Even if you don’t know the term, you’ve definitely seen digital display advertising - probably multiple times already today. In its most common form, it’s all those boxes and banners you see scattered across almost every website on the internet.

Many of these ads will beg you to ‘find out more’ or ‘click here’. But of course you won’t; few people do. The average click-through rate (the ratio of clicks on an ad to the total number of people who have seen it) for an online display ad is just 0.05%.

Yet for many years, clicks and click-through rates have been used as the primary metric for understanding the effectiveness of online advertising. It seems like a hard sell. Indeed, if other mediums, such as email, outperform digital display ads in click-through rate, it may seem like a no-brainer. But, if 60% of SMEs still use paid digital advertising, there must be more to it.

When developing our self-service ad platform, we found that a common and frustrating issue advertisers had was with performance being solely judged by click-through rate.

Thankfully, the industry has started to wake up to this too. In 2019, the Internet Advertising Bureau UK (IAB) declared a National Anti-Click-Through Rate Day, with the memorable tagline ‘Don’t be a clickhead’. The IAB argues (and we agree) that conducting brand studies - measuring the holistic impact of your advertising on your business’s name recognition and reputation - should be advertisers’ new priority.

Click-centric campaign measurement has ended up missing most of the actual effects of digital advertising. This is because it ignores the marketing funnel - the journey a customer makes in 4 stages towards a sale.

This journey starts with customers’ becoming aware of your company when they first hear about it; then they consider whether they are interested in what you sell. Eventually those customers will prefer your business over your competitors, before finally taking action with a purchase.

Click-through rate doesn’t map onto any of these stages, telling you very little about whether you’re achieving results in any of them. Display advertising’s real strength lies in getting people into the top of the funnel: generating awareness of your business. You can then build your brand through repeated exposure and clever retargeting.

Let’s be honest - you probably don’t remember the last ad you clicked on, but you probably do remember seeing advertising from various specific brands whose marketing you can recognise instantly.

Here are just a few ways of understanding the real effectiveness of online advertising across each stage of the funnel, and how it builds your brand in ways clicks could never tell you.

Awareness

Logo recognition

There are a few company logos that almost everyone on Earth is familiar with - McDonalds, Coca Cola, Ikea, Google, Nike, Apple, Microsoft.

These graphics are part of the fabric of our lives, and many of us will see several in the space of a day, from putting our shoes on in the morning to turning off our phones at night.

Their instant recognisability is a result of a whole mix of factors - great design, longevity, mass production, market capture and effective saturation.

Of course, some of these factors aren’t really relevant or achievable for some of the largest companies in the UK, let alone a small or local business. But whatever your size, a great logo remains a deeply powerful asset that speaks for itself.

Online advertising allows you to serve your logo at scale to a targeted audience, eventually imprinting it in people’s heads. Clicks really don’t matter in this context - what matters is getting the logo seen by the right audience in the right place.

Hosting your advertising in quality environments like your local news website is proven to boost its effect on brand awareness by over 10%. Check out how to get your ads up and running in a place people will pay attention.

Consideration & Preference

Say more with less

Decent display advertising should give people an instant impression of your business as a brand: not just who you are and what you sell, but your core qualities, quirks and values too.

Rather than dispassionately informing people that you exist, your advertising should communicate something essential about you; something that makes you qualitatively different from competitors.

All the elements of your branding - your colour scheme, your tone of voice, your use of imagery - must cohere within a small space to communicate exactly what you want to put across about yourself. Even more importantly, your branding must be used consistently from one campaign to the next, building and reinforcing recognition over time.

It’s very hard to make a big impact on a viewer from a single exposure. Repeatedly putting your material in front of your target audience in a premium context, across a number of campaigns, is the only way to get those essential messages across. Eventually, people won’t just be thinking about who your business is; they’ll already know, and will have moved on to wondering what you could do for them and whether to give you a try.

Action

Get your name out there to prepare the ground for sales

Name recognition is a factor in advertising that we’d most naturally associate with the top of the funnel; making people aware of your brand as a prelude to their journey towards a sale.

However, this fundamental task of marketing is hugely important at later stages of the funnel too. While people do make impulse or emergency purchases from businesses they’ve not previously heard of, it’s not that common.

As mobile marketing guru Larry Kim writes, “The single biggest predictor of whether people will purchase is whether they've heard of you before.” A brand awareness campaign, targeted at a responsive audience, lays the vital groundwork of name recall that you can then build on with a campaign on a more sales-oriented platform like Google Ads.

Whatever your click rate, a brand awareness campaign creates the conditions that make people more likely to go through the whole sales funnel (and back down it again later).

Brand awareness can still be measured

Discover the true impact of your campaigns

It’s not even as if turning your attention away from clicks will leave you without tangible data on how your ads are performing. It’s now possible and affordable for businesses of all sizes to prove the value of their awareness campaigns with brand studies.

