John Wanamaker, consider by many to be father of modern advertising famously quipped: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” As humorous as the statement was, it was equally true. Marketing and advertising are part science, part luck and involve a great deal of trial and error. Technology has taken us to a place where we can better track the effectiveness of online advertising, justify expense, measure ROI and even create attribution for efforts undertaken.
Today, effective measurement is a multi-layered process. Marketers who rely solely on the data provided by ad publishers/networks are being terribly shortsighted. Even the most basic metrics including ad impressions, clicks and CTR can be easily manipulated to appear stronger. In the local space, it is not uncommon to find online publishers who do not filter non-human activity and invalid clicks from ad reporting.
Filtering is a standard practice in the online advertising industry. Most online publishers and ad networks work hard to filter results. Google, for instance, works to filter and protect the advertiser and publisher from any fraudulent or invalid activity and while not foolproof, the systems are highly effective. If you are placing and online ad purchase of any size, ask the question and let the answer factor into your purchase decision: what is being done to filter non-human activity and invalid clicks from advertising response reports?
Here are a few tips to remember when measuring online advertising:
Website Log Files: At the simplest level, you can check how many times a particular page has been viewed over a certain period.
Unique URL’s: If you are running ads on multiple sites redirect users to a page with a URL specific to the ad.
Tracking Software: Links contain snippets of code allowing for more accurate tracking without any interruption in the user experience.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[...] Click here to learn more about effective online advertising tracking. [...]