COLUMBUS, Ohio, November 10, 2011 – ClearSaleing, an industry leading advertising analytics and attribution platform today announced the launch of ClearSaleing (CS) Barometer™, an advanced analytics solution that enables marketers to measure performance more precisely than ever before. CS Barometer provides deeper and more accurate insight into consumer behavior and the social and economic factors that affect their buying habits, giving marketers the ability to measure performance and react swifter relative to their competitors and other outside influences.

“CS Barometer combines innovative analytics and modeling technologies with hundreds of social and economic indices, allowing marketers to detect and respond fast to fluctuations in their digital marketing performance,” said ClearSaleing president Randy Smith.  “CS Barometer is the first solution to eliminate the complexities and barriers of measuring market and economic influences and empowers marketers with precise insight and confidence to create more targeted and strategic campaigns.”

CS Barometer also provides marketers information around their advertising marketing programs through access to online and offline key performance indicators, including economic information, unemployment rates, housing starts, consumer confidence, and other areas.  Available data includes:

• Economic Indices: Marketers can better understand how economic factors influence marketing success such as how consumer confidence may impact retail marketing tactics to how housing starts influence digital marketing efforts of household goods brands. Specific indices include: quarterly real gross domestic product (GDP), weekly M2 (Money Supply), monthly consumer price index (CPI), monthly producer price index (PPI), monthly consumer confidence index, monthly unemployment rate, monthly retail sales, monthly housing starts, monthly manufacturing and trade inventories and sales, Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index (S&P 500) and others.

• Social Indices: Monitors stats such as Facebook likes and Twitter mentions and enables advertisers to track social buzz as part of their integrated marketing campaign.

• Vertical Indices: Uniquely created for business, finance, services, retail apparel, and retail verticals, these indices are available with pre-populated, channel-specific data for easy search and display of critical metrics.

For more information about ClearSaleing’s advertising analytics and attribution technology, please go to www.ClearSaleing.com.

About ClearSaleing

ClearSaleing is an industry-leading advertising analytics and attribution platform. ClearSaleing enables innovative advertisers to increase sales volume and overall media mix profitability across their complex mix of advertising investments. The ClearSaleing platform and related services allow innovative clients such as American Greetings, Rosetta, Range Online Media and Nationwide Insurance to achieve true transparency across their marketing mix performance and to understand which marketing channels are most influential to profit, engagement, and overall return on investment. The company was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. ClearSaleing is a wholly-owned subsidiary of GSI Commerce. GSI Commerce is an eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY) company.

Recently, I was exposed to a company that has developed a technology that allows marketers to find and market to people that are friends or “connections” to their current customers.  This company cannot do this over Facebook, so there still is a challenge in valuing a Facebook Fan in the “ultimate” way, but they can do this over many other aspects of the social landscape.

The company I learned about is called Media6Degrees (M6D).  M6D is a social targeting company that leverages the power of social media to identify new audiences to target for their clients. M6D does not use any personally identifiable information (PII) in order to build these new audiences, so it cannot carry out the ultimate tracking for a Facebook fan, as described above, but it can get us pretty close. M6D is interested in the entire social universe, which includes blogs, photo sites, sharing sites and social networks. M6D labels customers of their clients as brand loyalists, and then scours the social media landscape to find ‘connections’ to the brand loyalist without using PII to retarget. Typical retargeting shows display advertising to people that have already visited your site, but have not converted. M6D performs traditional retargeting, but also develops whole new audiences by ‘retargeting’ connections of the brand loyalists.

Here’s an example of how M6D might identify a friend of a brand loyalist to start retargeting to:

• The M6D pixel can identify the types of blogs one of their brand loyalists visits. It then discovers through the M6D network that someone else reads similar blogs. Given that some of these blogs are read by a very small audience, M6D makes an educated, data driven assumption that these two people might know each other, or at the very least, are similar in their interests. They call this the social graph. Once they identify this new person, they will then begin to target ads to this potentially new prospect using retargeting, even though this new person has never been to their customer’s site.

With most retargeting and ad networks, it is a challenge to prove their contributions to the bottom line because most marketers value the last click versus looking at the entire Purchase Path. When marketers do look at the entire Purchase Path and give value to introducers and influencers, in addition to closers, the real value of display advertising begins to show. If you are a current customer of ClearSaleing, and are also using Media6Degrees, we’d love to analyze your data to see how many conversions were introduced by M6D’s advanced targeting technologies.

