Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Traffic Without Tracking Tags

We’re throwing it back in this week’s blog post with this image of the Drunk Driving Prevention ad from 1983. Their “friends don’t let friends drive drunk” slogan has inspired various spin offs over the years. A Google search turns up some seriously hilarious images of what friends don’t let friends do inspired by the drunk driving prevention ad campaign from the 80’s.

It turns out, friends apparently don’t let friends do a lot of rib-tickling things—like skip leg day, use comic sans and my personal favorite, live in Indiana (I’ve been trying to get my one friend out of there for like our entire friendship).

And since we consider all our readers friends, we’re sharing our own spin on the subject. Here are some need-to-know basics about traffic tags and four solid reasons that friends don’t let friends drive paid traffic without implementing them.

What Are Tracking Tags?

Before investing in paid traffic, it’s important to add small pieces of code called tracking tags to your website. These tags do not change your website’s appearance in any way. Instead they collect information that can inform decisions about your ad campaign, website and your business overall.

Types of Tracking Tags

Depending on your campaign goals, you may need to implement multiple tracking tags onto your website. For example, if you’d like to know how many visitors are coming to your site, where they came from, how long they stayed and what they did before they left, an analytics tags can help you answer those questions and more. Do you need a way to drive repeat visits to your site? A retargeting tag would help you reach those customers again. To measure how well each traffic source is benefiting your ROI, a tag that tracks conversions should be used.

Why It Matters to Your Business

Analytics, Retargeting and Conversion tags can make a world of difference to your bottom line. Implementing these tags will make campaigns much more efficient toward meeting your KPI’s. It can also tell you a lot about your customer base and how well your offers and messaging are resonating with them.

1.)    Relying on Click Metrics Alone is Outdated

The old way of digital advertising merely looked at click metrics like click through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC). A click through rate or CTR is the percentage of users who clicked on your ad compared to the number of ad impressions or times your ad showed up online. Cost per click is the total cost divided by the number of clicks or the average cost that you pay for each click

In the example below, for $2,882 the ad appeared 752,639 times and 1,129 people clicked on it, resulting in a .15% click through rate and an average cost per click of $2.55.

However, there is much more to digital advertising than click metrics. In general, click metrics tell you more about the engagement with the ad creative than other important metrics like audience and ROI.

2.)    Conversion Metrics Tell a Better Story

Taking full advantage of the digital advertising medium and making efficient use of your advertising budget means focusing on conversion data—not just clicks. Getting more clicks doesn’t mean you’re actually making more conversions, sales or revenue. In fact, there is an inverse relationship between click through and conversion rates. Studies have shown that as The  click through rate increases, the conversion rate and overall return on investment decreases.

Implementing conversion tracking tags will help you measure the effectiveness of different elements of your campaign and which of those components are helping you reach your goals. Digital advertising can be used to drive sales, leads or other action on your website. 

Adding conversion tracking adds an additional data point (beyond clicks) that helps you identify your best performers within your campaign— your MVPs so to speak. These MVP’s can be things like the best traffic source, the most engaged audience, the highest converting geographic location and even the time of day that best contributes to your bottom line in the form of leads, sales or other action taken on your website.

3.)    Audience Insights

Your best performers (or MVPs) develop into valuable insights over time. The longer your campaign runs, the more detailed and reliable your learnings will be. In general, digital advertising campaigns drive traffic based on assumptions made about the target audience.

For example, a children’s books retailer might target parents of small children on websites with related content. However, conversion data could be used to identify other audiences that may not have been included in the original targeting. The data could indicate the need to expand the audience to include other user segments like grandparents, or people who are in market for children’s toys.

These insights can also inform other decisions like special offers, promotions and messaging on advertisements, e-mail and web content.

4.)    Optimizations

The data produced from the implementation of tracking tags helps to form valuable insights that can then be used to improve the digital advertising campaign. These improvements are known as campaign optimizations. 

Optimizations are any adjustments made to the campaign targeting or budget allocation that helps the advertiser maximize return on investment while minimizing spend on less productive traffic sources.

5.)    Retargeting

Retargeting tags are different than conversion tags in that they collect data used for building retargeting audiences. Retargeting or remarketing audiences are used to target users who have previously visited your website or a specific page of your website. This allows you to reconnect with your prospects by serving ads to them after they have left your site.

Think about the last time you shopped for something online, say on Amazon. Once you left their site, that product or a similar product followed you around for several days after that in the form of display ads on other websites.

This is the reason that traffic from retargeting audiences performs better than other traffic sources. It serves as a reminder to prior visitors to reengage with your brand or offer. Retargeting also helps move prospects to the next step of the marketing and sales funnel.

Bringing it All Together

While there are several advertising mediums including digital and traditional, digital is hands down the most cost effective, efficient medium for delivering on your KPIs. Thanks to ever advancing technology, digital advertising enables businesses to go beyond simple click metrics to gain customer insights, optimize to the highest converting traffic sources and remarket to prospects. Implementing a tiny snippet of code on your site could mean the difference between driving revenue and driving junk.

For more information about digital advertising visit our website or give us a call for a free consultation at 972.878.3229