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Measuring the Effectiveness of Display Ads

Here are the basics for measuring the effectiveness of your display ads:

  • Impressions: How many times is the ad served to a person (or as near as can be estimated). Impressions to search engine crawlers and bots should be filtered out (most ad servers do this automatically).
  • Clicks: How many times someone clicked on the ad (and was taken to your website – remember to target the landing page). This should also filter out search engine crawlers and bots.
  • Click-through rate (CTR): The number of clicks divided by the number of impressions multiplied by 100 for a percentage. This number will typically be pretty small. CTR of 3% is very good for rich media ads, but will quickly decrease the longer the ad is left on a website. Many CTR will be under 1%. This is an indicator of how effective the ads is or how many times the ad was seen each time before it was clicked on.

Also important are:

  • Unique Visitors (UV): As near as the ad server can tell to the number of actual people who have seen your ad. This is usually measured by IP address (think of this is your Internet address) – but several people can share the same IP address (like all the people at an apartment building). This sometimes is measured with a cookie or login to a website to get better accuracy.
  • Share of Voice (SOV): How many other ads are you sharing space with on the website? I’ve seen this measured in terms of share of impressions on the whole website or section or as the share of ads on a page (impressions is more common). More importantly, this is a measure of how many other ads are competing with your ad for readers to look at it. The better the share of voice, the more likely people are to notice and click on your ad.

Most important to measuring the effectiveness of any ad is how it is fulfilling your goals for advertising. Are you advertising to improve your brand awareness? Then the number of impressions your ad gets is important. Are you trying to sell products? Then clicks and click-through-rate are important as well as how many of those clicks are resulting in a sale on your site. Remember, statistics are just a tool to measure effectiveness. First you need to set goals for your advertising and understand how to use available statistics and tools to measure how effective your ads are at reaching those goals (more on that planned in a future post).

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JavaFX – In more places than Flash

In a recent podcast put out by the good guys over at JavaPosse, Brian Goetz made an interesting comment near the end

JavaFX code compiles down to ordinary Java classes, so a simple JavaFX program can run anywhere you have a JVM. now hardware support for acceleration is different for different devices, but the intention is to have a program that will run on a phone, on a desktop, on an Applet, in a Blueray device, anywhere where Java can run. Flash dominates in the RIA space and there is excellent support in Windows, and pretty good support on the mac, and random support on other platforms. Java has the advantage where there is good JVM support on many more platforms, including mobile platforms. ~ Brian Goetz

If having your application work mobile and on the desktop and in the browser matters to you, I feel this will be a big consideration for you when choosing your RIA platform

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Quote of the Weekend

I think web 3.0 is going to be about the real time web. XMPP is going to play a major role in this movement… ~ Ezra Zygmuntowicz

I found this quote in an article up on InfoQ discussing EngineYards ‘backbone’ work in Cloud Computing. They are developing a new platform called Vertebra that will use Erlang and Ruby to ‘automate the cloud as well as distribute real time application development’. It sounds like Vertebra will be both a deployment tool and a back end messaging platform, using XMPP. XMPP is the messaging protocol used by the Jabber community.

This is exciting stuff, especially when Ezra mentioned that they will be open sourcing their technology. Imagine if hosting providers could standardize on one distribution platform whereby work could be passed along beyond institutional borders. One hitch may be billing, but I don’t think so. The math behind atomic charge-backs has already been calculated by the phone industry, a model they have always operated under.

Real Time Web. It makes more sense to me than a semantic web as far as a web 3.0 stake in the ground.