August 31st, 2010
The Cost of an Action
This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.
When we work on campaigns for clients, our aim is to understand one thing in particular: how much did it cost to get a desired outcome from the campaign? That is, how much did it cost to get a sign-up, a purchase, or the like. This is true even if the primary goal is to create awareness about something, or to create a shift in some key brand perception metric.
Knowing how much it cost you to achieve a goal allows you to compare various ways of getting to that goal to see what the most efficient way to achieve it is.
With that in mind, let’s explore how the Naked Campaign worked for us.
One of the things that we were interested in knowing for this campaign, was how much it cost to get a targeted person to our site. Here’s how that broke down:
“Spend”
Google (after filtering click fraud): $53.22
LinkedIn: $199.24
Site Visits
Google: 30
LinkedIn: 14
Bounce Rate (% of visits that saw just one page; we don’t count these people as interested for our purposes)
Google: 96.67%
LinkedIn: 92.86%
“Engaged” Visits
Google: 1
LinkedIn: 1
Cost per Engaged Visit (Cost/Engaged Visits)
Google: $53.22
LinkedIn: $199.24
As you can see, ultimately there was not enough “engaged” traffic for us to get a solid sense of how much it would cost for each engaged visitor that came through each of these sites.
If there had been enough traffic to have solid numbers, then clearly Google would be the better candidate for further investment. We could also have used these numbers to establish a success threshold for other acquisition campaigns. We know it cost us $53 to get an engaged visit to the site. All other things equal, activities that had a higher cost per engaged visitor would not warrant further investment.