No seasoned account manager or art director would dispute that driving online advertising sales for clients is a big priority in Adland; but it’s not the only objective to consider. A recent worldwide study by research company Econsultancy found that different channels are used by marketers for different purposes – and account managers especially would be wise to gen up on the findings.
What canny account managers ought to know: what works best for what objectives?
As reported in eMarketer, just under 40 percent of the client-side marketers polled used online display, paid search and social ads for lead generation, but it was the top priority only for social ads and online display. By far and away the most favoured channel for generating online advertising sales was paid search, although just less than a fifth of marketers used all three for increasing traffic. And it’ll come as little surprise to the seasoned account manager to find that social advertising was used as the channel of choice for branding purposes.
It might be stating the obvious, but the fact remains that knowing how the mix of objectives shifts from channel to channel, knowing which channel performs best for which purposes, allows marketers to extract maximum value out of each.
Beyond online sales
Over half the advertising agencies polled (and almost half the client-side marketers) said that the landing page was critical for optimization, with managing search engine optimization, bid management and paid search coming in as the next most crucial tactics for this purpose (client-side marketers favoured integration with SEO more strongly that their agency counterparts). Over a quarter of all respondents agreed that maximum value from paid search was best achieved through search retargeting.
At the top of the priority tree for optimization in social advertising (and by a wide margin), agencies and brand marketers alike placed audience retargeting as their tactic of choice. Given that social networks host strongly engaged users who share their habits and interests prolifically, this makes a lot of sense: advertisers can readily identify their most potentially important customers from this active user base.
Targeting ranked highly with online display, too, although advertisers tended to deliver ads based on their audience segmentation.
It’s not rocket science, but it’s good to know all the same.