作者：Jeremy Ozen

在数字广告世界，我们一直很迷信点击率。即有多少人看了广告、点击了广告并做出购买行为——无论是订购、购买或下载？

然而，我们都知道这种归因理论和测量方对在线媒体是无效的。对于移动设备，考虑到购买或转化其实是发生在设备上的，这种测量形式甚至更加不相干。因此，我们必须为Millennial Media这周宣布准备发布“Omni Measurement Solutions”（游戏邦注：是一套全面评估手机广告的影响力的解决方案），不再使用过时的指标而叫好。

mobile_advertising(from webcoupers.com)

通过使用自己的数据和第三方的信息，这款新产品除了能计算点击量，还能计算“开门率”——由数字广告曝光所产生的流量，和“注册循环率”——看过广告后的，但不是因为点击广告而立即发生的购买行为。Millennial所要做的就是，测量这整个购买路径，以及看广告和购买之间的所有活动，这是非常关键的。然而，尽管听起来野心勃勃，Millennial的眼界其实仍然太小——因为这个系统的一切似乎仍然依赖移动广告的初始曝光。

消费者比他们的设备更具移动性

数字广告曝光不再限于电脑和移动设备。现在到处都是屏幕——高速公路两侧、的士的座位背后、电梯墙壁上……这些屏幕几乎保证你在出门到前往购买之间，除了在你的智能手机上，你还能随时随地看到各种广告。

DataLogix（游戏邦注：一家从事市场数据收集和分析解决方案的公司）为Facebook组织的一次内部研究发现，平均99%的人看了Facebook的广告，然后在商店购买产品，他们其实从来没有点击广告。看到它的手机广告成为其商业增长率最高的部分之一，Facebook很严肃地考虑了这个问题。Facebook认为，如果广告商可以把自身嵌入Facebook用户的阅读流中，那么它就可以促进品牌联系，进而促进一段时间后的甚至线下的购买。Facebook与DataLogix等公司进行合作。

所以为什么Millennial没有考虑到这些基于地点的屏幕？因为这些显示器接触到的是一般人，不是拥有移动设备的个人，要进行追踪和评估一直以来都是相当困难的。

然而，无视这些显示器意味着无视脱离设备的人。我们做什么事和去什么地方并不会直接与广告关联起来。比如去见朋友、看电影、坐飞机，如果我们在这些时候购买了什么，并不一定是因为我们之前在手机上看过广告，而可能是因为我们正好看到另一个屏幕上显示了广告或我们接近购买点。

没有隐私担忧的设备识别

我们所生存的数字世界是由大量增生的、可以彼此对话的连接设备组成的。任何与网络相连的东西都会生成数据，而那些数据可以与其他数据一起制造新的东西——无论是通过人工分析还是某些自动化技术。

在这些数据中，最大的一个类别就是设备位置。在不对其他个人可识别信息造成危害的情况下，越来越容易监测到一部移动设备（或它可以连接到的另一部设备）是否在当前屏幕显示的区域内，或者这部设备是否在当前屏幕可显示的商品广告的地域移动。

当然，以上描述是大大简化过的。如果能更加深入地挖掘数据，我们可以跟上甚至超越Millennial目前所设想的——不需要点击或手机广告曝光。想像一下：有一个人坐在出租车里，当车开到某段路时，车内座位背后的显示屏就会播放专门为这个路段设计的广告。当这个人到达目的地时，根据来自设备的位置信息（从哪里来及到哪里去），办公大楼的屏幕显示在出租车上播放的相同的广告。几天以后，还是那个人，或至少还是相同的设备的用户可能会出现在他所看到的广告商品的出售场所。不必点击，不必在线购买。无论是针对个人消费者还是群体消费者，我们都可以反复这么做，以确定大型地点促销活动的效力。

地点数据使我们得以评估以前根本无法评估的数据。所以虽然Millennial的宣言看似野心勃勃，但一定程度上，它在其手机第一的中心战略中仍然显得短视。真正令人振奋的突破应该是，除了识别移动设备以外，还要识别所有关于购买路径的地点屏幕和运用可以分析这些屏幕的测量技术。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

How to track mobile ad effectiveness — all the way to offline purchase

by Jeremy Ozen

In the digital advertising world, we’ve become obsessed with click-throughs. How many people see an ad and then click through with an action — whether it is a subscription, sale, or download?

