As a business owner you are often advised, whether it be by your
accountant, peers or a coach that it is critical to track and measure
KPI's.
Many of these suggested KPI's 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. Without going through an entire list, lets look at one simple measurement in regards to your marketing. This is knowing how much it costs you to get someone to actually 'see' your advert. This is commonly known as the 'cost per eyeball'.
Cost Per Eyeball
Put quite simply, this is knowing how much it costs 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 using print, online, radio, billboard, direct mail, email marketing or social media.
Each of these obviously come with different costs per exposure rate and ways in which to measure their impact - some better than others. Online advertising 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 listener numbers.
Lets look at a few examples of how you can measure:
Radio
Let's assume you take a promotional offer that costs $1200 per month for 40 adverts.
The stations claims the have a listenership of 70,000 people.
This would equate to be a cost per listener (potential) of $0.017 cents. Rather than accepting this 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 time and the show audience is 25,000. This would now make your cost per listener (potential) at $0.048 cents.
Print
Now let's assume you decide to place an advert in the local weekly magazine as a full-page ad. The cost may be $3,000 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 it or if all the printed magazines actually get to the end user or how many of those who read actually read or saw your ad! So it isn't always black or white.
The same approach can be used for bus, taxi, and other print media methods once you have an idea of the total potential reach numbers, which should be provided by the salesman during their pitch to you.
Online
Online advertising has a number of methods to place and pay for an ad. You can pay per 1,000 impressions, or pay per click received on your advert over a period of time.
Typically, media outlets sell per 1,000 impressions, whereas pay per click is more common with mediums like Facebook or LinkedIn ads.
Let's look at CPM (impressions).
You may buy 50,000 impressions over a period of a month and the cost per 1,000 is $30. This makes your cost per eyeball at $0.03.
This is 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 and they should advise you if your budget is being depleted.
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 such as a landing or lead page.
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...
Many of these suggested KPI's 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. Without going through an entire list, lets look at one simple measurement in regards to your marketing. This is knowing how much it costs you to get someone to actually 'see' your advert. This is commonly known as the 'cost per eyeball'.
Cost Per Eyeball
Put quite simply, this is knowing how much it costs 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 using print, online, radio, billboard, direct mail, email marketing or social media.
Each of these obviously come with different costs per exposure rate and ways in which to measure their impact - some better than others. Online advertising 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 listener numbers.
Lets look at a few examples of how you can measure:
Radio
Let's assume you take a promotional offer that costs $1200 per month for 40 adverts.
The stations claims the have a listenership of 70,000 people.
This would equate to be a cost per listener (potential) of $0.017 cents. Rather than accepting this 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 time and the show audience is 25,000. This would now make your cost per listener (potential) at $0.048 cents.
Now let's assume you decide to place an advert in the local weekly magazine as a full-page ad. The cost may be $3,000 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 it or if all the printed magazines actually get to the end user or how many of those who read actually read or saw your ad! So it isn't always black or white.
The same approach can be used for bus, taxi, and other print media methods once you have an idea of the total potential reach numbers, which should be provided by the salesman during their pitch to you.
Online
Online advertising has a number of methods to place and pay for an ad. You can pay per 1,000 impressions, or pay per click received on your advert over a period of time.
Typically, media outlets sell per 1,000 impressions, whereas pay per click is more common with mediums like Facebook or LinkedIn ads.
Let's look at CPM (impressions).
You may buy 50,000 impressions over a period of a month and the cost per 1,000 is $30. This makes your cost per eyeball at $0.03.
This is 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 and they should advise you if your budget is being depleted.
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 such as a landing or lead page.
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...
