As web content proliferates, CPMs fall. Mathematically speaking, it’s inevitable. But content hasn’t become worthless. Whether it’s Shakespeare or the deep introspections of Mommy Bloggers, any content that someone besides the author is willing to pay attention to has value greater than zero.

And don’t buy into the myth that value has all shifted from content producers to content discovery. If there is no content, there is nothing to discover. “Discovery” is a derivative while content remains the underlying asset.

So, good news! Content’s value is still intact; it’s just been spread thinner and thinner as the web has grown.
Given that web content still has some value, the urgent matter before us is: How can publishers stay in the game while facing the commoditization and dilution of content?

Here’s one news flash for you: you no longer need a bloated corporate apparatus to sell ad space. If you own a web property (or a collection thereof), count on its value decreasing steadily with time, at least in terms of advertising revenue (subscriptions being an alternative source of revenue, but one that has no direct bearing on CPMs or ad sales effectiveness).

And don’t think you can gain the upper hand by expanding your web property or building a bigger media empire; you won’t ever come close to matching the web’s exponential growth rate.

Instead, focus on what you can control: costs and efficiency. If CPMs are in freefall, then your cost to sell each thousand impressions has to drop even faster. In a prior post for Adotas, I focused exclusively on automated ad creation as a means to streamline the sales process, but the need for cost reduction goes much further than that.

How do companies sell a commodity product, the value of which is declining? They develop standardized, automated processes that operate more and more efficiently at higher and higher volumes. They keep fixed overhead low, and per-unit margins high. In my corner of the online advertising world, this translates to self-serve platforms for creating and trafficking ads.

But there’s even lower-hanging fruit that doesn’t require an army of software developers to pluck. Think about it for awhile, and you could probably list dozens of anachronisms that are begging to be retired.

Rate cards are a perfect example. You might as well etch your prices in shekels on stone tablets.

The mere existence of a rate card implies a lack of variety in what you’re selling; it’s like opening a brokerage and only selling two stocks, then updating the prices of those stocks once a year in a downloadable PDF that’s mostly filled with overly contrived stock photos of businesspeople shaking hands. And then you’d wonder if your slowdown in business might be at least partially attributable to that newfangled E-Trade thing you’ve been meaning to check out…

Publishers also fall victim to the Fallacy of the Perfect Campaign, which leads to misguided and expensive investments in hands-on, consultative account management (in contrast to the completely hands-off, yet massively successful approach of Google’s self-serve AdWords platform). This quaint school of thought holds that campaigns will perform better if the media plan is hand-stitched and baby-sat by account reps and media gurus who’ve got first dibs on “premium” inventory.

Let’s assume that a personal touch does give a boost to campaigns. Guess what? Advertisers don’t want or need the best possible campaign performance!

To illustrate my point: someone shopping for a suit could pay $3,000 for a sublimely-tailored garment that will fit perfectly and be superior in every way to something made in an overseas sweatshop, but in this Technological Wonder Age of mass production, 99.999% of suit buyers are completely satisfied to buy 3 for 1 suits off the rack for $1,000 at a Macy’s Fall Sale. It’s called the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility, and it certainly applies to online advertising.

Even the negative connotations around the term “remnant inventory” speaks volumes. This is the inventory that’s arguably monetized most efficiently and powers scores of highly effective campaigns. Will publishers still call it “remnant” inventory when they’re selling a majority of their impressions through exchanges?

Don’t be travel agent in the mid-1990s. The age of the expert media intermediary is coming to a close, to be replaced by easy, automated and highly efficient (if imperfect) solutions.

Web content and ad space are still worth money, but the more mysterious, precious or inaccessible you make it seem, the fewer advertisers will choose to buy from you over more straightforward alternatives. Not to mention that your business will be built around complexity, when the rest of the industry is moving towards standardization, automation and simplicity.

At some point, it will be too late to turn back. You’ll be the last lonely travel agent trying to book Hawaiian vacations for customers who are about as inclined to visit your shabby little office as they are to cross the Pacific in a canoe.

