Click-Through Campaigns for Dummies

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If you are a Digital Marketer, chances are you are using social, paid, email, and/or affiliate campaigns to drive click-throughs to your website. While your marketing tool may be showing you a good volume of clicks, it is important to not simply take those numbers at face value. Several factors can inflate click volumes, so before you dedicate your whole budget to an ad platform, it’s important to have an analytics program in place to validate the impact of your campaigns.

Reporting gaps

There can be a large gap between the “clicks” that your ad platform reports and the impact you might see in Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. Here’s three reasons why that might be:

1. “Clicks” do not equal “Visits”
   Email servers and ad networks usually count the number of “clicks” on a link. This can be very different than the number of “visits” counted in Adobe or “sessions” counted in Google. Users can click a button multiple times, whether it be inadvertent, or in frustration because of a long load time. Perhaps the user opened several different links at once to see all the options before clicking again to move forward. In each case, your ad network will count multiple clicks, while Google and Adobe will only count a visit once in a 30-minute period. Having an analytics program will ensure that you’re looking at the right metrics and not comparing apples with oranges.

2. The Click’n’Close

   Ad networks may report clicks from users that never actually reach your site. Users may close their tab or browser before the page load data can be sent to Google or Adobe. Ads can sometimes be so well embedded in native content that users don’t realized they clicked an ad until a new window starts to load - prompting them to close it immediately. While you might think your web pages load quickly, you might be surprised. If your link uses a jumpstation, vanity URL, or redirect, the intermediate step adds time. Now think if the user clicked on your link from an iPhone 4, while out of network, on a business trip to Estonia. Your ad networks will report clicks for visit where the page never successfully loads.

3. Filters
   Your implementation of Adobe or Google Analytics will have filters to block some traffic. Ad networks will have their own set of filters. Keep in mind, humans are not the only ones using the internet. Bots ping servers and web crawlers index pages all the time. While analytics platforms work to filter out this non-human traffic, ad networks are actually incentivized NOT to have too strict of filters. If you are paying them per click, why should they discriminate? Bots often have telltale signs that you can watch for. Crawlers hit hundreds of pages in one visit and bots request the same URL hundreds of times. Bots are usually appear as “direct” traffic and come from IP-Geo locations that don’t match your target market. An analytics program can help you improve your filters and figure out which ad networks provide quality traffic and which don’t care who is clicking.

Start small and scale up

If you want to know what impact your click through campaign is really having, it is important to not try to do everything at once.

Start with smaller audience

Why should you limit your audience? A bigger audience is going to have a bigger impact on your bottom-line, right? In actuality, broadcasting your content can be costly and ineffective. Your messaging might be perfect for a social post, but completely unwelcome as an email. Instead of blasting your content through all means possible, start with a single message, on one platform. Once you have a baseline, iterate and discover the best channel and ad network for your message. Likewise, by specifying a single metro area for your campaign, you can have a more cost-effective impact. False traffic will be easy to identify and eliminate before scaling up to a national level. By starting off in a single metro area, the campaign will have limited impact, but it will dramatically ease the execution by having a single landing page with no need for translation. You will also get a greater response if you are able to tailor the messaging to the metro area.

Make it an easy transition

You may think it is important to ‘wow’ users on the landing page with a big image or video. You may want to enable users to do anything they want by providing the full header and footer. In my experience, that strategy plays out well in front of the executive board, but poorly in real life. Executive are already familiar with your site and are looking to be impressed by something dramatic, while normal users want to see what they were expecting to see. The best landing pages have few buttons and limited text. The page needs to be light-weight and mobile-friendly to keep the barrier to entry low. Reuse the text of the link to affirm that the user is in the right place and that any details they need will be shown if they click the CTA.

Grow into optimization

A/B optimization is a great way to improve your campaign methodology. Unfortunately, too often the job gets tacked on to a Digital Marketer’s other responsibilities. Test data can get polluted and the results get misconstrued. A dedicated analyst is needed to ensure proper hypotheses are tied to the right success metrics for a clear conclusion that can then be validated. Without someone dedicated to optimization, false-positives can create misconceptions that negatively impact the company for years.

