So you have a $500,000 budget to distribute your online display ad campaign for www.XYZCompany.com. The website has some form of high level web analytics installed such as WebTrends or Omniture and the tracking codes have been setup and your campaign is all going through the eyeblaster system.

You’ve spent several hours creating a blocking chart and the client has approved it. You send out the PO’s and all you have to do after the contracts are signed is setup your campaign in Eyeblaster or DoubleClick, whatever :)

I attended the IAB Conference in Calgary late last year and I heard people from AskMen.com, Yahoo! Search Marketing, ComScore Media Metrix, and more. One of the topicks that came up was whether or not keeping track of Click-Through-Rate (Clicks / Impressions = CTR) was an important metric.

The answer to this is, there is no right or wrong answer; it all depends on the KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators are that you’ve se up with the client.

Some campaigns may be only concerned with spending $500,000 for branding purposes, and others may need to track and report on how many clicks or traffic were driven to the website or specific landing page to measure the effectiveness of their campaign.

All of the campaigns I work with on a daily basis measure the performance of our campaigns; Clicks vs. Impressions = CTR:

• Which ad format is working best overall?
• Which ad formnt is working best on SpendingMoneyOnThisSite.com?
• Which keywords are working best in a particular adgroup?
• Which text-ad is working best as a result of our A/B Tests?
• etc :)

King Rosales is a Online Advertising Strategist in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.