Measuring success beyond click-throughs

Measurement that focuses only on click and impression counts captures just a fraction of an online advertising campaign's performance.

Clicks, of course, are a key interest indicator, whether you're running a classic consumer direct-response campaign, a brand-building campaign or a B2B lead-nurturing program. But, if that's all you measure in a campaign, you're missing key insights.

The click-through rate is one way to measure campaign success, primarily for B2C campaigns with shorter sales cycles and fewer hands in the decision-making process.

But the click-through rate alone doesn't tell you whether the clicks are coming from the audiences you targeted with your ad spend and content marketing or from drive-by clickers who bounce away as fast as they arrive.

Clicks are an indicator metric in brand-building campaigns, which typically are measured over time, but other metrics are just as if not more important.

Longer-term metrics that measure the steps a prospect takes down the path to a buying decision are often more accurate measures of B2B campaign success.

What happens after the click?

Online display ads generate awareness and interest in a brand, whether the viewer clicks or not. If they do click on the ad, what happens after that? Are you generating clicks from the sources you targeted? Do those sources generate high-quality or low-quality leads?

And there's more, too. Did your viewers just click a link on a video display ad or watch that one to complete, too? Did they watch it again? Share it? Did they click from the video to your website to check out an offer, download a paper, sign up for your email program or complete some other action that measures interest?

Measuring and analyzing more complex interactions

Being able to track your prospects or customers beyond the first click is key.

For that, you need a marketing platform like UPTRACS, which analyzes, manages and reports data to help you create more accurate media buys, make sense of attribution and target your messages, thus helping you determine the ROI of your campaigns more accurately.

Returning to video ads, consumers are far more likely to spend time viewing rich media video ads than they are to click on them. The average time spent actively engaging is roughly equal to watching two 30-second TV commercials back to back.

In this situation, these click counts, which exclude a high proportion of actively engaging consumers, inadequately measure of brand campaign success.

More important is being able to measure online and offline advertising against each other so that you can adjust your strategy and media buys to achieve better results for your campaigns.

In other words, you can finally start saving the ad dollars you used to waste on uncertainty and misguided strategy.

We'll be happy to set up a no-obligation test drive of the UPTRACS platform, or just drop us a line at 855-287-8722.