Several members of the EF team attended the OMMA Behavioral Conference in San Francisco last week. The focus of the conference was to explore how behavioral targeting has changed from simply targeting audiences by the Web pages they have recently viewed to utilizing targeting data from multiple sources such as social networks, site and search re-targeting, and various third party data providers. Because there are so many targeting channels, attributing conversion to the appropriate source has become very difficult for advertisers. The difficulty of attribution modeling quickly became a hot topic at the conference.
Abhishek Pani, our Director of Research & Quantitative Marketing, discussed a new attribution framework in his presentation titled “Evaluating the Marginal Value of Display”. Optimal budget allocation across channels is the fundamental problem that advertisers want to solve but given the lack of proper attribution models, they are forced to rely on simple heuristics to allocate revenues. Current attribution offerings in the industry ignore important variables such as the effect of time and cross channel demand elasticity (change in demand in channel A that results from a small change in spend in channel B). Incorrect attribution will result in sub-optimal budget allocation and lower the return on advertising investment. Because our platform manages across all channels of advertising (search, display, and soon social), we are able to measure, experiment, and build very accurate allocation models based on marginal contributions of each channel. Abhishek discussed our modeling strategy in greater detail during his presentation.
If you are new to the world of behavioral targeting for display marketing, the conference panelists unanimously suggested that you start with a retargeting strategy. You can retarget the users that have previously visited your site and you can retarget users that have previously clicked on your ads from your search marketing campaigns. Retargeting allows advertisers to target users that have previously shown the intent to convert and is known to have a solid impact on conversion rates. Site and search retargeting functionality is available in our platform.
If you’d like a copy of Abhishek’s presentation, please send us a tweet @efrontier.
Margarita Golod
Senior Product Marketing Manager
