October 2005

How to Salvage a Lackluster Online Campaign
By Alka Joshi, Alka Joshi Marketing

There's never been a cheaper, more immediate, flexible or more measurable way to market products and services than online advertising. However, companies are often reluctant to use online advertising or to devote large marketing dollars to it because it's unfamiliar territory. Initial forays into the online medium—pop-ups, flashing graphics, misleading headlines—irritated viewers, many of whom are marketing managers today.

But web gurus like John Boyd from Yahoo! and Christian Rohrer from eBay have since read us the riot act: Do not create online ads that blink, talk, pop-up, mislead or generally annoy the audience. So what if you follow this good advice to create an online campaign and still don't get the desired results? It's time to check the Quick Fix List. Doing so will help strengthen your campaign and help you run a better campaign next time.

Quick Fix List: 

• Buy an adequate number of impressions
• Monitor results daily and review fluctuations
• Monitor click-throughs
• Double-check the audience you're attracting
• Change ad content frequently
• Review the sites you're using
• Direct visitors to the correct landing page
• Monitor how long call-to-action items take
• Allow adequate time to monitor results
• Check your agency's work

Buy an adequate number of impressions.

It's tempting to spread an advertising budget across a number of sites and skimp on the number of impressions per placement. But remember that, on an online media buy, the same ad space is shared with other advertisers. Visitor #1 may see your ad while Visitor #2 may see another advertiser's ad, depending on the rotation. In a national publication, start with at least a few hundred thousand impressions per month.

Monitor results daily and review fluctuations.

After an ad has been viewed three days in a row, the response rate will drop dramatically. One easy solution is to take the ad offline for a few days and run it again. You'll be surprised at how well this works!

Monitor click-throughs.

Take a look at your click-throughs (CTs). Sites only provide reports on the number of clicks the ads received at their end. Verify those figures and see if the visitors have been registering for your free offer, downloading your report or browsing other parts of your site.

Double-check the audience you're attracting.

Double check to see if visitors to the site and your desired audience are the same group. Excitedly, we recorded an extraordinary number of hits off a keyword for a Google Adwords campaign, only to discover that the same word was popular in another entirely unrelated industry. We were attracting the wrong audience!

Change ad content frequently.

The online medium is more dynamic than any other advertising venue. The target audience is going to see ads frequently, which means they will get tired of them faster. When developing ads, be sure to produce several versions of the same message and rotate the ads to keep them fresh. Since editing content for online ads is so easy and inexpensive, consider doing this every few days.

Review the sites you're using.

If results aren't good, look at whether the ads should have been placed on different sites. Consider advertising on web logs or "blogs." In the February 2005 ClickZ article "Blog Advertising: Right for You?" Hollis Thomases suggests using more than just banner ads on mainstream pubs. With thousands of blogs, many with reasonable advertising rates, blog ads may be a good way to generate awareness among niche influencers and savvy decision makers.

Direct visitors to the correct landing page.

Make sure that when visitors click on an ad, they land on the correct call-to-action page on your web site. Check this the first time the ad is posted and every time the ad is changed. Directing visitors to the incorrect page makes them feel that the organization doesn't have its act together. Once you've lost visitors, they're not coming back.

Monitor how long call-to-action items take.

Online visitors have no patience. If downloads take more than a minute, the visitor will move on. If the site takes too long to load because of multiple flash demos, or if the registration page takes longer than a minute to complete, the visitor won't come back. It's better to tell the audience at the beginning how much time it's going to take to complete the call-to-action rather than taking a chance on a negative first impression.

Allow adequate time to monitor results.

Because results from online advertising are so immediate, it's tempting to abandon efforts quickly if you're not getting the expected results. However, mindshare takes time to build, no matter what medium is employed. Give the campaign at least six months to prove itself. A consistent program builds customer awareness and results should become evident over time.

Check your agency's work.

Take heed: even an agency claiming expertise in online campaigns may not be proficient in continual monitoring, fine tuning and reporting. Since you know your business better than anybody, your role should be to guide the agency in determining whether visitors to the site are the intended target audience, in redirecting the campaign towards different sites and in judging how long the campaign should run. This will help you salvage a lackluster online campaign and plan even more effective campaigns in the future.

© 2005 Alka Joshi Marketing. All rights reserved.