Microsoft’s Tool For Measuring Engagement With Online Ads

Online advertising is an industry that keeps growing with each year, but there are a lot of things that can be done better, and one of the most important of them is measuring the impact an online ad has on those that view it, apart from other things. The alternative, of course, is to simply count hop many times a unit is displayed, and how many clicks it generates. But...how did Microsoft got here?


"Microsoft Corp. today announced Engagement Mapping, a new approach to managing and measuring the effectiveness of online campaigns that goes beyond the current “last ad clicked” standard. For the last decade, virtually all ad campaign reporting methodologies associate sales, leads and Web traffic simply to the last click or ad exposure. Engagement Mapping takes into account for the first time all the various online touchpoints and interactions a consumer experiences before an eventual sale."

The above is what Microsoft's press release says, but it should be noted that everything started back in May 2007, when aQuantive was bought by Microsoft for $6 billion. What's the link between that event and Microsoft's Engagement ROI, the new online campaign reporting and optimization solution?

Well, it's all about Atlas, a smaller company owned by aQuantive, because they were developing the Media Console software, now a part of the Engagement ROI!

Because we'll talk about this subject a lot in the future, I'll leave other details for a later time, because the beta starts officially with the 2008 Spring, on March 1st, and results are expected to pop up before the end of the first half of the year.