The Effectiveness of Online Advertising

Advertising is not an exact science so measuring success of an advertising campaign can be done in multiple ways. It’s impossible to determine if your sales are up due to certain advertisements but it can certainly give an idea of whether or not the ads are in the right direction. To asses the effectiveness of an advertising campaign you can keep track of sales, new customers, requests for information and website traffic or click through rates all to guage the impact the advertisments are having.

An option to track effectiveness is to put a referral box in the site’s shopping cart. This will allow you to ask the customer how they found your site before they finish their order. This method is useful because it is a good way to find out which websites are providing the best impression to click ratios and also the best click to buy ratio.

Another way to evaluate the impact of online advertising is to use cookie-based technology that can help establish whether the consumers have been exposed to the advertising as well as how many exposures. Cookie technology was a huge step forward for measuring advertising effectiveness because it allowed us to see if the advertising effected a transaction as well as you could connect transaction data back to advertisements that referred the transaction.

A different but effective approach to measuring advertising effectiveness is by running ads with different themes. You could place one that focuses on price and then one that focuses on company reputation. Feature different web addresses that will take the users to a common portal like a standard company website, and by doing this you can track where the hits come from and measure with ad is producing more hits and therefore which one is more effective.