The main reason that SEO and SMM have become such popular methods of advertising is that they are relatively easy to monitor and assess. With many search engine optimisation tools available now that can provide immense detail on visitors to your website, not to mention good old quantitative data, SEO seems like a foolproof advertising approach as you can see the effectiveness of a campaign so accurately. The ability to get a ‘cost per click’ on paid advertisements or sponsored links is deemed so important to marketing departments and managers, that it appears online marketing methods are the best way to go.
There is no denying that this is a positive factor and lack of evidence regarding campaign effectiveness is something that does let a lot of other traditional media down. That being said, these traditional methods have been around for a very long time and have proven themselves in other ways, so perhaps their slight step away from 100% accuracy and reporting has done them and the clients that use them a favour.
Take television and press advertisements as a prime example. We can be told how many people are watching a specific channel at that time, more recently there has even been the facility to monitor individual households and obtain demographic information regarding the household members. The same goes for press. Circulation figures are what newspapers and magazines sell themselves on and there is no mistaking that press is still heavily consumed. However, the problem is that from a marketer’s point of view, there always has and always will be a major flaw with these traditional methods.
It is easy to assess how many people are tuned into a specific television channel, just as it is to know how many people receive a copy of a particular press item. What we do not know is how many people are actually watching the television or reading the paper. If we ask the average person on the street, a large proportion will say they use the advertisement break within television to do something else, such as make a drink. There are research studies available which demonstrate how an audience consumes advertising through various channels, yet it is still not fully accurate.
If we focus just on this then we would be less likely to use traditional advertising methods, yet the truth is that there is much more to them than just hardcore data, and this is sometimes the problem with SEO. We focus so much on monitoring click through rates (CTRs) and link quantity that we can forget that SEO is still an internet marketing strategy. What we see traditional advertising do is assess the overall improvement, whether that is profit or sign ups, during a specific period of time when advertising ran. Whilst this is a very general approach, it ultimately tells you that the advertising is positively affecting your business as a whole. Whilst CTRs are great, it would not hurt the SEO world to look at all the other benefits they are getting for the business in general.
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Posted by Jon.
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