Various attribution models used in GA.

Evaluate success

Having a low cost-per-click is nice, but it is not an accurate measure of success. Revenue is a much better metric, but even that can be insufficient. While you may have created a campaign to drive purchases, users may have signed up for your newsletter instead. The revenue from the campaign would tell one story while the lifetime value of those newsletter sign-ups might tell a different one. You should monitor each step of the user flow through your click through campaign as well as any other site goals you have, since there are many ways your campaign can have value. Just as there are many KPI’s to watch, there are multiple attribution models. You should start with last-touch, but don’t stop there. Each channel and ad type will serve a different purpose, so you’ll want to find the attribution method that fits the ad, not the other way around.

The Diversity Bonus: Campfire's Journey to Recognizing Cognitive Diversity

If you’re looking to find ways to improve your bottom line or are facing complex problems within your organization, it may be worth looking first at the diversity of your workplace. Workplace diversity is more than just the right thing to do to make society more integrated and just. It can also produce bonuses. What follows will be a look into what a diversity bonus is, how your business can identify where these bonuses might exist, and how to leverage a diverse team of thinkers to increase the potential for bonuses.

What is a Diversity Bonus?

A diversity bonus (a term used by Scott E. Page, author of The Diversity Bonus) is the increase in performance that results from cognitive diversity. When we think of the individual members that comprise a team, they each bring tools; different frameworks, heuristics, models, categories, and representations. Each tool no matter the size contributes to the project. The team’s collective performance includes a quantifiable, measurable diversity bonus.

Examples of diversity bonuses abound:

1. When multiple people make predictions, their collective error (the error of their average guess) depends in equal amounts on their average error and the diversity of their predictions. If everyone makes the same prediction, the group would be as accurate as the average person. If they make different predictions, the crowd is more accurate than the average person. In one study involving thousands of predictions by professional economists, the crowd was better than the average economist by 21%. That 21% is the diversity bonus.[1]

2. Being stuck on a problem can be frustrating. Having employees with diverse representations create what Stuart Kauffman called different adjacent possibles. When someone else presents a new adjacent possibility and helps get you unstuck, it has created a diversity bonus.

3. Creative tasks also produce similar bonuses. A creative team requires creative people; it also requires diversity. Think about it, if a creative team consists of only people who have the same ideas, then the whole only equal the parts. However, differing ideas will produce a diversity bonus!

Interwoven diversities

This argument of diversity bonuses rests on cognitive diversity, e.g. knowledge bases, categories, heuristics, causal models and frameworks. Though when most people refer to diversity, they mean identity diversity, e.g. race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.

While identity diversity matters, it is also not the only contributor to cognitive diversity. Our social networks, personal preferences, work activities, formal training, and experiences all contribute to our mode of thinking. How much identity interacts with and contributes in any one instance will vary. Discussions in policymaking, healthcare, and the judicial system will likely hold more weight towards identity than, say, assembling engines in an automotive plant.

Producing diversity bonuses for your business

As a consultancy, Campfire has operated in large part around providing effective solutions through working in teams. Being a still-relatively small company has allowed us to pull ideas from our collective pool to accomplish complex tasks. We have also made strides to improve as a company through the creation of a Diversity Forum; where we discuss topics related to our industry as well as the current affairs in the U.S. and abroad. Lastly, Campfire has recognized the need to level-up our knowledge base around diversity and inclusion. As such, we have participated in implicit bias training to help round us out.

Campfire recognizes this as a complex and ongoing initiative to better our company and surrounding communities. We’re striving to create diversity bonuses within our doors, as well as exhibiting the potential benefits to our clients. The real bonus comes from the connections you build with your team and that can’t be measured.

[1] Scott E. Page on The Diversity Bonus; Oct. 2nd, 2017; https://web.archive.org/web/20180713122348/http://blog.press.princeton.edu/2017/10/02/scott-e-page-on-the-diversity-bonus/