5 Simple Tips to Improve Your Advertising

by Rod Jacka

If you are advertising online you have probably already realised that it can be hard work to get results from your campaigns. To help you out, here are 5 simple tips that you can use to improve your advertising:

1. Tag all of your paid advertising campaigns
2. Measure the campaign response rates
3. Measure conversion
4. Measure the "bounce rate"
5. Test your campaigns

Tag Your Campaigns

The most important tip of all is to measure your campaign activity once the visitor has arrived at your website. Sure Google Adwords, Yahoo or your agency will tell you how many clicks you have received to your site, but this isn't an indication of real success.

 

In order to measure the success of the campaigns, you need to track them. To do this you need to tell your web analysis tool how it can identify the visitors from these campaigns. This process varies between the tools but it is commonly known as "tagging" your campaign.

Tagging a campaign is relatively straight forward and most vendors offer a tool to assist you with tagging your campaigns. Google Analytics makes this easy with its URL builder tool. This tool will prompt you for the correct information needed to tag your campaign links one at a time. If you have more than a few links to tag, then you might want to consider downloading our free Google Analytics campaign tagging spreadsheet.

If you don't tag your campaigns you can't measure them, so make sure that you do.

Measure the Campaign Response Rates
Once you have tagged your campaigns you can then start to measure how many visitors have arrived at your website. This is the first indication of success and it is relatively easy to obtain through your campaign provider's reporting tools. The downside is that this only provides the most basic of information. To get a deeper understanding on what happens after a visitor arrives at your site from a campaign you will need to use a web analytics tool such as ClickTracks, Google Analytics or Urchin.

You can analyse your campaigns in great detail using these tools and determine whether they are generating results for your business. Panalysis regularly holds seminars on how to measure advertising campaign response. For details please refer to our training page or contact our sales team.

In short you should be first looking at two key factors; conversion and bounce. Once you have examined these you should also look deeper for other success indicators for the campaign which could include average page views per visitor, time on site or whether the visitor viewed key content on the site such as your products or services pages, contact pages or similar.

The higher the Avg. Time on Site value and/or Pages/Visit value per campaign then the more likely it is that the campaign is working in a positive way for your business.

Measure Conversion
Most professional web analytics offer some form of goal or e-commerce based tracking. It is crucial that you examine the effectiveness of the campaign in generating outcomes. Most effective campaigns will try to drive the visitor towards some predefined action and the response rate can be measured. Tools such as Google Analytics, Urchin or ClickTracks all have features to do this.

In Google Analytics this is done by either setting up the e-commerce tracking facility or by configuring one or more goals on the site. These topics will be covered in more detail in future articles on this site, so please ensure that you join our newsletter.

Once your goals have been configured you can then measure the results of the campaign against these outcomes.

In general the higher the conversion rate of the campaign the better it is performing. Where a campaign is not generating a healthy conversion rate then you should consider revising or dropping that campaign.

For assistance with goal setting and configuring your web analytics software please contact our sales team.

Measure the "bounce rate"
Regardless of how you are getting visitors to your website, in most cases if the visitor leaves immediately then the campaign hasn't brought a qualified customer. The ratio of the number of visitors responding to a campaign who leave a website in a short period of time (often 1 page view or within 5 seconds from arrival) and the total visitors from that campaign is known as the "bounce rate". This is a critical indicator of the success of the campaign. If a campaign has a higher than normal bounce rate then the campaign can be quickly assessed as to be less effective than other campaigns or the website as a whole.

So what is a "normal" bounce rate? This will depend on your site and circumstances, however in general you should compare the campaign bounce rate against the overall site bounce rate. In our experience most websites will have an overall bounce rate of between 40% and 60%, though this varies significantly between sites. In a recent study that we conducted on over 30 websites the bounce rate averaged around 50%. If your site average has a 50% bounce rate and your campaigns are bringing a 75% bounce rate then you can be sure that the campaign is not performing as well as your website generally and hence should be carefully assessed and revised.

Google Analytics offers a great report for quickly assessing the bounce rate of any campaign against the site average. Just log in, select the campaigns report and then set the views option to   and then set the drop down to measure bounce rates for both options.

 

Test your campaigns
A little bit of testing goes a long way. The following image shows a real life test on our website testing two versions of our white paper signup page. You can quickly see that the gr_adcopy_3 version is converting at a whopping 22% whereas the gr_adcopy_2 is converting at a still respectable 14%.

This technique is known as an A/B split test and it can be used to quickly test campaigns from the creative or text that is shown in search engines to the landing pages the visitor sees when they hit the site. By showing two variations of a web page or a specific element on that page you can quickly determine which message has the best "grab" in the market. For more advanced users multivariate testing can be used to test multiple elements simultaneously.

The results speak for themselves, with a lift of 8 percentage points on just a simple test it is obvious as to why you need to do this.

OK, I agree this one isn't as simple as the others, but the value makes it very worthwhile.

If you would like to discuss AB testing in more detail, please contact our sales team.

Conclusion
As the old adage goes "you can't manage what you don't measure" so be sure to measure your advertising campaigns.

And remember that it isn't just online advertising that can be measured, you can measure any campaign where you control the URL where the visitor is being sent to. More on this in a later article.