By now you’ve heard Mozilla’s announcement to set the cookie default to “block” in the release of Firefox 22. With the current version sitting at number 19 it may be a while, but the end is nigh for 3rd party cookies. Looking for response from the industry ADOTAS reached out to OptiMine today and asked CTO Rob Cooley what he thought the impact would be.

You can read his entire answer here, or go with the pasted text below, but the gist is that attention-based advertising has always struggled because it is difficult to place a real value on it using cookies alone. Add the explosion of multi-device usage and the change to Firefox will only only make the problem worse. So, what’s an advertiser to do? Look to impressions:

“Mozilla’s announcement reinforces the risk in relying on cookies alone to value the impact of attention-based advertising, such as display and Facebook. In addition to challenges posed by browsers (among others), cookies fall apart when it comes to tracking across multiple devices. The good news is that there are now ways to use cross-channel modeling to calculate the true value of digital advertising impressions, independent of a specific tracking mechanism such as cookies. In addition to overcoming cookie-inherent limitations, a Value Per Impression (VPI) approach provides advertisers insight into the full-funnel value of their impressions, including the perennially important – but often elusive – brand effect.”  – Rob Cooley, CTO

 The bottom line: Cookies are nice, but the cookies-only strategy is on life support, and Mozilla’s move to block cookies by default is just the latest nail in the cookie coffin. If you really want to know the value of attention-based advertising, VPI is the only approach.

@OptiMineInc

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ADOTAS has put forth an Op-Ed that takes a look at the at trends in the digital advertising space. It drew on several sources, including eMarketer and Forrester, and considered, among other things, spend – current and future, media mix, and influencers. Of the several conclusions drawn, three that pertain directly to paid search are:

1. Budgets continue to shift to digital advertising channels
2. Paid will remain number 1 for, well, forever it seems
3. Value is driving budget distribution.

The first two are not a surprise, but number three, that is something new. OK, maybe not new new, but definitely newer.

Where this plays a pretty major role is in display advertising. Long considered a branding exercise, marketers have struggled for years to tie display to any real monetary value. Paid is much easier: Clicks lead to conversions and conversions to revenue. With display it’s been all about eyeballs and, now, how many times a particular set of eyeballs sees a particular ad (vCPM). The great unknown is which, if any, of those views turn directly into revenue or, at the very least, contribute to a conversion through another channel.

But will vCPM drive more spend into display?

To the article we go:

This year our industry has seen the birth of a new acronym: vCPM. Viewability seeks to measure how frequently an ad is actually seen by a user, and not merely the number of times it’s served by a site’s ad server.

At the same time, Forrester reports that viewability will have a neutral effect on overall ad spend. If this is the case for 2013, look for brands to focus their display ad spend on viewable impressions.

Brand-awareness is still important, but most advertisers are shifting their focus to performance-based pricing models. Year-over-year growth in display related ad formats…is in outright decline. [emphasis added]

It’s the whole Jerry McGuire thing. If it can’t show ‘em the money, marketers are going to use the channel as little as possible. That, and everyone is still trying to figure out which half of their budget is being wasted and, without a clear link from display to revenue, display finds its way to the chopping block.

What marketers need, what will give them peace-of-mind, and the potential for a huge career boost, is the missing link; the connection that lights the path between display – not to mention other channels – and revenue. But why stop with a straight-line path. Let’s go for the kit and the caboodle: Honest-to-goodness cross-channel attribution.

True visibility into the effects across, among and between all digital channels so marketers can not only find the 50% of their budget that’s being wasted, but put it to work generating bottom line results.

Some say Utopia doesn’t exist, but it may be closer than you know.

@OptiMineInc

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Rob Cooley, OptiMine CTO, has penned an article for Adotas.  The subject, choosing  the best keyword bidding method, is becoming a hot one among paid search professionals.

The bidding landscape has been evolving for a number of years. What started with rules-based approach has progressed through local optimization to global optimization. Until recently, however, global optimization was only achievable by clustering keyword data.  As you move from the head into the tail conversions become fewer and aggregating the data from, potently, thousands of keywords is the only way to have enough to build reliable models.

Until recently.

Read the article to learn why individual keyword-level modeling is driving dramatic financial performance improvement for those who are using it.

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