R.O.I. MEDIA

Cost effective advertising, the holy-grail of marketing, the Shangri-La of high-way signage and double page spreads. Is there a solution out there that one can actually measure how much of your target market you’re actually reaching?

Yes, if you know where to look.

Pay per click advertising has been around a while now and any business with an awareness of just how much an internet presence contributes to a successful advertising campaign is already on board. If not, get out from under that rock that is business cards and flyers and step into the realm of the greatest innovation since pre-sliced bread. Enter: Google AdWords!

Why AdWords and why does it differ from any other method of advertising? In two words: Measureable impression share.

Impressions are the number of times your ad displays itself to the world at large that you’re targeting. So it therefore makes sense that impression share would be the ‘share of voice’ you have in that market amongst your competitors.

Not only does this handy feature tell you how you fair against the rivals, but also lets you know where you’re falling short. Overall impressions can be broken down into a 3-way split in this way: Current impression share, impression share lost from budget and impression share lost from ad rank.

Impression share lost from budget is fairly self-explanatory, a daily limit will determine just how many clicks you’ll receive and in most cases you would be acquiring as many as possible, right? So long as they’re coming from worthwhile potential customers of course. You could be limited depending on your product/service as big competitors may have deeper pockets than you.

Impression share lost from ad rank is determined by how well your ads perform amongst the rest. A number of factors influence this figure and mastering the art of the perfect campaign takes time. The key areas to focus on would be the quality score that you’re granted on your ads, relevant click-through pages and, most importantly, bid price on your keywords. Bidding price will ultimately determine how high up your ad will display in the list and thus influence ad rank.

Here’s an example on how you can troubleshoot an advertising flaw using this tool:

Joe’s fax-to-email business has been on adwords for quite some time. Recently he’s spotted an inconsistency in the number of sales that he’s been making and it doesn’t look pretty. Joe’s been measuring his AdWords PPC conversions (actual sales generated online from his website), and there’s been a significant drop of late. The first place he looks: Impression share! He sets up a 3-way pie chart that determines how the ideal 100% impression share is split into the main categories. Immediately he can tell that impression share lost from adrank is now a bigger slice than before and the loss from budget remains the same. In knowing this he’ll now focus his AdWords efforts on assigning his Ads more specific landing pages on his site, pushing up the bids on his keywords that grant less-than-ideal ad position and maybe even cull a few keywords that have not converted and/or have a poor click through rate. He may also throw in a few more bucks per day to compensate for the up in bid price and not harm the impression share lost from budget.

For centuries advertisers in every industry have been plagued with approximation, ball park figures and AB testing when it comes to getting their name out there and seeing a return. The impression share tool offers surety that you’re hitting the mark, getting accurate figures and above all; determining what you’re doing wrong and how to fix it.