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B2B Advertising – Measuring Success

You’re promoting your B2B website through Google AdWords, contextual ads, display ads and print ads. The phone seems to be ringing more often and you’ve been getting more emails for RFP (request for proposal). Which ads are working? What is worth continuing?

Similar to statistics for a website, advertising has its own set of analytics. The online advertising measurement basics are:

  • Impressions: The number of times the ad is shown on the web. This may include everywhere the ad is shown if it is on different sites or sections or it may be broken down by ad spots (which are specific places it was shown).
  • Clicks: The number of times the ad was clicked on. Online ads usually include a call-to-action or a phrase enticing people to click on the ad. Once they click on the ad, they are taken to your website.
  • CTR (Click-Through-Rate): The number of clicks divided by the number of impressions – usually displayed as a percentage.

How many impressions your ad gets depends on the website you are advertising on – huge sites can get millions of impressions per day. Smaller sites only get tens of thousands impressions per month. The cost of advertising is usually calculated based on CPM (cost per thousand impressions). Obviously the larger sites have larger audiences so it will be more expensive to advertise on them.

Clicks will also depend on the size of the website you are advertising on and how many impressions your ads get. CTR will tell you how effective your ad is at getting people to click. However, this also varies quite a bit depending on the industry, size of the ad, where it is placed on the site and whether it is rich media (interactive).

The best way to measure which particular ad is working is to have a unique landing page for each ad (basics of creating unique landing pages) to measure how many people are actually getting to your site. Using your website analytics, you should be able to track on each landing page how many visitors actually make a purchase or email for more information (have these calls-to-action right on the landing page).

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B2B Website Promotion – Types of Ads

Once you’ve decided to promote your website through online advertising, there is a wide array of options available: tile ads, banner ads, skyscraper ads, page-peel ads, rich media ads, video ads, etc. How do you know what all these are and which to use?

The Interactive Advertising Bureau is a wonderful resource on all the basics of online advertising, including examples and guidelines for different types of ads. They also conduct research into what type of online advertising works and in what situation.

If you are just starting out in advertising online, then I suggest a banner or skyscraper ad on websites which are important to your audience. Good places to look are association or publications for your particular industry – remember to look for what your customers read, not necessarily what you read. In order to properly track the effectiveness of the ads, I suggest creating a unique landing page on your website for each ad you have. This will allow you to track from your analytics program how many people click on the ad and make it to your website.

For those who are more adventurous or willing to spend more money, rich media ads (ads with audio, video or interaction) can be extremely effective in capturing your audience’s attention. There is a wide variety of rich media ads – the IAB has some rich media guidelines to help. You’ll need a Flash or Rich Media Developer to create the ad – make sure they follow the specs for the website on which the ad will be posted (rich media ads with their added interaction can become quite large in file size and time for visitors to download. Try to keep your message to the point).

I’ll cover more about measuring advertising and specific ad examples in future posts.

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B2B Analytics Basics

We’ve discussed some of this before, but just as a refresher:

There are three types of basic information for a website:

  • Page views are the number of web pages viewed on your website.
  • Visits are the number times people visit the website. They can view multiple pages (page views) each visit.
  • Unique visitors are the number of people who visit the website (usually as near as possible to ascertain).

What other information should you look for in your analytics package to find out if your site is usable and designed with your customer in mind?

  • pages/visit: how many pages (on average) do people look at when they come to your website. Obviously, the higher the better. Some of this will depend on if your traffic comes mostly from search engines or from direct traffic. Visitors from search engines are less likely to browse around once they’ve found their answer (or if they didn’t find their answer).
  • average time on site: how long (on average) do people spend on your site. Again, the longer the better. If this is a very small number (under a minute), your visitors aren’t bothering to read much of what is on the page.
  • bounce rate: is the percentage of visits where the visitor only viewed a single page and then left. This often means the page where the visitor entered was not relevant to what they were coming to the site for (although it could also mean that they found their answer and left). This stat is extremely important for eCommerce sites which don’t want visitors to leave until they’ve purchased something.
  • % of new visits: how many of your visits are from new visitors. This will tell you how loyal your audience is. If your site is engaging, your visitors will come back from time-to-time for more information and updates.

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