Aspire has another exciting Ask the Expert post! Our digital team includes so many talented folks who are glad to share their insights with local media sellers. In this post, Ricky Appelbaum, lead client development manager, shares his tips for presenting ad analytics during customer meetings.
Every advertiser cares about campaign performance and expects easy-to-understand reporting. Not all platforms provide this. In fact, it can be a cumbersome process that delivers a lot of data but no real clarity. When you have these conversations with customers, the first step is ensuring reports are simple but meaningful.
Appelbaum believes it all begins with understanding the campaign goals and the digital tactics used.
Performance Metrics That Matter
It is important to understand basic digital advertising metrics and how they convey performance:
- Impressions: This is the number of times an ad is shown. Impressions build awareness and help advertisers understand the visibility of the ad.
- Clicks: This is the number of times users click on an ad. Clicks show a level of engagement that signals the audience’s interest.
- Click-through rate (CTR): This is the ratio of clicks on an ad compared to the total number of impressions served. Rate metrics are helpful for comparing a campaign to industry-wide benchmarks and historical trends.
- Completions: This is the total number of times users watch or listen to an ad in its entirety.
- Completion rate: This is the ratio of ad completions compared to the total number of impressions served. Completion rates vary greatly depending on the ad type and whether it’s skippable.
There are many other metrics that are specific to the ad type. For email marketing, stats like opens offer unique insights. Social media has likes, comments and shares.
Appelbaum noted that you should always include context when showing advertisers analytics. Context could consist of benchmarks from the industry or previous campaign performance. Diving further into the performance of ad campaigns could also include looking at other sources like Google Analytics or point of sale (POS) platform data.
For example, if an advertiser is running display and geofencing ads, they can look at the total website traffic since the ads’ launch compared to the traffic from beforehand. This will identify an increase, or lift, in website activity that was caused by the campaigns.
Advertisers Have Different Expectations About Ad Analytics
Appelbaum shared that local media sellers will have groups of advertisers with different reporting needs and expectations. Some will be very hands-off. They just want to know if the ad is running and has received the expected number of impressions, along with how many clicks. They may want to know what websites ads appeared on, which is another reporting feature. These businesses aren’t going to go into the weeds but want to see basic performance information.
Others will desire a more in-depth analysis. Appelbaum provided an example of completion rate for a video. If the video is one minute long and you can see a large percentage of drop-offs start to occur at the 30-second mark, it would make sense to recommend shortening the video so the advertiser can convey their entire message.
In this conversation, you’re adding your own expertise to qualify the metric. Your customers want optimization ideas, and you can offer these based on your experience. Data is the best way to inform decisions!
Ad Analytics and Conversions
Your clients’ ad buys may span all phases of the sales funnel. Many tactics focus on awareness and building brand familiarity. Companies eventually want to understand their impact on a conversion, which can mean different things to them. It could be a purchase, form fill for an estimate, or registration for an event.
The advertising you provide can build intent for these conversions, but advertisers will need to look at additional sources to evaluate impact. An example would be a campaign promoting a unique sale with a coupon code for checkout. Checking redemptions in their POS platform will give a good picture of how many people moved through the full sales funnel.
Ad analytics help connect all the dots, letting the advertiser define the true impact of the campaign.
Digital Advertising Analytics Vary from Broadcast
Another area Appelbaum brought up is the difference between digital advertising and broadcast. Radio spot buys focus on dayparts and can be very exact. Programmatic digital advertising doesn’t work that way. There’s no prioritization of time or location. Rather, it’s audience-first.
Audience-first means building a target customer through demographics, geography, interests and previous online interactions. “Who” is more important than when and where.
Appelbaum emphasized that it’s essential to make this distinction with your customers from the start to set expectations. Without having this conversation, the advertiser could be expecting to see analytics that aren’t available or optimal for digital strategies.
How Often Should You Be Checking Ad Analytics?
Appelbaum stressed that monitoring campaigns is critical. You could look at them daily if you have the time. However, he cautioned that you shouldn’t overreact to performance data from any one day. Campaigns need time to ramp up. Depending on the tactic and duration, this could be a week or two. He advises sellers and advertisers to be patient before jumping to conclusions.
You’re looking for trends, and ads should have time to deliver before you implement significant changes. With longer campaigns, those won’t begin to show until 15 to 30 days. At that point, optimizations can happen to drive better performance.
Do you have topics you’d like one of our experts to tackle? Let us know, and we’ll add it to our content calendar!