Until recently, brand studies were not a realistic option for most SMEs, with the likes of Facebook only offering them for campaigns over £20K in ad spend. However, we now offer a comprehensive brand study as standard to our advertising partners, courtesy of our independent analytics providers Brand Metrics. Making that vital brand lift data accessible to everyone, with more marketers than ever able to answer that crucial question, “did my campaign work?”.

Whatever your click rate actually is, don’t get too hung up on it. There’s so much more happening when you get your brand out there than simple taps of the mouse button. You’re embedding your name and visual identity in people’s heads, making them think through what you offer and pushing them closer to the cash register.

For more advice on understanding the real effectiveness of online advertising, check out some more of our content

• DIY advertising: how self-service platforms can boost your digital advertising campaigns
• 5 reasons why more advertisers are choosing local media over social media marketing

William Shakespeare once said, "Don't believe everything you read on Facebook."

Okay, maybe it wasn't the great bard, but the idea rings true. For businesses it poses the question: If trust is an issue, is social media the best place to market your brand?

Will social media marketing become obsolete?

The short answer is no. It's still an integral part of the marketing toolkit, and will continue to be so for some time.

But, there are growing concerns among media experts - 77% think that falling trust in social platforms will negatively impact media spend.

For many businesses, there is the added dilemma of knowing which platform to dedicate money, time and resources to. With so many to choose from, it can be hard to know where your target audience is and how to reach them.

How is local media different?

In the light of growing scepticism of social media advertising, traditional media platforms like local news, radio and TV, offer an alternative way to advertise your business.

For many SMEs, regional news offers an effective way of advertising vs. the pricier options of TV and radio. And, thanks to self-serve advertising, it’s accessible to those with even the most modest of marketing budgets.

In fact, there are some strong reasons why your local news title could be the right choice to advertise online with.

1. A more trusted platform

Social media platforms encourage users to share personal information, but at the same time they need to prove they can keep it safe. Unfortunately, there have been a number of high profile data breaches in the last decade. Leading to people placing less stock in these platforms.

As Warren Buffett said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” (This one's a genuine quote)

Local news brands, on the other hand, are highly regarded by readers. In fact, consumers trust local print and online media three times more than social media*. Part of that is because traditional media is held to a higher level of scrutiny and accountability, thanks to being regulated by organisations like IPSO and ASA.

By picking a trustworthy platform to advertise on, a brand can build credibility and confidence, increasing the chance of potential leads becoming paying customers.

2. Quality over quantity

Advertising with a regional news platform offers a better experience, thanks to first-party data. Users tend to stay on a news page for longer, as they actively click to view the topics that interest them. This can extend the time they view your ad, making it more likely that they'll recognise and recall your brand when they're ready to buy.

In contrast, the average social media user spends just 0.7 seconds viewing an ad, as they scroll past enough content to scale the height of the empire state building every day. Making it significantly harder for your ad to get noticed.

High-quality data allows you to target the desired audience, letting you reach the right people for your business. Knowing who you're talking to, also means you can personalise your ads, making them appeal to your ideal customer.

3. A higher level of privacy

You don’t need to look for long to find stories of intrusion of privacy or misuse of data on social media. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is just one such example. It highlights the conflict of interest for social networks to keep both users and advertisers happy, while not falling foul of complex regulations.

In contrast, local news sites typically have clear privacy policies in place, explaining exactly how they record data and keep it safe. You can read ours here.

Privacy being a primary customer concern, brands should think seriously about their digital presence. 52% of social media users say protecting their privacy and data is incredibly impactful on their decision to interact with ads. And 43% say they’d switch from their preferred brand to a second-choice brand if the latter provided a good privacy experience.

4. Build awareness of your brand

Developing awareness of your brand on social media can be effective and rewarding, but it’s also a challenge. It’s crowded with other brands trying to grab people’s attention, making it hard to stand out. And it's hard for brands with small budgets or fewer followers to be able to make a splash big enough to make a return on their investment.

Advertising with a local news title is a great and cost-effective way for new customers to discover your brand. Allowing you to build brand awareness, so that when potential customers are looking to make a purchase, they’re more likely to think of you.

With self-serve advertising you can give people who’ve never come across your brand a strong first impression, no matter your marketing budget.

Discover more about the effectiveness of online advertising.

5. Puts your message in the right place

Advertising on social media doesn't allow you to control the kind of content your ad is seen next to. Meaning there’s a risk your brand will appear next to content you wouldn’t want to be associated with.

One method that National World Ad Manager offers, and is growing in popularity, is contextual advertising. This places your ads alongside content that’s relevant to your products.

For example, placing an ad for athletic clothing next to an article about running. It’s already a safe bet that the people reading the content are interested in the subject, so you have a better chance of being a brand they think of, when they’re considering buying.

Is local media advertising right for my business?

Good advertising strategy calls for a mix of marketing channels to be most effective. It’s important to think about what’s right for the goals you want to achieve.

Social media platforms have always been popular because of their advertising platforms. But now, local news brands provide a strong alternative - a self-serve model, on a more trusted platform, with better privacy and higher-quality data. It’s also a cost-effective way to build your brand awareness with the right audience beside relevant content.

*YouGov/Local Media Works, 2018