It’s no wonder why advertisement budgets of all companies are increasing every year. Driven by a huge increase in web usage (thanks to smartphones and faster internet speeds), companies are realizing it to be easier to reach out to the mass using online advertising strategies. Online advertising, spread across websites, social media platforms, and search engines, offers consistent growth when it comes to acquiring leads or making sales. Apart from precise targeting, it also helps companies and brands gain valuable insights into the market and the performance of their products and services. Consequently, brands have been continuously coming up with creative and unique ad campaigns that drive their goals, while positively engaging their audience.
While the importance of online advertising is fairly understood by all, it is also of paramount importance to measure and monitor the success of the campaign. Ad monitoring brings out key understanding of the market while helping define:
- The best online strategy for communication
- Measuring web contribution against company goals/objectives
- Measuring the impact on offline sales
- Ranking the effectiveness of different ad platforms
- Analyze and understand audience browsing behavior
- Access targeting and campaign performance
Read more : 10 Reasons To Encourage You Using Bing Ads In Addition To AdWords
How to confirm if your Ads are working?
The idea with online advertisement is not to run one campaign and sit back and hope it would succeed. Also, advertising is not a science and once you have the calculations right, everything else will fit into your scheme. There are a lot of factors that determine the success of your ad campaigns, including the current economy of your demographic, the time of the year, the changing trends, entry of new competition and more. All of these amount to taking extra steps in deciding whether a particular ad campaign works and take steps to change it according to the demand of the market. Here are some ways you can seek to successfully monitor the success of any online ad campaign:
- Compare sales figures before, during and after a campaign. It should also be noted here that some campaigns will have delayed effects upon the sales success.
- Coupons in print ads can be a great way to determine which platform gives the best results. The coupon code, when redeemed shows you the most popularly used platforms.
- Offer incentives to the customer such that they feel drawn to respond to an ad campaign.
- Monitor leads and website traffic according to the time of the day, the age group, the time of the year and so on.
- Keeping track of leads and where they are coming from. Is it social media that offers you the maximum returns on the campaigns or offline advertising?
- Set up dedicated telephone lines for tracking customer responses.
- Use forms in your website to seek information
- Track click-through rates
- Lastly, do ask customer, both old and new, about how they feel about your product/service
The key takeaways from the above include:
Begin with monitoring your business:
It’s about knowing how many customers visited your store, how many of them bought a product/service and compare the figures to the past analytics. It also necessitated that you monitor the ad campaign success by keeping a track of how many inquiries/hits you are receiving at any time of the day.
Access Which Type of Ads generates maximum ROI:
There would be several tools to meet this end. The idea is to know which platforms did the best and which didn’t fare so well. This will also help you understand the most popular platform in your product/service niche.
Compare Results with Initial Goals:
This is of utmost importance if you are looking forward to coming up with a more targeted ad campaign in the future.
Paybacks of Ad Monitoring
Regardless of the kind of product/service you are engaged in, the market today has become highly competitive. There is an alternative to every product and it’s not unusual for one brand to take over another in a matter of days. With ad monitoring, you will better prepare for the future and find out the most effective way of reaching out while retaining your space in the competition.
Online advertising has become an essential part of any marketing mix. While it offers numerous benefits, it too needs to be continuously updated and improved for continued success. The only way to gain the insight is through Ad Monitoring.
