As a business, it's important to be clear about the goals of any media campaign. Often, we find that clients are trying to use one overarching campaign to drive several different objectives, which ends up making none of them truly successful.
In the course of a single campaign it is certainly possible to have varying levels of success creating awareness ("Get Noticed"), driving traffic to your site ("Be Found"), and driving online actions ("Convert"). However, it isn't effective to optimize toward all three simultaneously.
Get Noticed
For example, perhaps you are launching a new product or service and your goal is the get the target audience to gain as much awareness as possible of your new offering. You would want to buy as much of the media as you could, efficiently, to generate the largest amount of exposure and have it "Get Noticed". On the backend we would work to find the lowest effective CPM and drive greater reach and frequency. Your Click-Thru-rate (CTR) and actual clicks would not be relevant to this objective. It may not even be something people would never click on, as the ad and the ad creative were simply intended to create a top-level awareness. Too often clients expectations are misaligned and they instead focus on the clicks of a "Get Noticed" campaign and see it as unsuccessful.
Be Found
However, let's say your goal was to drive traffic to your site and "Be Found". Perhaps in this case much more information was needed than could be seen in the ad space. Your objective is get the target audience to a specific page on your site so they could learn more about this new offering. Now the established KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is the actual number of times someone clicked on the ad to get to that page. In that case, we need to optimize toward the audience and tactics that are driving the most clicks and engagement. In this case, how MANY impressions we delivered is irrelevant as we only care about the ones that took the action to "Be Found'.
Convert
Finally, your sole focus of the campaign may be to get people to "Convert". In other words, you want them to take some online action (fill out a form, click to call, buy online etc) as the desired result. We then know to optimize specifically to those tactics that are driving the most success all the way to this final stage. How many impressions were delivered and whether they were clicked on is not relevant. Perhaps we can explore why they clicked and never made it all the way through (known as abandonment), but that isn't the same as caring about the clicks themselves.
Clear Campaigns Lead to Success
Asking one campaign to accomplish all the stages of your consumer journey, Get Noticed/Be Found/Convert, can be a great source of frustration in using digital media. Instead, create different campaigns with clear goals and creative designed to drive each specific stage and work with a partner who knows how to maximize the individual aspects of each. For more questions or to get started on your campaign, contact us today! We can tailor our solutions to fit your specific objectives and help you design the best campaigns for your business.
