Technology
Engage uses a cookie placing and tracking technology to overcome the problem.
When a user visits a site where Engage serves a banner, a cookie is placed in the user's pc and a unique user id is assigned. All without the user knowing anything about it.
At the advertiser's site, Engage serves another banner, one so small that it's only one pixel by one pixel in size.
This tiny banner, so small that it's invisible to the naked eye, sets another cookie into computers that visit the advertiser's site.
Once set, the cookie will begin looking for the unique user id. If it finds one, it will know not only that the visitor has previously seen an advertisement about the site, but also where and when the ad was served.
Furthermore, this technology is able to track what the user does on the advertiser's site, what kind of transaction took place and how long it takes for the transactions to take place.
According to Miller, this technique is even capable of tracking highly involved purchases where a customer goes through extensive deliberation before making the purchase.
"If you just measure click-through," said Miller, "I might click on an ad, go to the advertiser's site, if it's a very involved kind of purchase, I might not necessarily buy then, I might have a look, go away, do some comparison then decide to come back and buy from this site."
The solution is very technology driven and it's not perfect.
There are Netizens who clean out their cookie files. It's also likely that customers who come to the advertiser's site later on are actually lured by advertisments on other media.
"It's not 100% perfect," admitted Miller, " but it's a lot better than what you get with other medium."
The technique is called a closed-loop analysis, and what it gives rise to, according to Miller, is a complete ROI accountability of advertising.
