Internet Adversiting vs Traditional Advertising
While hanging with Jay of CocoDesign yesterday, we started discussing Internet advertising vs traditional advertising. We discussed that the obvious difference between Internet and traditional advertising is the ability to effectively track and target campaigns. After our conversation, I started to ponder how one could even attempt to track the effectiveness of traditional advertising like Internet advertising. The most common measurement practice for traditional advertising is to use custom landing pages, custom phone numbers, or coupons/adcodes. But this is still no measurement of viewers (or opportunities) to conversions, which the vital for tracking effectiveness. To create any kind of effectiveness measurement for traditional advertising, one would have to be able to track opportunities (similar to impressions), engagement (similar to a click or CTR), and conversion (any predefined and preferred action). Below are a few off-beat ideas on how to tracking traditional advertising like Internet advertising.
Billboards
Billboards are a great innovative use of unoccupied space viewable by a large diverse group. However, they are great for one thing: advertising to everyone on the road. There is only few broad targeting options with billboards mostly based around amount of traffic. So, how do you track effectiveness? To track the complete effectiveness of a billboard advertisement like an Internet marketing campaign, you would have to be able to determine the following: how many people pass the billboard? how may people actually look at the billboard and process the message? Then, how many people look at the billboard, use the contact information, then request information or purchase something from the advertiser (conversion)?
Magazines
Magazine advertising is another great method to reach your audience. Magazines provide many more targeting options, but can you truly track effectiveness? To track your effectiveness you would have to be able to determine the following: How many people viewed the magazine (not just subscribers, but all viewers)? How many people viewed the ad and process the message? Then, how many people viewed the ad, visited the website or called, then requested information or purchase something (conversion)?
TV/Radio
TV and Radio advertising is another great advertising method that offers additional targeting options. TV and Radio are wonderful mediums because you can catch viewers when they are most focused. However, there are still limitations with tracking effectiveness. To track effectiveness you would need to determine the following: How many listeners/viewers (number of viewers/listeners that are actually listing to one media device)? How many people processed the message and reacted? How many people requested information or purchased from advertiser (conversion)?
Internet Advertising
For optimal effectiveness and targeting, Internet advertising provides the most flexibility for your reach and budget. Through analytic software, the most effective measurement metrics are readily available: impressions, clicks and click-through-rate (CTR), conversions and conversion rate. Impression data is the most valuable component, because it provides a number of opportunities that were available. Measuring clicks from impressions, you can determine click-through-rate (CTR). Using CTR, a one can determine what ads get more viewer response thus allowing effective measurement and ad testing opportunities. Once a visitor views your ad, clicks on your site and triggers a conversion, then conversion rate can be determined. Conversion rates provide campaign success data. If impressions are high, then high conversion rate is a great metric to determine that the campaign was an overall success. Of course, if the conversion rate is low, well… you know what that means.
All Internet advertising can be targeted to reach a group with a certain interest. Specific targeting alone saves tons of cash on your marketing budget. Also, using a content network such as Yahoo or Google, any business can advertise in the same space as large competitors even with a much more limited budget.
The Internet experience is a much more personal experience compared with other advertising mediums. Although, Internet marketing tracking methods are not 100% , we can assume that each visitor is only one visitor. Rarely, would more than one person use the Internet on the same computer at the same time. This is an advantage over traditional advertising because there could always be more than one user for each medium. For example: For each magazine subscriber, publishers do not know if 1 person or 15 will actually read the one issue. The lack of knowledge hinders the ability to truly track effectiveness.
Google Analytics - Automated Reporting
Reporting has just recently become a large request with a number of sites that I market. Clients enjoy knowing how many visitors or the number of conversions their site receives. When the first requests started arriving in my email box, I figured I would address each email with custom researched data and provide the data in the body of my email. Since then, I have wised up and started using Google Analytics automated reporting feature to send reports to clients and myself on a consistent basis. This removes the element of human error and allows the client to be more involved in the data.
How do you use the automated reporting feature in Google Analytics?
Automated reporting is very simple to setup and you have the ability to automate any report in GA. To start an automated report just simply click on the “Email” button at the top of any report. (See the example below)
Once you select a report to automate (by clicking the “email” button), then you will need to select the frequency. GA gives you the option to send the report immediately or schedule reports to be sent daily, weekly, quarterly or monthly. In addition you can even have the report compare data to the previous equivalent time frame. Automating your reports saves time and provides a more efficient way to monitor site health.
In my next post, we will discuss KPI metrics you should frequently monitor.
What Have You Been Working On?
A lot of people have been asking “Beau, what have you been working on lately?”. So, here is a list of my most recent projects.
Simplemint.com - Chocolate Mint and More! This site is my introduction to affiliate marketing. I have always wanted to try affiliate marketing. The site has been launched for about 2 weeks and I can report that it has made $0 so far. What a great start!
Careerchoices.wordpress.com - Career Choices is a blog to promote career options and advice along with relevant degrees at Columbia Southern University. It has always been a passion to motivate others to do more in life. This blog gives me the ability to fulfill personal and career interests with one blog.
Shopatgordons.com - This is official website for Gordon’s of Metairie (also in Mandeville and Kenner). This was one of my favorite projects. Due to budget and time restrictions, this site was built with the online version of Wordpress. The site will only cost $10/year.
Orleanscandles.com - The best select of Orleans Home Fragrances candles, fragrance accessories and gifts on the web.
New Orleans Gifts Site Launched
OrleansGiftShop.com has been officially launched! OrleansGiftShop.com sells New Orleans Gifts and Fleur De Lis Home Accessories. Ghotibait created a custom templates and complete customization of the shopping cart software. In addition to the template design and branding, Ghotibait will continue to provide Internet Marketing services including Search Engine Optimization, Email Marketing, etc. Check out the site & do some shopping.
Columbia Southern University
Ghotibait has recently launched a new website and campaign for Columbia Southern Online University. The site utilizes some amazing javascript functions from J-Query, in addition to some custom scripts. The site has also been set up with many landing pages optimized for organic and paid search engine campaigns. The pages Online MBA and Online Degree are example pages that have been optimized for organic search.
In addition to web site design and development, Ghotibait also provides Search Engine Marketing Services.
Spring Cleaning
Things have been changing here at Ghotibait. The site has be updated with a new blog format. We are using Wordpress software for the backend. Wordpress has been great to install and use. I will have to test the reliability.
Check back for more updates!
Ghotibait RSS Feed