AffDollars BlogEducational marketing blog for affiliates.

Tracking your online media buys and optimizing based on performance is a must for everyone regardless how much money they have invested. Ever wondered which metrics are most important and which of these statistics you need to track and optimize when doing a media buy? If so this post will give you some insight into the basics.

The following statistics are the key components that will make or break your campaign:

#1 – Creative Impressions - You want to track the overall impressions that your advertisement is getting; be it a flash video, a GIF image or a simple JPG you always need to find out how many people are viewing your creative. This data can later be used to calculate your click through rate or “CTR” and other useful statistics.

#2 – Creative CTR - Your creative CTR is simply the click through rate % of your advertisement meaning the percentage of people who click the advertisement compared to those who are just viewing it. With this vital information you can pinpoint which creatives are performing best and eliminate those which are not getting you many clicks.

#3 – Presale page CTR - You absolutely need to know your click through rate on the presale page. If you are direct linking you won’t be using a presale page and this won’t apply to you. If the presale page is lowering your conversions compared to direct linking it should be improved upon or eliminated altogether.

#4 – Sales Offer Page CTR - Once the visitor has reached the sales page there maybe multiple offers to choose from its important you know the click through rate to each individual offer if possible. Find out How many people are clicking through to each offer.

#5 – Conversion Rate - One of the most important metrics is the conversion rate, this is simply the amount of final sales or actions that result.

What to do with these key media buying statistics:

The next step is to use your statistics which you tracked to optimize your campaign. Once you have tracked all your metrics you will have a proper overview of your campaign and will be able to eliminate the bottlenecks which are holding you back from success.

Optimizing Impressions: To find out the amount of impressions you can expect on your advertisement talk to the webmaster or sales representative for the website in question. You will also want to use tools such as www.quantcast.com to find out how many impressions you will be getting from your media buy. If you see that your impressions are lower than the webmaster originally told you and didn’t have anything in the contract you can try and negotiate with them to try and get some extra impressions for free.

Optimizing Creative CTR: If you have a very low click through rate on the majority of your advertisements simply make more and make them different. Try using more flashy, eye catching designs, use shock tactics or stronger calls to action to increase your click through rate.

Optimizing The Presale Page: If your presale page is not getting a very good CTR you will need to do a better job preselling. Test different designs and different layouts, use new fonts, new headers and new titles, split test your results and see what comes up as the winner. You may just be surprised what works best. Be aware that using a presale page will usually lower the amount of people seeing the offer page but if done correctly can increase conversion rate dramatically.

Optimizing The Offer / Desired Action: If the offer just isn’t converting or your can’t get the visitors to complete the desired action try switching it up to something else. Rotate new offers, try different calls to action and sales text or try unique, different ways to get them to complete the desired action, use incentives and any tools at your disposal. Remember to always stay within the limits of the rules at all times or you may forfeit your commissions.

That’s pretty much all there is to it! Once you have the tracking in place to study these metrics you can easily identify what is causing your campaign to fail or what areas need to be improved upon. Simply increasing the CTR on any of your stats by 0.5% can mean the difference between a failing and successful money making media buy.

Final Tip: For best media buying results always try and find the best creatives, presale pages and offers BEFORE running your campaign on a large scale. Using Google content network is a great way to study and improve on metrics before taking it to the next level with a large scale media buy.