B2B Marketing Consulting Agency Blog

Impressions vs. Leads

- November 20, 2012 5:32 am

When it comes to online advertising, marketing people all ask the same thing: how many impressions does our ad get? Innovaxis asks, how many leads were generated by all of our online marketing activities and how many of those leads generated sales?

In the spirit of any publicity is good publicity, impressions do measure the theoretical number of times your ad was seen, though what happens if someone leaves their browser tuned to the page with your rotating ad and then they walk away? How many “impressions” were really seen by search engine “crawlers” from Google, Yahoo and Bing? And how many impressions resulted from your employees, the ad site’s employees, your competitors, and other non-customers? These are just a few problems with only measuring impressions.

Wouldn’t it be more powerful if your ad offered a code or “mention this ad” message in order to receive an incentive? Your salespeople would then be able to track how many times sales resulted from your ad, as customers calling in would be sure to mention it in order to receive the incentive.

Key Ideas

  • Ad agencies love impressions, sales loves leads
  • Include an incentive to track your ad’s effectiveness

Conclusion

This is just one example of methods we have discovered in order to make online advertising lead to more sales. For other insights that you can implement, contact us.