Microsoft Jumps On The Engagement Wagon

Microsoft announced today an important new tool that will help advertisers to measure an engagement metric for their online ads.
This is a great step forward for the industry when a giant like Microsoft (that owns aQuantive and Atlas) admits that the old way of measuring impressions and clicks is just not good enough.

The new "Engagement Mapping" tool will allow you to measure the different interactions consumers had with an ad as a way to understand its effect on the buying decision.
Basically it will take into account how may times an ad was shown across sites, and hopefully also the different interaction the users had with it, when deciding on whether it contributed to the final sale.

This is a great step forward, but you probably would not be surprised if I say MS didn’t went all the way with that.
What they are missing is also the ability to tie the different interactions, across sessions, the users had inside the advertiser site to the final decision process about the ad ROI.
Even going further, the goal of an advertisers is not always a one time sale. You actually want to measure the user interaction with your brand across time.
For example: for Amazon "Acquiring" a user that will buy one item is not as valuable as a user that will register to Amazon prime and buy at least two items every week on the course of a few months.
Also, some advertisers goal is not a sale on their online shop. A social network want to get users that will not just register to the site, but will also use it as much as possible, will have many friends in their list and upload as many photos as possible.

Still, this is a welcome step forward for the Analytics and advertising industries, and it will probably start to move other companies in the same way.