Posts Tagged ‘Dashboard’

Analyze local response by DMA

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Advertisers typically pay by CPM to run Xspot campaigns. It’s in their best interest to know that as many impressions as possible are being served to relevant target audiences.

Now you have an easy way to get advertisers exactly the audience information they need.

Custom reports generated in the Mixpo Dashboard include a table that lists views, clicks, and other performance data by designated marketing area (DMA).

DMA table in custom report

DMA table in custom report - Click for larger image

Because the 210 U.S. DMAs are organized in the table in descending order by number of views, advertisers can see at a glance how target viewers are responding.

More information

Learn more about how DMA data can shape Xspot campaigns.

Mixpo subscribers can learn more about monitoring views by DMA by opening the Reports page, and then clicking Can I monitor Xspot views by DMA?.

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Above and below the fold

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

According to Stefan Tornquist, research director at Marketing Sherpa, delivery reports supplied by online publishers or ad networks “rarely indicate what percentage of the media buy was served above or below the fold.” Yet, eye-tracking studies have shown that on-page placement has a major effect on return on investment (ROI) and return on ad spend (ROAS).

A 2008 study commissioned by MarketingSherpa found that while ads placed above the fold are visible to 100 percent of site visitors, only about 60 percent actually see them. Below-the-fold ads are visible to only 70 percent of viewers and only about one quarter actually see them.

Even at remnant rates, it’s extremely expensive to pay for impressions where 75 percent of viewers don’t even see an ad.

On the Mixpo platform, you now have an easy, visual way to monitor the on-page placement of Xspot campaigns.

Using the Xspot Position map in the Dashboard, you can quickly and easily get an overall picture of an ad’s placement across all of the domains where it’s running. In combination with the Domain filter, you can also compare the placement between different domains.

To get an idea for what an Xspot Position map reveals, take a look at this map for an Xspot that is running primarily above the fold.

Xspot running primarily above the fold

Xspot running primarily above the fold

Here’s what the map tells you:

  • The top square represents the browser window above the fold. It is divided into 25 smaller squares representing positions on the webpage. In 95 percent of the impressions this Xspot received, it was positioned above the fold.
  • A square’s color and percentage indicate the proportion of total impressions where the Xspot appeared in that position. Variations in position result from variations in the size and resolution of viewers’ browser windows.
  • The two rectangles below the square represent the area of the webpage that is below the fold. In this position map, in 4 percent of impressions, the Xspot appeared in an area more than one page below the fold.
  • In the lower right corner of the position map, you see a summary of the number of impressions the map represents (in this case, 29,863 impressions) and the percent of impressions that resulted in views (in this case, 4 percent).

In contrast, take a look at this Xspot Position map for an Xspot running primarily below the fold.

Xspot running primarily below the fold

Xspot running primarily below the fold

In 83 percent of the impressions, this Xspot appeared below the fold. In fact, 58 percent of the time, the Xspot was more than one page below the fold. According to the MarketingSherpa data, this advertiser paid for almost 70,000 impressions (75 percent of 83,343 impressions) where viewers never even saw the Xspot.

To learn more about the Xspot Position map, visit the Reports page, and then click How do I interpret the Dashboard?.

To learn more about the Domain filter, visit the Reports page, and then click Can I monitor Xspot performance by domain?

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Measure to improve

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

Way back in 2006 IAB gathered opinions from marketing executives to learn what they thought was most compelling about online advertising. One of the key characteristics the executives identified was the ability to measure an online campaign’s effectiveness.

Today, articles continue to emphasize the advantages of online over TV and other traditional forms of advertising. For example, in a recent Ezine article, Derek Rogers points out that “with traditional advertising, there is little you can do to track the success of small changes within campaigns or one campaign as compared to another. However, with online advertising you have a huge array of information at your fingertips.”

In the Mixpo platform, you have access, as Rogers puts it, to a “huge array” of performance data about Xspot campaigns. Track interactions, views, and clicks. See the ratio of views to impressions and clicks to views. Monitor how much of an Xspot viewers typically watch and how many watch it all the way through.

Performance data for a Mixpo product tour Xspot

Basic performance data for a Mixpo product tour Xspot

Having access to all that data is one thing. Actively using it to improve advertiser’s campaigns is another. With the most recent release of the Mixpo platform, we’ve made it much easier for you to do just that.

We’ve talked elsewhere in this blog about the key role that thumbnail images play in an Xspot’s performance. The thumbnail image is the image that viewers see in the Player before they play an Xspot. The more compelling the image, the more likely viewers are to play. But how can you be sure which thumbnail image will result in the most views?