However, we all know that this kind of attribution and measurement for online media is broken.  In mobile, this form of measurement is even less relevant given the dearth of purchases or conversions actually happening on a phone. As such, we have to applaud this week’s announcement by Millennial Media that they are releasing their “Omni Measurement Solutions” and moving away from antiquated metrics.

Using both their own data and third-party information, the new product is intended to measure not just clicks but the “door open rate” — how much foot traffic is generated by digital ad exposure — and “the register ring rate”—purchases that happen after exposure, but not immediately because of a click.  Measuring the entire purchase path, with all its “in-between” activity as Millennial intends to do is crucial. Yet, as ambitious as all of this is, Millennial is still thinking small — because everything in the system still seems to rely upon an initial mobile impression.

Consumers Are More Mobile than Their Devices

Digital ad exposure is no longer limited to desktop and mobile devices.  Screens are everywhere now—alongside the freeway, in the backseat of a taxi, over the buttons in an elevator.  It’s almost a guarantee that you will run into multiple ad units aside from your smartphone between the time you walk out your door and the point of purchase.

(A DataLogix study performed internally for Facebook found that on average 99 percent of people who saw Facebook ads and then bought a product in a store never clicked on an ad at all. Facebook, which is seeing one of the biggest growth rates in its mobile advertising business, is taking this seriously. Facebook argues that if an advertiser can inject itself into a Facebook user’s reading stream, it can foster brand affiliation, which can lead to a purchase down the road, even offline. Facebook is taking steps to measure this by working with companies like DataLogix.)

So why isn’t Millennial taking these location-based screens into account as well?  Because these displays reach multiple people, rather than the one person who owns a mobile device, and have historically been very difficult to track and measure.

However, ignoring location-based media means ignoring the way that people are untethered—not just from their desks but also from their devices. We do things and go places where our connectivity is an afterthought.  Out with friends, to the movies, on an airplane.  If we’re making purchasing decisions during this time, it isn’t necessarily because of ads we saw on our mobile devices earlier.  It could very well be because of content that was delivered to us on other screens as we were out and about, close to the point of purchase.

Device Identification Without Privacy Worries

The digital world we live in is defined by the proliferation of connected devices that can talk to one another.  Anything connected to the web generates data, and that data can work with other data to make things happen—whether through manual analysis or some sort of focused automation.

One of the biggest categories of this data is device location.  Without any other personally identifiable information being jeopardized, it is increasingly easy to monitor whether a mobile device (or another device it’s networked to) is in the vicinity of a location-based screen—and whether the device then travels somewhere else where a product advertised on that screen is available.

This is an over-simplification, of course.  With a deeper dive into data, we can follow all of the in-betweens, beyond what Millennial is currently imagining—without a single click or a single mobile ad impression.  Imagine this: a person is in a taxi whose screen shows an ad that has been specifically designed to appear only if the taxi is taking certain routes.  Person arrives at destination and, based on location information from device (where it had come from and where it ended up), the screens in the office building display an ad for the same product that was promoted in the cab. A few days later, that same person—or at least that same device—winds up at a Macy’s where the advertised product is available for sale.  At no time did the ad display on a desktop computer or mobile device.  There were no clicks.  No online purchases.  And we can do this over and over again, for individual devices or groups of consumers—to determine, say, the effectiveness of a big location-based campaign.

The power of location data lets us measure many things that were previously immeasurable.  So while Millennial’s announcement was ambitious, in some ways it continues to be short-sighted in its mobile-first focus.  A truly exciting breakthrough would be identifying all the location-based screens on the path to purchase, in addition to mobile devices, and employing measurement techniques that take all these screens into account.(source:venturebeat)