In the early days, everyone was excited about click-through rates (CTRs) and the first ads which could garner CTRs of 30% or more. Over time, there were debates about view-based conversions versus click, online GRPs, online reach, etc. These debates are still raging as new vehicles (e.g., video) have been added to the marketing mix; the complexity has only increased.

The latest trend has been how to bridge search and display with attribution modeling. At the end of the day, marketers are using these tactics to evaluate the impact of different vehicles at different stages in the marketing funnel and are trying to get to an overall Return on Ad Spending (ROAS) for their boss or their client.

Simultaneously, there has been a real shift from buying impressions or views to buying audiences across media. The new question facing a marketer is “how do I value my online audience?” – which can be simplified to “how do I value a cookie?”

To answer that question, a breakdown of the current model is needed. Traditionally, marketers have evaluated the performance of their display advertising campaigns based on action-oriented goals (e.g., CPA, CPC, CPX). If a campaign does not hit the minimum, many marketers deem it a failure and cancel the flight, which prevents them from capturing an immense amount of value—especially when it comes to retargeting.

While customer targeting, re-targeting and re-messaging have all been around for a while, it seems to really have caught fire over the past three to four years. Part of the current debate centers on whether a display campaign that fails in terms of its CPX goals actually has value in terms of building an advertiser’s cookie pool.

The challenge for most centers around time. How long do you have to run a campaign before you can expect payoff from your cookie pool? It is best to think of display campaigns in terms of two equally important stages: “audience acquisition” and “customer retargeting.”

In Stage 1, a marketer launches a display campaign and hopes to build awareness and generate actions (e.g., registrations or purchases). With the traditional model, a marketer would base their judgment of success or failure solely on this first stage and these initial actions. In other words, I spent $X and I generated this many leads or this many sales and so my ROI for the campaign is either positive or negative compared to other marketing vehicles.

The traditional model misses the fact that with each site visit (or e-mail “open”) the marketer has the opportunity to place a cookie — (i.e., identify an individual). Over the length of the campaign, you will have added to your cookie pool, also known as your online audience.

In Stage 2, a marketer is able to capitalize on these cookies through a retargeting campaign—which are often the most effective campaigns you can run since you are connecting with people who have already visited your site, opened your e-mail, or expressed interest in your product/service. A marketer is able to continue that conversation across the internet by creating personalized ads that—we all hope—are highly relevant to each prospect. Thus, by using retargeting, marketers will generate additional actions and at a better scale than just through audience acquisition.

However, it has been hard to capture this additional value in the classic CPA model. In fact, an inexpensive CPM campaign that delivers no actions and does nothing but increase an advertiser’s online audience (i.e., cookie pool) can be one of the best campaigns once the retargeting actions are factored in over time. And to make sense of it all, one has to be able to value a cookie.

Determining the Value of Your Online Audience

To determine the value of a specific cookie, marketers should consider the following six factors:

1.       Action Value – What value does each action warrant based on your business model?

2.       Conversion Rate – What percent of people who visit a landing page convert (i.e., take the action you are measuring)?

3.       Cost of a Click – If you bought media on a CPC basis, what is the resulting cost of a click?

4.       Cookie Value – Based on the “Action Value” and “Conversion Rate,” what is the gross value of each cookie that comes to the marketer’s landing page?

5.       Marginal Value of a Cookie – What is the net value of each cookie that comes to the marketer’s landing page once-acquired, including of the cost of obtaining the retargeting click?

6.       Marginal Value of each Acquisition Campaign Click – What is the net value of each cookie that comes to the marketer’s landing page, including of the cost of acquiring the cookie, and the subsequent retargeting click

While 1-3 are pretty standard, 4-6 are more esoteric. This approach has the power to change the way advertisers are running and valuing their display campaigns. But not all cookies are created equal. Here are a few “gotchas” to keep an eye out for:

First: Cookie Pool Decay. Just like Oreos, cookies have a shelf life and can expire or be deleted. To counteract these trends, marketers need to continually run both audience acquisition and customer engagement campaigns.

Second: Brand Fatigue. How many times can a brand hit a prospect before losing them or numbing them to the message?  Marketers need to determine, maintain and frequently review metrics that shed light on their audience behavior and drop off. They must then use these insights to continually optimize media with tools.

