What does an impression really mean? Technically speaking, one impression means that the ad was served up once through a browser. That’s all fine, but what if the ad was below the fold, or the user never looked at the ad? A similar challenge also exists for print advertising and here many marketers use something called OTS (opportunity to see), to estimate the number of real impressions. In its simplest form what OTS means is that a reader needs to be exposed a certain number of times to an ad, before it’s counted as one impression. For B-2-B print advertising this means that you have to run the ad 3 – 5 times to reach the reader. For on-line advertising you can estimate the impressions in more detail and with greater accuracy, but only if you know the number of unique visitors and the visitor return frequency for the duration of your campaign. In addition, all impressions are not equal. A web site have many different types of visitors, many of which aren’t in your target market, so unless you can determine exactly when your ad in running (through for example context sensitivity) or the persona your ad is served up for, you need to be more conservative with your calculation of the total number of impressions.  From a cost perspective this means that to reach the intended number, the campaign will cost more, but you’re always better off knowing the true cost, than some artificial number.

A click is one step further in the funnel, and therefore easier to put a value on than an impression. The only problem here is that the CPC for an on-line ad tend to be way more expensive than for email marketing or for a PPC campaign. So why do marketers run on-line ads, although the ROI comparison doesn’t support it? The answer here is that on-line advertising, email marketing, or PPC marketing can’t and shouldn’t directly be compared, because they work in different stages of the funnel. Marketers need to know for their particular audience what promotional tactics work best in what part of the funnel?

Even when being fully aware of all these details it can be difficult to sometimes justify or to explain the return for an on-line ad campaign. Therefore, the campaign always needs to be looked at holistically, to understand the interaction between advertising and other promotional tactics, in particular PR is, and what other benefits it provides. It is also a good practice to run pre and post impact studies, and to do message and concept testing to minimize the risk of wasting any money.

From a global campaign perspective, you also need to measure each country you’re targeting on its own and not compare countries to each other, because the cost of reaching a particular population varies greatly, as does the general quality of for example a click through.

Finally, a few words about awareness, because it’s very common that a marketing plan calls out for increased awareness through the use of advertising. To start with awareness on its own is never a good measure, because it is seldom measurable in a way that you can contribute a change in awareness directly to a specific tactic. In addition it doesn’t tell you anything about perception or preference, or what action a customer might take.

And finally you should be able to slice and dice this data based on the business segmentation (your web taxonomy). In addition you should also create a dash-board where you track the trending of all the different conversion percentages rather than the absolute numbers. If you then are also able to correlate this data to your web satisfaction data, measuring things such as overall satisfaction, would recommend, able to find, and a positive search / browsing experience, combined with how much money and effort you’re putting in, you’re much closer to understanding your real performance and business contribution of your web site.