The marketers' strategy around display continues to evolve as they move into the automated channel. Here Jamie Jaggard, Head of Consumer Marketing, Zoopla Ltd, discusses real-time buying, attribution modelling and the post-view impression window

As a marketer what do you perceive as the real opportunities around automated and real-time buying of display inventory? Is it price transparency? Or is it inventory visibility?

Predominantly it’s about control. Control over providing the right message to the right user at the right time. Whilst it still requires hugely detailed levels of planning around customer segments, 1st and 3rd party data management, and working with operators that know how best to bid in RTB environments, its starting to enable display campaigns to operate at a level of control that’s as close to paid search as you can get.

Can you give an overview of the Zoopla approach to attribution – and how it underpins your display buying strategy?

First and foremost it’s about data collection. We know from basic modelling that when we run e.g. retargeting ads it has a positive post-view impact on other channels but other than up-weight the ROI accordingly, it didn’t really allow us to understand its relationship in the conversion cycle alongside other channels. So we now gather as much campaign data as we can, with the help of a 3rd party and we have a strong in-house analytics team who take a very scientific approach to modelling the value that we should assign to each campaign metric, depending on their context and relationship to each other. Ultimately it will give me the media buying insight I need to drive incremental leads affordably across our various channels.

Why shouldn’t a media buyer have a set attribution model? What are the key advantages to a direct advertiser like Zoopla of employing regression analysis to better understand the path-to-conversion?

Users don’t act in accordance with buckets created by set attribution models. When I first looked into attribution, I was of the opinion that an even distribution of value across multiple conversion channels, or a U-shaped model, or a linear model based on recency was better than the last click model directionally, however it’s a false assumption. It’s also a constant process of adjustment, depending on the campaign mix. The advantage of regression analysis is it homes in on the result you want to measure or increase, in our case an agent lead. Regression will tell me that if I spend x on a view or a click, at a certain part of the conversion cycle, I’ll increase conversions at a rate I can afford.

How important is your in-house analytics team in this whole process?

Critical. I particularly like the fact that they’re background is in statistics and analysis rather than online advertising so they’re not biased by any false assumptions. I provide the marketing context and the campaign objectives and they provide the science. I don’t anticipate that it will be easy to apply the learnings in practice but it feels like the right approach if we want to be as accurate as possible.

How does this model affect your media buying and the types of buyers you work with? Are you more likely to work with re-targeters for bottom of the funnel activity and exchange traders who actively participate in prospecting?

I see 3 levels of display really. Product level retargeting currently handles the bottom of the funnel very well, especially for a classified business such as ours. We’re moving into Phase 2 of our category level retargeting programme with a customised solution across exchanges that we’ve built with a 3rd party for users that indicate that they’re looking to buy a house in Reading but haven’t yet dropped into the property level pot yet. The next step will be to support our TV and Radio activity in prospecting and building our brand online. We’re keen to do the first round of attribution while the display we’re doing is quite functional and DR based. We need the attribution model to be working well by the time we really dive into full scale display buying which is on the horizon.

Where do you think display fits into the media mix – from the perspective of a marketer? What in your mind is the value of the display channel for an advertiser like Zoopla?

To date, there have been better ways of building our brand. TV still cuts through very well and the post-wave research we’ve conducted make that very clear. But as current retargeting tech shows, being able to run display in a manner not dissimilar to paid search and getting branding benefit a side effect is great when our allowable CPA is so tight. But the things that excite me would be to use one platform to deliver our various product messages digitally through standard banners formats, video ads, VOD, social ads etc but via one bidding platform to retain control over the delivery of the message, and to reduce wastage.

Is the post-view impression window distorting the effectiveness of display?

I don’t think that a post-view impression window as a means of measuring display effectiveness is that valid – it will still count conversions that you can’t tie directly to the campaign simply through the nature of display being so wide ranging a medium.

Is the industry placing too much emphasis on the last click/ad metric in display? Should more marketers and agencies be rewarding touch points along the journey to the goal conversion?

Yes, but attribution isn’t a trivial exercise so it’s easier said than done. The agencies that I know well are very concerned with attribution and finding solutions for their clients to assign the correct value to all touch points and most marketers with large budgets these days understand that the last click model is pretty moribund but also that it takes a long time to do the analysis and its hard to implement. The fact that new display technologies and formats provide ways for an advertiser to measure dwell and subsequently buy on ‘cost per engagement’ can only be a good thing. Given that a ‘hover’, or a video ‘view’ sits somewhere in between impressions and clicks, it will be easier to make the link between these engagements and conversions which will help to bridge existing gaps.

What type of innovation are we likely to see from Zoopla in terms of how it buys in the display channel? More re-targeting? More search re-targeting?

I think the technology is there to do “display CRM” that’s beyond basic retargeting. It just requires tying a lot of data together. Also we’ll actually get round to doing some comprehensive display prospecting to support and complement our major brand campaigns.