Clicks vs. Click Throughs and Why You Need to Understand the Difference

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

If you run advertising campaigns, you should be receiving reports from the publisher’s ad serving software/company showing you the number of impressions your ad received, as well as the number of clicks.

This information can be valuable to you as you decide whether or not to proceed with additional ad campaigns with said vendors. But what is a click, really? For vendors and ad-serving comapnies, a click can include the following:

1. People who click through to your website
2. Spiders/bots/webcrawlers trolling the net to index information and links
3. People who clicked on your ad (by accident) and realized that wasn’t the action they wanted to take and closed things down before actually visiting your site
4. Fraudulent click activities – which end up being a combination of automated clicking devices/ip addresses who never make it to your site

As you can see there are a lot of instances where a click may not be an actual click and may be inflatign your results. This is where the click-through comes in.

A click-through is exactly what it sounds like – someone has clicked on your ad and landed on your (campaign landing) page.

It can be kind of tricky to get this information, as it requires you to have your own tracking system in place that allows you to place your own click tags in your ads (as well as those from the ad serving company/publisher.) It also requires you to have the ability to place tracking code on your site to tell when someone has clicked through from an ad.

Generally speaking, if you sit down with your IT and marketing teams, you should be able to figure out a way to do this – especially if you are using some sort of paid tracking software/system.

Did you know that the variance between clicks and click-throughs can differ as much as 30-50% in some cases? Every tracking system will be different and there will always be discrepancies between data sources, but normally you look for a less than 10% differnce.

Paid Search advertisers seem to have the lowest data discrepancies, and that is because they have long since instituted double tracking and didn’t stand for the difference between clicks and click-throughs, especially because paid search is billed on a cost-per-click basis. This forced serving companies/software systems to pay attention and fix the discrepancies quickly in order to avoid losing money.

However, in banner advertising, most programs run on a Cost per Thousand (CPM) impressions basis, so it’s advantageous to the publisher to show lots of clicks and not worry about fixing any potential discrepancies. For anyone who is running banner advertising campaigns on a CPC basis, I strongly recommend you ensure there is a second tracking option in place for you to compare the numbers.

Perhaps it’s time to stop and take a second look at your advertising campaign and see how it’s really doing.

Photo Credit: iamwahid; Stock.Xchng

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26.02.2009 Banner ads, Web analytics, campaign tracking, online advertising, web marketing No Comments

Why You Need to Understand Where Your Website Visitors Come From

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

Where do your visitors come from? I mean really come from – and I’m not referring to backgrounds or locations. I mean how do they get to your site? It definitely wasn’t magic (although we all like to think so now and again).

More likely than not some form of search (paid or organic) is going to be the largest source of traffic. If it’s not you have bigger problems that won’t be helped byt this post.

But what about after search? What is the biggest source of traffic? Is there one site that stands out on a regular basis? Or perhaps it’s a matter of “bookmarked” or “typed” urls (which is basically people opening up their browser and either manually typing in your website, or selecting it from their favourtites).

Whatever that source is – do you give it a second thought? What do you do with that information?

Do you look to see what people do once they land on your site from that particular source? Do they convert? Do they view specific content? What are their habits? Are there any patterns you can identify to help you either provide better content, help them convert or improve your overall marketing experience?

Say they come from website X – should you go spend all of your ad dollars on website X? Maybe. Maybe not. Why wouldn’t you spend all your ad dollars on that site? Well back to my earlier question of what do people do when they come to your site? Did visitors from site X convert? Did they do so at a higher or lower ration as compared to your site’s average conversion rate?

If you answered yes, then you definitely might want to consider checking out some sort of relationship with that site (if you don’t have one), after you investigate what it was that caused your traffic spike and sent people to your site in the first place.

Once you have that information – you can use it to better understand why people are coming to the site, what they are looking for and how you might work with that site owner/pubisher to create valuable content (which can also be in the form of ads) that will continue to not only drive traffic, but keep site X’s conversion rates at the same (or higher) levels.

If the conversion rate for visitors from site X was lower than your site’s average conversion rate – the question you have to ask is, is it worth it to go spend money and advertise on that site for more traffic that doesn’t convert? Perhaps. Again once you know why or how visitors are coming to your site from site X, you can then determine if you think there’s a way to improve that conversion rate.

If for whatever reason you decide you don’t think you can improve the conversion rate then perhaps you should look at focusing your ad dollars elsewhere – maybe there’s another site out there that is providing you less traffic, but a much higher conversion rate. Wouldn’t you rather spend your money focused on converting more of these individuals than by driving large numbers of unconverting traffic?

