Digital Advertising: Think beyond the clicks
Let’s be honest, all you want is to save time and money on your marketing and digital advertising to focus on your customers and watch your business grow more and more successful every day. (Un)Fortunately, no one has found the magical recipe to achieve that. The good news is we do have some tasty ingredients to help you get there like a chef.
Are you willing to learn how to cook? Then grab your apron and keep reading!
Food for thought
You can’t optimize what you don’t measure.
At Enigma we get shivers down our spines when we witness businesses neglect the importance of reporting and measuring the impact of how they invested their money. Success lies in the willingness to understand what worked best, how, and why. The journey to converting a prospect is sometimes longer than we think and the tools we use might not always be the most appropriate to the situation. Determining which touchpoint was the most efficient is not an easy task. And with the number of channels available to showcase your products or services, comparing their impact on the conversion journey is even more difficult.
In marketing lingo, we talk about attribution when we address this problematic. The two most common ways of explaining how conversions happen are called post view and post click attribution. Of course, the topic is complex and much wider than those two terms, but we wouldn’t want to give you indigestion so if you want to know everything about models of attribution, meet me here. In the meantime, we’ll focus on attribution window, post click and post view to ease your hunger without stuffing your brain.
Attribution what?
Attribution models, attribution window, attribution here and there… wait, what kind of sorcery is this? Ok, let’s rewind a bit. Before going anywhere, you need to understand the concept of attribution window – or conversion window if you like it better. Attribution models will then make complete sense to you and you’ll chew them up easy peasy, you’ll see.
An attribution window is a period of time between a first touchpoint and a conversion. We need to define a window in order to be able to assess and attribute the credit of the conversion to a specific touchpoint. Without an attribution window, all you have left is speculation. Don’t forget, we want to lean on real data to optimize every single step we undertake. And whether we talk about post view or post click attribution, this concept is central.
Clicks aren’t everything
Post click & post view
Can you remember when was the last time you clicked on an ad? That’s what I thought (unless you actually do remember, but you’ll see my point anyway). People have a tendency to avoid display ads for various reasons and we can’t blame them when we see the amount of information we are all bombarded with every day. The most common behavior is to Google the brand and then visit their website to have a “safe” look at their products and/or services. Of course, it doesn’t mean ads are useless and don’t influence a viewer’s decision and behavior. People tend to think they make decisions based on their own rational thinking and aren’t influenced by marketing at all. Well, they underestimate the impact of repetition and emotional responses towards what they’re presented with every day because the likelihood of purchase intent does increase when exposed to a specific brand, product, or service.
But let’s go back to post click. We talk about post click when the conversion happens within the predefined attribution window, meaning the user clicked on an ad during the chosen timeframe. On Facebook for instance, the preset attribution window is of 7 days which means the conversion will be attributed within this period of time. If a web user clicks on a banner and converts after 8 days, the conversion will not count as it goes beyond the attribution window set to 7 days.
Post view is more than a side dish
Knowing that conversions cannot only be measured by a last-click metric, how are we supposed to calculate the impact of an ad if people run away from them? Well, I’m glad you asked. This is precisely why post view enters the stage. We need post view to add insights to the big picture. Without post view, we don’t take into consideration those people who see the ad and go straight to the website to make a purchase instead of clicking on it.
You must have understood it by now, the perfect digital advertiser thinks beyond the clicks and gathers all the critical information to cover the entire scope of their campaigns. The modern marketer knows the intent of a display ad is to make an impression on a target audience in order to generate a purchase. When we remove the focus from clicks only, we have space to concentrate on what matters most: landing the right message in front of the right audience.
Post view & post click are as thick as thieves. The idea here is not to determine if post click is better than post view or vice versa but to understand the importance of using them together. It isn’t a matter of choosing but making them dance together instead. They are complementary and both bring useful insights to help you make better-informed decisions in the future.
Where to get your conversion data from?
The more data you have, the better. Google Analytics is a common tool to gather the information you need but we recommend you use other advertising platforms to make sure you don’t miss out on anything and get accurate reporting.
To fully understand your campaigns and their impact, we advise you to work with partners and platforms that take post view into account. Before launching your campaign, you will need to set your goals first, then find the right methodology and attribution model to stay in tune with your objectives. Finding the right attribution model allowing post view conversion metrics is key here as not all platforms take it into account by default.
A world without cookies
As you know, the future is always full of surprises. Indeed, post click and post view are based on cookies and as you might have heard, cookies will no longer delight advertisers. Since Google announced their disappearance within the next year or so, the world of advertising is bubbling to find new ways of measuring attribution.
No one has come with a solution yet, but don’t worry, if we’re not the ones providing the answer to that question, we will certainly be amongst the first to learn about it. Stay tuned, we’re always up-to-date with technology when it comes to marketing 😉
If you’d like to know more about how we address digital campaigns to deliver the right message to the right audience and at the right time, click here. You’ll discover how we amplify your voice through our digital expertise.