Online advertising is a big challenge. You need to know what you are up for. One of the main factors that you must consider when you advertise online is the use metrics.
How crucial are the metrics?
When you advertise, whether it is online or offline, you want to know how successful your ads are. This means you need a way to measure them and that is where metrics come into play. In online media, it comes in many forms. It could be the sales figures or conversion or number of clicks your ad got.
Impressions or click-throughs?
For example, a single ad is used for 2 campaigns. With all costs being constant, you were able to gather the following data. With this, you will then decide where you should channel your next budget on.
- Ad Placement A – For this, you managed 2000 clicks and 200,000 impressions.
- Ad Placement B – this ad managed 200 clicks and 2,000 impressions
This means that A had a 1% CTR (Click-through Rate) and B had a 10% CTR.
So, does this mean that A is a better bet since it had more clicks? Not necessarily so. From this data, it means that only 1% of those who saw your ad clicked on it (which can be interpreted to be interested in your ad). In B, 10% of them clicked on it. So, this means B is a better bet.
However, you should really be looking at what your objective is. If you are only looking for impressions, then A is your option. But if you want to know how many of the viewers are interested in your ad, then B is where you should spend.
Guide to Direct Metrics
This refers to how your ads can be measured without involving any calculations. They include:
- Ad Impression – This refers to every instance the ad is seen.
- Click – Here, it refers to every instance the user clicks on your ad
- Conversion – Occurs when the user does what your ad wants. If you ad is to drive a sale transaction, and the user does that, it is considered to be 1 conversion
- Engagement – an instant when there is a form of interaction between your content and the viewer
- Frequency – This refers to the number of times your ad appears to one viewer at a given time
- Non-Organic Traffic – Paid traffic
- Open Rate – A percentage of users who opened an email sent to them by the advertiser.
- Organic Traffic – Traffic garnered that are not paid for like through search engines
- Page Impression – Refers to a single code load of a webpage
- Page View – Counts the number of times a webpage was loaded
- Post-Click Conversion – or PCC counts the rate of the user who purchased the product after clicking on the ad
- Post-Impression Conversion – counts the rate of the user who purchased the product after viewing the ad.
- Qualified Leads – Leads that have the potential of becoming sales
- Reach – the amount of users that your ad would have access to
- Recency – refers to the time frame of how long since the user had performed an action from ads
- Session – This is the timeframe between the user logging into the website and logging out
- Session Duration – measures the time a user spends in a website in one session
- Unique User – refers to every single person who logs on
- Viewability – measures if an ad has been viewed
- Viewable Impression – known as VI, it refers to the ad impression which was seen by the user and not ads that were in the webpage but was not seen.
- View-Through – refers to the ad which the users has seen through. This is most common among video ads like those in YouTube.
- View-Through Conversion – When the user views the ad in totality and then clicks through, it will be calculated for this.
Metrics used for performance comparison
The following metrics are used mainly to compare performance of campaigns.
- Bounce Rate – this refers to users who came to your site but immediately left which is why the word ‘bounce’ was used
- Conversion Rate – calculates the conversions garnered from each click
- Click-Through Rate – Used to compare the performance of ads from the basic level. it wants to demonstrate how effective your ad is in terms of garnering clicks
- Engagement Rate – calculates the how engaged the viewers are with your ad
- Install Rate – mostly used for mobile marketing, it refers to the number of clicks in your ad that eventually gets the user to install the app
- Pages Per Session – refers to the average number of pages the user browsed in your webpage from the moment they log in until they log off
- Viewability Rate – calculates the percentage of ads in your campaign which garnered views
- View-Through Conversion Rate – this calculates the percentage of users who saw your ad but did not click on it. However, they then visited your website and were subsequently converted
- View-Through Rate – normally used for video ads, it refers to the percentage of users who viewed your ad in entirety as compared to the total number of ads shown.
- Share of Voice – refers to the percentage of messages coming through from your campaign.
Metrics for financial purposes
Basically the following metrics are used to calculate fi your ads are feasible financially and if you should continue to spend on your current campaign.
- eCPM – This is similar to CPM. What you want to measure is if your ad is worth the amount spend based on how many users seeing it.
- Impression RPM – this refers to the amount cost for every 1,000 impressions of an ad. Google AdSense uses this metric which gives you an idea of how much you would need to pay for every ad you place
- Page RPM – refers to the revenue receives by the publisher for every 1,000 page impressions from advertisers.
- ROI – refers to the amount you stand to receive based on how much you invested. Gives you a clear picture of how long it takes before you break even and then start earning profit.