Through performance testing. Using the Copy feature in the Dashboard, you can now create up to 8 versions of an Xspot, each with a different thumbnail image. The versions are automatically placed into ad rotation, which means that they rotate randomly through the same Player. This makes it easy to track the performance of each version to determine which thumbnail image results in the most views.

Copy This Xspot window with randomly generated thumbnail images

Copy This Xspot window with randomly generated thumbnail images

The platform automatically generates the initial thumbnail images from the video and image content of the Xspot. You can also click an auto-generated image to select a specific thumbnail image yourself.

Using the new Copy feature to auto-generate thumbnail images is an easy way to jump in to performance testing. But it’s only the beginning. Visit Improve Xspot Performance to learn more about setting up performance tests of your own. (For more details about auto-generating thumbnail images, on the Improve Xspot Performance page, click What’s the easiest way to try performance testing?.)

Each performance test you run not only optimizes a specific online campaign. It also increases your cumulative knowledge about what makes online—and even traditional—campaigns effective.

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Reports – It’s all about the numbers

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

For you and your advertisers, it’s all about the numbers.

Advertisers want to know what they’re getting for their advertising dollars.

You sell advertising based on its ability to perform.

In this post, we’ll walk through the performance reports available in the VideoAd platform and describe some best practices for accessing and generating them.

We’ll answer the following questions:

What types of performance reports are available?

As a group manager, you have access to:

All reports are in PDF format that you can easily open, save, print, and email to advertisers.

Summary reports by VideoAd

Summary report for several VideoAds in an account

Summary report for several VideoAds in an account

Useful for: Providing advertisers with a high-level snapshot of how one or more of their VideoAds are performing.

Includes: Graphical displays of views, clicks, interactions, and playthrough. A tabular presentation of engagement and exposure rates for each VideoAd.

Generated by: Selecting the VideoAds you want to include, specifying a date range, and clicking the Generate Report button in the Dashboard.

Detailed performance reports by account

Detailed account report. Data shown for one VideoAd in report.

Detailed account report. Data shown for one VideoAd in report.

Useful for: Analyzing a VideoAd’s performance on an on-going basis and optimizing the VideoAd to perform better.

Includes: Summary engagement and exposure statistics for each VideoAd accompanied by detailed graphical displays of impressions, interactions, views, and clicks.

Generated by: The platform, automatically, every week and every month. Available in the Advanced Analytics section of each advertiser account or by email.

Tip Not sure what a particular statistic means? Check the glossary of performance terms included as the last page in each account report.

Summary performance reports by group

Group report with summary data for each account.

Group report with summary data for each account.

Useful for: Maintaining a high-level perspective on the account activity within a group. Comparing the performance of accounts across the group.

Includes: Summary of activity across all accounts. Tabular presentation of engagement and exposure rates for each account.

Generated by: The platform, automatically, every week and every month. Available in the Advanced Analytics section of the group manager’s account or by email.

I’d like more details about working with reports.

How can group managers easily monitor their accounts?

The easiest way to stay informed about the performance of VideoAds and accounts in your group is to receive automatically generated account and group reports by email.

Setting up email receipt of automated reports

Setting up email receipt of automated reports

To set up email receipt of reports, sign in to the account with reports you want to receive and go to the Reports tab in the Advanced Analytics section.

For example, to receive group reports by email, sign in to your group manager account. To receive specific advertiser account reports by email, sign in to each advertiser account.

You can have reports sent to just one or several email addresses. In the Email to list, separate multiple addresses with commas or spaces.

I’d like more details about setting up email receipt of reports.

Can group managers generate custom reports?

Yes they can.

From within an advertiser account, you can generate account reports customized by date range and the specific VideoAds the report includes.

From within your group manager account, you can generate group reports customized by date range.

You generate custom reports on the Reports tab in the Advanced Analytics section.

Generating a custom report

Generating a custom report

This picture shows how to generate an account report that covers the time period from January to April, 2009 and includes only VideoAds with data.

As custom reports are generated, they are placed into a Customized Reports list on the Reports tab.

Customized reports list

Customized reports list

To open a PDF report, click the link. To delete a report, click the red x.

I’d like more details about generating custom reports.

Tip

You can quickly generate custom account reports for specific time periods from within your group manager account. Under Individual Account Reports, select a time period, and then click to open a PDF report.

Individual account reports for a specific week

Individual account reports for a specific week

When you generate individual account reports using this method, you can’t specify which VideoAds the report includes.

