Social media ad metrics unveiled: Source Media In Canada

Social media ad metrics unveiled
by Gariné Tcholakian

A new set of media ad metrics definitions have just been released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) in the US, developed to help marketers, broadcasters and advertisers measure the value of social media campaigns and help quantify and describe the shift in the online sphere.

The definitions cover a wide variety of online user interactions and dialogues, as well as methods to put solid numbers together for online activities to help marketers, agencies and publishers quantify the value added by consumers as they distribute the content throughout their personal networks, one of the defining characteristics of social media.

The new Social Media Ad Metrics Definitions, which can be viewed in full here, divides social media into three distinct categories with the metrics specific to each type: “Social Media Sites,” “Blogs,” “Widgets & Social Media Applications.” The document also covers other tools pertaining to social media platforms including: video installs, posted newsfeed items, user comments, uploads, poll votes, site relevance, author credibility, content freshness and relevance and conversation size.

The IAB’s Canadian arm will be reviewing and approving the new terms for the Canadian market at the next Emerging Platforms Council meeting on June 4. IAB Canada president Paula Gignac tells MiC, “based on everything I’ve seen, it doesn’t look like anything that we would have a problem with in the Canadian market.”

“We’ve been going through discussions in the industry about the number of metrics, and I know that some of the traditional agencies are really not happy with how many metrics there are for the different channels in interactive,” says Gignac. “This gives marketers a lot of flexibility to how they build their evaluation for what’s successful. I think the area that’s developing the quickest, that everyone wants to know more about, is the widget and the social media application metrics,” she says, adding that mobile marketing is also a growing area of interest.

“Anytime that you can put measures around a channel in the interactive arena, it’s going to mean that advertisers can chart their progress as they delve into this new channel,” says Gignac. “They’re going to be able to have benchmarks with which they can chart their progress going forward, and they can relate them back to real sales, real key objectives that they determine, so we’ll have metrics that will help them move forward with successful programs in the next couple years.”

Next Monday, May 18, the IAB is hosting its first IAB Social Media Marketplace in New York, bringing together industry-leading advertisers, publishers and platforms to provide solutions for leveraging social media.

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