There is no denying that the rise of digital marketing has changed the game and more and more resources are being sent by companies in online campaign budgets. According to Wordstream, the average small business using Google advertising spends between $9,000 and $10,000 per month. And that’s taking into account just one advertising platform, while companies, big and small, are also spending money on Facebook Ads, SEO services, paid content, email marketing etc. So why is digital marketing so popular?
Digital marketing’s ability to measure results
If there would be only one advantage to take into account when comparing digital to traditional marketing, it would have to be this one. When you do print media advertising, for instance, you might know how many people have bought the magazine where your ad is being shown, but there is no way to tell how many of them flipped the pages to get to get to where your ad is displayed. You don’t know how many of them actually saw the ad and there is no way of knowing if seeing it prompted a reaction from them. (Well, actually, if you had a unique coupon code on the print ad, you could measure how many times it’s been used and you would get an idea of the CPA – cost per action – of the ad). Even with tv ads, which were so popular for advertisers in the 90’s and before that, there is no reliable data about the number of people who actually get to see your ads. Ratings are usually just estimates, and they don’t come close to telling the whole story of how your ad is seen.
But with digital marketing, things are so much easier. You can now properly calculate what the return on investment for any ad is. For the first time, people can interact with ads. They can click on them and then they can add a product to their digital carts and pay for it. Every step they take can be traced. You know what your cost per click is and you can see how many of the people clicking actually make a purchase. Simple math will tell you how much money every ad dollar is bringing back. If it’s not worth it, you just stop the campaign or you change something.
Measure results through A/B testing
For more advanced users of the digital marketing tools, measuring results can tell you in great detail what you are doing right with your ads, and what needs to be changed. For this, we use A/B testing. “A” is the scenario where we create an ad for our products or services, while “B” is a slightly altered version of A. On B, we change only one detail of the ad: the position of the photo in the ad, the color of the product, one or several words from the ad text etc. We run both A and B simultaneously and we measure which gets the best click-through-rates. If B is doing considerably better than A, we can just give up on using A and focus on B. Or we can test again, with another small change. This way, you can focus only on the ads that are producing results.
How reliable is the data from advertising platforms?
If you know a couple of things about the internet, then you also know that online digital marketers are somewhat exposed. There are many bots out there, who imitate actual person’s online behaviour, with the sole purpose to make you waste money on clicks that are actually irrelevant. It’s unavoidable that the data you get is somewhat affected by these practices. Although advertising platforms work actively to stop it, click fraud won’t go away very soon and some sources claim it accounts for at least 25% of all clicks in the Pay-Per-Click industry.
But an experienced digital marketer, such as the ones from the Akby team, can easily verify data and spot anomalies in click behaviour, to ensure that your campaign is not wasting money and performing to the maximum of its’ capabilities.