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The Dashboard: A guided tour

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

As Mixpo’s VP of Marketing, Glenn Pingul, points out in a MediaPost Online Video Insider article, “at the end of the day, effective advertising is really all about the message.”

Glenn’s point is that, while online video technology is “poised to be the next driver of change in advertising,” it, like all technologies, is only “an enabler” that can never ultimately drive a VideoAd’s effectiveness.

Unquestionably, technology can’t compensate for poor content.

However, one of the truly powerful aspects of online video technology is its ability to teach. The Mixpo platform allows advertisers to closely monitor VideoAd performance and make changes on the fly in response to performance data.

Over time, this analysis-based experimentation can give advertisers a sophisticated understanding of the types of “messages,” to borrow Glenn’s word, that drive engagement and response.

In this article, part 1 of a 2-part series on performance analysis, we’ll take a guided tour of the Mixpo Dashboard and examine how the Dashboard’s data displays help advertisers become more knowledgeable content creators.

In part 2, we’ll go deeper with a look at Advanced Analytics.

Here’s what we’ll cover in the rest of this article

An overview of the Dashboard

The Dashboard functions as the home page for a Mixpo account. It’s the place where you manage the account’s VideoAds and get a real-time, at-a-glance appraisal of how each VideoAd is performing.

Dashboard - the account home page

Dashboard - the account home page

In addition to graphical displays of performance data (each of which we’ll discuss in more detail below), the Dashboard provides you with a performance summary for each VideoAd.

Summary performance data

Summary performance data

Tip Pausing your cursor over the summary list opens a small window that contains more detailed performance data.

Let’s spend a little time with the summary shown above to see what it tells us. If you’re a little fuzzy about what terms like Engagement and Exposure mean, you might want to read What do terms like engagement rate and exposure mean?.

This VideoAd is doing a pretty impressive job of holding the attention of viewers who decide to watch it. On average, viewers watched 88 percent of the VideoAd and 75 percent of viewers who started the ad watched it all the way through.

In addition, of the almost 210,000 people who landed on the page where the VideoAd is embedded, .50 percent took some action with the ad by viewing it, clicking a link or lead capture invitation, or interacting with the Player controls.

Given that typical click rates for display ads average around .10 percent, a .50 percent engagement rate is pretty impressive.

While this VideoAd is performing well, the advertiser might consider testing a different thumbnail image or initial call to action to try to boost the views-to-impressions rate even further.

I’d like to read more about thumbnail images.

VideoAd Activity

The VideoAd Activity section of the Dashboard displays impressions, views, and clicks over time.

VideoAd Activity - Impressions highlighted

VideoAd Activity - Impressions highlighted

Hover over a line or bar to display specific numbers and dates.

VideoAd Activity - Clicks highlighted

VideoAd Activity - Clicks highlighted

Hiding impressions gives you a clearer sense of the number of views.

The power of this time-based display is that it uncovers patterns. For example, suppose, in response to the summary data we discussed above, an advertiser switches thumbnail images. View and click patterns in the Video Activity section will show whether or not the new thumbnail had any effect.

Careful scrutiny of impression patterns might also help advertisers develop a sense for the best times to run ads in online publications.

Playthrough and Engagement Profile

While the VideoAd Activity section displays chronological time, this profile presents viewer actions in relationship to the length of the VideoAd itself.

Playthrough and Engagement Profile - Playthrough highlighted

Playthrough and Engagement Profile - Playthrough highlighted

In the Playthrough chart on top, the green bars show the percent of viewers who stopped watching at specific points throughout the VideoAd. For example, approximately 620 viewers stopped watching this VideoAd almost immediately while 1500 watched it all the way through. More than 200 viewers liked the VideoAd enough to replay it.

Playthrough and Engagement Profile - Engagement highlighted

Playthrough and Engagement Profile - Engagement highlighted

In the Engagement chart on the bottom, red circles represent interactions and orange circles represent clicks.

Looking at the two charts together suggests a relationship between the large number of interactions viewers are taking at the beginning of the ad and the number who stop watching.

An examination of the VideoAd content shows that the advertiser placed a lead capture overlay at the beginning of the ad inviting viewers to sign up for a special offer. From the data, it appears that many viewers opened the lead capture form and instead of signing up for the offer, stopped watching the VideoAd.

Based on the Playthrough and Engagement profile, the advertiser might decide to move the lead capture overlay closer to the end of the VideoAd. This would increase brand exposure and, as a result, increase the likelihood that viewers would not just open the lead capture form but also fill out and submit it.

Viewer Locations

In the Viewer Locations section, advertisers can track, worldwide, where views and clicks originate.

