Go ahead, put all those eggs in one basket

Now that advertisers are opening their pocketbooks more, it’s a great time to take a comprehensive look at how your online advertising dollars are working across all efforts. eMarketer recently reported some statistics from “2010 Lead Generation Optimization Key Trends Analysis” from CSO Insights revealing that most marketers are increasing their budgets for lead generation and new customer acquisition.

It’s interesting to note that the largest increases reported are on web design/content, email marketing, social media, and SEO.  But how many advertisers are working to ensure that all their channels work together?  How are online display advertising dollars impacting both natural and paid search campaigns? And what about those email campaigns?

In another article by Bob Rose, "Do You Have A Marketing Credit Crisis?", he cites various multi-channel attribution models and says, “But really all of them have interesting solutions to creating a matrixed framework of conversion events, assigning values to engagement, and other values to metrics such as time-on-site, pages viewed, tracking through the funnel the percentage of credit that each tactic should get – and aaaaaah my head just exploded.” Sound familiar?

A while back, TruEffect published a paper on The Impact of Display on Search and concluded that a first-party solution helps with the exploding heads by allowing advertisers to control online campaign data from one central point – theirs. What would it be like to see into the various measurement methodologies of your media and technology partners, and understand who, and what, actually attributed to the success of your efforts? First party ad technology can provide a centralized way to look at campaign performance across channels. It gives a whole new meaning to putting all your eggs in one basket. Seriously. More, better, actionable data – less exploding heads. Everyone's happy.

– Layne Salter