Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Measuring Blog Marketing
In a two-part story on Measuring Blog Marketing on Clickz.com, Zachary Rodgers writes, in the first part of the article, about the challenges that advertisers face in measuring their blog spend, gathering the metrics of blog ads, and the buzz they generate.
Some points to note:
- The good news is when it comes to measuring blog ads, experts say you don't have to reinvent the wheel. The bad news is, many contend the wheel may not be the best tool for the job.
- Banner ads can be run on blog sites just as they are on any other Web pages, but advertisers may handle those metrics differently.
- Because the blog environment's still relatively uncrowded, advertisers don't feel the need to do daily monitoring of a campaign.
- Since 25 percent of blog readers prefer to subscribe to RSS feeds, the only way to reach these individuals is in the content of the post itself. How popular and accepted are these placements, and is it possible to measure their effectiveness?
- For publishers selling ads within feeds, the RSS aggregator phenomenon poses a problem -- namely that it's still hard to sort genuine page views from robotic server hits. While services like FeedBurner help bloggers identify their total number of RSS subscribers, they don’t give an accurate read on page views.
- The providers of RSS-based services, are improving their abilities to track syndicated feeds. FeedBurner plans to offer a single pixel tracking mechanism for individual posts via a premium feature.
- Some advertisers feel that impressions don't matter when your ultimate objective is to create a buzz about a product. And that direct response metrics greatly understate the value of influence-rich blog communities.
