Reporting and Presenting Advertising Metrics: What You Should Know
Chances are if you have a website, you more than likely will be asked by a manager, stakeholder, or advertiser, about the performance of your site. In today’s digital landscape, it’s crucial to understand the metrics of your website to stay competitive, and to generate revenue opportunities.
For news publication sites in particular, running ads on your website adds another layer of metrics that publishers need to be tracking. By reporting ad metrics, you can effectively show your advertisers what is working well and what needs to change. But without an established plan to monitor ad campaign results, it will be challenging to prove ads are performing well.
Below we outline a few best practices we suggest in presenting ad metrics to your advertisers.
Establish Monthly Reporting
By monitoring metrics monthly and creating a report, you show your advertisers you are always on top of the performance of their ad. A monthly ad metrics report gives ‘big picture’ insight on ad campaigns. In return, this helps solidify the advertisers’ perception of your website, can help build trust through transparency, and often uncovers opportunities for an advertiser to improve upon, and for you to market additional advertising opportunities within your website.
Establishing a reporting procedure gives an advertiser the confidence they need to invest their ad money with your site and will increase the likelihood of them continuing to use your services.
Reach Out to the Advertiser
Generating reports also presents you with an opportunity to get in front of your advertisers and offer ways to improve their ads’ ROI based on what the reports are showing. Maybe you want to suggest updating banner ads with a new promotion, find out about any upcoming events they are attending/hosting where they need another channel for advertising. Or offer a way to share the latest news about the business, i.e., press releases, news coverage, award announcements. In staying on top of your ad metrics, you can see areas of improvement for ad campaigns and then showcase your expertise by presenting insight to your advertisers.
Smart, Presentable Reporting
Once you begin looking at the metrics, it can be easy to get caught up in all the data you can generate. Your advertiser will have communicated with you what their overall goals are for their campaign–so it’s essential to not overwhelm them with a report that shows clusters of data. Focus on the categories that mean the most to them, i.e., total monthly impressions and clicks on banner ads, and be sure only that data is reflective in your reporting.
Another tip, don’t use shortcuts like screenshots or cutting and pasting in presenting your findings to an advertiser. The presentation of the report is just as important as the information it provides. As demonstrated by Cecile Wehrman, owner and publisher of JournalTrib.com, it’s best to create a clean PDF document that presents a visual representation of ad performance, as well as the daily impressions/clicks.
So if you’re not already generating ad metrics report, start diving in! And if you’re already an Our Hometown customer, check out this knowledge base that walks you through how to locate and export your ad metrics. If you need to be set up with an ad account to access your dashboard contact us today.
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