The single most important step for activating a new campaign or strategy is defining the goal of our marketing efforts. In digital media, this most often falls into one of the three main buckets of the conversion funnel: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.With the proliferation of machine learning, decisioning, and optimization in digital marketing platforms, goal setting has become even more critical. Machine learning can optimize campaigns at a level of detail and in a fraction of time that is impossible for humans. With a properly set goal such as clickthrough rate, a target return on ad spend or incremental reach, artificial intelligence can find the most effective and efficient paths to accomplishing these set KPIs.So if setting a campaign’s goal is so critical to optimization, which goals are best? For awareness focused efforts, optimizing towards reach or completed video views is a great way to ensure you’re maximizing awareness in a given area. For conversion focused campaigns, optimizing towards CPAs or ROAS is the best way to ensure efficiency in driving conversion actions. Consideration is the most complex part of the funnel to define, as it often requires driving users to some kind of information to help drive their desire for your product or service. That leads us to our topic for today:

Clicks vs. Landing Page Conversions

Let’s start with a couple of definitions:

• Clicks - User’s clicking on an advertisement, which drives them to the assigned landing page for the ad.
• Landing Page Conversions - Users arriving on a landing page after having seen or clicked on an ad.

With clicks you only get insight into who clicked your ads, whereas with landing page conversions you can see users who clicked and those arrived on your website by other means (search, direct, etc.). Landing page views provide a more holistic view of the effect a campaign is having on the target audience. This allows machine learning to have more data points and user experience flows to work with and find efficiencies within, leading to higher performance over time. We would only recommend click focused optimization if it’s not possible to place conversion pixels on a given site or app. Otherwise, optimizing towards a CPA, geared towards landing page views, is the most ideal and efficient way to drive website traffic or consideration for a given brand. Want to talk about this topic or other programmatic news or even strategic questions? We’d love to hear from you: all@venturagrowth.com