Measuring display advertising and affiliate marketing
How to measure display and affiliate advertising for your business including key metrics such as ad impressions, cost-per-click and click-through-rate.
Online display and affiliate advertising involve placing adverts and links to your site on other websites.
Display advertising
Online display advertising includes options such as:
- Banner advertising - a visual ad at the top of the web page. It can be static or dynamic.
- Expandable banners - which reveal panels when the mouse cursor rolls over the banner.
- Video advertising - which can be within another ad format and streamed to create a richer user experience. In-video advertising is also becoming more common.
- Floating advertisements - which move on the web page, without altering the page itself.
- Tear-backs - which 'peel back' when the cursor is rolled over one corner of a web page.
- Takeovers - where clicking on or rolling over an advertisement causes the entire webpage to change.
See advantages and disadvantages of display advertising.
Affiliate advertising
Affiliate advertising is measured by performance, where you pay a cost per action - eg per click, download or new customer that you gain.
It involves placing adverts on third party sites, including:
- search engines
- price comparison websites
- more targeted content sites
It can be set up and managed in-house or outsourced to a third party provider, eg affiliate networks.
The majority of affiliate marketing uses cookie-based tracking. See using cookies and the law.
The focus of this is payment attribution - which site you should award the commission for an action.
Display advertising key metrics
There are two categories of metrics for display advertising - planning and performance.
Planning metrics include:
- Number of ad impressions - how many times the ad is shown.
- Cost per Mille - the cost of showing the ad per 1000 times.
- Cost per Click - total campaign cost divided by number of click throughs.
- Cost per Action - total campaign cost divided by number of successful actions.
- Click through rate (CTR) - number of clicks divided by number of impressions.
Performance metrics include:
- Brand awareness - any increase in search activity resulting from campaign
- Engagement metrics - amount of interaction with rich media advertisements
- Direct response metrics - CTR
You can also profile the visitors to your website using visitor information metrics and cookies. You can match these profiles against your campaign objectives and target customers. You can use data to target advertising to customer actions - known as behavioural targeting. This helps you target the customers who are most likely to convert.