3 Simple Steps to Analyzing any Online Campaign
At the end of an online campaign one often hears from media agencies that they ‘over delivered’ on the online impressions. That’s easy for traditional media buyers to understand and easy for agencies to sell. But a web campaign does not end at impressions nor at click throughs (this is where a little knowledge is dangerous).
To analyze the effectiveness of a web campaign, I suggest the use of a very basic funnel mechanism:
Attract: Track and measure the traffic from all media/tactics used.
Engage: Once traffic has arrived does it engage? Read your product info/whitepaper? Engage in a conversation or forum? View demos/videos?
Convert: Once the visitor has gained the necessary info, does he convert to an action? The action will depend on your objective and can range from subscribing to a newsletter, to ordering a product, to placing a call to a rep or paying a bill online.
Now put on your web analytics shades and look at the ‘over delivered’ impressions – what does it really mean?
Attract: Are the people who saw the impressions interested in your message, did they interact with the ad and/or click through? If so, how many and from where?
Measurement: Visits or Unique visitors.
Engage: Once they did click through, what did they do? Did they engage or just exit from the landing page as they were not ‘qualified’ traffic. This is where a little knowledge hurts. If you measure your success by CTR, it could be unqualified traffic drawn to your website under the wrong pretext.
Measurement: Product Views, Demo’s downloaded or form posts.
Convert: Of the traffic you received how many took the action you wanted them to take, from subscribing to your newsletter to calling in/going in-store for more info or buying it online?
Measurement: Online sales, leads generated or email subscriptions.
A good online campaign delivers on all 3 aspects and ultimately connects the right consumers to the right products and services. Your cost per conversion to action is the bottom-line financial measure which should become your benchmark.
A situation where the agency ‘under-delivers’ the impression would not be too bad IF--- it was more qualified traffic who engaged and at a higher percentage and/or bringing your overall cost per conversion lower.
Go ahead, change the conversations with your media agency and ask them to start measuring the whole funnel and your cost per conversion.