…Continue reading article on All About ROI Magazine online

All social monitoring technologies pull data from popular social sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, MySpace, etc. Since they all pull data from the same sites, they more or less show the same data. One area of differentiation some companies have is the ability to also pull data from unstructured data sets. For example, a company like Social Seen could also pull in information from your corporate systems, like your CRM, Call Center, website and suggestion boxes.

These Social Media monitoring tools classify each “conversation” in a positive, neutral, or negative fashion using standard language protocols. If the word “good” is used, they assume it’s positive, and if the word “bad” is used, they assume it’s negative. If it doesn’t contain a positive or negative lean, they classify it as neutral. This challenge of accurately classifying conversations is a common problem in the social monitoring space. Recently, I learned that the Hebrew University developed a technology that has the ability to analyze conversations for positive or negative sentiment.  When tested against human reviewers, their algorithm agreed with humans nearly 80% of the time. So, there is hope that this common problem will be solved.

Actions That Are Clear

It’s obvious to me that if a company is using a social media monitoring tool, one worthwhile action to take is to reach out to those who have had negative experiences with your brand. Not only do you have a chance to turn this customer’s negative experience into a positive one and to hopefully retain them as a customer, but you increase the likelihood of that customer posting a positive message next time.

Another use of social media monitoring is to use the negative comments about your product or brand and address those at a more macro level. By this I mean that you can incorporate negative feedback into future product development or to create whole new business lines to address overarching complaints in the marketplace.

Many social media monitoring technologies allow you to monitor more than just your brand. Therefore, one smart action to take is to monitor your competition.  Understanding your own competition from their customers’ point of view can create opportunities for yourself to either expose your competitions weaknesses or capitalize on these weaknesses and turn their customers onto your company product offerings.

Actions That Are Not So Clear

Do positive comments equal profit? By this I mean does increasing the number of positive sentiment on the web increase profitability, and if so, is it quantifiable and by how much? If you could clearly state that for every positive comment, I get X return in profit, then one can easily determine how much time and how many resources should be dedicated to increasing positive sentiment on the web. But I’m not aware of social monitoring technologies being able to quantify this, so it is impossible to determine how much money and man power should be invested on generating positive sentiment.

If you could determine the ROI of positive sentiment, how do you generate more positive sentiment? Ideally, positive sentiment is driven by you providing a great product and service that people want to tell others about. The only way outside of creating great products and services to generate positive sentiment without using unscrupulous methods, like hiring cheap labor overseas to post positive things about you, is to ask your customers to post things on your behalf. “If you like our new X, please become a fan of our Facebook page.” Twitter’s new advertising model is another method that could potentially help you drive positive sentiment by paying for it.

There’s no way to track the influence of positive sentiment at the customer level. For example, if a person was in the market for product X and went to Amazon to read comments about the product, and while reading the comments learned about product Y, then went to a search engine looking for product Y, clicked on an ad and bought product Y, all a tracking technology would know about this customer is they clicked on an ad for product Y and converted. There is no tracking today that would also incorporate that the user read a positive review beforehand. Without this type of tracking, social media will never be able to be accurately valued, and therefore, it is impossible to know how much time or resources to dedicate to these types of endeavors.

I am by no means an expert in social media monitoring or in executing social media strategies. I am an expert in advertising analytics and quantifying the value of trackable steps in a purchase path. I am sure there are other actions that one can take from the data that social media technologies provide today, and I would love to hear what those are. Please feel free to share those below and hopefully change my opinion on social media monitoring for the better.

I found it interesting this week to read What Celebrities Make For Twittvertising, which discussed the heavy payouts celebrities receive for tweeting about various products and brands. After reading this, I couldn’t help but think about how this relates to valuing a Facebook fan, so I decided to have some fun by identifying ways to truly value these celeb tweets…

Read the entire article on the Search Engine Land Blog…

Continue Reading

This is the third video in the 2.0 series and covers Offline Ads, SEO, and Social Media. The different Purchase Paths explored in this video are : Direct mail with a branded search, Search with SEO, Twitter with a search, and Twitter with the address bar. Please visit ClearSaleingInc on YouTube for the latest Attribution videos and events.