Arthur Freydin’s Blog

Online marketing, gadgets, business, and thoughts.

 So with all the hoopla surrounding Microsoft’s press release touting their “Engagement Mapping” beta, I thought I might delve a bit into analytics.

Microsoft’s big claim is that they will now allow advertisers to attribute an entire click-stream to a single goal (conversion, lead, etc.). So let’s take an example to illustrate this point:

You’re a online lead farm for education and you have purchased various CPM banner ads from BlueLithium (first mistake there). You would now like to determine which ads are really converting for you and which ones you can trash.
You fire up Coremetrics or Omniture and take a look at your tracking code reports for those banners. Judging by conversion numbers over a 30 day period, it looks like 7 out of your 10 banners have converted and 3 of the 7 are actually positive ROI. What do you do? You end up trashing the 3 banners that have not converted at all and optimizing the banners that have converted but are in negative ROI territory.

The issue with the above methodology is that users typically have their analytics solution setup to only track conversions to the last source (cookie). There is quite a simple solution and it doesn’t require letting Redmond run your analytics. Both Coremetrics and Omniture allow you to switch to weighted click attribution while still allowing you to track conversion on last click! As far as I know, neither analytics solution even requires you to change any code.

Still, I value what Microsoft is doing here. If they can bring this critical issue to the foreground and force other analytics providers to explicitly support multiple click attribution, it may open the doors to a new kind of website performance analysis. Now let’s hope that Microsoft doesn’t leverage Engagement Mapping to convince advertisers to spend more advertising dollars by saying “But look, all of these other ads received clicks too!”