchange volume estimates range between 3B to 5B impressions per day in the US, which equates to 35K to 58K QPS. Exchanges enable “pre-targeting”, e.g. IAB ad-sizes, only certain sellers, domain whitelist, and other desirable constraints, which brings the total meaningful and desirable QPS range down.

4.  What are your Response Rate/Win Rate Metrics?

• Response Rate is an indicator of how much exchange inventory is “interesting” – after pre- targeting – to a bidding media partner. Higher response rates indicate a richer demand pool and thus higher likelihood that the media partner is bringing some scale advantage to the table, i.e. the scale for fine-grained audience targeting.

• Win Rate (the % of bids that you submit on that you actually win) is an interesting metric, but only meaningful when combined with response rate. If the response rate is very high, then an ad network can achieve its inventory goal with a low win-rate. Conversely, a lower  response rate would necessitate a higher win-rate to “earn” high inventory, reach, and overall ranking.

5.  Bottomline: What is your incremental reach with RTB?

• Ultimately, it’s all about the relevant additional reach RTB fluency creates for a network beyond what is measured by the increasingly outdated comScore/Nielsen metrics. The critical variables in this regard are QPS, response/win rate, and the resultant “cookie reach.”  Of course, cookies are not UUs but it’s how most networks do a basic approximation to UUs.

Let’s take a simple example to illustrate what we mean. Assume a modest 5000 QPS and a 50% response rate. This results in ~215 million impressions per day. Factoring cookies-to-UU adjustment and reach saturation over a typical month, we would estimate that this example partner has an overall potential reach of 145 million uniques per month.

For Brand.net, we had approximately 10K QPS and a 28% response rate in September. The resulting potential reach with RTB would have been 153MM uniques, increasing our reported reach of 92MM uniques by over 66%.

Of course, these numbers will vary depending on average campaign frequency, campaign breadth, and the contextual / audience focus of each partner. All further reinforcement that if “marketing is the new finance” and innovative marketers are already putting that dictum to practice, agencies and brands need to get familiar with the new math and metrics of RTB quickly.

This is yet another way RTB is altering the playing field for media providers, separating those with the technical investment and sophistication required to take full advantage on behalf of their customers. To date we have seen this trend primarily in the Direct Response world. Now it’s transforming Brand as well, so by this time next year we’ll see a very different landscape.

Filed under: Ad Networks, Display Advertising, Inventory
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Brand.net Launches Digital Media’s First Social Media Measurement Suite for Brand Advertisers

by Cindy Cattey
November 8th, 2011

Brand.net today announced the launch of its Social Media Measurement Suite, the first turnkey media and measurement solution designed to give brand advertisers insight into the impact of their cross-format digital media campaigns on their social media presence and perceptions. Social Attitude™ and SocialLink™ provide integrated insights on the impact of display, video and social media on users’ brand perceptions on Facebook and other social activity.

“Our brand advertisers have told us that it is critical, but extremely difficult, to measure the impact of their digital media campaigns on their social media presence,” said Elizabeth Blair, CEO of Brand.net. “Previously, they challenged us to measure media’s impact on offline sales and we developed SalesLink®, the first and per Nielsen the most-used web-wide offline sales media and measurement solution. Our customers asked us to turn our innovation to their latest challenge, social media measurement, and today we are excited to launch for them the first two products in our Social Media Measurement Suite, Social Attitude and SocialLink.”

• Social Attitude taps into the expansive demos of the Facebook community to provide brand advertisers with understanding of the attitudinal impact of their web-wide digital campaigns. Powered by Nielsen Online Brand Effect, an ad effectiveness measurement service that provides performance metrics and qualitative insights into the impact of online ads running anywhere on the web, Social Attitude delivers rapid and detailed insight into brand KPIs through Nielsen’s polling of exposed audiences on their Facebook homepages.

“Nielsen understands how critical social measurement is to brand advertisers and, in our view, the most important thing is to have a multi-faceted understanding of audiences, including reach and frequency metrics, as well as how they interact with brands,” said Scott McKinley, EVP Ad Effectiveness at Nielsen. “That’s why we’re excited to work with Brand.net to give their clients insight into the impact of their digital campaigns – no matter how big or small – drawn from our measurement of Facebook’s expansive community of representative and highly engaged users.”

