Microsoft's Ad "Engagement Mapping" Beta Due March 1st

[engine]

Microsoft Corp said on Monday it would test a new way to measure the effectiveness of Internet advertising in a challenge to an industry standard that has helped the likes of Web search leader Google Inc.

Microsoft's "Engagement Mapping" is due to begin in beta form on March 1 and departs from a standard that ties sales, leads and traffic to the last ad that a user clicked on online. Instead, it attempts to take into account all the Internet interactions that lead a consumer to buy a product.

Microsoft's Ad "Engagement Mapping" Beta Due March 1st [uk.reuters.com]

[Lord Majestic]

Real life story: in 2000-2001 I was working on email marketing project and for the time we were pretty advanced in terms of analytics because we did not just count clicks from sent emails, but also had full reporting what the user bought on site or what they clicked on but did not buy (we could target them later with special offers, which worked great).

Here is the kicker: we had conversion stats showing sales of X after email shot, however this was tracked using session cookie only, when we changed that to be 7 days we fould out that actual sales were more than double X - obviously the sales did not double after we changed tracking, we just were not tracking them fully!

So, in reality it might well be that what Microsoft suggests actually makes sense.

[pivinaju]

I am interested in knowing how agencies can actually test the product and how. Anyone has any idea?

[gibbergibber]

-- Why are all MS projects so extremely dull? --

That's where the money is! :)