Third: Landing page limbo. Any good marketer will tell you that an online marketing campaign will fail if the value proposition is not strong and the conversion process is un-engaging. So marketers must continually evaluate and optimize their “digital storefront” to ensure the maximum number of conversions.

Today, most marketers evaluate display campaign effectiveness on initial actions. Unfortunately, by doing so, they may be missing a completely different source of value—building their cookie pool—that enables them to execute more effective retargeting campaigns over time. And this, in turn, can change the very way they think about display marketing.

And none of this would be possible without numerous layers between advertisers and the sites on which they advertise. The infamous Luma Partners display ad infographic makes this point nicely: there are alot of tiny optimizations that determine which advertiser wins which inventory, and every single layer appears to be adding value.

But there’s a built-in risk to this entire system: every transaction has quantitative and qualitative guidelines, and while quantitative guidelines are easy to maintain, qualitative guidelines tend to get diluted at every stage. GM cares deeply about what kinds of sites run their ads. GM’s agency cares, too. The exchange GM’s agency uses to buy its ads probably doesn’t care too much about GM per se, but does care about its relationship with the agency. The ad network cares a little less than that, and the publisher is mostly happy for the revenue.

Which is why GM is so understandably upset that their ads are running next to porn. This is the almost inevitable result when someone drives hard bargain in terms of quantitative limits (i.e. buying a certain number of pageviews at a certain CPM), but can’t clearly delineate the qualitative guidelines (what’s a trustworthy site? What’s a classy site? What’s the boundary between a celebrity showing skin and a site showing softcore porn?). GM could whitelist some kinds of content—but if they created a whitelist, surely Yahoo-owned Flickr would be on it. And if they’re already picking where they want their ads displayed, how much do they really need outside help in the first place.

This is clearly demonstrated in this excellent Digiday piece on how a single advertiser with a large budget and a focus on CPMs was able to alter best practices in the video ad market to the point that quality was seriously threatened.

At no stage in these transactions do people need to think that they’re being dishonest. It’s not necessary; there are not sharp delineations between legitimate activity and running ads that hurt the company that pays for them. There’s just a drift as the transaction that places an ad gets further and further removed from the business interest that conceived the ad in the first place.

In some ways, this is a classic agency problem; another variant on the problem Groupon ran into with its superbowl ads. But in another sense, the fungibility of online ads makes them even harder to handle than traditional ads or other agency relationships. A few possibilities:

• As they’re already doing, larger companies may need to focus on trusted, non user-generated sites.
• There’s now greater economic demand for algorithms that can detect offensive content. Search engines surface offensive content comparatively rarely; perhaps DoubleClick will be the first ad network to offer an effective automated filter, since they can lean on Google’s search engineers and their existing corpus of data.
• There might be demand for an independent accreditation service, able to rank sites by some standard (e.g. sites that are an “A” for coastal twentysomethings with masters degrees may be a “C” for middle-aged midwestern evangelicals).

This isn’t catastrophic yet. It’s likely that more people noticed the incongruous ads on Flickr through the press coverage they got than through browsing Flickr. But few CMOs want to face even a tiny risk that they’ll run their ads against offensive content. Right now, the economics of display advertising make it very expensive or very dicey to avoid.

(This is probably why Facebook only recently launched their ad API. Facebook has focused on brands for strategic reasons: if they can own branded advertising online while Google gets direct response, Facebook will be a far bigger business. But this means they have more to lose from making brands look bad. A related problem: some of the highest-CPM ads don’t fit into the normal ad exchange format.)

Cross-published at Digital Due Diligence’s website.

What is actually somewhat surprising is how long it’s taken the industry to come around to that point of view. For a very long time, the CPM (cost-per-thousand-impressions) pricing model, in which advertisers must pay upfront for a bulk amount of consumer data (and where only a fraction of that number may end up interested) seemed to be the norm.

Leads were obtained, sure, but at what cost? How many non-leads had to be part of the acquisition process for it to work? How much time, energy, and money was being wasted? These questions become more and more pressing as organizations seek to streamline their lead-generation and acquisition processes.

Enter the cost-per-lead.

