Industry jargon or real tools for real ROI?
The retail industry as a whole tends to focus on certain portions of the year when consumers are somehow obligated to spend. In these critical times, advertising to attract consumers in some sort of timely fashion can mean the difference between profits, dividends and smiley investors, or a newly-elected marketing team.
For Staples, tax season is its Christmas.
Sue Develin, Staples' manager of sports/online marketing, talks about her encounter with EyeWonder:
"Our Spring campaign in '07 was an important one for Staples, as we are promoting the tax season and also targeting small businesses. The EyeWonder developers built an in-banner coupon engine for Staples that allowed us to deliver unique coupon codes to consumers," she says. "This is critical in containing the coupon usage, as well as giving us the benefit of more secure and accurate tracking at POS."
Regarding crucial metrics for such a campaign, Develin responds, "As a retailer focused on driving foot traffic and revenue in stores, using online and the current click-based metrics only provides insight into one aspect of consumer behavior.
"We have been focusing more on the engagement metrics such as cost-per-interaction, time spent, percent-video-viewed and others. This helps us to get a better understanding of the consumer behavior and can help us to re-focus our creative strategy as necessary. Also, coupon prints is helpful as we can now see what sites are better at redemptions and start to track in-store sales a bit better."
She also spoke of places where more metrics reporting might help in the future, such as "Reach/Frequency/GRP information (un-duplicated) across a campaign. It will help us to better understand spend levels and what the appropriate spend is to maximize performance," she said, while underscoring that "overall [EyeWonder's] service is strong."
In such a campaign, quantitative measurement reflects directly on qualitative measurement. In other words, the number of users interacting with the ad reflects directly on foot traffic to Staples. Using the ad as a distribution model for coupons and then tracking those downloads and later comparing barcodes of coupons-used versus coupons-downloaded provides a surprising wealth of data:
- General campaign results include: How effective were the coupons? What ROI did the campaign achieve? What percentage of users converted? What percentage of total customers used coupons from the ad?
- Less obvious implications include: Where did users find the ads and what placement was most successful? Based on that result, what kind of sites are most conducive to providing Staples customers? Subsequently, what kind of user might convert at Staples? What kind of behavioral targeting information can be deduced from various users at various websites and how can that information be leveraged to increase ROI and real foot traffic?
