Written By Sepideh Saremi | February 25, 2008 | Share This |

online metrics microsoft engagement mapping

Microsoft has just announced the beta of a new reporting metric: “Engagement Mapping” aims to capture all the various online marketing messages a user is exposed to before making a purchase, rather than giving credit for a sale to the last ad that was clicked. Microsoft’s SVP of Advertiser & Publisher Solutions Brian McAndrews called the current practice of giving credit to the last ad clicked “outdated and flawed.”

McAndrews said in a press release (emphasis mine), “Our Engagement Mapping approach conveys how each ad exposure — whether display, rich media or search, seen multiple times on multiple sites and across many channels — influenced an eventual purchase.”

Basically this means that if you see an ad on a social network for product X, then click on a search ad a week later to buy product X, that social network’s ad gets some credit for the sale, too. But there aren’t many details yet about how exactly engagement mapping will work, even if Microsoft says it will measure the “impact that recency, frequency, size and ad format (such as rich media and video) have on a consumer’s online path to action.”

Microsoft’s announcement is the most recent indicator that advertisers are anxious to determine what pieces of their online marketing efforts are meaningful, and what engagement actually means. In related news, just last year Nielsen/NetRatings eschewed page views in favor of positioning time spent on a site as the primary metric of user engagement, though publishers and other content sites continue to rely largely on page views for their CPMs.

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