Digital advertising plays a fundamental role in a business’ marketing strategy, with platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Instagram amongst the most popular platforms for digital advertising.
In fact, ‘94% of marketers use Facebook advertising’, with around ‘3 million businesses’ using Facebook for marketing purposes.
There are various metrics within digital advertising that you can measure to gain a better understanding of how well your paid digital advertising efforts are performing.
Key digital advertising metrics to measure include, but are not limited to:
- Ad impressions
- Customer conversion rate
- Clicks, alongside click-through-rate
- Cost-per-acquisition
3 million businesses use Facebook for marketing purposes.
1. Ad Impressions
The first key metric to measure is the number of impressions, which is essentially how many people are seeing your ads.
Impressions are counted any time your digital ad is shown on the platform in question. To boost impressions, there are various things that you can try. That said, two of the most important aspects involve your budget as well as targeting.
An effective way to increase your impressions is to increase your budget, as this helps to maximise the number of times that your digital advertisement is shown to your desired target audience.
Next, there is targeting. If you are focusing on a niche audience with your advertising, then it could be that you are restricting your ad impressions. By broadening the scope of your advertising, then, you should see the number of impressions increase. It’s worth noting, though, that not all impressions are equal, and it may actually be more beneficial to receive less impressions, but to a highly targeted audience.
For instance, say you sell women’s health supplements, and your target audience is also predominantly women. In this circumstance, female customers are likely to represent far more valuable impressions than men.
2. Customer Conversion Rate
An essential metric to measure is your customer conversion rate, which refers to valuable consumer activity on your site.
Conversions can be anything from gaining email addresses through form completions, to selling your products online. That said, as an ecommerce business, sales of your products is the main conversion that you should be driving.
Tracking your customer conversion rate helps you to gain a wider perspective on the type of ads that connect with your consumer, and which ads aren’t as effective. As such, you can use this information to your advantage for creating future advertising campaigns that resonate with your customers.
There are a few ways that you can increase your customer conversion rate. Firstly, you can take advantage of remarketing. Remarketing allows you to remarket to people that have previously been engaged with your site but failed to convert.
It is thought that ‘users that visit a website after clicking on a retargeting campaign ad are more likely to convert by up to 70%’, as they are already more interested, and thus more likely to buy your product.
In addition to this, you can further target your audience by creating a smaller ad group. In doing this, you can ensure that your ads are as relevant as possible to maximise your potential for conversions.
Finally, you can engage in Conversion Rate Optimization tactics (CRO). This is making tweaks to your website in order to improve your conversion rate. An example of this is adding customer testimonials or social proof to your site.
3. Clicks, Alongside Click-Through-Rate
Clicks show how your audience is engaging with your ads, and click-through-rate (CTR) is the amount of ‘clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown’.
For example, if your ad receives 1,000 impressions and this results in 10 clicks, then your CTR is 10%. The click-through-rate can be affected by the platform that you’re advertising on. For instance, ‘the average click-through-rate on Google Ads paid search ads is 4-6%’ as there is high likely intent for the service you are advertising. Conversely, the average click-through-rate for Instagram is only ‘0.22%’.
Tracking the amount of clicks that your ad generates, paired with the click-through-rate helps you to gain a better understanding of how well your ad appears to be resonating with your target audience.
The more people that are clicking on the ad, the more interest people evidently have in your product or service.
One way to improve your click-through-rate can be to create a sense of urgency for your target audience that persuades and incentivizes them to click on your ad.
Additionally, you can add a specific and personal call-to-action to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your ads.
4. Cost-Per-Acquisition
Last, but certainly not least, an important metric of your digital advertising to measure is cost-per-acquisition.
Cost-per-acquisition (CPA), also known as the cost to acquire a paying customer, is the amount that you spent on your ads divided by the number of ‘new customers acquired’.
As such, if you spend £1000 on your digital advertising, and you receive 100 conversions, your cost-per-acquisition would therefore be £10.
Ways to improve your CPA are varied, from making your landing page easier to navigate, to adding more reviews to your website to gain the trust of your customers and become a bigger authority.
Making these changes will therefore help to improve your conversion rate, and in turn, will help to reduce your CPA.
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