Microsoft Pitches New Ad Measurement Approach

Microsoft's advertising arm is becoming increasingly active as the company looks to get the most out of the internet.

Recently Microsoft has tried to differentiate its advertising by offering a new form of ad measurement to help track multichannel campaigns.

As it moves to better compete with Google in online advertising, Microsoft is aiming to increase its appeal to marketers with a new way of tracking Web ad campaigns' performance and return on investment (ROI).

The company's new "Engagement ROI" measurement -- which is being baked into its Atlas Media Console campaign management tool -- seeks to promote a change in thinking about how ads affect consumers' buying decisions.

The conventional take has been that consumers' buying decisions are impacted only by the most recent ad they clicked on -- the so-called "last ad clicked" view.

"Our engagement mapping approach conveys how each ad exposure -- whether display, rich media or search, seen multiple times on multiple sites across many channels -- influenced the eventual purchase."

Engagement as a metric is starting to be pushed pretty hard lately, but there is still no one concrete definition/measurement standard for it. For a lot of companies 'engagement' is simply a buzz word for 'time-spent' while for others it is 'time-spent interacting' which applies more to flash based activities. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft (via aQuantive) can turn this into an ROI figure.


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