I recently had the chance to write a research paper for my Internet Marketing class on the effectiveness of online advertising tools and how the effectiveness of an online advertising campaign is measured. The interesting part is why measuring effectiveness of online advertising isn’t even close to being great. I do not wish for this blog post to be as long as my previous posts, therefore I will simply touch upon the major points of this issue:
- There is no perfect way to find out if any advertisement’s click-throughs are fraudulent or not.
- Even though there are great tools out there such as Google Analytics that will allow one to measure return on investment, bounce rates and points, as well as how different advertising tools are doing in comparison to others, there is no real method to measuring effectiveness fully as there is no way to measure the brand impact, whether the one website visitor will come back to the website in the future to make a purchase, or what it was about the advertising campaign that got the visitor to click on one of the advertisements in the first place.
- If someone views the advertisements of an advertising campaign there is no real way of telling what kind of impact the advertisement had on the viewer and whether the visitor will visit the advertiser’s website in the future simply by remembering information that was displayed in the advertisement such as the company name or the web address.
- According to research conducted by Alaxander Dreze (Internet Advertising: Is Anybody Watching?), 50% of a website’s visitors automatically avoid advertisements, therefore if one of the purposes of an online advertising campaign is to create brand impact or awareness, the advertisers have already lost out on 50% of potential viewers. But then again, 50% is much lower than the avoidance rates found for television advertisements and the Yellow Pages advertisements.
I am not trying to discredit internet advertising at all; on the other hand of this argument there are some great ways of measuring the effectiveness of online advertising, but as a whole, it is not perfect. With the ability for anyone to advertise online today within five minutes of deciding to do so, one must first take into consideration the above mentioned.
Well, you can say the same for virtually all forms of advertising. Magazines, TV etc… at least with online marketing you get a click and possibly an immediate sale. With online technology and software you can purchase or use you can track the referer take into consideration the site it was on and/or the keyword and other things like that and check the relevancy and compare ratios etc..
I’m not sure if I see the point of the arguement - no marketing system is perfect, if I’m reading correctly. I belive your professor was speaking from an outside perspective - which is why is is probally teaching and not making money in online marketing. Basicially - it’s a shallow outlook, your success in any medium of marketing all depends on skill.
Benoit I have to agree with you. Many people believe that internet advertising is a lot better/effecient/etc. than broadcast or print advertising, but the reality of the matter is that internet advertising has just as many problems as all other types of advertising.
The purpose of the paper that I wrote was to educate a reader that has no experience with marketing or advertising on the internet about the tools that are available for advertising on the internet and how effectively you can measure the success of those tools. Hope this clears things up.