With numerous data on hand along the customer journey, it’s imperative for digital advertisers to learn what metrics will aid them to find out ad performance and effectiveness. Advertisers must answer difficult questions about their customers’ journey to conversion to know what motivates them to perform certain actions and how to optimize their campaigns for scalability and business growth.
1. Are you considering website visits?
The number of site visitors, the number of pages viewed and how long they spend on your site provides important insights into how your consumers engage your brand throughout the conversion funnel. So, do you factor in the weight of visits on conversions?
Task: examine the entire customer path from the first website visit to the last conversion.
2. Are you reaching new customers / leads / prospects with your campaign?
Increasing your customer base is critical for cultivating additional conversions that help to grow your business.
Task: assess the percentage of new audiences reached.
3. Are you reaching the right audience?
In this digital age, it’s fairly simple to bombard a lot of users with cheap advertising, cookie bombing or invasive spam methods – all of which are an utter waste of your marketing budget. Ad performance is maximized with a targeted audience.
Task: assess how many of the new audiences reached above visited your website. You’ll then be able to determine whether or not you’ve targeted the right users and how well you’ve done so.
4. Are your leads qualified?
Did any of the new audiences that visited your website really convert?
Task: the conversion rate on your site should be able to tell you how well you’ve qualified your potential customers.
5. Do your leads require re-marketing?
Most times, website users don’t convert upon their initial visit; however, this is also an opportunity to persuade them to come back and complete the conversion cycle with re-marketing. Do you know of your visitors’ behaviors and when and how you should re-target them with custom ads?
Task: find out how many prospects converted upon first visit versus those who converted after multiple visits.
6. What is the average conversion duration?
If it takes most users 14 days to convert, then you don’t need to go beyond that.
Task: from the first event on site, figure out how many days or weeks it took leading up to the ultimate conversion.
7. How many ad impressions were needed?
Why serve 30 ads when you only require 3? In order to measure ad frequency, examine the number of ads served before and after the initial website session. This will help you optimize ad performance for efficiency.
Task: count the impressions that were delivered before the conversion.
Evaluating your findings
A tool that I’ve personally used for AdWords ad performance is WordStream. Their Grader Plus product provides actionable insights and recommendations. The best part is that it’s absolutely free. I highly recommend you give it a try.
Any advertiser’s objective is to maximize return on investment (ROI). Using the above 7 questions as a guide, you’ll be better equipped to gain valuable information on your consumers’ journey to conversion and maximize campaign and ad performance.