The new advertising metrics

Dave Smith asked me to sit on his panel at ad:tech in a few weeks to talk about next-generation metrics. I'm a metrics and counting guy from way back, and I regularly meet with a bunch of metrics and analytics companies to keep my finger on the pulse of what's happening in the industry -- so I was happy to oblige. But as I started digging into the topic, I was surprised how much has changed in the last year.

Change is the byword for the online advertising market these days. I predict more change of a more radical nature over the next three years than we've seen in the past 10. And yet, we still haven't nailed the basics. We still don't use gross rating points (GRPs) or targeted rating points (TRPs) as a basic standard currency. We still don't have a clear and coherent story for traditional advertising and media professionals that enables them to easily begin buying and selling online media.

But the market is shifting in large part because consumer behavior is shifting. The massive changes in the past five years toward social networking and mobile media consumption mean that we can't slow down and wait for people to catch up. We must press ahead. To paraphrase Admiral Farragut, "Damn the GRPs, full speed ahead!"

To my mind, the biggest change that will happen in the next few years in metrics also ties into what is happening in targeting and real-time bidding. The social graph -- the connections we all have with others -- will drive massive change. The ability to understand which people (represented by a node in the graph) are really "nexus points" -- influencers, change drivers -- means that we can be much more thoughtful about how we influence and who we target to achieve maximum effect.

This area of marketing and technology has yet to be truly defined. Some companies call it social targeting, others have repurposed the older term earned media. Still others are calling it word of mouth, while others are calling it viral marketing. Any way you describe techniques and technologies in this space, there's some degree of intersection among all of them.

Given that I focus on technology that drives the online marketing world, allow me to cover a few areas that you might not have heard about. I'll start with a company focused on earned media called Meteor Solutions. Meteor has built an analytics solution that tracks how content is shared. It dynamically creates a social graph that uses first-party tracking tags in the URL of hosted content. When a person copies and pastes that URL into some vehicle, and someone clicks on it, Meteor captures that activity and creates a new node. If one of those people then copies and pastes the link, it creates another node.

This is a very simple mechanism that takes advantage of standard behavior. When an article, video, game, ad, or any other content is tracked this way, the content owner can understand how that content was disseminated from a root source (such as a publisher site, corporate site, or even a UGC sharing site) and where it ended up.

Ultimately, Meteor has built a powerful analytics engine that is fine tuned for tracking the sharing of content. The company can identify (anonymously) influencers, track where the person who shared the content was geographically, and see the link-stream from the source to numerous end-users who saw the content. Some examples I've seen are really amazing. For example, a company creates a piece of video content that is branded entertainment, a blogger picks up the content and posts it on his or her blog, and then a major news outlet picks up the link from that blog and posts it in an article that gets massive attention.

This type of activity tracking in the social and user-generated content sphere is incredibly valuable for brands that can use this information to reach out to influential bloggers, tweeters, and writers. They can use it to understand the effectiveness of their marketing, influence of their writing, etc. And even if the link is only shared via email, when someone clicks it, Meteor can track it.

There is an interesting intersection between this type of tracking and targeting of ads based on social networks. Companies like Media6Degrees are looking at the social graph to target ads to friends of people they've categorized as valuable to an advertiser -- and it works. As you might imagine, if you're trying to reach avid cyclists, you might find that friends of theirs are also avid cyclists. And when looking at two avid cyclists who are not connected, finding people who are connected to both makes it highly likely that the link between the two is cycling.

These analytics and targeting methodologies are coming together quickly, and smart marketers should understand them in order to take advantage of this new social world we're living in.

Eric Picard is the advertising technology advisor to the Advertising Platform Engineering team at Microsoft.

On Twitter? Follow Picard at @ericpicard. Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.