So, what is this privacy hullabaloo about? First you need to understand what cookies are and how they work. They record things like sites you visit, and things you purchase. At no time do they collect and divulge personally identifiable information. And, anyone can delete them and remove themselves completely from being tracked at all.  Consumer focus group of one over here, but I would much rather get relevant advertising delivered to me than just any random message. I have been served-up free shipping after abandoning online carts, and other offers and messages that have enhanced my online experience as opposed to threatening me in any personal way.

If you want to know more about the proposed privacy reforms being pushed by consumer watchdog groups, take a look at the Legislative Recommendations Primer and read all about it.

The ad industry is trying to stave off this unnecessary legislation by creating a symbol that would be placed on all online ads to let consumers know their habits are being tracked. Last fall this was supposed to be adopted by most advertisers, but this is not happening at all. Nice try, but I don’t foresee this as a viable solution. The IAB is also trying to demystify all this by buying relevant search keywords and serving up a site with clear information rather than media propaganda.

Bottom line, anyone can delete their cookies, but currently only 15 percent of web users choose to do so on a regular basis.  I find it annoying since not only does your history get erased, but all your re-called passwords and favorites. It is very inconvenient for a regular web user to do this.  The government has much better things to do than spend time on the so called dangerous threats of behavioral targeting. The implications of this legislation could not only affect getting great offers, but literally stifle the digital media industry from both a buying and creative perspective. So, do what you can to save the cookies!

But, sometimes campaigns are not focused on direct response, but rather influencing upper-funnel stages such as awareness and consideration.  When this is the case, a best practice is to conduct pre- vs. post-campaign brand survey studies, but we can also utilize an audience engagement construct based on online behaviors that act as proxies for awareness and/ or consideration and be leading indicators of future economic value (leads, transactions).

There are a number of behaviors that can make up an engagement score – rich-media ad interactions (window expansions, video plays, utilizations such as calculators or games), homepage visitation (especially via post-impression response^†), landing page visitation, store/ branch locater activity, consumption of high-value content (reinforcing campaign messages), etc.

However, not all of these behavioral interactions are equally valuable depending upon campaign goals and the interaction’s respective place in the purchase funnel – visiting store locater results pages is an intuitively stronger indicator of purchase intent likelihood than visiting the campaign landing page or even the brand homepage or ad unit interactions.

To account for this differential value of interactions, each behavior can be weighted, respectively, to reflect each one’s relative value (say, on a scale from 0-2, or whatever is appropriate for the specific brand’s business).

Once a methodology is established, the engagement score can be utilized as the basis for gauging campaign responsiveness (via engagement yield = engagement score/ ad impressions) as well as financial efficiency (via cost per engagement = media cost/ engagement score) to guide campaign optimization decisions.

So, the next time, your client has a digital campaign focused on influencing upper-funnel activities, and you don’t have the time, funds, or interest in formally evaluating brand awareness and consideration measures from a brand survey study, consider behavioral engagement as a good, easily available success proxy.

What experiences have you had in using online behavior measures as gauges of success for upper-funnel digital campaigns…? What else would you consider…?

^†Post-impression (PI) response represents the target audience being exposed to online display advertising (OLA), not clicking on the ad (banner), but at a later time visiting the brand’s site and exhibiting the campaign’s goal behaviors (homepage visit, priority content consumption, order submission, etc.). PI response typically accounts for 60-90% of total campaign response.