Measuring the value of your online advertising

By Simon van Wyk

The old chestnut “Half of my advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half” doesn’t apply to online advertising. While there is as of yet no foolproof formula for measuring online success, the data you can collect from visitors makes it much easier to find patterns and test various methods to determine which ad works best.

Here are a couple of places to go to learn more about how to do this for your business:

  • Search Marketing Now (SMN) has produced a webcast that covers the basics of ad tracking. As SMN says, “Any good Internet marketing professional knows that assigning all of the value to the last ad clicked on before the conversion is inherently flawed. Most Internet advertisers, however, lack 1)The tracking technology required to determine the actual team of ads and their sequence that lead to the conversion; and the valuation methodology to properly assess each ad’s true contribution and value to the conversion…. there is no industry-accepted standard or method for assigning relative value to ads in the path. How do we effectively attribute which ad - or group of ads - ultimately led to the final conversion?”

  • The Conversation Marketing website states boldly that  “Advertising exists to help you make money. That’s it. There are no moral victories in marketing.” Advising that you need to track the ROI of online advertising “every bit as carefully as other media,” the site outlines four simple questions that enable you to measure the effectiveness of each of your Internet assets: 1) What’s the goal of your web site? 2)What’s that goal worth? What’s the value each time you accomplish that goal? 3) How many times did you achieve that goal? 4) What did it cost to achieve it? Find out more here.

  • Measuring the Social – Shifting Towards Online Advertising – Dan Neely, founder and CEO of social media and customer intelligence company Networked Insights, has produced a short video explaining the increasing importance for companies to measure and understand the complete online social situation as it affects online advertising. He says, “The current macro-economic environment will impact both offline and online ad spend….In the recent meetings with the ‘big three’ US auto makers in Washington, General Motors CEO James Wagoner said that GM would be shifting a substantial amount of their $500 million ad budget online…. Although this is smart, it’s only the first step as its not simply about shifting ad dollars online, it’s about doing this efficiently and intelligently - targeting the right people with the right content. Check out Dan Neely’s video here.

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