By Moran Treiser, Sales Manager
Maintaining the focus- a way of thinking in online advertising
When we think of online advertising there are a lot of parameters to consider, but the main question is – which ones are the most important to us as advertisers?In the economic climate we have today, every dollar counts and everything is measurable, which is a very good thing to the ones who know what to focus on, and a very bad thing to the ones who think everything is important in an equal manner. In our day to day work, we often meet advertisers who know what they want to achieve, but for some reason measure the wrong parameters. One of the most important things to remember in online advertising is that if a certain parameter doesn’t have any correlation to the achievement of a certain goal, it shouldn’t be considered as relevant to the marketing activity.
Traffic vs. Conversion
A client that has a clear CPA goal- whether in the Casual Gaming, Mobile content, or the Lead generation industry, should always consider his eCPA as the most important parameter to measure, and to judge the other parameters by.
The second important parameter, from an online marketing point of view is the eCPM of the campaign which starts the whole conversion chain. These two parameters are in correlation to one another and therefore should be considered when running an online campaign. However, A client with a clear CPA goal, shouldn't consider the CTR important for this goal. The CTR is very important in the matter of how much traffic is getting into the website and how much interest can the campaign raise, but to the specific goal of the campaign – the eCPA – it is irrelevant. For example lets take a mobile content advertiser who has a CPA goal of $8 . He is paying an average of $0.50 CPM during his online campaign. In one case, the CTR is %0.4 and the eCPA is $7.50, and on the other case the CTR is %2 , and the eCPA is $12. Which case is better for this advertiser ? the case where he drives a lot of traffic to the website but the conversions percentage within the site is low, or the case where he drives less traffic but maintains a high conversions percentage in the site ? The point is that when we measure the final result, the data we get for the parameters along the way are not important if we can't connect them to the final goal.
Impressions vs. Conversion
A second parameter is the amount of impressions while running an online campaign on a dCPM model. Although the campaign is being optimized according to the CPA goal, some advertisers would consider a great deal of importance to the amount of impressions yielded during the campaign. Again, a parameter which is irrelevant to the goal of the campaign.Lets use our mobile content advertiser for an another example. The CPA goal is again $8, and the amount of impressions he is supposed to yield during his campaign is 12 million impressions with an eCPM of $0.40. Again lets imagine two cases. On one case he pays $0.40 eCPM and gets 12 million impressions, however his eCPA is $10. On the second case he pays an eCPM of $0.60 (possible because of the use of dCPM payment model), and receives only 10 million impressions but achieves an eCPA of $7. Again the question is asked, which case is better ? does the amount of impressions and the CPM price really matters while trying to achieve a certain eCPA ? While trying to achieve our advertiser's CPA goals we sometime encounter different situations where we might need to increase our CPM payments, increase the CPA payouts in order to compete with other advertisers over the media. "Out of the box" thinking is required in our optimization and campaign management strategies; in order to get the most important mission complete – achieve our client's CPA goals.
At the end of the day, Everything is dynamic, and everything is flexible but one thing remains constant – the bottom line results.
