I’m often asked how do you know if an online ad was successful? Well many times you don’t know for sure. You can make some assumptions based on what was important to you and your organization at the time you created the ad, to measure or gauge the effectiveness it had at meeting the goals you set.
For example, if the number of people seeing your ad and coming to your site is important, than click through rates are an important metric for you. BUT in this day and age, with click through rates falling faster than Chicken Little can yell the sky is falling, that’s probably not your best metric. After all what does it really tell you? Okay, so someone came to your site. Big whoop.
Did they do anything? Did they sign up for anything? Did they accidentally click and wind up on your site? You don’t really know that do you? And there isn’t really a way to find out unless you hunt down and ask those people specifically.
So how can you tell if an ad was effetive or worked?
First – ask yourself the question of what you expect/want people to do when they see that ad online
Once you have that figured out you can start to devise a measurement strategy around that specific goal (or goals).
It might include things like signing up for a newsletter – so you would track how many people signed up (not just arrived at the newsletter page) after viewing the ad, this would likely need to be done by using a cookie or something along those lines and can/should be worked out between your ad serving company and your IT department.
If you took it one step further and had mirrored tracking links set up for each creative execution, size and even publisher (perhaps placement even), you’d be able to analyze how each version performed and determine if big boxes or leaderboards in creative A worked better and which sites got you the most registrations – or perhaps had the best ROI based on cost of media/number of subscribers.
Suddenly you can now tell a story to your stakeholders, your sales people and so on. You now know what is beginning to drive those subscriptions. Just think if you started testing the colour of the ad background, the placement of the click here etc. what you could learn about your advertising for a fraction of the cost of a print ad test.
A story is much more compelling than a click through rate. A story (usually) has a point, if not at least a beginning, a middle and an end. A CTR is just a number.
It’s also OK to have different measurement goals for different campaigns – or even multiple goals that are all measured with completely separate benchmarks. Using the same yard stick to measure everything you do doesn’t really work for much of anything – especially online advertising, so isn’t it time you shook things up and looked beyond the click through rate?
Photo Credit: miamiamia Stock.xchng
Rebecca Atkinson (Muller) is a freelance web marketing/analytics consultant with more than seven years of direct experience helping businesses create and implement online marketing and communications strategies. Her clients come from all industries including finance, technology and not-for-profit. She specializes in helping her clients determine how to improve their advertising programs, focusing on visitor behaviour – beyond the inital click-through. Full bio available