If you are a small business owner or marketing professional, you have probably been pitched or sold on buying impressions or unique visitors. Sales people will sell you on increasing traffic to your website by driving traffic from theirs or ad networks they buy advertising on. In local markets, businesses often see radio and cable advertisers dipping into the world of digital advertising. This has definitely caused some problems and we’re going to show you why in this blog series.
The Problem
The primary metric these advertisers use to measure success is click-through rate (CTR). Click through rate is simply the number of times people see an ad and the amount of times it gets clicked on. This is valuable information you use when crafting ads, but ultimately it’s a meaningless number to look at when measuring the effectiveness of your online marketing.
How Should You Measure Online Marketing Efforts?
All online advertising efforts need to be tracked on your website analytics side. It’s very simple to do with free tools like Google Analytics. Businesses need to be able to see how many visitors are coming to your site and who they are and where they originated. At a minimum the simplest measure is to look at Average Visit Duration, this is how long a visitor stayed on your website. Businesses also want to look at acquisition and how they’re driving traffic to their website. By looking at these figures, you’re going to be able to figure out where visitors are coming from and how long they’re staying on your site. This is the first step to measuring the effectiveness of an online marketing campaign.
What is revealed by looking at those two statistics?
Here are some stats from this month from one of our clients whose primary objective is to recruit employees. All stats are real, and names of companies are kept confidential. If you want the full detailed report contact us here.
[one_third]
Medium
Google Ogranic
Google PPC
Radio Station Website
Local Job Search Website
Facebook Ads[/one_third]
[one_third]
Visits
703
281
34
34
93[/one_third]
[one_third_last]
Avg Visit Duration
2:08
1:01
0:00
2:56
1:09[/one_third_last]
Just by looking at these two statistics, many problems are revealed by companies selling impressions or unique visitors. Average visit duration is low meaning visitors are not staying on the site. Often times people visiting the advertisers site will click on the ad by accident and close out of the screen right away. If visitors arean’t staying on a website theres literally no value to buying impressions or unique visitors.
Why is this happening?
In our next blog that will come out next week we go into why some of these campaigns work, and some are a waste of time and money.
If you need help with online advertising or how to set up and look at an Analytics report contact us today!
