If you’ve ever worked in digital advertising, and specifically been involved in one of the first digital campaigns launched by a company that had previously done most of their advertising via traditional channels (TV, radio, print, OOH, etc.) you’ve probably experienced something similar to this scenario.

The digital campaign ends on a positive note, with solid results, and you put together some kind of wrap-up or “post-mortem” report summarizing how the campaign performed. Included in the report are all kinds of metrics, ranging from CPMs, to effective CPCs to potentially CPL (cost per lead) and/or CPA (cost per acquisition) analyses. After going through the results and explaining what everything means, and maybe even after supplying some industry benchmarks to provide a point of reference, you get a response something like this:

“this is great, be we were actually hoping to see a lower eCPC”

or maybe this

“thanks for the report, but we were expecting a lower CPA than what the campaign produced.”

Sound familiar?

I’ve been involved in launching, managing and reporting on online advertising campaigns for more than 9 years, and I have consistently seen this type of response from clients (particularly newer ones). Recently, after receiving a similar response, someone from our team had the courage to ask the client what results they seen from some of their traditional media buys for the same campaign. The client responded “oh, we don’t know what that produced.”

So why the higher expectations for digital media?

This entry is filed under Metrics, Performance Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.