In cost-per-lead pricing, the advertiser pays only for a specific signup from a consumer interested in its special offer. For example, it’s not enough for a consumer to click on an advertisement; the consumer must then do something else (sign up for something, etc.).

CPL placement allows advertisers to generate guaranteed revenue as well as set both budgetary and return expectations within their organizations. Letting their feet get wet and treading lightly during these tough economic times has given the CPL visibility and marketing departments the freedom to test.

So where do we see the CPL model come into play today in our industry?  Once strictly married to co-registration, we have now seen its popularity spread to banner campaigns and affiliate models.

The advantages are clear: you’re not paying for leads that don’t do what you want them to do.

Most marketers assume that the lower dollar cost per lead, the better. Spending less is always better, right? Well … not always. For example, would you rather have 100 leads per month at an average cost of $0.50 per lead, or 150 leads per month at an average cost of $.80 per lead? Seems like a no-brainer: $0.80 is more expensive than $0.50.

However, depending on factors such as lead-to-sale ratio, and the average profit margin associated with a sale, an $8 lead might be your best choice. In fact, you just might be willing to spend much more per lead, based on your ROI. The point is that many different factors contribute to what is your optimal lost per lead, and those factors can sometimes be in flux, so that the smart marketer is always reassessing his or her CPL strategy.

In the past, relatively few marketers were paying attention to the backend results, and now that lack of attention is catching up to them. The reality is that no one could really tell how much each lead ended up costing, so there’s no way to tell whether or not it was money well spent.

Marketers who expend the time and effort required to estimate the value of an online lead have a big advantage over their competition when navigating the marketing efficiency curve. Instead of focusing solely on driving cost/lead down, these savvy marketers focus on maximizing lead volume at an acceptable (i.e., profitable!) cost per lead.

It seems that everyone is trying out new ways of finding new customers and reviewing the already-established methods for effectiveness and cost-effectiveness alike. Co-registration has come under fire lately because of the danger of partnering with a less-than-scrupulous list broker.

(Note that I’m not against co-reg: If you have a reciprocal arrangement between your organization and a few others in related areas and negotiate paying for only valid, usable leads, you’re fine—honest and effective data collection is essential to the online industry and is in everyone’s best interest; no one benefits by gaming the system or cutting corners.)

New lead-generation companies are popping up every day and it’s difficult to cut through the static to see what has the potential to really work.

So what does the future hold? I think we’re going to see the CPL model morphing more and more into CPA (cost per acquisition) deals, so that payment is made when a customer actually makes a purchase. Think about it: isn’t that a more efficient way to spend your acquisition dollars – by actually making an acquisition?

Do you know what your current cost per acquisition is? If you don’t, then it’s time you gave it some thought. Lead generation seems to be all that people are talking about (just look at the attendance at LeadsCon if you don’t believe me: every year the conference gets bigger and bigger), but not everybody is really clear about where their company stands in terms of real performance marketing.

The bottom line? Each marketer must test his or her own efficiency curve, understanding the volume/cost relationship for your particular market. As campaigns are being optimized, data is been gathered, and you need to take a step back and analyze your options.

Don’t throw money away or jeopardize your brand: create a clear CPL strategy, analyze the results, tweak as needed, and repeat. And that’s talkin’ about our lead generation!

Google never called itself a performance marketing company, but they often talked about their advertising services and performance-based in that you pay only when people click on the ads. Cost per click is a step down the funnel compared to cost-per-thousand-impression advertising, but it hasn’t traditionally constituted a form of performance-based advertising. In a way, it’s almost ironic that as Google goes further down the funnel, many of those in the performance marketing space are moving one step up the funnel into CPC.

As we mentioned above, the move to CPC isn’t exactly a new trend. Sure Hits, owned by Quinstreet, was the first vertically focused click network and is at least five years old. Everyone knew they were doing pretty well, especially when purchased for north of $30 million.

Still, it took another two years and Quinstreet going public before the idea of focusing on CPC started to make it into the general consciousness of the broader performance marketing space. It was hard for any business to ignore Quinstreet’s numbers. While not specifically broken out, others watched as their CPC business went from $15 million to $30 million to $70 million to north of $100 million. If you didn’t know better, you might think this was a 2004 ringtone business.

