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Improvement
Given the picture we've outlined, it should be no surprise to discover taking steps to improve campaign performance is rare. Thirteen percent of companies state they do nothing to improve performance of their online advertising at all. These are probably the companies that aren't measuring the performance in the first place.
The good news for sites selling ad space is that less than half (43 percent) of advertisers will drop an under-performing site. It's also good news for agencies that ads that perform badly have a good chance of being left in place, with only 51 percent of advertisers removing them.
Once a visitor lands on your site, you've paid for them, so it's important to retain as many visitors as possible. However, only 55 percent of companies reported they tuned their landing pages. Absolutely no one reported that they made any changes deeper within the site itself as a result of what they learned.
Conclusions
You can often learn what you should do by looking at what others are doing wrong. The picture that emerges from this study reveals some flaws in the way most people undertake online advertising.
The most fundamental gap is the disconnect between getting people into the site and what you deliver once they get there. We all understand that different ads work for different audiences. Most of us now understand that you need different landing pages to retain these different audiences when they arrive. However, once they are inside the site most companies assume a "one-size-fits-all" approach. They may be counting how many people are engaging in the target action, but less than half make any attempt to understand why. Analyzing internal site behavior provides the why.
It's as if there is an attitude that the core of the site is set in stone, never to be changed. Websites should not be regarded as monolithic entities or as static ones. Your site is a set of pages, each one of which has its own pattern of interactions. These interactions vary according to the person who is viewing them and the goal they are seeking to fulfil. The ad and landing page that pulled them into the site tell you what that goal was. Your ad offered them something; it made a promise. The landing page convinced them your site could fulfil that promise. If they didn't make it to the target action, at some point they ceased to believe your site could actually deliver. Analysis of what they did and where they left from tells you when they ceased to believe in your site.
Given that people don't ask why things are happening, it shouldn't surprise us that they're not doing anything about it. Without an understanding of why something is happening, you can't work out what to do to change it. The most important discovery is that so few people ask whether the cost of advertising exceeds the return it produces. Perhaps this is a consequence of not adjusting to the differences between online and offline marketing.
It's impossible to make a direct, simple, correlation between expenditure and profit offline, but it's surprisingly easy online. There's no excuse for not seeking this information. You should know if you're making a profit or loss. You may have good reasons for running at a loss, but you should be able to articulate them.
The patterns we can see here are a call to action for the online marketing industry-- both advertisers and their agencies. We need to improve accountability; we need to accept that it is possible to know what our ad spend is earning; we need to take steps to understand why; and we need to respond to this information.
Brandt Dainow is CEO of Think Metrics, creator of the InSite Web reporting system. Read full bio.
