MUMBAI: Internet firm Yahoo! and Marketing Management Analytics (MMA) have announced a new service that will help US marketers improve their return on overall marketing investments by evaluating the offline sales impact of their online marketing programmes.

 
This move builds on Yahoo!'s commitment to enhancing the accountability of online marketing ROI, and will help marketers deploy a best practice solution for budget allocations across all media. Yahoo! and MMA's marketing ROI assessment model builds on an existing MMA model to include data from Yahoo! showing users' exposure to online graphical and search advertising.

The two parties say that this new model provides a focussed assessment of online programmes on Yahoo!, measured next to programs on other media, and gives insights and recommendations to marketers on both online and offline marketing spend. Marketers can choose to provide MMA with data from other online sites, including direct marketing campaigns and Web site data, to get a broader view of their total marketing programmes.

 
 
Yahoo! chief sales officer Wenda Harris Millard said, "Marketers need to be able to measure and make decisions about online and offline marketing campaigns with a holistic view. Providing this new service with MMA is a key step in Yahoo!'s continued commitment to providing marketers with leading tools to enhance and optimise their marketing spend."

 
 
MMA Chief Client Officer John Nardone said, "In many ways, online marketing can be more accountable than many offline marketing tactics, but there is still a real need to understand the total sales impact of online and offline programs on a common ROI basis so that optimal budget allocations can be made. Clients are shifting more and more of their total spend online, and need to move beyond measurement of clicks and page views to understand what is really working to drive sales."

MMA claims to have pioneered the use of marketing mix modeling to help companies plan, measure, validate, and optimise their marketing performance. Since that time, MMA has conducted more than 1000 studies on hundreds of brands and businesses in more than 20 countries.