In the past six months a variety of competing and quasi competing marketplaces have opened up. The economics can be quite interesting with CPC’s in the $4, $6, and $8+ range for services where the lead prices aren’t much higher. Those prices explain why you’ll find more than a few people slapping up a simple landing page, a new version of the zip submit if you will, where once the user goes on to the next page, they see CPC results. If the affiliate could buy clicks at $.25, for example, while being paid $4 per click on the post zip submit page, they wouldn’t need a super high click on ad, enter zip, click on CPC feed ad conversion rate to become profitable.

We started thinking about that model and the CPC marketplaces again recently when the recent round of news came out about the FTC cracking down on fake news sites. One of the more prominent fake news sites still running is one promoting auto insurance in the manner just described.

The fake news site talks about an insurance site that promises users great savings on their auto insurance. When the user clicks on the link on the fake news site to go to an insurance comparison’s site, they go instead to an insurance zip submit that offers no comparisons only links. Given the prevalence of the media and the purported volume of traffic delivered from this site, the jump page to jump page can work from a publisher standpoint.

But what about from the advertiser’s perspective?

The problem with fake news sites isn’t just the lack of disclaimers and misrepresentations. There is a quality issue. That quality issue gets masked in the world of acai berry because of the nature of the ultimate action — a credit card transaction. The end buyer of the user, the berry maker, has the ability to create was to monetize that user that a lead buyer doesn’t. They can and do all sorts of things to keep that person on just one extra month, with each extra month often making the difference between losing money and profitability.

But what can someone do with a web visitor to their site? Cookie them? Even if they fill out a lead, then what? Call them? None of that gives them tools to make money. CPC is a powerful tool for the publisher, but without proper controls, a potential mess for the advertiser or network.

There is another secret with the CPC business that helps make the economics of running a marketplace so compelling. For many businesses — e.g., auto insurance — those who buy clicks differ from those who buy leads. Big brands buy clicks. They don’t buy leads.

Vertical networks are treated differently than a typical publisher site. They get the search budget. The search budget often has different backend metrics for success than the performance budget does. There is often a premium placed for traffic going to the advertiser’s landing page, and being a brand, they often will assign a greater cost per acquisition target than a typical lead buyer could ever afford.

Despite the increase in cost-per-click networks, the demand from both sides is still strong — buyers of clicks and those with traffic. We haven’t seen the last new entrant by any stretch.

If you build it though, that doesn’t mean they will come. Lead buyers will pick up bad traffic quickly, so it’s best to be super strict to keep the CPCs as high as possible. Once they start to go down, it’s very hard to get them to go back up.

Sites like the above will be the first to be on the lookout for fresh meat to abuse after having been knocked down in payouts from the other networks. Funny business is funny business regardless of the cost per.

This article was originally published at DMConfidential.com. Reprinted with permission.

Say wha? Facebook ads may not bring significant ROI for most marketers, but they used to be pretty inexpensive. Crappy but cheap — that’s my reasoning for eating convenience store burritos for dinner (uncooked — who has time to microwave these days?).

This follows a Webtrend report from February saying that Facebook CPM ads shot up to 25 cents in 2010 compared to 17 cents in 2009. Click-through rate decreased from 0.06% to 0.05% between the two years.

Efficient Frontier’s data can’t include new services like Sponsored Stories (also known as “paid social”), Facebook’s answer to the Promoted Tweet, so we’re talking about the same old lousy ads that marketers can’t stop grousing about. And get this — the growth in spending on Facebook ads is expected to outpace the growth in spending on display through exchanges.

Isn’t there some kind of inflection point? Won’t marketers eventually reach the point where the cost of Facebook ads pathetic ROI from Facebook ads. Or is the ROI improving to justify higher CPC and CPM rates?

Or are Facebooks ad just that freaking cheap that no one cares about CTRs or ROI?

But today optimization constraints are loosening with the advent of real-time audience buying. This has transformed the way online display inventory is purchased and now allows brands and agencies to buy audiences rather than content, evaluate data in new ways, and to optimize against consumer behavior in real time.

This paradigm shift in media buying has opened up the door to optimization strategies that ultimately will have a large impact on performance for both brand and direct response campaigns.

