However, on the street afterward (not in the elevator, of course, because they really are all wired for sound by nervousclients), the print salesperson quickly upbraided the digital seller. "Whywould you ask such a ridiculous question?" Puzzled, the digital salesperson tried to explain that this was important to be able to help make this campaign a success. The print representative answered confidently, "If the advertiser's ad makes it into the front of magazine, the campaign is a success!"
Sadly, in our world we know that so manybuyers are just looking at a "click report," and that at a certain point of the campaign, they are simply going to drop half of the sites from the buy and reallocate to the top half of performers. Silly."
This brings up a good point, but why not use the tools and research we have to help that follow up and measurement before the campaign starts when you use either one of these tools in your proposal and get the client to agree to attainable and reasonable goals that can be measured against key metrics that will make sense to them. We want to more than measure clicks, we want interaction and to move the meter on the bottom line with sales attributable to the campaign with pre-determined goals and metrics that we can look at throughout the campaign. The article did ask what the buyer wants....
" For smaller agencies where the planner/buyers manage everything about their campaigns, they need to know you still care. They need to know that they weren't just some passing fancy that brought you to goal and got you the money to buy your new boat.
I don't think that buyers expect sellers to know that much about campaigns since vendor ad server access can be limited. However, the salesperson should continue to be a resource with information and service that a buyer needs. Sharing the latest information about the client category or competition is good. Uncovering variations in your site's audience behavior that could affect delivery orperformance would be helpful. Just letting the buyer know you'reavailable and checking in would also make a good impression.
When there is an analytics team involved, I think there is an opportunity for vendors to provide added value. Analytics folks are super-smart about numbers, but they lack the hands-on and intimate experiencewith the actual strategy of the campaign. Sometimes this makesthem rely too much on the numbers so they would benefit from a new friend from a partner Web site who can share some details about a particular site and their audience. The analytics contact could then use that information to help translate the reporting data into more meaningful insights.
And please, if you do go this route, take theanalytics guy/gal out for a nice steak lunch or mani/pedi date. They will really appreciate it, since they never get that kind of treatment but hear the media teams brag about it all the time.
In terms of knowing the performance of your site in the campaign, I think it isimportant to ask when you get the chance. However, agencyfolks may not be comfortable sharing that information because they feel it should be confidential. Even though they may be overreacting, respect their boundaries. Usually a good question to ask that is not too specific, but should give you an idea of how things are going is: "How is my site performing against the others in terms of your key performance indicators (and/or success factors)? Are we above or belowcampaign average?"
I think this is good advice but knowing up front what the expectations and reasonable outcomes of any campaign would be are reasonable and attainable by using the research and tools we have available.