Measurement of Ad-performance

One of the reasons for the popularity of online advertising is the ease and detail of performance measurement. Unlike print advertising, where performance measurement is quite a challenge, display advertising effectiveness can be measured down to the last detail.

Accountability is very high in the online medium. There are a number of parameters for performance measurement. Some parameters provide a more generalized idea of performance while others provide a much sharper analysis.

Campaigns like Run-of-Site (ROS), Run –of-Channel (ROC) provide even better analytics simply because they run over a smaller number of websites. In such campaigns an extremely detailed analysis is possible – performance by website, whether the campaign performs better on certain types of websites within a channel etc…

Some of the commonly used barometers for campaign performance are –

Number of Impressions – Analysis starts with number of impressions served.

Type of Ad impression – Certain types of creatives are found to perform better on certain campaigns. In some campaigns, therefore, the 300 x 250 might perform better than the 468 x 60… In another the Skyscraper might perform better than the 728 x 90….

Position of the Ad impression on the page – Many a client has requested a 1^st scroll banner position i.e the ad should appear on a webpage at 1^st view..Such requests are made based on metrics from earlier campaigns which have pointed to the effectiveness of 1^st scroll banners over others

CTR – Click thru’ rate (CTR) is an important measure. CTR, I believe, is a measure of how compelling the creative has been… A good creative motivates the user to click thru’ and see what the product / service is all about

Registration – Does the landing page provide for registration? If so how many have registered?

Email Acknowledgement - Post registration, a confirmatory email is often sent to the user. This email needs to be acknowledged for the registration to be active. How many users have acknowledged the email, is an another important measure.

Cost per Action – Any type of campaign – CPM. CPC or CPL always has a back-ended CPA goal. A client would therefore, put down a CPM budget of £ 5,000 with a CPA goal of £ 50 i.e. for every £ 50 spent, they’d like a customer action. Customer action would vary from campaign to campaign.

With more advanced targeting methodologies like Semantic targeting becoming available to the advertiser, better performance measurement tools are also evolving as a natural consequence.