Why online advertising success is often wrongly controlled

Users have often already made their purchase decision when they resort to a search engine. This only serves to navigate to the desired website.FROM OLAF BRANDT*During a purchase decision process, most users have contact with various advertising media, e.g. newsletters, rating portals, (price) search engines and supplier websites. Website operators must therefore find out what contribution individual advertising media make to the purchase decision. Only in this way can they find out which form of advertising is most efficient and when, and allocate more budget to this advertising medium. Until now, the de facto standard for analyzing online campaigns has been last ad analysis. Here, the last advertising medium with which the user had contact before a purchase is always awarded 100 percent of the success.Search engine advertising is overratedThe negative consequences: Search engine advertising is often overrated. This is because users who have already made their purchase decision often only use the search engine to navigate to the desired website. Since the actual contribution to success of the individual advertising media remains in the dark in the last ad analysis, online marketing is only optimized with regard to the last phase. As a consequence, important leverage effects through campaigns that stimulate or convince the user remain unconsidered and are therefore underbudgeted.Consideration of the entire customer journeyTo correctly determine the contribution to success of individual advertising media, website operators should always consider the entire customer journey, i.e. record and analyze all of a user's contacts with advertising media. This makes it clear what influence which advertising medium has in which impact phase and how often it is involved in the purchase decision process. Based on these findings, the online marketing budget can then be optimally allocated to the advertising media used.Recording of all contact pointsThe prerequisite for this comprehensive analysis is the recording of all contact points in the form of raw data. With raw data storage, every ad media contact is recorded and stored without first condensing the data: How often does the user come into contact with which advertising medium? How long does he stay on the advertiser's website? If the data is available as raw data, it can be combined in any way to answer such questions. Website operators thus not only learn that, for example, advertising medium A was clicked on a total of 5,000 times, but also the sequence in which individual users came into contact with which advertising media.Analyze contact combinations and advertising impactThe first step in the analysis is to determine whether users actually need more than one ad media contact before an action (e.g., placing an order). If this is the case, website operators should analyze the order in which users make contact with the advertising materials and how frequently certain orders occur. If, for example, most users have four advertising media contacts before an action, an analysis of the contact combinations will reveal which sequences are particularly successful.Stimulation, persuasion and actionAccording to the AIDA model, users should be accompanied through all four phases until the purchase decision is made. Whether campaigns are structured accordingly and work can be examined by means of advertising impact analysis. This is based on a simplified AIDA model, which is reduced to the three phases of stimulation, persuasion and action. The advertising impact analysis provides information about the function that a campaign or an advertising medium fulfills in the purchase decision process. Website operators can thus check whether a campaign or an advertising medium has achieved the respective goal - stimulation, persuasion or action. Based on the results, future campaigns can be optimized to achieve better results.ConclusionWhen evaluating the success of their online marketing measures, website operators should make sure to record all campaigns in one system. Instead of examining only the last advertising medium before the sale, they need to analyze all advertising media in each phase and budget according to the results. If website operators know which are the most effective advertising media in the different phases, how they work and how they influence each other, they can distribute the budget optimally among the different advertising media.*Olaf Brandt is Director Product Management at etracker GmbH, www.etracker.com.