Now that online advertising is forecast to take a bigger slice of advertisers’ budgets than ever in the coming year, Yahoo! announced on Friday a partnership with a market measurement firm that will let buyers see just how those Internet ads stack up in terms of return on investment (ROI).
Yahoo!’s sales team will offer ad buyers a dedicated measurement platform from Marketing Management Analytics. The Yahoo! version of the service will integrate MMA’s ad measurement model with Yahoo!’s data about ad impressions in display ads on the portal and clickthroughs to its search ads.
The MMA service for Yahoo! will roll up advertisers’ total offline spending in order to compare the results with their online promotions on a common ROI basis. The result, Yahoo! said in a release, will be a more focused comparison of online ad programs on Yahoo! with programs on other media and clearer insight for advertisers into the most productive allocations for their marketing budgets—presumably leading to a more highly optimized mix of offline and online marketing campaigns.
If they wish, Yahoo! ad buyers will also have the opportunity to load data from other online sites, search engines and e-mail marketing campaigns into the hosted MMA service, to get a broader view of their total Internet marketing programs.
“We’ve created a specific analytic product for Yahoo! clients who are interested in understanding better how their online ads are performing, how much money to move into or out of online, and the intereactions between online spend and offline spend for all the various marketing levers,” said Ed See, chief operating officer of Wilton CT-based MMA.
The relatively small size of advertisers’ Internet ad budgets has been a major obstacle to comparing online and offline spends by ROI, according to See. “The online component has been so low that it’s almost a rounding error in the overall marketing budget,” he said. But a proprietary econometric model allows MMA to examine the variables that can affect marketing efforts in both spheres—for example, interest rates or even changing weather—and produce recommendations on the probable return in each.
“People are rushing headlong into spending [on online advertising], but they still have questions” about how much to spend, whether they’re overspending on online ads and what return they’re getting, See said. “We’re partnering with Yahoo! to give them a very quick read on their online spending at an attractive price point.” Advertisers who want more insight can then sign on with MMA for a fuller modeling of their total ad budget and performance.
Pricing information for the Yahoo! MMA offering was not released.
