Defining Digital Advertising Success

Defining Digital Advertising Success

Simple Display Ad

Maximizing the effectiveness of advertising involves specific steps that sound relatively straightforward, but can be relatively complex to institute. The four fundamental steps are: setting a primary objective (e.g., increase brand awareness, drive content engagement, etc.); defining a call to action (what exactly do you want the consumer to do?); measuring results; and optimizing buys toward the best performing creative/media. For DMO websites, especially those that do not feature booking, these steps are not always so simple. Rich digital advertising products present great opportunity, but also additional complexity.

While the objective for a simple banner ad is typically to drive click-through to a website, multi-media online advertisements can push rich content without having to bring the user to your website. Some ad products are so rich, they act like microsites – with multiple tabs, imbedded video and other interactive features. Additional possibilities create a multitude of decisions to make, such as how much content and how many calls to action are appropriate.

To level the playing field on evaluating ad performance, Brand USA reviews results along four tiers: cost per impression (CPM), cost per on-ad engagement (CPE), cost per click through (CPC), cost per net visit (CPNV) (excluding visitors who bounce[1]). An example of on-ad engagement would be clicking on a tab or playing a video within a display ad. As such, on-ad engagement is not a relevant metric for simple display ads, but is an important factor for rich media ad performance.

DiscoverAmerica.com display ad

Simple Display Ad
(one call to action)

DiscoverAmerica.com display ad

Complex Display Ad
(three calls to action, dynamic images)

While CPM, CPE, and CPC are common metrics, many companies do not carry analysis through to what happens once consumers have arrived at the website. We believe it is important to understand the bounce rates associated with each ad buy, as high bounce rates can be symptomatic for a range of underlying problems such as a mismatch in messaging or click fraud. Tracking the net visits (total visits minus bounce) for each ad gives us a more accurate way to optimize as well as an opportunity to catch potential issues.

Additionally, Brand USA has found that individual media vendors can produce significantly different bounce rates even when running the same ad creative at the same time. The quality of audience targeting is essentially what drives the difference. Below is an example of how we can see the impact of effective targeting. Both of the media vendors in the example were directed to optimize against engagement, as they were running a rich media ad unit. Based on this metric alone, Provider 1 was more than twice as efficient as Provider 2. When looking at CPC, however, the results completely reversed and Provider 2 is twice as efficient as Provider 1.

International Online Ad Campaign
  Cost per Impression (CPM) Cost per On-Ad Engagement (CPE) Cost per Click-through (CPC) Cost per
Net Visit (CPNV)
Provider 1 $0.003 $0.31 $4.00 $7.14
Provider 2 $0.003 $0.82 $1.99 $5.53

When considering bounce rates separately, Provider 2 had a higher bounce rate than Provider 1 (64 percent vs. 56 percent among those who clicked through to the website). Bounce rate is another metric that, when considered by itself, could lead you to conclude Provider 1 performed better. When stacking all the metric up, however, it is clear that Provider 2 was the better source for website visitors.

This sample situation illustrates just how important it is to define success when analyzing post campaign data reports. Provider 1 has much lower on-ad engagement costs, but is significantly more expensive than Provider 2 in terms of cost per click-through and cost per net visit. Therefore, if website visitation was the primary objective of the campaign, then Provider 2 was the clear winner. However, if reach was the primary objective (because the ad unit itself was so rich), Provider 1 did a better job of reaching a broader range of users who had a light level of interaction. Ultimately, thoughtfully setting a campaign’s primary objective is the first step to gaining meaningful insight into any campaign performance.

[1] Bounce refers to visitors who leave the website without engaging with content or visiting another page

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