• SocialLink provides detailed insights into the impact of a brand’s digital campaign on its own Facebook presence, including Facebook fan page visitation and related search activity. SocialLink ties into comScore’s extensive brand tracking on Facebook, mapping broad-reach online campaigns to both Facebook and brand micro-site engagement. For the first time, brands can learn how their paid campaigns drive audience behavior and interactivity across owned and earned channels at the same time.

Rounding out its Social Media Measurement Suite, Brand.net also integrates comScore’s Social Essentials into its upfront partnerships. With Social Essentials, Brand.net provides detailed behavioral insights and data on the size, frequency and demographic composition of a brand’s Facebook following.

“Our advertisers asked for social media measurement that more closely ties impact to campaign and we have responded with a trifecta: proven Nielsen and comScore research capabilities, the power of the Facebook community, and the quality and scale of Brand.net media, powered by our pioneering MFP platform,” said Blair.

Filed under: Brand.net News, Measurement
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comScore Reach Rankings: Whither RTB?

by Madhu Vudali
October 27th, 2011

comScore recently released its latest rankings of “ad-focused properties” (aka ad networks). “Who’s up and who’s down” always attracts much ink in the broader industry/business press. In seriousness, many of the agencies use this ranking as a filter to decide whom to work with: the higher the ranking, the better the chance of scoring that RFP.

That “footprint filter” may well have made sense at a point in time. But RTB is completely changing that. Here’s why: (a) the Exchanges/SSPs/DSPs provide a massive, if not near complete, coverage of US internet audience and (b) most ad networks (Brand.net included) are making full use of the inventory footprint enabled by these platforms. Essentially, all of us can potentially reach the entire US internet audience. In short, comScore understates the reach of ad networks that are successfully integrating RTB. As RTB grows, this understatement becomes more profound.

Given all of the above, Agency buyers no longer have an accurate way to determine the meaningful potential reach accessible through their largest media partners. Who in the ecosystem can and/or should step in to fill that gap? And what will new planning metrics look like?

One potential outcome would be for existing big players in measurement (e.g., Nielsen, comScore) to release new metrics that resolve the gap. Alternatively, Google or QuantCast, who have measurement capabilities but less tangible footprint with buyers, could use this as an opportunity to leapfrog the more established players.

Or the most intriguing option: perhaps there are startups on the horizon that will challenge existing measurement companies by innovating new methodologies and metrics to help buyers make informed decisions in our new RTB-enabled world?

In our next post on this topic, we’ll explore some related questions and alternatives that agency buyers should consider to address this issue. In the mean time, who do you think is most likely to take advantage of this opportunity?

Filed under: Ad Networks, Industry News, Measurement
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CMOs and Fanning Social Measurement: What’s Not to Like?

by Cindy Cattey
October 24th, 2011

Last week, we highlighted the recently published IBM CMO survey focusing on their #1 pain point – Data. Now what about #2 on the list: dealing with social media? CMOs cited the challenges they face to track consumer comments, capture and evaluate all the data generated by social media, and then analyze and measure it. A few specifics:

- More than half of all CMOs think social media is a key channel for engaging with customers
- 8 in 10 plan to increase their company’s use of social media
- A majority believe ROI will become the most important measure of success but fewer than half feel prepared to measure and manage it

Ouch. The message is loud and clear. And we’ve seen this movie before. Once again…the Internet has created a great brand marketing tool for CMOs that goes “beyond the click”, but has failed to sweep in quickly to help them measure and manage it smartly. If we don’t straighten this out, if brand advertisers aren’t prepared to measure all the metrics that matter …they will keep 90%+ of their multi-billion brand spending in TV and other traditional media.

