Advertisers are screaming bloody murder. First, it was click fraud, now it’s ads appearing on hate speech videos on YouTube and Breitbart. More and more I am hearing from clients who are fed up with online ads and it shows no signs of letting up.
Programmatic buying has become the norm for a lot of online ad buys but it has problems. Problems include ads serving up on sites that brands would like to avoid. The lack of a “human touch” might mean better cost savings, but the ads don’t always wind up where they will do the best good.
Last month we manually selected and placed ads on sites for a pharma client. While the cost(s) were higher the metrics improved dramatically including a lower bounce rate, time on site and average page views. The client has told us that she is willing to pay more to avoid “controversial sites” and improve metrics, but she also needed someone to show her the why and how.
When analyzing online ad metrics we don’t use click through rates as much as we look at bounce rates and average page views per click. If your ads result in a great CTR but high bounce rate you’re wasting a lot of money.
Google has their work cut out for them to please advertisers. Our client was livid that one of their ads served on a political right wing extreme site and threatened to pull all their money from online advertising. Brands need to do two things to fight back:
1ne: Ask your agency to guarantee that your ads will NOT appear on politically sensitive sites or on YouTube hate videos. If they can’t find a new agency.
2wo: Check your analytics CTR’s against bounce rates, time on site and average page views.
In short you have to pay attention to your online ad spend via analytics. Your agency should be providing you these numbers as part of your ad buy.
You say: you have to pay attention to your online ad spend via analytics.
I agree, I need to see statistics. Tell me where to read about this statistic, in order to understand which indicators are good and which are bad.