Atlas Institute Study Proves Its New Cost Per Revenue Metric Is Critical to Evaluating Online Advertising Success.

Business Editors

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 4, 2001

New metric helps Best Buy's digital marketing campaign

deliver on business objectives

Avenue A, Inc. (Nasdaq:AVEA), a digital marketing services and technology company, today announced the latest report from the Atlas Institute, part of its new Atlas DMT operating unit.

The report examines the latest online advertising metric, cost per revenue (CPR), and proves that when used in evaluating digital marketing campaigns, the metric can produce better financial results than other metrics being used by marketers today. In a 15-week online advertising campaign with Best Buy, the analysis resulted in a 36% decrease in cost per revenue across the company's digital marketing campaign.

The new CPR metric takes into account the actual revenue generated from particular publisher sites and other digital channels within a media plan. This metric allows advertisers to consider both the volume and the dollar size of transactions and helps them determine how much they're spending to generate a dollar of revenue from each site or channel.

Using Atlas DMT's Vital Signs reporting technology, the Institute examined the correlation between cost per revenue and cost per sale to determine how the new metric affects media optimization decisions. In a 15-week digital marketing campaign for Best Buy, the Atlas Institute found that some publisher sites efficiently produced a high number of sales, but had low average order sizes. Conversely, they saw a number of publisher sites that produced few sales, but resulted in high total sales revenue.

The study proved that optimizing a campaign based on cost per revenue can produce better financial results than optimizing solely on the cost per sale metric. In fact, 30 percent of the sites that were retained based on cost per revenue would have been dropped had they been evaluated on the cost per sale metric alone.

"By using the cost per revenue metric, we are finally able to measure factors that are important to us, such as which sites are generating the greatest revenue and the highest margins, and then adjust our marketing choices accordingly," said Bettina Hanna, Best Buy.com's director of brand and acquisition. "This is a big step beyond knowing only which sites are generating the most orders."

"Cost per revenue represents the next step in the evolution of digital marketing metrics," said Young-Bean Song, director of the Atlas Institute. "With CPR advertisers can develop campaigns that more accurately deliver on their business goals."

About the Atlas Institute

The Atlas Institute is the research and education arm of Atlas DMT, a provider of digital marketing management systems and an operating unit of Avenue A, Inc. The Institute publishes Digital Marketing Insights, a series of publications by Atlas DMT's senior marketing analysts and digital marketing experts that help our customers improve their digital marketing effectiveness. Many of these findings are also made available to the digital marketing industry at large. Each Digital Marketing Insight report is designed to help marketers more successfully build value with their customers, throughout the customer lifecycle: from awareness to acquisition and from retention to growth. Atlas Institute also provides education in digital marketing to Atlas DMT customers and partners.

About Avenue A, Inc.

Avenue A, Inc., the digital marketing services and technology company, was founded in 1997 to help marketers acquire, retain and grow customers across all digital media. Through its two operating units - Avenue A, a provider of digital marketing services, and the new Atlas DMT unit, a provider of digital marketing management solutions - Avenue A, Inc. has the capabilities to touch and bring value to every interaction in the digital marketplace. The company is based in Seattle and operates offices in New York, Chicago and London. Avenue A, Inc. also offers digital marketing services through iballs, a wholly owned subsidiary based in New York. Avenue A, Inc. and iballs adhere to the NAI privacy principles that have been applauded by the FTC. These principles are designed to ensure Internet user privacy. Please visit www.avenuea.com to learn more.

Avenue A, Inc. has applied for registration of the "Avenue A" and "Atlas" service marks in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks, trade names or company names referenced herein are used for identification only and are the property of their respective owners.