New service enables marketers to measure ROI of online campaigns alongside offline programs.
Now that online advertising is forecast to take a bigger slice of advertisers’ budgets than ever in the coming year, Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet company, and Marketing Management Analytics, Inc. (MMA), the marketing analytics pioneer, recently announced a new service that will help marketers improve their return on overall marketing investments by evaluating the offline sales impact of their online marketing programs.
Yahoo’s sales team will offer ad buyers a dedicated measurement platform from Marketing Management Analytics. The Yahoo version of the service will integrate MMA’s ad measurement model with Yahoo’s data about ad impressions in display ads on the portal and clickthroughs to its search ads.
We have created a specific analytic product for Yahoo clients who are interested in understanding better how their online ads are performing, how much money to move into or out of online, and the inter-reactions between online spend and offline spend for all the various marketing levers, said Ed See, CEO of Marketing Management Analytics.
Yahoo! and MMA’s marketing ROI assessment model is based on an existing MMA model to include data from Yahoo! showing users’ exposure to online graphical and search advertising. This new model provides a focused assessment of online programs on Yahoo!, measured next to programs on other media, and gives insights and recommendations to marketers on both online and offline marketing spend.
If they wish, Yahoo ad buyers will also have the opportunity to load data from other online sites, search engines and e-mail marketing campaigns into the hosted MMA service, to get a broader view of their total Internet marketing programs.
The relatively small size of advertisers’ Internet ad budgets has been a major obstacle to comparing online and offline spends by ROI, according to See. ‘The online component has been so low that it is almost a rounding error in the overall marketing budget,’ he said. But a proprietary econometric model allows MMA to examine the variables that can affect marketing efforts in both spheres — for example, interest rates or even changing weather — and produce recommendations on the probable return in each.
In many ways, online marketing can be more accountable than many offline marketing tactics, but there is still a real need to understand the total sales impact of online and offline programs on a common ROI basis so that optimal budget allocations can be made, said John Nardone, MMA Chief Client Officer. Clients are shifting more and more of their total spend online, and need to move beyond measurement of clicks and page views to understand what is really working to drive sales.
People are rushing headlong into spending on online advertising, but they still have questions about how much to spend, whether they are overspending on online ads and what return they are getting, See said. We are partnering with Yahoo to give them a very quick read on their online spending at an attractive price point. Advertisers who want more insight can then sign on with MMA for a fuller modeling of their total ad budget and performance.
Marketers need to be able to measure and make decisions about online and offline marketing campaigns with a holistic view, said Wenda Harris Millard, chief sales officer, Yahoo!.
Providing this new service with MMA is a key step that reflects Yahoo!’s commitment to providing marketers with leading tools–enhancing the accountability of online marketing ROI, and will help marketers deploy a best practice solution for budget allocations across all media.
Pricing information for the Yahoo-MMA offering was not released.