Mapping the Complete Path to Success
You cannot measure a campaign's success on clicks and actions if the creative doesn't give people a reason to click or convert.
You cannot measure a campaign's success on clicks and actions if the creative doesn't give people a reason to click or convert.
OK, I know I’m supposed to be an online media guy and this is supposed to be an online media column. But, I just have to speak up here. Far too often, advertisers who base the success of their online campaigns on hard conversion and action metrics forget that media will only do one thing: put your ads in front of the right people. It won’t make people, desire, click, or convert. It’s the job of the creative to encourage desired behavior — and it is some form of desired behavior (clicks, actions, or conversions) that success is typically based on.
The funny thing is when our firm just does the media buy for our clients, and doesn’t do the creative (banners and landing pages), we can usually tell whether something is going to work before the first impression has even been served. We can always tell when creative was done without the final metric for success in mind and wasn’t mapped all the way though to the desired action or behavior.
You cannot measure a campaign’s success on clicks and actions if the creative doesn’t give people a reason to click or convert. What you need to do is plan, design, and model the whole transaction associated with the initial conversion event and also plan immediate automatic lead escalation triggers.
Let’s say you are a high-tech company or online service trying to generate leads by getting people to sign up for a free trial or download a white paper. You must have a series of components that funnel prospects towards your marketing objectives. The components that must be modeled to complete an online conversion for a free trial or white paper should include the following:
Remember, online you have only seconds to communicate your offer. Make sure you don’t have banners that take 20 seconds to get to the offer. By then most people will have scrolled or moved on, so make your offer and give it a permanent place on your banner. If it is a skyscraper put it at the top. Don’t make people wait to see your offer!
A thought out conversion path will not only get you a cheaper action or lead — it widens your universe of performing opportunities because buys that would have been labeled “non-performing” will work!