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Online Advertising - How Does It Actually Work?

We're very aware that not everyone who's using adCenter Analytics or reading this Web Analytics Blog is necessarily interested in online advertising. We’ve made a conscious to make sure the content here is not too advertising-heavy as there’s nothing worse than getting sold stuff you don’t need, especially if you’re quite happy with the rich information the tool is providing you with.

However, Microsoft Advertising’s flurry of activity over recent years in the online advertising space, buying companies and doing deals with the likes of Facebook and Digg.com, has meant we get asked more and more about the business we’re in. It’s not just the people I meet at conferences and in the pub that are asking, but people in our own company who are really interested in the direction we’re headed and want to know more.

As an avid reader of LiesDamnedLies.com – Ian Thomas’s Blog – I picked up that the English guy who first brought Microsoft Gatineau into Beta has started a series of 101 or “beginner” posts about online advertising that have got quite a bit of attention.

So far there are 3:

The Online Advertising Value Chain

How Does Ad Serving Actually Work?

Ad Networks

They’re pretty detailed and accessible so do take a peek............if you’re interested in how online advertising works of course!

adCenter Analytics Deep Dive – The Dashboard

We hope you’ve had a chance to take a look at the analytics beta refresh that went live over the weekend.

As promised, this is the first of a series of posts take a deep dive look at some of the new features.

My Dashboard

The new dashboard feature is really helpful, as it gives you a snapshot of what’s happening on your site without you having to run several reports before you spot anything out of the ordinary occurring with your traffic.

When you first log in, the default view contains a series of “gadgets” displaying information such as:

· A Traffic Summary – Page views, visits, repeat visits, bounce rate and visitors

· Detailed graphs showing page views and visits

· Bar graphs showing visualizations of top pages, top keywords and top referring websites

You’ll notice the calendar legend has been hidden, so if you click the + in the top right hand corner of the page above Help, the calendar will fold down and you can select any given day, month, week or a custom date-range.

Dashboard Customization

The layout of the gadgets is fully customizable. You can “drag and drop” the gadgets into a different order if you so wish. You can also remove gadgets from the dashboard by clicking on the “X” button in the top-right corner of the gadget frame if they are not relevant to your needs.

Adding more gadgets couldn’t be easier!

Simply click on “Show gadget library” and you’ll see you can add “at-a-glance” information on:

· Browsers

· Languages

· Operating systems

· Screen resolution

· Website instrumentation

Of course, the KPIs provided in the Dashboard are just top-level information.

To dig deeper, just click on the “view report” links on each of the gadgets to get more insight.

You can also add reports to the dashboard when viewing a report. Simply click on the “Add to Dashboard" button located just under the calendar view.

You might also want to know how your traffic metrics compare over different time periods. The answer is only a few clicks away.

· Make sure that the Traffic Summary gadget is showing on your Dashboard

· In the calendar select the week or month you want to compare with the previous (other than the current week or month)

· You can see that the traffic report now has a column showing a comparison of your page views, visits and visitors based on your time-period selection.

Do let us know via the adCenter Analytics Forum what you think of the dashboard feature, or if you’d like to see other gadgets to be added to the library.

Cheers Mel

adCenter Analytics Beta Refresh – New Features Added!

If you’ve logged into your adCenter Analytics account this morning you’ll be pleased to see a number of new features have been added by our product teams over the past few days.

I’ll take you through each one but do expect deeper dives here on the blog over the next couple of weeks!

Dashboard

This functionality lets you choose which information is most important to you. It gives you an up-to-date snapshot of your website’s traffic activity. It’s fully customizable so you can tailor it to your needs.
We added this to make it easy for users to take a quick peek at their data without having to run any reports. This way, soon after logging in you can immediately spot any traffic spikes or potential problems with your site that might need deeper investigation.

The default view includes:

• Traffic summary
• Page views
• Visits
• Top pages
• Top keywords
• Top referring websites

You can use the Gadget Library to add any other snapshots you wish to view quickly and easily.

Path Reports

This report helps you understand the path that users are taking in order to get to a particular page on your website, or where they go after they access that page. This might include scenarios such as from landing pages or to specific points like account sign up or conversion pages.

You can use this kind of information to optimise their navigation experience so they convert quicker or find what they might be looking for more efficiently.

Top Entry & Exit Pages

Knowing on which page people land when they find your website is crucial, because it may not always be your homepage. This information tells you which pages your users entered via most often, the average page views per visit they browsed, and how long they spent on the site.

Having an idea of which pages visitors leave your site the most is equally important.

If they’re going elsewhere from pages they “shouldn’t” and hence are not converting, you can do some analysis and maybe try to ferry them through a different path or change/add some text to help them navigate a little better.

Media Campaign Timeline

We’ve made improvements to the Campaign Timeline Report which allows an overview of referrals and conversions that were generated by your tracked marketing campaigns over the past year. You can compare individual campaigns within a group, and compare groups of the same campaign type or across campaign types, and spot trends in campaign performance over the last year in conversion rates and ROI.

Treemap Improvements

Back in April we talked about the Treemap Report and how it could be used to help optimise your site. In this release we’ve added enhanced navigation and enabled you to see demographic segmentation of page views and referrals. This is an awesome feature, as you can now see who is interacting with your website from an age and gender point of view, right down to which pages they see and how they arrive at those pages.

We also made some changes in the back end of the system to improve the performance, reliability and data quality in response to your comments and suggestions here on our web analytics blog, via email, and in person.

We’re very excited about this release and would love to get your feedback here on the blog, or on the analytics forum.

If you’ve not signed up and want to give adCenter Analytics a try, check out our analytics information page on the Microsoft Advertising site.

Do check out the blog later this week for more info on the tools and features in this major release.

Cheers Mel

adCenter Analytics Beta Refresh This Week – Downtime Expected

We’ve been listening to your feedback and feature requests, and as a result will be upgrading the Microsoft adCenter Analytics Beta this week with some tools to give you more insight about your website's visitor activity.

The new features will help you optimize your online and offline marketing campaigns for higher conversion potential.

Starting on Wednesday July 23, as part of the upgrade, adCenter Analytics will be unavailable for up to three days. During this time, you'll be unable to access your Analytics profiles. However, your website data will continue to be collected and will be available after the upgrade is complete.

After the upgrade, Analytics will offer these new features:

• A centralized, customizable dashboard where you can see key campaign performance indicators at a glance.
• New visitor Path reports, plus Top Entry and Exit Pages reports, to help you gain insights about visitor behaviour.
• Age and gender clusters that help you understand the demographic breakdown of your audience.
• A holistic view of campaign performance across all search engines to help manage your return on investment (ROI) on all your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

Check back to our Web Analytics Blog for more details and deep dives on the new features next week!

If you want to sign up to the beta then please visit our adCenter Analytics page on our Microsoft Advertising site.