This is the 3rd blog in the series on “Managing Ad Performance in the Cookieless World” . You can find the other blogs in this series here:

Ad Performance in the Cookieless World: Soar or Crash
Your Advertising Analytics Could be Misleading You
Ad Performance in the Cookieless World: The Incremental Micro Factors

The purpose of advertising is to make consumers aware of your brand or connect them directly to your business at the right moment and reduce friction. Somewhere along the way, the purpose is covered in “50 shades of grey,” which includes doing search advertising on the brand term even when someone is anyway coming to your website.

Are you getting most of your search ad conversions because your ads show up when someone just types your brand name in the browser address bar and hits search and then clicks on your ad while your organic result is right below that ad?  Do you have a rough baseline number for organic traffic and conversions, if you spent zero dollars on Google?

Without proper reporting and insight, many advertisers think their Google Ads campaign is performing pretty well without realizing that most of the performance could be due to the brand term searches. While others keep advertising on brand terms believing that this will keep competitors from stealing their traffic.

Read Also | Digital marketing compliance in the context of GDPR/CCPA

While Google has made it really easy for you to advertise on Google, it’s not in Google’s interest to show you the real return on your ad dollars. That’s why you need a neutral tool that could report the performance with high fidelity data and without any bias.

The same goes for Facebook. If you get certain organic traffic and engagement from your non-promoted posts, are you able to have a neutral measurement to understand what Facebook ads are truly producing in terms of your sales?

LayerFive platform consistently shows that our customers’ brand-term based ad spend doesn’t necessarily generate incremental value.

This is where an A/B testing culture comes in. You should do A/B testing and figure out how advertising on brand terms impacts your overall traffic and sales. Even if you spend a smaller percentage of your budget on brand term advertising, knowing whether that spend is truly bringing in incremental customers or not could save you big dollars over time.

Read Also | Cost of complying with GDPR, CCPA and CPRA

Your overall ad budget performance may go down if you stop advertising on brand terms. But if you can measure correctly, then that lowered performance is your true ad performance to bring incremental customers. 

Google obviously could have taken a “do no evil” approach and made sure that the first thing a user sees is the first organic result before seeing any ads. But they know it’s a cash cow so they won’t do that. And advertisers can’t measure effectively so they keep throwing money and believing they are getting good performance. 

So, if you are spending a significant part of your ad dollars on advertising on Google, and FB, then ensure that your performance measurement has a neutral view across paid, earned and owned media because your consumers are not just finding you on paid media. You can impact your ad budget performance in a macro way and get your ad dollars to go farther.

The post Bringing in New Visitors: Not all paid clicks are created equal appeared first on LayerFive.