2023 Digital Report Card: Digital Ads Performance
If your content doesn’t get seen by anyone that matters to your business, does it even exist?
Getting eyeballs on your information is essential to putting your investment to good use. That’s why placement is one of Mud Mile’s pillars of service.
Digital ads is a big term for one tactic we use to connect your content with your audience. For the purposes of this article, digital ads include:
- Search engine marketing (SEM)
- Display
- Maps
- Native advertising
- Streaming video
- Streaming audio
- Social media advertising
Mud Mile’s digital team spent hundreds of hours placing and optimizing nearly $200,000 in digital ad spend in 2023. For our partners, who represent B2B, B2C, and DTC businesses and a wide range of business goals, we generated more than 61 million Impressions for their content.
The Stats
As with so many things in life, you get what you pay for when it comes to generating Impressions. Volume is important, and when you spend more with digital tactics we can often stretch your money further with a better ability to compete at the auctions.
But, Impressions aren’t everything. To make the most out of a partner’s digital ads budget, we aim to connect content with the right audience. It’s a matter of quality of Impressions rather than quantity of Impressions.
To measure that quality, we look at the partner’s goals: what did they want to get out of these ads? For all the partners cited in the chart above, the answer is “sales” in some form or another, be it in the form of attendees, new clients, or new customers.
So, the primary objective we utilized in programming ads for these partners was traffic back to their website. The KPI we look at is the Click Thru Rate (CTR), which is the number of Clicks on an ad compared to the number of Impressions generated.
Success Story
If you compare the two charts above, you’ll see that Partner 3, a direct-to-consumer e-commerce business, is a great example of the importance of targeting a specific audience. This account has one of the smallest budgets we’re currently working with. That meant a relatively low number of Impressions in 2023 at 910,000.
With our help identifying their goal audience, a layered targeting strategy, and commitment to seeing that strategy through, this partner earned our top CTR, our cheapest CPM, and celebrated their best sales year *ever*.