Microsoft's Engagement Mapping takes aim at 'last click wins'

I work for an integrated digital agency and for us it is common sense that all digital channels are inter-related and have an impact on each other.

But calculating the impact of say display advertising on search and making sensible optimization decisions is quite complex.  It's also a pointless exercise if clients are obsessing over metrics like CPA as measured by the 'last click wins' method.  Basically this means that the last click before purchase deserves 100% of the credit for that sale.

So today's announcement from Microsoft of the beta launch of  Engagement Mapping is interesting.  It's the first big new thing to come out of Atlas since their purchase by Microsoft, and looks very much like an enhancement of the conversion attribution modelling stuff that Atlas have been talking about for a while.

Essentially Engagement Mapping will look backwards from a conversion and see what ads the consumer has been exposed to before purchasing.  "Engagement ROI evaluates and assigns measurable value to a consumer’s interaction with ads, giving advertisers and publishers a more complete picture of online behavior."

Measuring all this stuff is certainly a step in the right direction, but the real gold is in working out a model that attributes a value to everything.  The last click at present is more likely than not through a search on brand terms: we need to know what prompted that search so we can push budgets at the right channels.

What kind of factors might influence the level of engagement you get from an online ad?  Stuff like size of ad unit, level of interactivity, amount of clutter on a page from other ads, degree of targeting behind a placement.  Some of this data is already sitting in an adserver, but it's tricky to pull it out in a meaningful way.

The current obsession with 'last click wins' clearly favours search and affiliate marketing - but it also directs budgets away from online media that probably play an important role in the decision making process.  That includes good quality blogs and forums, and of course the online properties of 'old media' companies - newspapers and magazines particularly.

So a small step towards re-balancing budgets - and hoorah for that!