Viewer Locations

Viewer Locations

Tip To expand the Viewer Locations section, click the blue plus icon in the upper right corner. To see other parts of the world, place your cursor over the map and drag.

Blue labels represent views. Orange labels represent clicks or clicks and views. Pause your cursor over a label to see specific numbers.

At its simplest, Viewer Locations shows advertisers where their viewers are coming from and might help them better target their content.

The location-based data also allows advertisers to compare the performance of ads published in regional online publications.

Website Activity

The Website Activity section compares VideoAd activity across all of the sites where the ad is embedded. It also provides advertisers with a picture of the ways in which viewers are discovering their VideoAd through Internet search.

Top Embeds

Top Embeds

On the Top Embeds tab, you see the sites where a VideoAd is embedded listed by number of views. For example, this is the Top Embeds list for one of the Mixpo product tour VideoAds. The highest number of views originated on the Mixpo website where we embedded the VideoAd.

The second highest number originated on a popular technology trends blog called TechCrunch. This is an excellent example of how advertisers can benefit from the viral spread of a VideoAd.

While viewing the product tour VideoAd on the Mixpo website, the blog post’s author clicked Embed on Your Site, optionally available on the INFO menu in the Player, to copy the VideoAd’s embed code and paste it into the post. Thousands of people viewed the VideoAd in the TechCrunch blog post who would never have discovered it on the Mixpo site.

I’d like to know more about the options on the Player INFO menu.

Tip From the Top Embeds tab, you can navigate directly to the webpage where a VideoAd is embedded. Open the website folder, and then click a URL.

Top Embeds tab - click URL

Top Embeds tab - click URL

On the Recent Referrers tab, advertisers see a list of webpages that viewers visited before viewing the VideoAd landing page. When the webpage is a search site, hovering over the URL displays the search query, including the search terms viewers used to locate your VideoAd in search results.

Website Activity - Recent Referrers

Website Activity - Recent Referrers

For example, the image above shows how a viewer discovered a local opera company’s VideoAd for a production of Phantom of the Opera by searching on video.google.com.

Advertisers can use this data to refine and improve the keywords associated with their VideoAds and increase the likelihood that potential customers will discover the VideoAds through Internet search.

Tip When viewers navigate to your VideoAd by clicking a link in an Internet search engine results list, they open the VideoAd landing page. I’d like to know more about landing pages.

Wrap up

Compelling content, not technology, is what sells services and products. But, as Glenn Pingul put it, technology is an enabler. By taking full advantage of the performance analysis tools available in the Mixpo Dashboard, advertisers can become compelling-content creators over time.

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Better performance tracking. Better VideoAds.

Monday, February 16th, 2009

One of the compelling reasons that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are turning to online video advertising in such large numbers is because they can measure its effectiveness.

As Stephen Condon, Vice President Sales and Marketing at PixelFish wrote recently, “The old adage that ‘50% of my advertising works; I just don’t know which 50%,’ is especially true with television advertising and represents an unacceptable risk to SMBs with limited marketing budgets.”

That’s why we recently refined the way the Mixpo platform tracks and measures VideoAd performance.

Our refined approach is more consistent with online ad tracking standards and gives advertisers a more accurate picture of VideoAd effectiveness.

In this article, you’ll discover:

New performance measures

To more accurately express viewer response to VideoAds, we renamed one existing performance metric and added two new ones.

  • What we used to call conversions we now call Clicks. We count a Click each time a viewer clicks an overlay to display a webpage, submits a lead capture form, or clicks a More Info or Inquire call to action on the Player’s INFO menu.
  • Engagement rate (a new metric) is an overall measure, expressed as a percentage, of a VideoAd’s ability to capture viewers’ attention and interest. We calculate Engagement rate by adding together the total number of views, interactions, and clicks and dividing that total by the number of impressions.
  • % Completed (a new metric) measures your VideoAd’s ability to hold viewers’ interest. We calculate % Completed by dividing the number of viewers who watched your entire VideoAd by the total number of viewers.

Tell me more about the INFO menu.

Changes in data presentation

We made significant changes in how we present performance data to make it easier for you to track performance in the Dashboard and optimize your VideoAds in response.

Summary data

Summary performance data

Summary performance data

The summary data now includes Engagement, the new metric, and Exposure, a metric previously available only in Advanced Analytics.

Exposure, which we calculate by adding up the total number of minutes all viewers of your VideoAd spend watching it, provides you with a measure of overall brand exposure.

If you hover over the summary statistics, you see more detail, including the new metric, % Completed.

