One of the first and foremost things ad campaign managers do involves thinking about their audience—who they are, what their challenges look like, and how they’d benefit from a product or service.
Understanding your audience is critical, so when we are asked by the client to skip the reach portion of a media plan to allocate more budget to the parts that bring in traffic and conversions, we try to educate the client on the importance of establishing visibility with a new audience before expecting favourable action from them.
In this ever-evolving world, gaining mindshare from your audience is essential before making your product proposition to them. That is why major mature brands like Nike and Starbucks still spend millions of dollars on brand marketing without featuring any products.
To gain mindshare, you need to be present where your audience is, at multiple frequencies, and not all of it will be directly attributed to you.
To drive traffic to a brand’s store or app, it has to be visible across all touch points possible.
Once you have gained recognition, you should move on to the next stage. This holds true for any e-commerce or direct-to-consumer brand.
I know you are still not convinced that bidding for reach to get more traffic and conversions is a more profitable option than bidding for conversions, keep reading and let me help you change that perception.
Imagine a new restaurant opened nearby, and you want to try the food, but you are hesitant as you don’t have enough information about the restaurant. As a promotional tactic, they are distributing the menu in your neighbourhood, you get to know about the menu and find it interesting, but you are still not compelled to try the food. Next, you see an ad about the new restaurant on TV multiple times and easily recall the restaurant. Taking human nature into account, you will take the new restaurant into account the next time you want to eat outside.
Here you can see your journey as an audience, which shows how buying something off the shelf happens rarely. You won’t consider buying food from a new place until you have more information about the restaurant that’s a lot like when you bid for conversions from the beginning. The audience may not feel compelled to purchase the product right off the bat until they have more awareness about the product or brand.
By becoming visible where their audiences are, established brands are building a community of buyers.
The most common method used by these brands is Non-Product Advertising, which is when a brand tries to promote an idea, concept, or interest that it feels is important and will resonate with the target audience. In other words, advertising without showing the product.
For example, the Nike ads slogan “Just do it” appears on football stadiums considering the opportunity to influence the right audience for their athlete shoes and apparel brand.
To put all these theories and examples into action, let’s take a practical approach. Say you have a budget of $1000 to run a launch campaign for your grocery eCommerce website for 2 weeks. We have two media plans for a grocery e-commerce website here
Plan 1: Reach Plan
Cost | Est CPM | Impressions | Reach | Est CTR | CPC | Clicks | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Meta(feed and stories)
| $450 | $4 | 112500 | 37500 | 0.40% | $1.00 | 450 |
Google Display | $350 | $3 | 116667 | 38889 | 0.35% | $0.86 | 408 |
Google Search | $200 | $35 | 5714 | 5714 | 3% | $1.17 | 171 |
Total | $1000 | 234881 | 82103 | 1030 |
Plan 2: Traffic Plan
Cost | Est CPM | Impressions | Reach | Est CTR | CPC | Clicks | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Meta(feed and stories)
| $400 | $5 | 80000 | 26667 | 0.80% | $0.63 | 640 |
Google Display | $0 | $4 | 0 | 0.35% | NA | NA | |
Google Search | $600 | $35 | 17143 | 17143 | 3% | $1.17 | 514 |
Total | $1000 | 97143 | 43810 | 1154 |
In these plans, we have assumed the following:
- We would be targeting the same audience in both plans, but the bidding priorities are different for both plans: one is bidding for more reach, and the other is bidding for more clicks.
- Display and social CPM and CTR rates: We have taken the global averages mentioned in the WordStream Benchmark reports (Google, Facebook, and Instagram).
- The frequency of display and social ads has been set to 3 for the campaign’s duration.
- The Google Search Ads CPC has been estimated using the keyword planner tool for grocery e-commerce and delivery.
- The Google Search Ads CTR has been estimated using our historical averages for similar consumer e-commerce businesses.
What did we conclude?
The CPM and CTR for the Reach plan and the Traffic plan are different as they vary according to the objective of the campaign. The Reach plan will have a lower CPM and lower CTR because the goal is not to get clicks but to be visible to more people, while the Traffic plan will have a higher CTR along with higher CPM rates because the goal here is to show ads to only those people who are likely to click.
As you can see here, the number of people who end up on the website is higher (by 12%) in the traffic plan as compared to the reach plan. As a result, more people are getting a first impression of the portal and may even decide to purchase.
In the reach plan, people who you have reached through your ads is much higher (by 87%), and these people have seen your brand at least three times in the past two weeks, which means you have almost doubled (87%) their odds of brand recognition is higher in this plan.
We can consider that people who had clicked on the reach campaign ad might actually be users with higher intent than those who clicked on the traffic campaign ad as the algorithm decided to show ads to an audience that it believed would be less likely to click, but they ended up clicking anyway, which means the ad grabbed their interest, gaining a more qualified audience for your website.
If you have followed this so far you would have understood that for an e-commerce brand the best way to reach an audience and have more sales eventually
will be to take the multi-channelled marketing approach while bidding for reach. This will enhance the consumer journey experience and help the website reach more potential customers which will then contribute to your community of buyers.
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