It’s not enough anymore to say “Wow site X drives lots of traffic, let’s advertise there.” Pathing tools available within any analytics system (even the free ones), if set up properly, can start to give you a better understanding of visitor behaviour and help you make more informed advertising decisions, which should increase your ROI and… and… and…

Photo Credit: afreeta; Stock Xchng

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22.10.2008 Web analytics, analytics tools, online advertising, web marketing, websites 2 Comments

Looking Beyond the Click Through Rate

Friday, September 5th, 2008

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

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05.09.2008 Web analytics, online advertising, web marketing No Comments

Listening To Your Audience

Friday, March 14th, 2008

All too often marketers and agencies tell people what they should think or who they should target. It’s not often that you find marketers and agencies who listen to what the people say and then create something based on what’s happening on the Internet. Which in this day and age of social media is something we should all be doing more of.

Recently Mediapost highlighted a company and agency that did just that though.

In December DogCars, a site dedicated to reviewing cars from a pet-friendly angle, announced that Honda’s Element was DogCar of the Year.

Honda and their agency took that bit of information and created an ad campaign that shows the car’s features from the perspective of a dog (and it’s owner). The multimedia campaign includes print, online, tv and video . A massive undertaking to spend on what some might see as a small percentage of the population (which being a dog owner myself I think is actually larger than most imagine).

They’ve even created an interactive website targeted to Pet lovers of every kind to showcase the car’s features. Unfortunately it doesn’t work so well in Firefox, but that’s a whole other can of worms.

It’s about time companies and their agencies really started scouring the web (among other places) to see what is being said about their brand and learn when to jump on a great opportunity band-wagon when they see one.

Well done Honda.

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14.03.2008 Integrated marketing, agencies, interactive marketing, online advertising, web marketing No Comments

How to Improve the Customer Service Experience (or Third Time is not the Charm)

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

Rather than make this a rant-and-rave post (which it is, no matter how you slice it), I’m going to try and make this productive for other marketers.

This is an update to the series of Canadian Tire posts regarding the company’s decision to close its version of a gift registry — Celebration Station.

I’ve blogged before that company representatives had indicated I would receive a gift 2-4 weeks after confirming my address with them. It’s now been more than six weeks and there’s been no gift and no further communication. This despite two attempts to contact them via the email address provided for gift registry questions. I even pointed them in the direction of my posts and indicated that I had readers asking for updates.

Quite frankly, I’m appalled at their lack of communication. So if you plan on removing a service you offer your customers, here are a few points to remember:

1. Have a detailed plan in place about how you’re going to go about removing the service and what you’re going to replace it with (if anything), and detail how you plan on addressing it to your customers.

2. Chances are if someone hears you’re going to discontinue something, that is when the product/service will be in full demand. So if you plan on offering a gift or some form of tangible apology offer to your customers, make sure you can fulfill them by adding 40% to your calculation of the number of items you think you need. If you have extra, it can be a great chance to hold a contest for your customers — or even employees for the number of complaints they are likely to have to deal with over this decision.

3. Appoint one person to take point on all communications received (phone calls, emails and monitoring of social networks and blogs etc.) Have a team designed to deal with anything that comes up and prepare a contact strategy that includes a time line for getting back to individuals — and stick to it.

4. Consider changing your telephone on-hold messaging to address concerns customers may have with this change in your offering. Create automated email responses to be sent back to those customers who send you an email. State the time lines you’ve created (and yes, buffer slightly) for getting back to people so they know their email didn’t get lost in some cyberspace vacuum.

5.Care. Care what people are saying and make sure your staff cares too. If neither you nor they do, then you have bigger problems that can’t be addressed by this post.

All in all, if your customers think you care about them and their feelings, chances are they are going to be a little more accepting of issues you might have meeting promises you’ve given them. They may not like it, but I have to say that if I had any communication from Canadian Tire in all of this after the initial “so long, we’re closing” email, this probably wouldn’t be my third blog post about the situation.

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05.03.2008 Internet Marketing, online marketing, web marketing No Comments

I Twitter a Confession

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

Back in November, I wrote a post about Twitter and was having a very hard time wrapping my head around it’s usefulness.

I must confess, I’ve been spending some time with it and think that I might be turning into a convert. Sure there are a lot of social tools out there, and Facebook allows you to share items and status updates with your friends pretty easily; but what I’ve found is that while Twitter seems to do the same thing, it does it in a different fashion. With only 150 characters (including spaces) to update what you’re doing, it’s a very convenient way of sending quick updates to friends and colleagues on various things you’re doing in your day.

I liken it to the new grapevine for the technological age. I hear about new blog posts people have enjoyed and/ or posted. I also find it’s been helping me prioritize which articles from the numerous industry newsletters I should read first. It’s also been great at keeping me in the loop with other happenings within the industry and across the globe.

In general, I have to say I feel, well, more connected.

