Once your online advertising strategy has been executed, the next task is measuring its effectiveness. Breaking down the success of your ad offers much more information than just how high your return on investment (ROI) is. The data gathered helps you determine things like whether you’re putting ads out on the correct channels and at the right time. Let’s take a closer look at the kind of information you should be looking for.
Find Your Frequency
Finding your frequency is all about tracking the frequency of your exposure and then locating the sweet spot. That means knowing the perfect number of impressions or ad views you generate before over-exposure and fatigue kick in and viewers are no longer interested. You can do this by researching the best time to post advertisements to generate the most activity. It’s worth noting that all audiences react differently, so you should conduct your own timekeeping experiment until you find that sweet spot yourself.
Analytics and surveys are helpful tools in gathering this kind of information. Using both gives you a much clearer overview. Analytics provide an overview of customer activity presented as data. Surveys that contain precise questions help you make sense of that data as they offer motives behind customer behaviour.
Quantify Your Advertisement’s Reach
So, you’ve figured out the best time and channels for your ad placement – what’s next? Now is time to quantify its reach and identify precisely how many people saw it. Measuring its reach goes hand-in-hand with finding your frequency – the former will be at its highest once you’ve figured out the latter.
You should be utilising analytical tools to check the number of views your online ads are generating. Dips in the numbers can then be addressed and can help you find different ways to boost customer engagement.
Your campaign will probably have a number of elements such as – banners, videos, and social media posts. Measuring which generates the strongest traffic flow to your site will help you understand where your strengths and weaknesses lie. You can then make improvements to your strategy accordingly.
Crunch the Numbers
Once you have a numerical view of your traffic flow, you should start to dig deeper. Break the numbers down further to see if your ads generate the desired effect – customers clicking through to your site.
Monitor your CTR (click-through rate). This compares the number of people who click on an advertisement with the total amount of people who viewed the link. This will give you an indication of how effective your ‘Call to Action’ is. If this number is consistently lower than expected, consider whether you are utilising the correct channels for your target audience.
Based on your financial goals, work out how many website visitors need to be converted into subsequent paying customers. Once you know this figure, you can then see how it corresponds to your CTR, as well as your sales. If this is underperforming, consider the overall strength of your ad – is it noticeable and memorable? It needs to catch the attention of lurkers and encourage them to take action.
Another way to make crunching the numbers easier is to use unique links and codes for email and social media ads. Unique links allow you to calculate how people interacted with your content and what action took place – whether they browsed, subscribed, or made a purchase. These links make it a breeze to collect more detailed data.
Measure Reality Against Prediction
When measuring the success of your ad, always refer to how you predicted it would perform. This is what makes having a clear set of objectives so important. When you are piecing together your online advertisement campaign, create realistic, achievable goals. That way, when you measure its success against your prediction, there should only be minor discrepancies that you can then locate and work to improve.
To Sum Up
Staying on top of your online advertising activity is crucial in determining just how effective it is. Ultimately, you want to engage with as many people as possible to generate high traffic and, as a result, high returns. When measuring the ad’s success, it’s wise to combine both active and passive data. By that, we mean data gathered through analytics, along with information collected from engaging with the customer directly, either via social media comments, surveys or focus groups.