More summary statistics on hover

Hover over the summary stats to see more

Viewer Activity

The Viewer Activity section of the Dashboard, which measures activity over time, now displays clicks along with impressions and views.

Viewer Activity section

Viewer Activity section

Hover over an orange bar to see specific click numbers and dates.

Playthrough and Engagement

In the Playthrough and Engagement Profile, you see the same green bars you’re used to. These bars show you where in your VideoAd viewers stop watching.

Playthrough and Engagement Profile

Playthrough, interactions, and clicks

We now accompany the green bars with both red circles, which represent Interactions, and orange circles, which represent Clicks. Hover over a circle to see specific details.

This gives you a clearer picture of exactly what actions viewers are taking throughout your VideoAd. The more you know, the easier it is to optimize VideoAds to perform better.

Web Activity

We’ve renamed the bottom-right section of the Dashboard and reorganized it to show Top Embeds by default.

Sites where the VideoAd is embedded listed by views

Sites where the VideoAd is embedded listed by views

Top Embeds shows you the URLs for the webpages where the VideoAd is embedded listed in descending order by number of views.

Tip You can still see the search engines and search terms viewers used to locate your VideoAd landing page by clicking Recent Referrers.

How you benefit

The refinements to our performance measures:

  • Make online video advertising even more accountable by presenting you and your advertisers with clearer indicators of a VideoAd’s performance.
  • Give you and your advertisers a more accurate picture of a VideoAd’s ability to attract, motivate, and hold viewers.
  • Make it easier for you to collaborate with advertisers to optimize VideoAds, target what works, and develop more effective VideoAd campaigns in the future.

I’d like to read detailed definitions of all performance measures.

Tell me more about tracking VideoAd performance.

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Keep track of VideoAds with notes

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

In Creative Insights on Rich Media (visit doubleclick.com to download a PDF), Sally Cole, Business Marketing Manager at Google, points out that advertisers get the best ad campaign results when they set measurable goals up front.

For example, with one VideoAd, an advertiser might set a goal of beating the industry interaction rate benchmark. In another instance, the focus might be to compare two versions of the same VideoAd to see which produces a higher complete rate.

As you work with advertisers over time, you’re likely to build up a significant number of VideoAds in each advertiser’s account. Unless you put an organizational system in place, you can easily lose track of when and why various VideoAds were published.

Fortunately, you have a couple of simple tools at your disposal that help you keep track of the VideoAds you publish:

VideoAd title

As you know, the VideoAds you create in a single account appear in the vertical, scrolling Your VideoAds list that occupies the left side of the Dashboard.

Your VideoAds list

Your VideoAds list

VideoAd order in the list is determined by editing. The VideoAd you edited most recently, in other words, appears at the top, and the order is always changing.

This arrangement is convenient because the VideoAds you’re currently working on are the easiest to access. It does, however, highlight the importance of being able to quickly identify VideoAds by scrolling through their titles.

To ensure that VideoAd titles are as effective and scrollable as possible, make them unique and meaningful, and put the unique information up front (the length limit for titles is 100 characters).

Why front load titles? In the Your VideoAds list, titles are truncated at 37 characters. If several titles begin exactly the same way, you won’t be able to distinguish one from another.

Obviously, you have to develop an approach to VideoAd titles that makes sense for your organization but here are some examples of informative titles that might work:

mixpocorp_Jan09_CreateVideoAds (AdvertiserName_monthyear_VideoAdSubject)

mixpocorp_Jan09_CreateVideoAds.mov
(AdvertiserName_monthyear_UploadedFilename)

OptimizeVideoAds_200812_mixpocorp
(VideoAdSubject_yearmonth_AdvertiserName)

Tip When you’re performance testing different versions of a VideoAd, the word “Rotating” is automatically added to the title of the ad you use to set up ad rotation.

How do I assign a title to a VideoAd?

Descriptive notes

It’s impossible for even a meaningful title to carry all of the important information about a VideoAd. That’s why we added the Notes feature.

Notes allow you to supplement VideoAd titles by recording:

  • The date a VideoAd was published.
  • The date you began ad rotation to compare the performance of a VideoAd’s versions.
  • What aspect of a VideoAd you’re performance testing.
  • The advertiser’s goals for the VideoAd.

To annotate a VideoAd, click the Notes button associated with the VideoAd in the Your VideoAds list.

Clicking the Notes button

Clicking the Notes button

Then in the Notes editing window that opens, annotate the VideoAd in any way that will help you (and the advertiser) remember exactly when it was created and what goal motivated its creation.

Edit VideoAd Notes window

Edit VideoAd Notes window

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