‘Tis the season for Christmas shopping hype. The ads are everywhere, so are the lights, the endless music, and daily wave of hype numbers about how great the web is for online shopping. Unfortunately, it’s a fountain of hype with almost no explanation.
Black Friday records.... blah, blah.
In case you missed it...
- Online retailers saw market share of Thanksgiving Day traffic grow by around 18.8% from 2004, while the proportion of visits to those sites on Black Friday grew by 20.9% year-over-year (Hitwise)
- Online shoppers will spend $19 billion in November and December, a 24% rise over last year, (comScore forecast)
- The online ad market is set to hit at least $55 billion globally by 2010 (Piper Jaffray)
Am I the only one who is noticing these announcements have almost zero substance? Little analysis, and almost no discussion as to why or what the average guy can do to help reap some of the reward.
I did however come across one meaningful announcement... lost in the shuffle of press releases waves from dueling analysts offering almost no analysis but lots of numbers. Yahoo! and Aegis Group, a
Yahoo! is using Aegis Group for their savvy measurement and their expertise with econometrics analysis. Aegis likens econometrics to a branch of economics that “uses complicated mathematical calculations to measure the relationship between different events.” Aegis claims to “weigh myriad factors such as weather, price cuts and advertising quality in determining how sales are affected.”
Under the partnership, Yahoo! advertisers will pay extra for the service. Ah ha, another way for Yahoo! to boost its hungry revenue to satisfy the even hungrier analysts who demand more growth, more margin, more earnings!
Of course we have many, many different metrics for measuring online effectiveness (click through rates, conversion rates, cost per click, etc.) but this is the first one I’ve seen linking online efforts to offline sales. Though apparently comScore has something that few rely on.
Yahoo! and Aegis’s plan builds on an existing model to include data from Yahoo! showing users
"Marketers need to be able to measure and make decisions about online and offline marketing campaigns with a holistic view," said Wenda Harris Millard, chief sales officer, Yahoo!. "Providing this new service with
"In many ways, online marketing can be more accountable than many offline marketing tactics, but there is still a real need to understand the total sales impact of online and offline programs on a common ROI basis so that optimal budget allocations can be made," said John Nardone,
Anyone come across a credible model for linking real world advertising with online use and sales?
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