In the age of doom scrolling and absent attention spans, it’s important to be intentional in advertising to ensure that a qualified audience will be reached, not someone who will scroll past an ad they have no interest in, in less time than it takes you to say ‘bed-rot’. At Blackfoot, we prefer to place importance on the metrics that matter, such as completed video views, conversions, reach to a relevant audience, and viewability.

While a high volume of impressions might seem to indicate success, this rarely translates into efficiently generated conversions if you’re not reaching the right people. Often, when planning a media campaign, we will prioritise engagement and conversion based goals so activity can optimise to meaningful interactions rather than serving ads to potentially uninterested users. Engagement based promotion objectives are often more effective in generating Viewable Impressions when compared to Awareness based promotion objectives, helping to ensure clients are achieving both efficient reach as well as user consideration.

When relevant, a way to increase efficiencies is to create tailored audience segments so that only relevant age and gender demographics are reached, as well as consumers with an active interest in similar products, or even those within 10km of a store! This significantly reduces wastage of campaign budgets, and while it may increase the cost per impressions, you’re almost guaranteed an improved ROI. Reaching relevant audiences can increase conversion rates, reduce costs, and also identify users that are more inclined to be loyal customers.

Viewability is also important, as it is measures how many people saw an ad for long enough that the content has the opportunity to draw attention. An impression counts the load of an ad, whether or not that was scrolling too fast to see the ad or it loaded further down a feed and was never reached. Looking at viewable impressions can give us a better understanding of who has really seen the ads and which channels are more likely to offer a longer attention span from users.
In marketing, it’s not just important to reach a broad audience, but also to ensure that a qualified audience is being reached. With these campaign strategies and focusses, we can increase the likelihood of ads being interacted with, conversions achieved, and relationships built with customers.