How to monitor your progress

Just like TV, radio, outdoor and print, you can judge the impact of your online adverts using brand building metrics. This is done by surveying consumers after they’ve been exposed to an advert. Common brand metrics include increases in favourability toward your brand, likelihood to purchase your products, and the opinion of your brand compared to competitors. Research companies like Millward Brown and GfK offer this service.

There is a vast amount of information you can gather on how consumers are interacting with your online advertising. Whether you’re using search, display or video advertising you can see how many times your ad was shown to a customer, this is commonly referred to as an ‘ad impression’. You can then see how many of these ad impressions resulted in someone clicking on your ad to go through to a website know as the ‘click through rate (CTR)’.

It’s even possible to know how many people opened your email newsletters, visited your website, interacted with an advert, watched a video, and much more. Whatever online advertising tools you use, there will be information available to you from the media provider.

You can use online data to help you plan and budget for your future online advertising campaigns. An important metric to calculate is your conversion rate, which is as a simple example, the number of ad impressions divided by the number of sales or sign-ups to your newsletter. For instance, if your objective is to encourage people to sign-up to your newsletter, and it required 10,000 click throughs using search advertising to generate 1,000 sign-ups, your conversion rate in this instance is 10%. As you know the cost of the advertising, you can then work out the cost of each conversion, informing future budgets.

More information on this important topic can be found in our beginners guide to measurement. Our members’ directory will help you find relevant and suitable companies to help monitor your campaign’s progress online, whilst our measurement training course can help you to gain a greater understanding measuring and managing digital ROI.