A colleague of mine and I were in New York for Ad Tech last week and had the pleasure to schedule time with a few of the leading ad serving and tracking providers. Our core focus for the meetings was to ultimately unlock that holy grail of advertising - closing the loop from customer awareness to purchase. This concept goes far beyond just direct awareness to conversion it also includes identifying the multiple touch points a consumer experiences with a brand. From hearing a radio spot to viewing a banner to finding that brand via a search engine. There are many steps to this process and many funnels to how these conversions may take place.

Fortunately, solving this challenge is at the forefront of these vendors' minds and they are making some strong steps to get there. One vendor for example will soon provide a report illustrating the relationship between media spend, impact on brand name searches and whether these brand searches converted. Another report shows the most frequent searches clicked on for a keyword prior to a conversion on that keyword. Reports such as these are a solid step toward a far deeper understanding of customer behavior.

We must remember however, that while this is a step in the right direction, it is still a baby step. 3rd party cookie limitations and the inability to track organic placements are just a few of the challenges that are still to be faced...and oh yeah, what about those offline campaigns? The good news is, we're getting there.

Labels: 3rd party cookie, paid listings, search engine marketing, tracking online advertising