Quantifying the Pass-Along Value of Online Advertising
A new ad-tracking tool makes it easier to quantify the value of an ad when someone shares it with friends.
A new ad-tracking tool makes it easier to quantify the value of an ad when someone shares it with friends.
Most media planners and buyers intuitively know that the ad placements they plan and purchase for their advertisers have a ripple effect. A user who may click on an ad ends up passing along the link to the destination page to other users who’ve never viewed the ad. This sharing of links generates an X factor of pass-along value to the advertiser that — to this point — really hasn’t been easy to quantify. Now a new company, Meteor Solutions, has developed a technology platform that allows media teams to connect the performance of paid media with the “organic lift” that occurs by word-of-mouth.
How Meteor Works
Meteor Solution’s Tracker technology initially works like many ad-tracking solutions: some lines of JavaScript must be inserted on the campaign’s destination page and other script must be inserted on the conversion confirmation page. When a user clicks on an ad and arrives at the destination page, via a cookie, she’s assigned a unique ID. That ID is also appended to the destination URL. If that user bookmarks that URL or shares it with friends by e-mailing it, copying and pasting it, blogging about it, tagging it, or posting it in a social community, visits to the appended URL will be tracked by Meteor. URL shorteners, commonly now used by Twitterers, and other tracking scripts like Web analytics or ad tracking solutions, do not impose upon Meteor’s tracking.
Because of the cookie, Meteor can identify that a visitor to the appended URL is not the original visitor. This second visitor is cookied and assigned another new unique ID and appended URL — and so on and so on for each new visitor to the site.
Conversion actions generated by these shared URLs are also tracked. Meteor then generates “sharing graphs” from these visits and conversions in a dashboard.
Meteor Tracker can help shed light on some of the unaccountable “no referrer” source in Web analytics that typically dominates all sources. Meteor has found that approximately 20 percent of inbound no referrer traffic actually comes from shared links.
Implications for Media Planners
Agencies can utilize Meteor Tracker in a number of ways:
In a time when advertisers want to see their ad dollars being put to the most effective use, Meteor’s solution can help give media planners an edge.
Hollis is off today. This column was originally published Feb. 10, 2009 on ClickZ.