i-advertising




One of the things I love to do is answer questions about digital marketing. Thanks to Google Analytics I can see what key phrases and terms folks like you use to find this blog and create articles around the topics people are looking for. Last night someone found this site looking for information on “internet advertising goals”, which is as good a topic as any to write about today.

When businesses bring me in as a consultant to help them navigate the digital marketing landscape, the first place I start is by helping them establish some measurable and realistic goals for internet advertising. Some may come to me after a failed marketing campaign. Others contact me to help them with their first venture into online advertising.

Why have goals?

Like anything in life, marketing online requires that we first create a clear vision of what we want our outcome to be. If we have no vision of what the finish line looks like, how can we possibly know if we’ve reached it and met our goals?

We begin by looking at our business. Many advertisers fail to do this and start with goals like “We want to get more visitors” or “We just need traffic”. That’s false. If you’re an ecommerce site that sells a product and I drive 100,000 people a month to your site and none of them buy, I’ve met your stated goal of “more traffic”, but it didn’t do your business any good in terms of sales - which was your true goal.

Any marketing goal should be:

• Measurable
• Specific
• Realistic

Here are some realistic goals that can be measured, meaning that at the end of the campaign/quarter/year we’ll know definitively whether we did or did not reach them:

• “We want to generate 500 leads per month”
• “We want to generate leads at a Cost Per Lead not to exceed $25 per lead”
• “We want to drive 10,000 downloads of our company’s white paper in the next 90 days”
• “We want to drive sales at a Cost Per Sale not to exceed $15″
• “We want to generate 1 million member signups this year”
• “We want to generate $5 million in ecommerce sales through our web site”
• “We want to generate 1,000 qualified telephone leads per month for our national sales force”

Each of these is an acceptable place to start. Note that they’re all fairly quantifiable. We can track phone calls generated from a web campaign. But we still have a considerable number of unknowns. For example, how much traffic (visitors) will it take to convert into 1,000 qualified phone leads per month?

The answer is that we can make some very general assumptions on paper, but we really will have no idea until we start driving traffic to the site - qualified traffic. Targeted traffic. That’s why it’s critical to test-test-test.

Specific

A specific goal leaves few questions unanswered other than “How will we do it?”.

Realistic

Are your goals realistic? Especially in commodity-product companies where margins are slim, unrealistic expectations imposed by investors or upper level management can push the need for goals that are simply unrealistic. For example, if you know that your company needs to drive 100 visitors to your site before one of them buys your product and you want to generate a flow of 1,000 orders per month, is it realistic that you as the marketing person will be able to drive 100,000 visitors per month on a marketing budget of $25,000/month?

Let’s take a closer look…

$25,000 / 100,000 = $0.25 Cost Per Visitor

Because it is possible to drive visitors for 25 cents per visitor, the traffic goal is realistic, provided that the $25K is all media budget and does not include ad creative and other necessities. However, what kind of traffic will 25 cents buy? Targeted? Untargeted? US-only or “From anywhere”? And more importantly, will they buy?

We won’t know until we start testing. It may be that in order to maintain a 1% visitor to order conversion, we need more targeted visitors than just “traffic”. If we do, our goals - all of them - must be adjusted to reflect the reality of both our site and the cost of reaching that target audience and getting them to buy.

Minimizing Cost Per Order to Maximize ROI

The single biggest mistake that businesses make online is that they do not invest enough money into the development of their web site. This is a critical statement. It’s not the only mistake businesses make online but it is far and away one of the biggest. This is the face of your business. It is the very first impression that potential customers have of your organization. And you want to develop it as cheaply as possible?

It’s not just first impressions that suffer either. The difference between a site that converts visitors into buyers at 0.5% and one that converts at 1.5% is huge. A poorly designed site will cost your organization exponentially more in the long run than one that is designed properly at the outset.

Consider this:

At a 0.5% conversion it takes 200 visitors before one places an order.
At 25 cents/visitor, your organization’s Cost Per Order would be $50.
To generate 1,000 orders/month you’d pay $50,000.

At a 1.5% conversion it takes approximately 67 visitors to generate an order.
At 25 cents/visitor, your organization’s Cost Per Order would be $16.75.
To generate 1,000 orders/month you’d pay $16,750 - a Cost Savings of $33,250 PER MONTH or $399,000 per year!

If you are being pressured to save money on a website design or are being discouraged by management who feels funding a redesign is not necessary, do the math. Paying good money for a first-rate site or paying for the redesign of a poorly designed site is one of the best investments that your company can make. It will save you literally thousands of dollars if not hundreds of thousands.

Branding/Awareness Goals

Perhaps your company doesn’t sell product through your site. Maybe you simply want to increase brand awareness within your customer segment. Your goals are a bit more difficult to measure than someone with a direct marketing goal, but they still need to be specific, measurable and realistic.

Specific: “We want to increase aided and unaided brand awareness in our market segment by two percentage points by end of year”

Measurable: Where is your aided/unaided awareness now? How is it being measured? How will you structure pre and post-campaign studies to show brand lift?

Realistic: How big is your market segment? How many people must you reach in order to show a lift of two percentage points? Is this a realistic goal given what your company has available and allocated to marketing efforts?

If not, perhaps a reality check is in order.

Hope this helps!

A super-connecter, Adam Boettiger is a recognized expert in the field of digital marketing. With twelve years of online marketing experience spanning agency-side and client-side positions, Boettiger has helped small businesses and large brands realize their full potential online.