The Case for View-Based Conversions
You're not using view-based conversions to evaluate your online media campaigns? Why? Five steps to determine how well they help a campaign.
You're not using view-based conversions to evaluate your online media campaigns? Why? Five steps to determine how well they help a campaign.
View-based conversions are conversions tracked based on whether a Web surfer has seen (but not necessarily clicked on) a particular ad banner before going to the Web site promoted on that banner. If you’re not using them to evaluate your online media campaigns, why not?
If you don’t use them, you’re not alone. Our ad-serving providers tell me a majority of online advertisers still don’t consider view-based conversions. As a result, advertisers dramatically underreport campaign performance.
I’ve heard the rationales against considering view-based conversions. Some say it doesn’t make sense to attribute to an ad unit a conversion that occurs 72 hours after ad exposure, for instance. Some believe it’s unlikely the exposure directly influenced the customer to convert.
Others think view-based conversions are invalid because of “outside noise,” the idea that advertising in TV, radio, and/or print influenced the conversion in combination with online. Well… perhaps.
View-based conversions are valid. Check out DoubleClick’s study on them, or Atlas DMT’s or Advertising.com’s. Here’s how to determine the percentage of view-based conversions that should be attributed to your campaign (similar to how these studies did):
In this case, divide 10 (the difference in view-based conversions between your control group and your test group) by 5 (click-based conversions from your test group), and you get 2. In the future, you’ll multiply your click-based conversions by two to determine the view-based conversions you can take credit for.
Some people aren’t comfortable attributing a conversion that occurs 30 days out to an ad exposure; there are too many other factors that could influence that conversion over that time span. If you aren’t comfortable with this long period, take a more conservative approach. Even giving yourself credit for what takes place in the first 24 hours should dramatically improve your campaign performance metrics.
Depending on what you’re trying to learn and how granularly you’re trying to mine the data, you’ll need varying sample sizes. Work with your ad-serving partner or an ad network to help ensure you have a statistically sound test.
Get a test going. You’ll find your campaigns are performing much better than you’ve been able to demonstrate in the past. You may also find placements you’ve eliminated through your previous optimization efforts are actually worth reincorporating into your plans.
If you do run a test, I’d love to hear about your results and the conversion factors you come up with. Me, I can’t wait until measuring campaigns in this way is the rule rather than the exception.
Pete is off this week. Today’s column ran earlier on ClickZ.