What will my traffic/clicks be from my digital ad campaign?

There are two questions advertisers typically want to know about their advertising campaign:  how much traffic will my website get (aka how many clicks will I get) and how many leads will I get from my digital ad campaign.  If you’re a digital salesperson, you should be able to answer these questions, and if you’re an advertiser, you should ask them.

We’ll tackle the first question in this post and check back next week for part two, “How many leads will I get from my digital ad campaign?”

How should you calculate an estimate of how much traffic an ad campaign will send to your website?  On average about .1% of impressions served will result in people coming to your website either by click or by view through.  (Actually, the national click-through-rate average, depending on your business category, ranges from .05%-.1%.)

Therefore, if the digital ad campaign is serving 500,000 impressions that would mean about 500 people (500,000 impressions x .1% = 500) should visit the website as a direct result of the ad.  Simple right?

Well yes…and no.  Remember, most people DON’T click on ads.  So, if less than 1 in 1,000 people click on an ad why was $49.5 billion spent on digital advertising last year?  Because it works.  Be careful about judging the effectiveness of a digital advertising campaign based solely on clicks and volume of traffic.  Just because someone doesn’t click, doesn’t mean the ad wasn’t effective.  While clicks and traffic to the website are one metric, you also should be tracking conversions.  When people get to your website, do they do what you want them to do (purchase, sign-up, contact you, etc.)?

You should also be looking at your Google Analytics reports, especially your bounce rate and average session duration on your website and landing pages.  If your bounce rate is high and your average session duration is very low, that’s an indication that people who come to your site aren’t finding what they want.  (If all this Google Analytics stuff doesn’t make sense click here.)

Now you know how to estimate clicks/traffic…next week leads/conversions!