Stories that made the digital headlines this week include a new whitepaper from Microsoft on the effectiveness of online  branding campaigns, Google’s newest search feature for online shoppers and exciting news about 360i’s participation in this year’s SXSW Interactive conference.

New Whitepaper: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Digital Advertising for Brand Campaigns

This week Microsoft released a new report that explores the significance of “dwell scores” – calculated by the time spent with advertising multiplied by the rate of active engagement with an ad – when it comes to digital programs. The research, derived from comScore and Eyeblaster data, shows that higher dwell scores correlate to “significant improvement in positive engagement with a brand post ad exposure.” The report notes that such positive effects often include a higher volume of branded search queries, more visits to the marketer’s Web site and higher levels of engagement by visitor’s on site.

As digital continues to become more and more central to brand strategy, understanding how consumers interact with online advertising will become increasingly important. As this report shows, click-through-rate alone cannot adequately measure the performance of branding campaigns – and other metrics such as dwell scores should be more closely considered.

Download the whitepaper: Digital Challenge: Being Greater with Data.

Read the full article »