As you might assume, I spend a good bit of my time developing, managing, and reviewing internet marketing and advertising campaigns for our clients. In most cases, these clients have a solid grasp on the world – and metrics – of these programs. You know the ones I’m talking about, the one’s with cool abbreviations like: CPC, CTR, Conv, Impr, and others. We talk about the performance of these ads or programs, based on the number of users who click our add, complete our predefined goals, the total number of visitors to the campaign site, or whether or not they flow through the funnel we set up for them.
Or maybe we’re talking about social media campaigns, and worrying about the number of friends, or followers of our associated Twitter profiles, Facebook Fan pages, etc. We get so caught up in these numbers, that we forget one simple thing…
Those numbers are created by people just like us. In some cases, we’re one of those numbers being tabulated.
How do you respond to a banner ad? When was the last time you were wowed by an email campaign? What was the last website you visited that was simply intuitive, and gave you exactly what you wanted, while delivering a glowing user experience? That’s what I thought. What about what the user wants?
The facts say it all: less than 0.05% of banner ad are ever clicked, and email click rates measure in the low single digits. The moral? People don’t want to be spoken to, they want to be talked with.
Our goal, as marketers and advertisers alike, should be to engage our audience, excite them to act, and provide them with memorable experiences, rather than to gimmick them into our way of thinking, or hand out short-term incentives to complete a form. To be clear, my point isn’t that any of these methods – okay, aside from banners maybe – are bad, but that we need to approach them differently. We need to utilize them differently. And we need to measure their effectiveness differently.
Next time you take a look at these reports, pay attention to things like referrals, average time on site, requests for information, and social mentions. Take a look at organic site traffic, from people who are sharing you with their friends. Why these numbers? Because they represent engagement, traction, and stickiness. Just like us, our visitors/users/customers/guests want to be engaged, and rewarded for action. We should be looking for ways to do just that.
- Written by Jeremy Heilpern
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