As a business owner, you are always advised, whether it be by you accountant or a coach to track and measure KPI’s for your business. Many of these will be financially based to track sales, costs or profits, but there are several other key statistics you cannot afford not to monitor and know, as they will directly and indirectly have an impact on the financial health of your business. Before going into the entire list, lets look at one simple measurement in regards to your marketing and how much it cost you to get someone to actually ‘see’ your advert- this is the cost per eyeball.
Cost per eyeball
Put quite simply this is how much does it cost you to get your message out to the marketplace for an individual to see. There are many methods of gaining a market presence with your marketing, whether it is print, online, radio, billboard, direct mail, and email marketing or social media.
Each of these obviously comes with different costs; exposure rates and ways in which to measure impact, some better than others. Online can give a completely accurate measure of clicks, impressions and conversions, whereas print or radio can only state the potential reach based on circulation or reach.
Lets look at a few examples of how to measure:
Radio
Assume you take a promotional offer that costs $1200 for a month for 40 adverts.
The stations claims are a listenership of 70,000 people.
This would come out at a cost per listener (potential) of $0.017 cents, but you should dig a bit deeper.
What times are your ads being played and what is the audience of this particular time slot.
Lets assume it is drive and the show audience is 25,000, this would now make your cost per listener (potential) of $0.048 cents.
Assume you decide to place an advert in the local weekly magazine as a full-page ad. The cost may be $3000 per page and they have a print weekly of 50,000.
Your cost per eyeball is $0.06 per printed magazine.
With this medium, you don’t know who has read, if all the printed magazines get to the end user or how many of those who read actually read or saw your ad.
The same approach can be used for bus, taxi, and other print media once you have an idea of the reach numbers, which should be provided by the salesman.
Online
Online has a number of various methods to place an ad. You can pay per 1000 impressions, or pay per click received on your advert.
Typically media outlets sell per 1000 impressions, whereas pay per click is more common with things like Facebook or LinkedIn ads.
Lets look at CPM (impressions).
You may buy 50,000 impressions over a period of a month and the cost per 1000 is $30. This makes your cost per eyeball at $0.03.
This is all good, but once your allocation is gone your ad ceases and no longer shows up, but this is usually managed by the vendor to give a balance each day.
With pay per click you may allocate a daily budget of $50 and bid for your ad based on a market rate say $2.26 per click. You know your cost per click or eyeball, but once the budget is gone, so is your ad. Once 22 people have clicked on your ad, it has gone for the day. With this method a direct and targeted ad is needed to drive to a conversion method.
What I like about online versus other modes is the cost per eyeball is low (if you go with CPM) and you can get a report from the supplier stating exactly how many people have clicked on the ad and your own sites analytics can see the incoming traffic from the site as well.
These are just a couple of examples, but the key is to not just throw your money at something based on claims of readership, eyeballs or circulation numbers. Work out what is the best method to give a good cost per eyeball, and then the challenge comes down to the design of the advert and the call to action. There is no point showing an ad 100,000 times and it asks for nothing from the reader.
Good luck….
Tony Ozanne
www.tonyozanne.com
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles, www.freedigitalphotos.net
