The painful truth about measuring the ROI of online advertising campaigns is that the process tends to be a bit mind-boggling. When interpreting results, a few things need to be taken into consideration: quality of creative, clarity of messaging, size, format, and ad placement on the page. Impressions, click-throughs, and of course, conversions in the ROI carriage—all three are important. But which is most important to your campaign will greatly depend on your campaign’s goals. The conception of any campaign is based on a specific need, whether it’s a desire for awareness or action.

Traditional Branding

Branding, the popularity contest of all advertising, is measured by the amount of impressions served and the resulting click-through rate. Successful branding requires serious long-term investment in your name and products. As long as your product is worthy, the value of rewards is quite high in the end. But don’t just take our word for it. Look at Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Kleenex, Tide, or practically any other big-name brand. Mega brands run media campaigns across multiple sites and target various demographics in order to reach everyone. The reward? Everyone knows your name. This is why click-through rate is so important; it gauges the collective level of interest in your brand and products. That is, of course, so long as the creative has a clear branded message.

Actions measured on site, while still important, should not be the main metric focused on for optimization, but should instead be considered in a more “big picture” way: Where are the visitors who clicked these banners going? How engaged are visitors on the site? What lessons learned can we apply to future micro-sites and media campaigns? Branding is a long-term investment that needs continual care and nurturing. Building a solid brand demands patience, dedication, and a heavy monetary investment.

Devil’s Advocate: While it is possible to get massive, untargeted impressions at really inexpensive rates, this is not the best way to go to market where branding is concerned. You risk being associated with lower-tier sites that could damage your brand’s image.

Direct Marketing

On the other hand, direct marketing is a great way to incite action now. These types of campaigns are highly targeted, measurable according to the number of actions required, and the cost per action. Great efforts are made by both client and agency to determine the appropriate creative, message, and target audience, whereas the agency and publisher are responsible for optimizing to ensure the campaign reaches the appropriate eyeballs with minimal waste.

A small company’s primary concern is efficiency and reaching goals; popularity among the masses is much further down the list. Niche companies also have a much smaller target audience than the big brands, and their primary goals typically range from increased sales to lead generation. For them, calculating the cost per action is extremely important to show that the end result justified the spend. The type of action being measured determines the amount of time needed to compile an accurate report on ROI. For example, if the action is the sale of product, then that particular product’s sales cycle needs to be taken into consideration. An accurate final analysis or report would need to come after the sales cycle has ended.

Devil’s Advocate: Compelling but un-branded ads may bring the traffic, but they won’t necessarily bring the actions!

Direct Branding

What’s the happy medium? The answer may be found in direct branding. Direct branding combines traditional branding efforts with the urgency of direct marketing. It’s a solution that most clients seem to be looking for these days, even if they’re not aware of what it is. They want both popularity and action from their visitors. Direct branding aims to deliver branded advertisements to a strategically targeted market utilizing both niche sites and popular sites that are able to demographically and/or geographically target inventory, along with creative that encourages user engagement. Direct Brand Marketers also seem to be taking a higher interest in lead generation opportunities, which lend themselves quite well to branding efforts as these vendors tend to deliver massive impressions while charging a CPC vs. CPM.

So which advertising method is right for you: Branding, Direct Marketing or Direct Brand Marketing? Only you—and the goals of your campaign—can determine that!

Comments(1)

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1. Direct response marketing and brand image advertising are different. From a creative standpoint, there is no synergy when you try to find a “happy medium.” When both functions are allowed to do their jobs unhampered by the constraints of the other, you have a better outcome.

   My observation is that the “direct branding” compromise was conceived by brand advertisers who want to “own” direct without having to really understand it.

     Comment by BT — February 25, 2010 @ 11:31 am

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