-By Jay Kulkarni

Digital marketers across the world are discussing the dire need for standards for metrics in online marketing. In early August at ad:tech Chicago, one keynote speaker after another brought this issue to the table, explaining that without comprehensive metrics, marketers will not be able to fully understand the pitfalls and successes of campaigns, stalling evolution within the field.

While the measurement terrain is hard to navigate, it’s certainly not void of road signs. The main issue for many corporations and agencies is that they simply don’t have the manpower to take this complex journey.

When looking at the state of the industry, lack of talent within this niche is not surprising. Yes, Internet use within our society has been well-established for more than a decade, but the style in which we behave online is changing almost yearly. In order to keep up, companies must dedicate a team of high-level experts to the task of developing metrics, which is a luxury most agencies and corporations simply cannot afford.

This circumstance results in this state of unknown in which many digital marketers are finding themselves.  Beyond Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Impression (CPM), which have both been defined as standard metrics and are commonly used to determine pricing for text and banner ads, meaningful metrics that determine audience interaction and response to a campaign are hard to come by.

Thankfully, we’re not all operating in the dark; online data experts do exist. Ways in which to incorporate them into your company’s efforts are twofold. They can either be brought on as in-house staff or can be utilized through partnering with an online media operations company that specializes in data within online marketing.  

The bottom line is that this need for metrics will not vanish and will only increase as behaviors become more complex online. Within the past several years alone, metrics in our sphere have been evolving at a furious pace. During this time of ingenuity, there are several measures that are in high demand as they continue to accurately demonstrate the effects of campaigns.

Defined here are four of these highly sought after, and relatively new, metrics that provide a much needed ray of light into the often dim world of online marketing.

1) Sell-through CPM: The CPM is still an industry standard and is now being taken further beyond simple click-throughs to determine historical and forecasting trends. Conversion rates are tallied based on CPMs to retroactively indicate campaign performance as well as to proactively set benchmarks for an upcoming campaign.

2) Media Attribution: As sophisticated online campaigns become a necessity and not a luxury, brands must run multiple online campaigns simultaneously to create a meaningful impression. These various campaigns can encompass any combination of what the Internet has to offer, including paid and organic search as well as display advertising.

Throughout their duration and at their end, online marketers are becoming increasingly interested to not just qualify their cumulative efforts, but also to understand which campaign to credit when a goal (such as a sale) is reached. The media attribution metric details this information.

3) Ad Sequence: The sequence in which an audience observes ads has the same impact offline as it does online. So, just as you would place television ads in a strategic order, you should be coordinating the sequence of your online ads.

The order in which a consumer is exposed to a series of ads can have an effect on the likelihood of that consumer buying or developing an interest in that product. Monitoring the success of ad sequences is thus an important bit of information that online marketers are seeking. Typically, success rates are monitored and tweaked every four to seven days in a 45-60-day online ad campaign.

4) Brand Attribution: When you are running a campaign for a company with multiple brands, it is important to attribute traffic and clicks to the specific brand that is generating the results. Online marketers are thus seeking unique data to determine the campaigns that are driving traffic and sales to their sites.

This becomes a difficult task when there are campaigns running for multiple brands simultaneously. It is thus important to develop a way to track the results when creating the campaign.

While these four metrics will not apply to every online marketing campaign, it is important to incorporate aspects of them to your efforts so that you can have a comprehensive analysis of your campaign’s performance.    

Jay Kulkarni is founder and CEO of Theorem Inc., an online media operations company that helps digital marketers to gather, analyze and report data on their various campaigns.