If I am correct, TeamBuy is launching in 7 days, so get ready to ring the bell, round 1. We get free front row seats to an excellent case studying unfolding before us.

My original summary may have come off as hostile when I intended it to be defensive. My original understanding was that the people using this software were internal-monitoring-internal (which still is a valid use case). If the majority of the usage is to quantify/measure the progress of a HIRED agency (analysis done by either party), it makes a lot more sense to me.

I am still eager to see the updates and progress of this project because I still have some fundamental issues with these kinds of performance metrics (on internal or external resources).

On the nature of my comments about SWIX, I think the product is great, I just like to ask questions (which you answered). I appreciate the difficulties in measuring and quantifying these hard and soft returns. On your last comment, I can imagine you are talking about campaign visibility. When Google analytics came out, (for the masses) it was the first time people visually *saw* how many people were viewing a site (and a whole lot of other stuff). It was revolutionary. I see the same thing here with SWIX. Showing visibility and iterating on what you guys already have will turn this into a big winner. I only got caught up with the dirty details of what we can immediate do with those numbers, something that you are working on now. I can’t imagine it will be long before Google starts following suite, or at least you get a knock on the door from Google :)

I am curious whether your focus is to enable marketers/agencies or their clients (saying both makes sense, but certainly you guys must lean one way). I suppose your adopting audience may influence that direction (hooray agile/lean development).

Thanks for taking the time to read my post and comment.

‘management keeping track of their marketing teams’ – not the case. What we have found is that marketing teams who work with agencies are interested in seeing the return delivered by those agencies (since they’re paying them lots of money). We think that a ‘progressive’ agency would even go so far as to use the app to demonstrate their success, but not agencies are so progressive.

on soft ROI – you’re right, soft ROI (increase in impressions, etc.) isn’t the end game. It’s a step towards it. Ultimately we have ways of getting actually revenue figures out the back end, we just haven’t got there yet. Keep in mind that before there were e-commerce products that could measure shopping cart abandonment (lost $) and ad returns (i.e our $4k ad got is $10k in revenue), people started by simply tracking visits. This is a journey we’re on. We’ll get there. Most professional marketers will tell you that the entire industry still operates without the perfect ability to see dollars in vs. dollars out. We have proxies for it which still allow you to make good decisions about what campaigns are working better than others.

Hope you enjoyed the event. Cheers,

Craig.