By Jamie Lintner, Advertising Accounts Manager, BDX

In the advertising industry there are two main tiers or “dimensions” that quantify advertising campaign performance. The first is the most basic and simply measures engagement with your content.  With this metric you put all of your eggs into the baskets that presumably provide the best Return On Investment (ROI), but it doesn’t tell the complete story as to how effective those clicks are. Click totals do not provide you with insight on what actions the users actually took once on-site. For example, you could run a campaign that has an incredibly high click thru rate that simultaneously has a high bounce rate, meaning your campaign generated little meaningful actions. The most sophisticated builders also look at actions to determine best performing campaigns.  This can be done by syncing up the click thru URL’s of your ads with your Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a free tool that everyone has in some capacity, but not everyone actually fully utilizes. For advertising purposes, it allows you to see ad performance in a broader, two-dimensional scope. Not only can you see which sites and/or creative generated the most click traffic, but you can also parse out which ones resulted in strong site-activities like direct leads. Conversely it also allows you to see which channels have a high bounce rate. Thankfully this integration is actually quite simple and painless to use. All you need to do is append each click thru URL with a separate code that can be generated on the spot. This can be done at sites like this (http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033867). Simply type in your domain name that would be used for the click thru, and then attach it with whatever identifiers you’d like to use to differentiate the ads. See the below example of a URL that has been appended. Once this is in place, I can query by source in my analytics for “BDX”, by medium for “banner”, or by campaign and am able to see how long the users that clicked on this particular ad stayed on site, how many pages they viewed, etc., and then compare them to campaigns running against similar channels.

Example of an Appended Link: http://www.testlink.com/?utm_source=BDX&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=CampaignA

 At BDX, we’ve recently unlocked a third dimension to quantify advertising performance for any type of ad placement. Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool when used to gauge performance of users that physically clicked an ad, however that leaves out any sort of reporting on the large percentage of users that DIDN’T physically click the ad. With our new PETRA tool, not only can we calculate how many people clicked on an ad or how many of those clicks resulted in leads and strong back-end activity, but also how many leads were generated by users who didn’t actually click. Traditionally view thru reporting is something that is calculated only for Retargeting campaigns, but PETRA allows us to sync up with all campaigns regardless of where the ads run. Quite literally, the sky is the limit as to how detailed this reporting can get. In the system we can name any event that we’d like to track for any particular site, i.e. Got to the Site, Filled out a Brochure, Converted to a lead, etc., and then track all actions taken by everyone that came into contact with an ad in some capacity. This is truly the definitive way to compare performance because it allows advertisers to measure a true cost per lead for any and all advertising channels.

BDX advertising typically provides great value for builders, but there is still opportunity in optimizing these campaigns for the best possible ROI.  Want to get more from everyone advertising dollar you spend?  Talk to us, we can help.  For more information on advertising or integrating your existing ad campaigns with our PETRA reporting, please contact traffic@thebdx.com.

Jamie Lintner is the BDX Advertising Accounts Manager and is responsible for monitoring all campaigns through all BDX Advertising channels.