Dynamic banner ads – value investment
The one thing that businesses love the most about their investments is the return. I know how frustrating it is when you can’t effectively measure return on investment because of the complexities surrounding the key performance indicators involved. Measuring ROI and the value of an investment such as rich media advertising, for instance, is complicated because of the dimensions of the subject in question. Rich media ads go deeper and farther than static display ads when it comes to engagement, communicating a marketing message, and delivering a persuasive call to action. So much so that any single KPI will only give you an idea of how well a part of your rich media creative are doing.
So how do you value your rich media advertising investment?
1) First, what’s your CTA?
What’s the end goal of your creative?Digital Production Agency said that From a top-level viewpoint you can plan rich media ads for the direct response or for brand awareness, and depending on which, you then focus on metrics such as form submissions ,click-throughs or ad engagement, dwell rate(time spend) and same-medium actions. The number of actions taken or amount of time spent that you need to factor into your KPIs depends on what you want your audiences to do. The cost per action or per length of time spent is one of the crucial metrics to include in your rich media advertising KPIs.
2) Second, who’s Your Audience?
If I designed a single rich media creative with a single marketing approach for all the buyer personas I plan to sell to, I’d be able to obtain some metrics on which segments of my audience respond the best to my efforts. That’s a poor example of measuring the target audience percentage reached by my rich media advertising – I used it to touch on two important points: the diversity of your audience’s buyer personas and the variation of your possible marketing approaches. These are just two factors, but if you have three personas and two approaches, then you already need to allot a budget for 6 creatives.
You need well-defined target segments. Rich media advertising isn’t search optimization, where you can blatantly use keyword research to target any segment of your audience at equal cost per segment. Rich media ads cost at least 1.6 times their static counterparts, and the more complex the ad, the more costs are associated with developing it. You need to target specific buyer personas; the ones who you’ll know will respond well to your ads either through retargeting or concrete demographic information. You also need to use the best marketing approach; the one that resonates with the specific buyer persona you pick.
3) Third, How Well do You Reach Them?
This is where we circle back to our first point. “How well do you reach them” actually means “how many of them do you reach and how many of them do what you want?” Apparently, this involves calculating your rich media advertising reach and then using it in a valuation formula in conjunction with the specific KPI you choose depending on your CTA.
You can measure your reach by following the traffic metrics of the medium of your rich media creative or how many people “see” your ad. As for your other KPI, you need to focus on your goal, but typically it’s either engagement (actions performed) and length of time spent or form submissions and conversion (whichever action your CTA pushes for). Assign a goal for your CTA-based KPI. If you’re measuring time spent, for instance, and your ad runs 30 seconds, then you may want to ensure that your audience actually engages with your ad for the entire 30 seconds. Count the target audiences that “pass” this goal into a new KPI: let’s call it audiences engaged. If you divide your audiences engaged by your reach and multiply that by a hundred, you will obtain a gross percentage of rich media advertising reach:
Rich Media Advertising reach = (audiences engaged / reach) * 100
If you reached 500 visitors to a webpage and 100 of them engaged with your rich media creative (i.e. passed your goal), then you have a rich media advertising reach of 20%. Note that this is a basic navigational metric. It can only show you the direction of the performance of your rich media creatives. The higher the percentage, the better your ROI. You can tweak your rich media advertising campaigns to lower reach (low traffic volume) for more specific targets that will respond well to your creative (higher audiences engaged), or increase your reach and see if your audiences engaged will follow suit, improve, or worsen.
This is a basic example of a KPI formula that can help you value your investment. You need to develop your own based on your goals, needs, and metrics.
