Measuring the return on investment of native advertising needs to take in the long tail or it might look like less bang for buck than it is actually delivering.
That was the message from Mia Freedman, founder and publisher of the Mamamia Network.
Native advertising, the buzzword of 2013, narrowly edging out programmatic, is publisher's great white hope. It has its detractors, but with the slow death of traditional ad revenues and the realisation that nobody clicks on banner ads other than by mistake, something has to give.
But if marketers don't measure it properly, native risks becoming mothballed in the wardrobe with the rest of the emperor's old clothes. Measurement needs to go beyond the campaign period and optimal SEO is key. Freedman outlined that yesterday at a breakfast hosted by the International Advertising Association (IAA).
“We did a campaign for an new child seat [that as a native element incorporated] a booster seat cheat sheet - four questions every parent needs to answer. Only 30% of the traffic for that post came in the campaign period, which was a week or so,” Freedman said.
But the post is still generating traffic "because the first place women, particularly mothers will go to research something is online. If that content is SEO'd well it is evergreen. It will continue to deliver ROI for months and years to come.”
Lorraine Murphy founder of The Remarkables Group said that being able to track path to purchase in the online space was another key pillar in measuring ROI.
“We do a lot of work for Coles and Woolworths and what we've been asking our clients to do for a long time now is add track-ability around online,” she said.
Murphy founded a group which works specifically to manage relationships between influential bloggers and brands and explains that if you add a track-able component to campaigns with bloggers brands will be surprised at there reach
“As soon as you can demonstrate that path to purchase, the ROI is there.”
It also means marketers can move away from last click attribution and start spending their marketing dollars in the channels where they are working, rather then handing them all to seach.
Murphy said brands should continue to push downloadable coupons or unique customer codes to better track the purchase path and see the sales influence of individual bloggers and channels.
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