Digital Advertising has dramatically risen in importance with the growth in the amount of time a person spends online. No less than 64% of buyers are swayed by YouTube or online videos and 52% of buying decisions can be traced back to social media .
As a marketing agency and advertising strategists, digital advertising not only helps you in reaching the prospects where they spend the most amount of time, i.e. the internet, but also in catching the right target audience.
Let’s take a look at the metrics which must be tracked to determine the efficacy of your digital marketing campaign.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
– This is elementary. The cost per click refers to the amount you pay each time a prospect clicks on your campaign. This amount determines your success probability as it is directly related to your ROI. The CPC can be brought down by raising the quality score and the relevance of the campaign. Google has automated this reporting to great effect. The average CPC varies across industry, demographics, and even seasonality.
Impressions
– Again, pretty fundamental. This metric tells us how many times our ad was displayed, by paid search, on third-party pages, etc. This measurement is important because it is a measure of visibility, a proxy for brand awareness. This might not be action-based, but gives us an approximate size of the audience that might have potentially been exposed to the ad. It is a good way to know whether our campaigns are reaching the correct target audience or not.
Cost Per Mile (CPM)
–The money metric and a kind of coming together of the first two metrics. This is the amount that is to be paid for every 1000 impressions. CPM helps us in gauging the budget-friendliness of our campaign. It also helps us in taking the decision on which media channel to choose based on who can economically get us to a larger audience.
Conversion rates
– This is an impact metric. The name is self-explanatory. It can be said that this is the most important metric for most campaigns. The metric can be defined in a variety of ways depending on how you want to slice and dice your data. Exactly who was interested in your ad? Who visited your landing page? Or even, who purchased your offering? It can be tracked based on what percentage of the people that saw your ad got interested or even made the purchase. Even on the basis of form factor, that is the device via which the ad was viewed most, and actions taken. Conversion information enables us to make intelligent decisions about extending, tweaking, or refreshing campaigns.
Return on Investment
– A clear win in the digital advertising world. Unlike old- media channels like newspapers or TV ads, it is much easier to calculate the ROI of a digital advertisement. With the help of Google Analytics and other third-party tools, we can, almost on a real-time basis, see the effectiveness of our ad campaigns. It’s transparently visible from minute to minute what investment is being made, the number of people landing on our page, and the actions being taken. These are clearly attributable results for clearly defined spends.
Click through rates (CTR)
– A metric about the efficiency of your ads. Each organization wants the target customer to traverse a specified journey once they have clicked on the ad. Some follow that path and a few drop off at some point or the other. By closely watching the click-through rates for different types of ads and different customer segments, one can identify which are working better. It’s easier to isolate specific pain points and iron the kinks out of the campaign.
Source tracking
– Which channel is the most effective for your offering and your target audience? People might see the ad on different pages before coming to the landing page. It is important to know where each customer journey originates from to decide where you must focus. This will help us understand which sites or what type of content is most suited for our ads. Of course, this also gives a deeper insight into our customer’s psyche.
The average cost per acquisition
– This metric as the name implies, is a nugget of information any business unit will be interested in. Every customer acquired or retained incurs a cost. But before the advent of digital advertising, it was very difficult to measure that accurately. Now with the help of CPC, CPM, conversion, etc. it is extremely easy to zero down on the exact cost of the acquisition. This opens up a wealth of analytical possibilities. For eg., you could find your most profitable customers – i.e the folks for whom the acquisition cost is low but the revenue is high.
Cost per action (CPA)
– The principle of the cost per acquisition can be abstracted and applied in other ways too. Organizations often want prospects to take a few different actions on the landing page and, while they all have specific business value, not all of them directly generate revenue. This metric helps us determine the cost for each of those actions and then work that into the overall ROI calculations.
Quality score
– Google helps us in generating a quality score, which is based on the quality and the relevance of the content being served to the target audience. As the quality score improves, the CPC, CPM, etc. come down, reducing our investment. Organizations also track the quality score as it also affects the brand equity. Digital advertising helps drive traffic, customer engagement, and revenue and with little investment. The transparency of the medium drives the science behind it. Brands are usually aware of market dynamics and have a deep understanding of their target customers. Marrying this with a deep understanding of the digital advertising landscape can help them maximize the impact of their communication efforts.
