Improving Top of the Funnel Website Metrics through the Eyes of a DR Marketer - Susan Rowe

Recently I had the opportunity to field a few questions from a very savvy online marketer His first question was about measuring the impact of offline media to the top of the website funnel He asked if they could simply correlate impressions generated from DRTV to customers appearing on the websiteHere39s how I answered that question From a DR perspective we believe that Reach Frequency and Impressions are not indicative of response to messaging This is due to a missing piece of the response equation namely attentiveness With that said there are some associations that you can make namely if you were to increase your awareness budget you would see an increase in activity at the top of the funnel and if you wanted to gain greater understanding you could conduct an ad awareness study or put an econometric model in place But first let39s review attentiveness and its impact on resultsLet39s use DRTV as an example of how attentiveness impacts results If we air a spot in a first run sports program say a College Football Game Purdue against Notre Dame while we may have garnered great audience numbers our response namely people going up to your website from the spot is simply dismal The reason is because of a high level of attentiveness So this program works extremely well in terms of establishing a brand but doesn39t help to get a potential customer up to the website to actually learn more about your product The viewer is highly unlikely to disengage from the program and go to the website as he or she might miss a score especially if the score is close which it won39t be this year as Purdue is in a quotrebuildingquot year So awareness won39t often engage consumer to grab their smartphones and go online to check out your product which helps you to finish the sales story online But awareness does help in other waysThe next question was how to know if we were hitting the right audience employing the correct creative using the right dayparts and putting forth the best offer We typically review through response tracking if the right audience is seeing the media We append a custom identification code to every person that we believe is generated through a TV ad and follow that person through the funnel to determine if they resulted in a sale We are able to tell which messaging and creative as well as which offers work best via testing We create test pods and we switch out creative in each pod from one week to the next to iron out seasonality issues and individual network performance issues to determine what works best Even if you don39t employ all of the DR techniques if one piece of creative message or offer outperforms another by 20 or more that would be extremely valuable to knowThe final question was regarding the portion of media that is not meant to drive conversion but is purchased just to drive awareness My advice was that awareness driving media should also be measured in some way Regression analysis would be the best method to track what is performing and what is not When we conducted regression analysis on one particular client the resulting report provided us with understanding as to where that next quottop of the funnelquot marketing dollar should be spent and what the expected ROI would be from that action When we followed the quotadvicequot we experienced marked improvement in our overall performanceBy the way this particular model was the first conducted on a brand response account which included brand advertising and DRTV advertising Surprisingly to some but not to us the model favored DRTVSo I think the larger piece here is that you can employ some DR techniques to improve performance where at the current moment you may be only softly evaluating the top of the funnel and thereby leaving some serious profits on the tablePrior to embarking out on her own Susan Rowe held the position of Senior Partner Managing Director within the Digital and Performance Marketing media practice for Ogilvy Neo in New York and Chicago Feb 07 July 08 Her charge was to oversee Performance Marketing for a number of high profile clients including Allstate Investools TD Ameritrade Select Comfort and Six Flags She was also responsible for leading NeoVideo the video unit that works with new forms of video on TV and online She was selected to be part of a Google TV39s first panel primarily for her work in development of ground breaking research with Google TV on the effect of attentiveness on response Susan can be reached at srowe2202yahoocomRead all Susan39s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Susan Rowe on ResponseDriven MediaCheck us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggerscomFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBloggerThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaBizBloggerscom management or associated bloggers MediaBizBloggers is an open thought leadership platform and readers may share their comments and opinions in 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Improving Top of the Funnel Website Metrics through the Eyes of a DR Marketer - Susan Rowe

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