We all know that online advertisements are one of the fastest ways to generate website traffic but monitoring advertisement performance is essential to an effective online marketing strategy, and few webmasters do that. If your advertisement campaign is not doing well then you are only wasting resources that could have be spent elsewhere.
So let’s say you created a banner advertisement using Google Adwords. Your analytics application (Google Analytics, Webtrendsetc) will let you know how many visitors are using that advertisement as a medium to come to your website. You need to understand a number of basic marketing metrics to be able to judge your advertisement campaign’s performance.
Two basic measures that every analytics will give you are Impressions and Clicks.
Impressions are the number of people to whom the advertisement was displayed to. This is a very basic measure and can be used to calculate more insightful marketing metrics.
When a web surfer clicks your advertisement this is counted as one click. Clicks will let you calculate the Click Through Rate (CTR) which is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions. Calculate this ratio to generate the percentage of people who click your advertisement after viewing it. As a rule of thumb, websites typically generate a click through rate of 1-5 percent. A click through rate of 5 percent is considered excellent and is rare. You should target at least 2 percent as your click through rate. In order to improve click through rate try changing the banner’s colour, shape or position on the webpage. Tweaking these variables and measuring performance will improve performance progressively.
Another important metric, cost-per-click, cleverly lets you see the return on investment of your campaign. Simply divide the money spent on a particular advertisement campaign by the number of clicks that the advertisement generates. If this ratio is high you are probably better off changing your advertisement strategy. There is no standard benchmark for cost-per-click as this is highly dependent upon the quality of traffic you wish to generate.
Whether you are using a notebook, desktop, smart phone or a tablet to access the internet, using Google Analytics you can segregate traffic based on the device’s operating system. This tool can be used intelligently to assess what operating systems people use who click your advertisement. So, for example if the click through rate is higher for Android users you can edit your banner so that it only displays to Android tablet users. This will maximize your return on marketing expenditures.
It is important to state that digital advertisement optimization is an on-going process. As an online marketer you will have to tweak your advertisements constantly and monitorthe performance. You will have to update your advertisement according to how traffic behaves, understanding different trends and seasonal variations.
