The Sky is Falling....

And in breaking news:

“ComScore Study finds 31% of Display Ads Never Seen”

“UH, OH! Facebook Pages Only Reach 17% Of Fans”

Crikey, I thought over my morning cuppa. We are all doomed. Or are we? Let’s break it down:

The only real new news here is the ‘31%’ in the headline. We all know that a percentage of ads are never seen and that’s ok because there are lots of perfectly relevant reasons for this. We all know CPC media buys deliver squillions of impressions and no-one really expects that every single one of them will be seen. Because the buy is based on clicks, wastage isn’t an issue.

As for ad impressions being delivered outside of geographic areas – well duh. We all know that ad serving isn’t an exact science and that some networks aren’t that rigorous with their targeting.

At the end of the day, if you want a guarantee that your ads will be seen (as much as there is a guarantee) then you need to pay for premium placements in contextually relevant environments. Media Planning 101 is to ensure you have the right mix of high reach/low cost placements which deliver cost effectiveness and premium, contextually relevant placements that deliver awareness and give the campaign a presence. The split is different for each brand/campaign, but a good starting point is 60/40 (and which way round that goes will depend on whether your objectives are awareness or response).

Anyhoo – its all a bit of a moot point as the real story behind this is ComScore’s announcement that they have launched a new “Validated Campaign Essentials” report which in a nutshell reports back on campaign wastage.

So on to the headline that Facebook pages only reach 17% of fans. If some of the brand pages I ‘like’ are anything to go by, this is also no surprise. For a start, some of the “content” they offer is so offputting I have ended up in the -5% propensity to buy category more than once. Secondly – the sheer volume of content appearing on my wall in any 24 hour period is overwhelming. And I don’t even have that many friends.

If you are managing a brand page on Facebook it’s essential to have an always on media budget set aside to support the page outside of wider campaign activity. Your campaign budgets should be used primarily to grow connections so that your always on budget can be used to build engagement through judicious and clever use of the sponsored stories product.

What I loved about the blog was the insight into a reporting metric we could all do with keeping an eye on – “average post visibility”. I’ll be adding this to our reporting metrics from here on in. And we could all do with keeping the “Tips for Solving Facebook Post Visibility Problems” close at hand.

So, I can get on with my work today in the safe knowledge that the sky is in fact not falling. Not today at least.

Cookies

Most people by now are familiar with cookies. They are the friendly pieces of code that remember you on the web – helping you fill out forms, remembering your location and keeping you signed in. They are also the way we track our advertising - how we discern uniques, how we track sales, how we behaviourally target & retarget. They are in short how the web knows who we are.

Super cookies have been in the news lately. The label is a bit of a misnomer, but generally refer to a type of cookie that is indefinite, difficult to delete and tracks a lot of data.

Most cookies have a limited persistence: 30, 60, 90 days… Advertisers limit cookie windows so as not to over-count conversion. One week, or even one day windows are not uncommon. Super cookies however are indefinite, tracking users across months or years, building a rich data pool about their behaviour. Sound familiar? That’s because they are the cookies often used for behavioural targeting.

In themselves these cookies are fairly innocuous - what worries some people is how difficult they are to delete. Regular cookies are fairly easy to delete as anyone with a slight knowledge of internet settings or a spyware program knows. A supercookie however isn't, it is hidden in the depths of the registry. And their close relatives Zombie cookies (seriously you can’t make this stuff up) automatically recreates itself after a user deletes it.

Also the data these cookies collect can concern people - the news Facebook tracks users across the web even after they have logged out, is a good example [watch this space for another post on Facebook vs Privacy, that is a whole other war]. A supercookie allows a site (or network) to build a profile of a user, sites visited, words searched, products purchased. This seems frightening, but really shouldn’t be. Sure a network might know I have read TV reviews, searched for a Sony Bravia & spent time on Trade Me looking at TVs – but if it means they serve me ads for new TVs, it only improves my browsing experience. All reputable networks or sites selling behavioural data, sell segments -- data aggregated and never personally identifiable.

So what does this mean for advertisers? Any data collected by us as an agency is covered through the Mediamind privacy policy But if you are currently using retargeting – this should serve as a reminder to check your data collection policy & ensure it is clearly defined and easily accessible on your site. It’s important to provide the ability to opt-out - direct your users to this page

Cookies are nothing to fear, they make our browsing experience faster, more relevant and more personal. Just make sure you have the right safeguards in place to prevent a tummy ache…