For starters, by targeting audiences directly, marketers can more accurately track users and the various events taking place within the consumer funnel. Demand side platform technology even allows marketers to take this one step further and assign a value to each user action based on their online behavior and/or response to a brand. Already, you can see that advancements in technology (i.e. tools AND media buying) are beginning to unlock the shackles around optimization.

Additionally, new real-time tools also track shopping cart transactional data and effectively measure and optimize multi-event conversion strategies. With advanced data insights and better visibility into the level of engagement, brands have an opportunity to improve optimization, valuation and measurement.

Let’s put this into context. Without the ability to analyze transactional data, a customer who converts with a purchase of $10 would be equally valued as a customer who converted for $1,000. Similarly, for automotive brands a conversion for downloading a car brochure could be a less valuable event than scheduling a test drive at a local dealer. Different levels of brand engagement infer a different value to the advertiser, which can be used to optimize for both brand and direct response campaigns.

Traditionally, brand campaigns have not been able to leverage ROI-based measurement, but by mapping and measuring how a consumer is engaging with the brand, advertisers can make better targeting decisions and bid pricing on the fly.

A great example of this is when an advertiser assigns different weighted values to various engagement events. Did the user click on the ad and get to my website? After arriving at my website, are they downloading a brochure or actually scheduling a sales call? Is my ad driving more browsing behavior as opposed to more buying behavior? Did the consumer interact with a rich media ad, did they watch a video on the site, did they interact with a product configuration widget, and/or have they spent more than five minutes on the web site?

Each of these actions must to be measured and weighed to evaluate the exact value returned from that ad. Just like search allows marketers to measure the ROI of a single event and optimize in real-time, so does today’s digital display.

Here are specific optimization steps that marketers can take for brand and direct response campaigns:

1. Tag all the valuable actions a user can take in a website that pushes them deeper into the conversion funnel
2. Observe and assign different weighted values to each of these actions to optimize your media buying
3. Use real data such as actual product price as a way to measure the true value of conversions
4. Use this data to decide how much to spend for the ad campaign

By connecting the dots between measurement, optimization and valuation, advertisers will successfully move consumers through the conversion funnel. Marketers should seize the opportunity to define campaign goals in a multi-event, multi-touch point composite. For digital display, the act of buying audiences as opposed to content will unlock the door to tried and true search strategies and improve your ROI.

Some lead-generation and direct-response marketers using targeting techniques have already seen this nightmare come true as ClickZ has learned that Facebook has incorporated an evaluation program that will decline ads if they loosely include user profile attributes. If the targeting aspect isn’t deemed relevant to the actual product or service — DENIED.

The semi-automated, semi-human-operated (it’s a frakkin’ cylon!) process decides if an ad is legitimately targeted to a locality, gender or age demographic. Sound pretty arbitrary? Several marketers report are that their ads with profile-based copy have been rejected and that their click-through rates and conversions have nose-dived.

But the affected advertisers aren’t ready to whip out their pitchforks, light the torches and angrily march toward Castle von Facebook yet. Sure, they’re complaining, but there seems to be a general understanding that this is part of the site’s growing pains in accommodating both users and advertisers.

“We are not actually going to know the outcome to all of these policy shifts until they are done,” Oz Sultan, executive advisor for Perks Consulting, told ClickZ. “We are just kind of getting the ‘bear with us’ [talk] right now.”

Rubicon believes this increase on the index, which measures CPM prices and revenue on 20 of the most heavily trafficked sites, was more than seasonal and exhibited a general growing optimism in the U.S. economy.

While celebrity news, such as the passing of Brittany Murphy, helped drive consumers online and pushed up CPMs, audience-targeted buys in particular were big revenue pushers with rates running four times that of standard content and site-targeted buys.

Hence, the value of unsold inventory is being reconsidered as segmenting and targeting come closer to reaching their potential, Rubicon noted.

“As many of our partners and customers can attest, the coming year will be focused on the next evolution of the market and identifying solutions that garner revenue that’s aligned with value — driven by the shift toward a truly open marketplace with transparency and controls that satisfy publishers and their demand partners,” said Craig Roah, COO and founder of the Rubicon Project.

