More Complete View of Digital Advertising

As I have discussed in previous posts, I believe the manner in which much of the marketing community is measuring the success of digital marketing and marketing in general is incomplete, sometimes shortsighted and eventually problematic.
Effective sales and marketing requires influencing buyers' behavior, attitudes and perceptions. Human beings, as I have discussed previously, are complex. In addition, B2B sales and marketing is a complex and often long process.

In my opinion, we are kidding ourselves if we think that we can measure true marketing ROI by counting how many clicks are delivered or even the number of downloads we receive from a lead generation program. B2B sales and marketing is simply a great deal more complex. Clicks, time spent on a site, page views and download activity allow you to gauge interest and engagement. Of particular interest to me is measuring escalating engagement--if a specific decision maker is downloading every piece of information they can get their hands on for Company XYZ's product, one could probably assume that buyer is in heavy research and decision set creation mode.

The following charts provide a clear illustration of the branding, awareness generation and perception changing impact of online display advertising. These undoubtedly will be unwelcome illustrations for many of us in the marketing community as we are all looking for silver bullet metrics. But, I do believe that it is important to continually remind ourselves of the realities of successful marketing--it just is not as easy and clear cut as we would like it to be.

Illustrations © 2008 Publishing Executive magazine, August 2008 issue.