Photo from http://www.go2markets.com

In today’s marketing world, there is a multitude of channels to select from when working to get your company’s name out there. New marketing solutions are being invented daily and sometimes it can be overwhelming to keep up with the status quo. Between the display campaigns, pay-per-click, SEO, blogging, and social media, it’s hard to keep your head above the hypothetical marketing waters.

It’s safe to say that there is no simple and quick answer as to which is the best marketing plan for everyone. Each company is different, and with different companies comes creating and customizing a marketing solution that works best for you. Every campaign has a different objective, budget, and target audience. What should matter is the results you receive and whether or not they are relevant.

Do clicks matter? Sure they do. What about page views? Yes, that can be important. However, some advertisers could be completely missing the point when the results of their campaign are delivered. It may be common nature to jump to the conclusion or have your eyes directly search for the click-thru-rate on the spreadsheet, and that’s not a bad thing, but it’s not always what really matters.

Let’s say, for example, you ran a display campaign for your mid-sized fine dining restaurant in a metropolitan area. Your main objective is to get more foot traffic and customers for an increased return on investment. Your budget is being allocated to a leaderboard and rectangle that will show up on webpages people are looking at because you want to grab attention. In order to track your increase in customers and sales, you have a call-to-action on your ad for a limited time only.

Now take a step back. Do you want these display ads being delivered to everyone in the state? What about the demographics? Are you looking to target high school students or adults of a certain household income? All of these questions matter and all of them can determine how successful your campaign is. By layering your campaign, you can make sure that your ads are only going to the people you really want them to reach, without wasting your budget on impressions elsewhere. If you don’t think people will travel across the state to visit your restaurant, tighten your geographical area to target those within range. If you definitely want to grab the attention of people ages 25 and up, you can do that.

Let’s jump to the delivery of your campaign results. Determining how successful your campaign is will depend on how you measure success. If increasing the amount of customers you receive in your restaurant to improve sales is you main goal, make sure you’re asking the right questions about your campaign results. As previously stated, although the number of clicks your ads received does matter, it does not necessarily determine how many people were impacted by the campaign and in turn brought them through your doors. A person does not need to click on a display ad in order to become a new customer of a restaurant. But how do you know if the display campaign worked on them? Here’s how:

A program called MOAT Analytics is changing the way we look at display campaign results. Rather than only showing the average click-thru-rate of a campaign, we can provide you with some of the following details for your ad campaign:

– In-View Time: This shows the length of time an ad has been actively in-view on the device screen.

– Universal Interaction Time: This shows the average length of time the user interacted with the ad.

– Attention Quality: This shows the ratio of users that converted from hovering to interacting with the ad.

– Heat Maps: MOAT can actually generate heat maps of your display ad to show where cursors hover over and where the clicks are happening. This can help you better understand the effectiveness of the creative design.

As you can see, although clicks are sometimes a great way to determine success of an ad, it is not the only factor to consider. The truth about your ad campaign is readily available with today’s technology. We will deliver for you more than just clicks. We think you’ll be amazed at what you will see.