Online Media Measurement. 2007 Qtr 4
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Online Media Measurement
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Online advertising, e-media, interactive media, new media, non-traditional media…these words conjure up many similarities. One of them is the ability to measure your media and calculate ROI. Truth be told, many online advertisers are still not measuring their online media and those who are, may not be doing as effective a job as they could be doing.
Analyzing clicks from various websites where you advertise is good, as it helps you to focus on which sites are generating more traffic. Analyzing costs-per-click (CPC) is even better as it allows you to know how cost effective certain sites are and helps you direct allocation of media budget. Calculating conversion rates and cost-per-lead (CPL) are even better, as it gets to what you actually want to measure, not just traffic to your website.
Let’s test your knowledge with a simple scenario. This example is meant to be overly simplified for demonstration purposes only.
ABC Company wants to get people to purchase a $3,000 widget. ABC Company runs a one-week online ad campaign, directing people to a special page on their website. They receive the following results, where X and O are two different people:
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| X | X | O | O | X | X | O |
| O | O | X | O | X | O | X |
| X | O | X | X | X | ||
| O |
One person buys a widget.
- How many total visits did ABC Company receive to their web page over the one-week time period?
- How many total daily unique visits did they receive over the one-week time period?
- What was their total number of unique visitors over the one-week time period?
- What is the accurate conversion rate:
- 5%
- 8.3%
- 50%
- 75%
- 20 total visits over the 1-week time period (count all the X’s and O’s).
- 12 daily unique visits over the 1-week time period (Count the X’s and O’s for each day...if a person came to the site more than once a day, it only counts as 1 unique person).
- 2 unique visitors over the 1-week time period.
- 50% (Conversion rates are based on the number of unique visitors: 1 person purchased the widget/2 unique visitors X 100 = 50% conversion rate. If you had calculated this based off of 20 visits —assuming that each visit was a unique visitor — your conversion rate would have been 5%, and your perception would have been that the campaign was not as effective.)
If this example had given ad costs, we could calculate cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-lead (CPL). This information could be used to compare advertising on different sites and ultimately optimize an online media campaign’s ROI.
Conclusion: Only counting clicks doesn’t give you an accurate look at the real results. Conversion rate, CPC/CPL and ROI are media metrics that should be considered in media measurement.
When setting up an online media campaign, it is necessary to know the goal. Branding campaigns are going to look different from promotional campaigns which are going to look different from search engine marketing campaigns. These different types of campaigns may be measured differently too. Other issues to consider are time spent viewing and/or interacting with the ad. With rich media, you may not necessarily want a person to click on the ad, but rather roll over certain parts of it to get additional information, watch video, etc.
Online media can be complex, as it is constantly evolving and changing the way people disseminate and receive information. Knowing the basics and measuring what is important (based on campaign goals) is the thread that connects all marketers. This is an exciting time for online media!
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