In the first half of 2009, display accounted for only 34% of U.S. online ad spend. Of that, only 38% sold with CPM pricing.

So the quid pro quo for the majority of online display advertisers has become the accountability and results that click-through and conversion-based pricing delivers.

Once the online display gurus stopped ringing their hands, they freed them for typing. Not necessarily better ads, mind you, but defenses of their format and the CPM pricing models that brands treat with growing skepticism.

In a curious way, it’s heartening to observe industry insiders remember what they do for a living. When authoring campaigns for highly competitive clients, we often drop the gloves and start swinging. My beer is lite-er, their burger makes you fatter, my phone map is denser, my kid’s computer can beat up your dad’s computer.

Online display disciples have embraced this approach lately by suggesting (more or less) that while their format isn’t perfect, it at least doesn’t disqualify itself with embarrassingly low click-through data.

Embarrassing? In direct response — TV especially, but online as well — ad buyers at the very least can compare ad spend to direct sales income (a figure that’s inevitably underreported, as it doesn’t include sales through other channels).

No sane advertiser will challenge this common sense staple: if you sell more in merchandise than you spend on the advertising, you know that the format is working.

Defending the format is trickier for the online display crowd, which seems to theorize weekly against data. So I ask them: Where’s the beef?

You find business success in numbers, not nicely turned phrases. While a good slogan can work wonders, you still need some numbers to prove that they actually move merchandise.

It wasn’t even a generation ago that marketers trumpeted online formats for the strength of their precise measurability. Ten years later, with less favorable CTRs, we learn that numbers were perhaps overrated and that we don’t really need instant accountability, especially given display’s mighty branding powers. Unfortunately, branding takes time — curiously a bit longer than the length of a budgeted campaign.

Still, many crusaders for the online display CPM model parrot numbers when it suits them. They’re happy to challenge direct response models quoting click-through-rates that fall south of 0.1%, and a finding that a mere 8% of U.S. online users account for 85% of all clicks.

And they seem positively giddy about comScore’s “Whither the Click?” study that claims a 65% lift in site visitation in the week following the first exposure to a display campaign and an “incremental online sales lift” of 27%. Exciting and buzzworthy numbers!

But if I were considering an online display investment, the worst number is the legion of display defenders who have embraced defeatist reasoning. The argument is that since current online metrics don’t adequately measure what’s important — awareness, positive feelings and so forth — we should simply trot out different metrics that sound better (even though they too fail to reliably measure impact).

The comScore study responds to the assumption that click-based metrics don’t capture the breadth and depth of variables that boost brand awareness and drive purchase decisions.

Yet by attributing every sale to the appearance of an online display campaign (a 27% online sales lift!), it repeats the oversimplification it presumably counters. Chances are that TV, radio and billboards played a role in that sales lift as well. Who runs single medium campaigns?

From a metrics standpoint, the minute you acknowledge the interplay of dozens of variables, you diminish the importance of any one, including the variable that you want to spotlight. So like PC telling Mac he should “trust me,” too many online display salesmen ask marketing directors not to obsess so much about numbers — seemingly because the product is still struggling to define a reliable case-proving metric.

If you’re going to employ a particular ad channel, you should play to its strengths and do it profitably. The Internet is a lean-forward medium. People click purposefully, focusing so intently on the objects of their search, that they don’t take their eyes off the road.

Product-centric websites are a must because consumers actively seek product info online. Nobody seeks out display ads.

While ad aversion is problematic for all formats, it’s endemic to online display. And that’s not even factoring in the  problem on which The Wall Street Journal has reported. In this scam, ad networks deliver code-only “displays” that consumers literally can’t see, but that are nonetheless tallied and billed in CPM accounting.

And the ever-popular entreaties for “better creative”? Well, better ads might mask some online display symptoms, but they won’t effect cures. Fact is, some ad formats are inherently inferior for accomplishing certain purposes.

I butter my bread with direct response television, but know better than to lecture Pepsico to sell more Mountain Dew by inviting frat boys to call now (even if they packaged Dew in a keg).

An equally apparent fact is that the purpose-driven nature of the Internet is simply not conducive to awareness by osmosis.