To be clear – this isn’t a by-vendor issue; it’s a universal problem, and thus a universal opportunity. We’ll all be better off the faster any of us can get CMOs the measurement tools that confidently allow them to measure and manage the impact of social media on their brands’ ROI. At Brand.net we’ve launched our first solution, SocialLink™, the newest in our growing suite of on and offline measurement tools. SocialLink™ measures a brand’s presence on Facebook and a campaign’s impact on Facebook activity, providing insight into how many users visited their Facebook page on click-through or through direct navigation. It also measures the impact of that campaign on usage of a brand’s corporate brand page and/or microsites. SocialLink™ was specifically designed to combine Brand.net’s ability to connect the world’s largest brands to their audiences with the measurement capabilities of comScore’s Social Essentials™ and Action Lift™ We are partnering with our key brand clients, and will share masked results once the campaigns have finished.

CMOs, in the well-known words of an IBMer (H. James Harrington): “Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement.”

Let’s get measuring.

Filed under: Brand.net News, Measurement
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Measuring Reach

by Madhu Vudali
May 6th, 2011

eMarketer has an article on measuring Reach properly – a topic near & dear to our hearts – citing research from MediaMind.  The takeaway is that cookies tend to overstate Reach (Unique Users or UU) by a factor of 3.0, due to cookie deletion.  Readers may recall that comScore had also done a similar study in 2007, where they found that the inflation factor to be 2.5.  It is good to see that these factors are in the same neighborhood. (Sidebar:  These are separate studies…but notice the 20% increase in the inflation factor?  Might users be deleting cookies more often because of privacy concerns?)

Media planners can get a rough sense of Reach using these adjustment factors.  However, when it comes to campaign measurement, you need something that accounts for the uniqueness of the campaign.  For example, comScore’s factor is based on an analysis of “cookies from one prominent Web property and one third party ad server” over the course of one month.  Your campaign might be spread out over many websites big & small and for a longer/shorter period.  Just taking a haircut of 60% on your cookie count may not be accurate.

At Brand.net, we have always been aware of cookies inflating Reach in general and the differences in this inflation factor for each particular campaign.  Rather than applying a gross adjustment factor to our cookie count, we have created a patent-pending technology code-named Lazenby, which combines cookie data, campaign delivery by site, site-visit distributions and other data to produce a Reach (UU) estimate for each campaign.  Lazenby UU counts have been validated by a variety of campaign-level 3rd party counts.

So, next time you see a campaign Reach report from a media partner, please ask for a breakout of cookies vs. UUs.  If the report already has the breakout, be sure to ask how the media partner is estimating the UUs from the cookie counts.

You might be surprised what you hear.

Filed under: Measurement
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A fishing fleet without nets

by Andy Atherton
March 8th, 2011

ComScore released another solid piece of work yesterday.

As readers of this page will remember, comScore has been outspoken on the failings of the ubiquitous click as a metric. Some of that in this report, but much more as well.  From my perspective, the most interesting thread in the report ties together a couple of their numbered points.

First, as comScore correctly points out, cookie-deletion creates real problems for cookie-based targeting and measurement approaches. comScore data shows that 30% of all US internet users delete their cookies monthly or more often. Furthermore, many computers see routine use by multiple users. These factors create “noise” in targeting that often results in much lower true composition against the target than is claimed or described. Consumers’ ever-growing concern about privacy will only make this worse. Probably much worse. More evidence (if any was needed) that measurement of campaign impacts against meaningful metrics is critical – especially when a targeting approach sounds like magic.

Secondly, comScore highlights the tradeoff between targeting and scale. This tradeoff is intuitively obvious, but often overlooked. Equally often, credulous buyers willingly suspend disbelief in favor of a nice-sounding pitch.

Consider the example of one of our clients, with a large online footprint of some 25 million accounts.  Of these 25M, this client has actionable cookies on <5M, with data of varying depths and value (and all of these cookies, of course, are subject to the churn challenge presented above). So this client can (and does) employ the most sophisticated targeting and re-targeting approaches on all of these 5M customers. But what about the other 20M customers they can’t talk to this way?  What about the 100M adults that aren’t customers yet? 30-spots?

For the online advertising to grow to its full potential (and necessary size as “offline” media erodes), we must more fully develop a broader approach to complement our myriad fine targeting approaches.

Sometimes it is best to fish with a hook, other times with a net. As an industry we need a good supply of both.

Look for more on this topic in subsequent posts, but wanted to make sure to call out comScore’s work while it was fresh.  Worth a read.

Filed under: Display Advertising, Industry News, Measurement
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