Digital marketers face an uphill struggle while trying to prove the added value of digital ads (mostly banners in this case) for branding campaigns. The big question that advertisers face these days aside from how many people have seen my ad is has my ad campaign been successful.
To gauge the success of campaigns, we’re still looking at impressions, clicks and CTRs and trying to divine the behavior of humans based on that holy trinity of abstract data.
Without getting too philosophical, I think marketers would do well to read up on cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias.
It basically means that humans are looking to confirm their held beliefs, picking information that is suitable to what they believe in.
It is too inconvenient to reconsider our held beliefs, so we indulge in justifying them rather than thinking too much about things.
Someone clicked an ad for a shampoo? Well well well. Someone’s gonna buy a shampoo tonight.
Car campaign CTR is higher than the benchmark? My god someone call the car factory. We’re going to need a new batch of Veyrons to accommodate that CTR.
It’s the easy way out.
Agencies can be forgiven for not pushing for more in depth KPIs. Sometimes, when trying to look beyond the clicks and CTRs, the client’s reaction is that somehow these two metrics are not on par and all the mumble jumble data like time on site, viewability and reach on target audience are just ways to justify “bad campaigns”
To me, this all seems a little strange. It really makes me wonder how brands investing millions in ad spend still think it’s okay to measure a campaign success by a number of clicks, the cost per click (sometimes even over blind inventory and without any brand safety!) and the CTR.
Instead of clicks, why not time on site? Why not measure recency of visits, % of new visits to the site, the source of the traffic? Why not look at the incremental reach?
Why not look at the number of returning visits from the campaign traffic?
There’s actually a whole science about setting realistic goals, about how goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-targeted (S.M.A.R.T )
First psychology and now management theory. I guess I had better stop now.