The owner of a company we work with recently called our pay-per-click (PPC) advertising services a “media buy.”  To be frank, I was pretty surprised by the use of such an antiquated term for such an advanced advertising platform.  Granted, his marketing department, which he relied on to understand PPC, has been gutted of its digital know-how by resignations and lay-offs over the last eight months. His exposure to the world of pay per click advertising is still pretty new, and his perspective is still stuck in the ever-dwindling worlds of television rating points and Arbitron radio ratings. I view him maintaining this belief to be our failure as an agency. We should educate the companies we work with about the power of what we can achieve through online marketing and ensure that they are able to distinguish it from other forms of media. So, as a way to bridge the understanding gap for those who are trying to decipher the difference between online media buying and pay per click advertising, here is my admittedly one-sided perspective on how the two differ. However, if you want to learn more about our recommendations for online paid media as a whole, download our Digital Marketing Checklist.

Online Media Buys:

• Pay up front for ad views (impressions, not clicks)
  • Use a media buyer or programmatic media buying
• Reporting: Usually for awareness metrics or reach
• Targeting: Usually just geographic – Nielsen DMA zones some iffy “audience networks”
• Success Metrics: Clicks, bounce rate, engagement and audience reach (whatever fuzzy math is in the ancient formula is that correlates audience reach/rating points to sales)
• Management Style: Set it and forget it (until it’s time to buy the next batch)
• Biggest Concerns: Ad viewability, delivered impressions and ad fraud
• Optimization: Budget allocation
• Favorite Catch Phrase: “Oh, this is for awareness, not direct response…”

PPC:

• Pay when someone actually clicks and engages with the ad
• Reporting: Start with site conversion data and then move on to traffic metrics
• Targeting:
  • Search keywords
  • Geography – as small as a zip code
  • Affinity interest
  • In-market interest
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Parental status
  • Average household income of area where ad was served
  • Previous site visit history (remarketing audiences)
  • Hour of day/day of week
  • Search interests in the past 30 days
  • Display partners site topic
  • Display partners site (placement)
• Success Metrics:
  • Sales
  • Leads
  • Key performance indicator (KPI) conversion rates
• Management Style: Constant, active, regular changes to budget allocations and bids based on conversion performance metrics down to the level of every targeting aspect
• Biggest Concerns: Conversion performance
• Optimization: Based on conversion performance and in almost daily cycles depending on traffic levels
• Favorite Catch Phrase: “Another record month of conversions”

Respect the Metrics?

We evaluate our account managers every quarter on how they meet our “core beliefs.”  One of the main tenants of those core beliefs is using data as a guide for strategy.  For us, that data is online conversion metrics, and we use those metrics as the guide on where to spend media dollars and where to pull back on an almost daily basis. We spend hours, weeks and, yes, even months getting company analytics and conversion tracking enabled correctly so that we can use those metrics to make strategic decisions.  Likewise, we spend hours trying to educate companies that optimizing to these conversion goals is the way to increase their profitability. Those metrics have to be bullet-proof and companies have to understand and believe that they are metrics to work toward.  If this doesn’t happen, then companies aren’t going to continue to work with us for long.  More often than not, these companies are still driven by unscientific things, such as their gut, feelings or — worst of all — ego. We optimize to the conversion first and build the audience second.  It’s not the other way around like traditional marketing has been for the last 50 years.  We don’t have to carpet-bomb the largest audience possible with ads and then hope that people walk through the door and somehow buy what we’ve promoted.  We have the power to track what tactics lead to success down to very tiny levels like search keywords. In other words, we don’t do “media buys.”