Compared to traditional marketing, a huge benefit of digital marketing is that the brand can get data about the marketing activities relatively accurately, fast, easily and cheaply.
Traditional marketing can be measured by methods like Media-Mix-Model(MMM). These methods are slow and expensive, it usually requires a professional third-party vendor to complete one study in 12-20 weeks.
Moreover, these methods usually cannot measure the specific effect of a very specific ad, if the format of the promotion is like a comprehensive campaign or ad set.
And modern digital marketing ads on platforms like Google or Meta could provide almost instant and comprehensive data, as well as a certain level of automatic improvement according to the data.
However, there is also a rising problem with the data: What is the data mean actually?
The higher number of the Reach/Views, Traffic/Clicks, and Subscribe/Likes, the better it is?
Views, clicks, and likes are essential parameters of the performance of ads. And even more important, it is vital to understand the parameters are only measurement tools, but not the purpose of the ads themselves.
What is Reach/Views measuring?
Reach/Views are related to the awareness section of the marketing funnel.
What is a Marketing Funnel:
TC:
The reach or views, is measuring the awareness of the ads brought to the brand or the product. Some platforms like Meta also have Estimatic Brand recall for reference.
While measuring the performance of the ads, it is important to not blindly chase a high number of reaches or views, and forget about the purpose of promoting the awareness of the brand or the product.
Ads designed to be very interesting, or so-called “Viral” sometimes belong to these wrongly designed ads.
What are Traffic/Clicks measuring?
Traffic/Clicks are usually referred to in the consideration section of the marketing funnel.
The Traffic/Clicks is measuring the Brand/Product favourability. The reason why we need to measure the brand favourability indirectly with metrics like traffic/clicks is we cannot measure people’s minds directly.
This is important because quite often there would big differences between the performance of traffic/clicks and the brand favourability, especially when the promotion use tactics like clickbait. It is very important for managers to avoid forcing marketers to use tactics like clickbait to create good-looking metrics.
What is Subscribe/Page Like measuring?
Subscribe/Page like is actually a combination of two things.
First is a metric that measures brand favourability. The underlying idea is one would click on the subscribe/Page Like if they ”like” the brand, which means they are in favour of the brand.
The second is a lead generation function. Because on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, those who subscribed or liked your page would be likely to see your organic post(post exposures that are not coming from advertising). Therefore it serves as a purpose of a lead list, for you to use organic posts to reach.
However, the situation is very different from when these platforms are just found.
Now Facebook has a very low organic reach rate, while Instagram and YouTube may be slightly higher.
This makes Page Likes less useful as a lead generation way on Facebook now.
Besides, there are too many ways to generate low-quality page likes, such as a like bait, giveaway, or even buying fake likes.
How about Conversion/Conversion Value/ROAS?
First of all, conversion in digital marketing actually only means the number of targets reached. Depending on the needs of the campaign, it might be Clicks, it might be Traffic, it might Purchasing, or it might be Lead Gen Form Filling. Here we assume the conversion is purchasing, which is also the meaning of conversion in some platforms.
And Conversion&Conversion Value&ROAS are better checked at the same time.
Conversion means the number of purchasing reach. It is important for businesses that have both expensive and cheap products. Having a high conversion but low conversion values, means people are only buying cheap products. And a low conversion but high conversion value, means people are only buying the expensive products. Both are clues to improving the business.
And ROAS(Return On Advertising Spend) is useful to express the effect of the campaign. It is the amount of money got by a unit of money invested as the advertisement fee.
Although it is useful, it could also lead to a lot of misunderstanding.
A high ROAS does not mean the campaign is successful, because it might be actually generating very little conversion values. The ROAS would still be high if the investment is very low.
Moreover, the AS(Advertising Spend) only includes the advertisement fee on the platform only. It does not include the fee spent on producing the advertisement content. Sometimes this content could be expensive. And sometimes the manpower spent on arranging the advertisement could be costly as well. Therefore you could also treat it like, an expensive advertisement that should have a higher ROAS to compensate for the cost.
Modern marketing is based on data and evidence. By interpreting the data, the marketer could have a quicker and more reliable understanding of the situation, which provide insight into improving marketing activities.
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