There are different goals of advertising. Brand awareness and purchase oriented (I forget the technical names). Most online advertising has revolved around driving purchases, with brand awareness only establishing even a non-negligible online presence fairly recently.
When someone creates the ads the ad almost always focuses on one of those two things. Purchase oriented ads are expected to produce a certain number of actual purchase, have metrics to measure their success, and have one set of techniques. Brand awareness has different metrics and generally takes different means to be successful.
My understanding (as an outsider who doesn't work directly in advertising) is that failed purchase-oriented ads are not viewed as successful brand awareness ads. If they wanted brand awareness they'd do a separate ad campaign that targets that specifically and would do a better job. So if a purchase ad fails to drive purchasing, it's still considered a failure.
> There are different goals of advertising. Brand awareness and purchase oriented (I forget the technical names). Most online advertising has revolved around driving purchases, with brand awareness only establishing even a non-negligible online presence fairly recently.
What?
> My understanding (as an outsider who doesn't work directly in advertising)
Aah. Yeah, in our market, you're not correct about brand awareness campaigns being a) recent and b) neglible. Most of our biggest spending campaigns are branding campaigns, and have been since 2007. Big caveat - I'm not in the US market.
The technical terms tend to be CPM/CPC/CPx/CPO, depending on who you're talking to - cost per thousand impressions (branding), cost per click, cost per conversion, cost per order.
Yeah, I am in the US market. My impression was that impressions were much less popular campaigns to run. But that's really an aside, and I might be wrong. :-)
My point was that (by my understanding) an ad aimed at generating clicks or conversions was measured for success by whether it generated clicks or conversions. It wouldn't be redeemed by being getting a lot of impressions if it failed on those counts. If the advertiser cared about impressions, they'd be running a campaign targeted at impressions.
Well, CPC/CPx/CPO campaigns only pay on those events, so yeah, impressions are a cost only.
But those campaigns tend to predominate on low-value inventory, whereas the branding campaigns naturally want a higher end of the market for impressions and the demographics viewing them.
Non-CPM is where Google really shines, their click-through on CPC is, AFAIK, an order of magnitude above the industry average.
When someone creates the ads the ad almost always focuses on one of those two things. Purchase oriented ads are expected to produce a certain number of actual purchase, have metrics to measure their success, and have one set of techniques. Brand awareness has different metrics and generally takes different means to be successful.
My understanding (as an outsider who doesn't work directly in advertising) is that failed purchase-oriented ads are not viewed as successful brand awareness ads. If they wanted brand awareness they'd do a separate ad campaign that targets that specifically and would do a better job. So if a purchase ad fails to drive purchasing, it's still considered a failure.