Web Site Measurement Hacks

Measure Banner Advertising

Knowing the impressions, response, success, and cost for each of your banner advertising campaigns can significantly improve the return on investment associated with this popular form of advertising.

Capable of reaching several hundred million people worldwide, banner ads have emerged as an essential tool for web marketers. As such, it is critical that you understand how best to measure banner advertising effectiveness and how to use this measurement to improve your business. To evaluate the effectiveness of any banner ad, there are three fundamental measurements: impressions, response, and conversion.

Impressions

Banner impressions are typically reported by an ad server solution, based on the number of image requests it receives. Impressions are usually broken out by the name of each creative element, but not necessarily by placement or timeframe. This can become a challenge if you run the same creative across multiple web sites and/or multiple periods. In this case, be sure to assign unique codes for each dimension you want to analyze—creative, web site placement, and timeframe (see Table 3-3). It is important to identify and carefully set these dimensions when you’re making the placement. Backing into these dimensions can be difficult, time consuming, or impossible, depending on which web measurement system you use.

Table 3-3. Examples of banner elements you may want to track

Creative	Message
Medium	Web site placement
Sub-site placement	“Fly” dates (start and ...