This post is like a sermon or more like a soapbox, we have always wanted to get up on that little wooden box and have at least one or two people listen and shake their heads in agreement. We hope this is the day. We have been listening to a lot of our clients talk about the world of performance advertising and how they have to work versus how they want to work. This got us to thinking (you know what they say about that) and so we present you our view on things.
Performance advertising is wrongly focused on clicks, pixels and confirmation pages. It is too focused on cranking out leads, in other words, volume at the expense of quality. There is also zero sense of sustainability, over-harvesting and, we squeeze all possible value (or perceived value) out of a channel or segment as quickly as possible.
This brings us to the ad network paradox that exists today (still with us?) Ad networks try to deliver two conflicting things simultaneously 1) high ROI to advertisers 2) maximum monetization to publishers.
And what really needs to be delivered is quite simple. Ready?
A customer that stops and engages with your brand. And, to get a customer to stop and engage with your brand means that your ad network needs to do three key things for you: 1) work backwards from your KPI’s to find the real measure of success for that particular campaign 2) eliminate the reliance of the campaign on optimization technology and apply a healthy dose of human intelligence that extracts the maximum value for your ad spend 3) deliver a constant stream of customers that boost your bottom line.
The way we live now doesn’t have to be complicated. It just needs to deliver one metric- high quality ROI.
