How to Measure the Effectiveness of Online Advertising

Measuring online advertising campaigns has been a challenge for most marketers since the advent of online marketing. How can businesses tell if their marketing initiatives are profitable or just a waste of money? We’ll assist you in demonstrating the value of your online advertisements to potential customers.

Why and how to evaluate any online advertising campaign’s effectiveness?

The fact that any advertisement is an investment is the main reason you need to evaluate the success of your web marketing initiatives. Any investor also wants to know when they can anticipate a return as well as how their money is being spent. There are times when campaigns unexpectedly succeed or fail. That is the risk for marketers who like to experiment and push the limits. The opportunity for real growth is found there. However, you won’t be able to show that the costs associated with those experiments were worthwhile unless you collect, store, process, and visualise the data on your marketing and advertising efforts. Your company’s marketing analytics system will determine how to manage all that data. Online advertising campaigns’ efficacy can be evaluated on at least three different levels.

Advertising service level
Google Analytics advertising level
Marketing analytics level

Online Advertising Metrics, and How they Can be used:

While the ideas behind different campaigns may be fresh, there are some things that all successful ones have in common. They begin on some type of advertising platform (search engine, social media, websites, or other services) and lead to the desired action on your website or landing page via a CTA. Everything is quantifiable.

The level at which you measure your online advertising will be determined by your expertise in data collection, storage, and processing.

Evaluation of Advertising Service Levels

To begin, examine data at the advertising service level. Everything starts with a fundamental understanding. Depending on the advertising platform you’re using, you may find that using a well-known branded analytics service like Facebook Analytics or Twitter Analytics is more convenient. Typically, you can access some basic analytics data from each advertising service’s provided page. However, you should move on if you find yourself trying to compile information from various advertising channel pages into a single efficiency or ROI report.

Reports and metrics for evaluating online advertising campaigns

It’s possible to find the following metrics and reports on the analytics pages for your various channels of advertising:

Impact, Engagement, and Reach
CTR, CPA, CPM, and clicks
frequency of ads
Amount spent

When it’s time to evaluate your advertising at the level of the advertising service, problems tend to arise the most. What did you make on those days, though? Facebook provides a detailed report on the daily distribution of campaign costs. You must import conversion data or install additional tracking code wherever that data is stored to find out that information.

Evaluation of Google Analytics

This is the next phase, in which we collect as much information as possible and evaluate the results of our online advertising campaigns. When you’ve connected Google Analytics and Google Ads, you can almost forget about the hassle of measuring online ads because you’ve collected all data about your conversion goals and imported your costs from social media manually (or semi-manually with the help of Google Spreadsheets and a services API).

However, there is one major caveat. It’s a never-ending battle to keep up with the data, which is constantly being aggregated and can be sliced into segments, cohorts, and channels. If you go over your sampling limit, your data will be hidden from view like buried treasure.

Google Analytics report on the effectiveness of advertising

We’ve spent a long time researching Google Analytics’ limitations and quirks. Here are some steps to take to get Google Analytics up and running on your site:

An eCommerce guide to saving time
How to import cost data easily
How to Integrate CRM Data into Google Analytics

All CRM and cost data are required to estimate the effectiveness of your online advertising not only for advertising services but also for other services. The Cost Analysis report in Google Analytics is excellent, but if you simultaneously launched numerous campaigns on various services with similar parameters, it will be too general. If you need to monitor multiple key performance indicators (KPIs) on a single dashboard but standard reports don’t cut it, try creating a custom report.

Can we get an accurate picture of all of our channels using the standard attribution models in Google Analytics? The answer is yes, but the accuracy is dubious. Commonly, each attribution model will adhere to its own logic, which is nothing more than a mathematical assumption that is difficult to modify in light of new data. Cost-effectiveness analysis can serve as a rough draft of your attribution model’s reliability.

Marketing analytics

For those seeking perfection, marketing analytics is the best approach. It allows you to see the overall situation with marketing and the business itself, not just the efficiency of online advertising. Here are the two approaches to evaluating online advertising within the context of marketing analytics:

Make a meaningful and transparent dataset from all of your advertising accounts. This will help you compile a body of information that is standardised, well-structured, and straightforward to process and analyze.

You’ll be able to add CRM data as well as other offline data, and you’ll be able to get reports on the effectiveness of your advertising while visualizing them in a familiar interface like Tableau or Google Data Studio.

Online advertising reports for determining the effectiveness of online advertising

Here is a thorough list of reports for evaluating your online advertising based on information obtained after applying marketing analytics:

Cost and revenue reports for any advertising services with an API or other integration that can transfer data.
Custom reports that can be created in Google Analytics
Report on Cohort Analysis
Reports on the customer conversion path, including demographics and cross-device activity.
All of these reports help determine the true worth of your advertising campaigns and overall marketing efforts.

Wrap up!

One of the most important routine tasks of an online marketing agency is measuring the analytics of online advertisements. Manual and automated approaches exist for this goal. As the sophistication of your advertising campaigns increases, so too must the sophistication of the tool you use to monitor them.