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I am going to start this series of post with few questions for you.  Here is some data pulled from a Web Analytics tool. This data is for a “Display Ad” campaign: Most of the web analysts today get the following view of display advertising from their Web Analytics tool.  Looking at this data and some publicly available information they will get started on the analysis and recommendation. Though some other analysts will say, Wait… I need more information.  Google Adwords has done such a great job in providing cost data and almost all of the analysts have dealt with some kind of paid search campaign, so they know that cost of campaign plays a role in the analysis of campaign.  So they demand it.  Well this is where most of the web analytics tools fell short, cost data generally resides in some other tool and it is not easy to get that data. But how said that Analytics was easy.   However, I am providing full data with cost so that we can continue with this po...

Are you obsessing over the total number of mentions, number of positive mentions and negative mentions? If you are then you are not alone. This same issue came up recently while I was speaking on the subject of Social Media at a local event. One person got very concerned when I said that a lot of social media conversations are marked “Neutral” in most of the social media monitoring tools. The reason is that tools are not yet advanced enough to classify everything and so when in doubt the conversation is marked “Neutral” rather than “Positive” or “Negative” . So what do you do in this situation, when you know that the sentiment numbers are not right? Short answer is: Don’t obsess over the raw counts. Let’s face it; you will never get an exact count of mentions about your brand, products etc. let alone the sentiment counts. Here are few reasons why the number won’t be accurate Tools - The number of mentions will change with the tool you are using. Different tools have different sourc...

I am sure you have heard of a story about a guy lost his ring in a dark alley. It was really dark and he could not see anything, so he went to a nearby lamppost and started searching for his ring underneath it. When asked why he was looking for ring under the lamppost, he said “because it is bright here”. That’s what most of the web analyst do. Even when the problem might exist somewhere other than what their web analytics data can show majority of the web analytics folks just look at “Web Data” for the answers. Why? Because that’s all the data they have easy access too. It is brighter there. Here are some other things which are in the “dark” areas. It is time for you to shine light on them: Ad Server – There are several factors that impact a performance of a campaign, many of them don’t show up in your web analytics tools, they reside within ad servers or with 3rd parties. Example: Which pages the ads was shown, what time was the ad shown etc. I will write more on this in a future ...

The purpose of this post is to clarify the terms CPM and CPC and also show how to convert from one model to the other. CPM CPM stands for Cost per 1000 Impressions (number of times the ad is shown) (M is Roman numeral for 1000). Generally display advertising (e.g. banners) is sold in CPM. If the ad is shown 1000 times the cost will be equal to 1 CPM price. For example, if a publisher charges $10 CPM, that means your ad will be shown 1000 times for $10. If your budget is say $10,000 then mean your ad will be shown 1,000,000 times ($10,000 *(1000/$10) ). Total Impressions = (Total Cost or Budget) * (1000/CPM) If you are trying to find out how much you will pay for a given number of impressions then you can use the following formula Total Cost = (Total Impressions * CPM)/1000 If you notice in the above calculations, there are no mentions of how many people the ad will be shown to or how many clicks will be generated. CPM advertising is solely based on impressions. In theory if you d...