Tuesday, 23 December 2008
Online Marketing And The Quantity Addiction
Impressions, clicks, hits, downloads, visits, page views. Notice a common theme here? It’s all about quantity, more, more, more.
The huge majority of companies and marketing professionals seems to be obsessed with these units of quantity, as if they held some innate value in and of themselves.
I’m not saying we should ignore these measurements, but they have a tendency to hijack our online marketing analytics. A boost in traffic a certain week might distract you from the lower conversion rate over the same week. Even if you’re looking at more useful stats like conversions, you have to dig deeper to look at what type of conversions you are getting.
Websites like Alexa and Compete are built on the holy trinity of impressions, visits and and an overall ‘ranking’ based on these measurements. Websites will sell advertising space based on how many million impressions they get a month, and advertisers will buy it. You may not have gotten a lot of business from your last ad on that major portal website, but you got a hell of a lot of impressions and it was great brand exposure.
You see, you may say that you don’t just care about the ‘quantitative’ and that it’s not all that matters to you, but I don’t think I can believe you. You’re still buying wasteful and poorly targeted banner ads, you’re still happy with a click through rate on your banners of less than 1%. You still pay for most of your online marketing by the impression. Even if you’re running search ads, you’re probably getting a lot of clicks and impressions you don’t really want, ones that cost you money but don’t really deliver much value. You’re also still satisfied with nose-bleed high bounce rates from your website. Still satisfied with measly conversion rates too. What’s the point of driving all that traffic, spending all that money, and generating all that attention if it goes to waste afterwards?
It’s certainly something to think about, especially in the current economic crisis. Can you really afford to go on thinking in terms of quantity?
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