Tips to Measure the Effectiveness of Online Advertising

The internet has become one of our greatest allies when it comes to completing day to day tasks. In the spirit of innovation, many business owners turn to being “online” as a way to oversee their businesses. Through their laptops from the comforts of wherever they are, it is easier for them to manage and control workloads and to get the work done virtually anywhere with just their fingertips.

Online Advertising 

As more and more people are increasing their online presence and becoming very internet savvy at that, it is now much easier to get an audience, not just locally, but worldwide. Just look at your own Instagram account, how many of them are not from around you? And yet, they see your posts the same as the others near you, probably even earlier if they have a better internet connection. You don’t need to do face to face marketing to sell your products. 

You can very easily create an online advertisement banner, post it on your website or any of the social media sites that your company maintains and wait for people to click on them to engage. This may sound very easy, but the question is: is it effective? Is this the right exposure you want for your business? Are you engaging with the right market? Below are some tips to measure the effectiveness of online advertisements:

HITTING THE TARGET (MARKET)

Whether you use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Youtube, or Snapchat, it is important to know your audience. If you are selling clothes for teenagers, ages 13-19 years old, Facebook and Instagram might be the best social media platforms for you. These kids don’t just post stuff, they “live” there. If you see an increase in the number of clicks/likes per posting, the number of subscribers and followers, as well as the comments and interaction with your customers, it means your audience is interested! You can say that your online advertisements are partially effective, because now you can see which products are interesting to your clients and which are not. Now that you know this, it becomes easier to focus on which content to capitalize on. It is very important to post content regularly about your product as much as possible, just be careful not to saturate your feed.

Some companies, both big and startups, have started to use an affiliate marketing strategy for their social media accounts. Ever heard of the term “influencer”? They hire a third party entity, it can be a single person or even an entire family, that best fits their products to market it for them. They act as brand ambassadors for a product and advertise it to their subscribers and followers. Some affiliate marketing strategies can be seen on YouTube. “You-tubers”, or people who post videos and content on YouTube use their influence to try and convince their followers to buy a sponsored product. 

They either make a video review on how good the product is or its benefits. For some unconventional ones, they are hired to give bad reviews about a sponsor's rival company. Nasty, right? The more subscribers an influencer has, the more likely the product will be seen in the online community. 

ANALYTICS

Like what we have established earlier, most things can be done online! Yes, even analyzing the effectiveness of your online advertising efforts! Setting up Google Analytics for your website can help you check the effectiveness of your online advertisements, it can be either paid or a free version. Obviously, the paid version offers more tools and insights, so it might be a worthy investment. With the use of Google Analytics, you can verify which keywords are mostly used by your audience when they are within your company’s website. You can also check the amount of time they spend on your website and the pages they frequently visit. Effectiveness is better seen if you have an increase in website clicks and longer viewing time.

It also helps that you get a report on and is able to track website traffic - meaning you can check which keywords are mostly used when researching services or products within Google that are connected to your business.  This is where a Search Engine Optimization and SEO specialist comes in. A good SEO specialist can help you increase your website rankings in search engines, e.g. Google, and if your website happens to be at the top of the results page, then your ads are mostly the useful and effective ones.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BOTTOMLINE

You’ve done your part - you have put in all the hard work in marketing your business online, you’ve partnered with the most trusted and most popular affiliate marketing content creator there is, but the question remains: does this translate to actual sales? This is probably the most important tool in checking the effectiveness of your online advertisements. After all your investments on your website, social media accounts and optimization specialist, it is now time to check if the return of investments is fruitful.

Try going through all your digital accounts and for each post, do your calculations. Record and make a table of all your posts from day 1 to day 30. Check if the product in the post with the most engagement is also the fastest moving product in your inventory. For your affiliate marketing strategy, check if there is an increase in sales with the partnered product within 30 days upon posting of a review. If you find that these products are mostly sold out then there goes your answer: your online advertisements are effective! Regularly check so you can maintain the effectiveness of your online ads, that way as your business grows, you can come up with new tactics and strategies to generate more leads, more audience and a bigger, more solid revenue.

KEY TAKEAWAY

The success of your advertisements is only a part of your business, it’s not everything. You might have a hit online advertisement campaign but if your products and services are poor, then people are going to realize that soon enough and your business will not prosper. Make sure you invest in your product, just as much as you invest in advertising it. Also, don’t lose hope if an ad campaign did not reach your expectations. 

Collect as much data as you can, check your competitor, do more research so you’re better in the next campaign. Strengthen your performance, talk to your customers, listen to their needs and by then you can formulate a good online advertisement that will capture their trust. As good old Henry Ford once said, “stopping advertising to save money is like stopping your watch to save time.”