Secrets to Successful Online Advertising

NOTE: This post isn’t written to you, dear publisher. It’s written to your advertisers. Please pass it along with my regards. It will help them be more successful with their online ads and get better return on investment (ROI) with limited budgets. In the end, it will help you, too: A happy advertiser is a repeat advertiser.

“I’m canceling my campaign because I’m not getting any clicks.” Over my years in online media, I’ve lost count of how many conversations I’ve had like this. An advertiser didn’t get enough clicks, leads, downloads, sales or other tangible response, and thus pulled the campaign and left, disappointed with the media property. But I also recount many instances when, before they pulled the campaign, the advertisers (or agencies) were willing to talk first. I shared with them the one secret to successful online advertising, and those that listened saw immediate, dramatic improvements in campaign performance. Are you ready for it? Here you go:

Match your creative and success criteria to your campaign objective.

“Uh, that’s not really a secret,” I hear you saying. You’d think this would be Marketing 101, but I cannot tell you how often I have seen the objective, creative and how the advertiser measures the success of a campaign completely misaligned. And when they are, often the campaign is nowhere near as successful as it could be, and the advertiser is disappointed with the results. When looking at a campaign, ask yourself these four questions:

1. What is the goal of my campaign?

2. Do my creative and landing page align with that goal?

3. Do my creative and landing page make sense to my audience and not just to me?

4. How will I measure the success of the campaign, and does it align with the goal?

What are you trying to achieve? Is it branding? Visits to your Web site? Registrations? A sales inquiry? An immediate online purchase? Whatever your goal is, make sure that your creative, landing page and how you will measure the success of the campaign all align with the goal and make sense from the perspective of your audience (which is often different than yours). By the way, don’t try to achieve multiple goals with one campaign. It will be like a sofa bed—it doesn’t do either the “sofa” or the “bed” well.

Is your goal branding? Online effectively achieves key branding goals: awareness, message association, favorability, purchase intent, etc. I’ve found that most advertisers don’t have a problem creating branding ads. Their creatives are beautiful and engaging, their brand is prominent, and they reinforce messages that they want the viewer to associate with their brands. But the disconnect comes when the advertiser measures the campaign by clicks or some other response metric when the creative is never designed to elicit that kind of response. Brand is measured by the impact that viewing (i.e., an impression) the ad has on the attitude, perception and intent of the viewer, not by a click.

Want visits to your Web site? Great! Make sure to design your creative to elicit that kind of response. Give the viewer a reason to click, and if you can add a sense of urgency or limited reward, that’s even better. If your ad’s message is, “Acme Co.: The best widget for slicing whatchamacallits. Click here for more,” you may have impacted the viewers’ brand perceptions, but you are unlikely to get them to click. Why should they? They have the information you gave them, and down the road, if they need that particular product, they are more likely to call you. But they’re not going to click right now unless you give them a reason. Don’t say your goal is branding but then measure the success of the campaign by how many clicks you get.

Is your goal lead generation? Now add the landing page as a critical part of your campaign. Does the ad creative tie in to the landing page? Is the incentive promoted in the creative clearly and prominently shown on the landing page? Is it clear on the landing page what the viewer must do next, and is the incentive reinforced? Are there distractions (other navigation, promotions, etc.) on the landing page that would derail the viewer from completing the task? Any of these can reduce the effectiveness of a lead-generation campaign and reduce the number of leads you generate.

Maybe your goal is direct online sales. Is it a product that someone would buy on impulse? Have you gone through the entire shopping cart and checkout process? Is it clean and simple, or convoluted and cryptic? Are you tracking cart abandonment so you can see where the problem spots are? Are you placing a cookie in the visitors’ browsers so if they come back in a couple days and buy that product, you can credit the ad campaign that generated the leads? All of this can affect sales and thus your evaluation of the ROI of your online ad campaign.