I struggled in my previous post understanding how this could be considered a great marketing tool. And I think I finally figured it out. Like anything, Twitter is not a tool that should be used on its own, but if used as part of an overall marketing strategy to the right audience, I actually think it could really work. Now in terms of specific ideas I have – I won’t give that away, afterall, being in the business myself I think I might have to save those gems for my clients. :)

Here’s a few quick tips on how to make the most of your Twitter experience (keeping in mind I’ve only been a Twitterer for a short while).

- Explore the Twitter tools and applications available and incorporate Twitter into your daily life, such as your blog or Facebook.
- Use a different update program. Rather than simply staying logged into Twitter’s website, download one of the many add ons that allow you to update on the fly (like Messenger). I currently use Twitterfox for Mozilla.
- Import your address books to allow you to easily find friends and colleagues who use the service.
- Once you start following people, look to see who they are following (not in a creepy, stalkerish way) to look for those you might want to network with.
- And Lastly, don’t be afraid to update your status often and/ or begin conversations with others – about things that might be relevant to all of you.

Happy Twittering…. Oh and and if you want to, go ahead and Follow Me.

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23.01.2008 Twitter, online marketing, viral marketing, web applications, web marketing 2 Comments

An Affair with Technological Flair

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

So I’ve just finished picking myself up off the floor and am trying to control my giggle fits. I think I can say I have officially seen everything now.

Have you ever wanted to break a date but not know how? Have you ever wanted someone (your significant other) to believe you were out of town or working late so you could partake in some other activity? Well, if you live in Toronto, now you can.

Toronto Alibi is a service that provides “solid alibi solutions that enable our clients to do what they want, when they want, in a discreet, confidential manner. Our service can help prevent short term indiscretions from destroying long term commitments..”

I dove deeper into the site and couldn’t get over what I found. It’s so wrong (in my personal opinion), yet such a brilliant use of technology that I can’t help but wish I’d thought of it first and had no conscience; because I think I’d be rolling in money about now.

Want to tell your significant other you have to go out of town on business, but want to make sure it’s legit? Well use the Hotel and/or Flight/Hotel service and they will email you an itinerary you can share. It will even provide you with a phone number to leave at home so that when your honey calls in, a qualified operator answers the phone with the correct name of the hotel and transfers you to the room (which conveniently gets sent to voicemail). You would then get a text or email message letting you know to call in and check your messages.

The list goes on with call-in sick services, simulated employment, break a date calls and my personal favourite – the “Fake-A-Friend” service.

Our “Virtual Pal” service can be that friend or co-worker that backs up any story you want. An agent from Toronto Alibi can come to your home with fishing gear or golf clubs and make any scenario believable. Your “Virtual Pal” can even call you at pre-determined times with any story you want, from any number you want, in order to add validity to any alibi. “Virtual Pal” ensures that your personal affairs stay private.

After reading that, I had images of customizeable avatars dancing in my head and showing up at my front door.

The caveat for this service though is that “All services provided are within legal limits. Toronto Alibi will not provide alibis for criminal activities.”

With prices starting from just $15 to get a phone call to break a date and fake-a-friends starting at only $75, I can only imagine that this will take off and do quite well. It honestly boggles the moral side of my brain though, that’s for sure. However, my fiance and I are having a whole lot of fun with this. After showing him the site, he lets me know he has to go on a press trip (he’s an automotive journalist) to none other than VEGAS at the end of the month. I’ve already had hours of endless fun teasing him about this. Good thing we have a solid and trusting relationship, or I might develop a case of paranoia.

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17.01.2008 web marketing No Comments

Web 2.What?

Friday, October 26th, 2007

I’ve been mulling over this post for a while now. I have a feeling half of my fellow marketers will appluad this post, while the other half will blog about how wrong I truly am. I vowed a long time ago that these words would never be a part of my vocabulary – but here we go.

Web 2.0, Web 3.0… What do these really meaning? Well according to Wikipeda, Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.

Web 3.0 is a term that is used to describe various evolution of Web usage and interaction along several separate paths including transforming the web into a database.

Say what?

In my personal opinion Web 2.0 and 3.0 are just made up terms that refef to websites and campaigns that are interactive and engaging and encourage “audience” participation. As simple as that. That’s something I think most people can relate to.

And when you can relate to something, it doesn’t seem that scary.

Clients may not get the technology involved or understand how to create these experiences, but you don’t need to throw a bunch of terms at them designed to make heads spin.

Our value as interactive marketers is the understanding, knowledge and passion we bring to the space. There are many different tactics and ways to create and execute sites and campaigns, knowing best practices for each of those and how to tie that into a winning strategy for the client is what we should be spending our time on; not using jargon that goes over heads or determining what web 4.0 is going to include.

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26.10.2007 interactive marketing, web applications, web marketing No Comments