Lost metric: conversion from impressions

Optimizing performance and get the best results of advertising campaigns – a key goal for mobile advertising marketers. WapStart account managers main goal is to helps clients reach their KPI quickly. Account managers run dozens of client campaigns on a daily bases gathering a lot of insights and metrics to apply tomorrow.

However, even the main conversion metric (CPI or CPA) is frequently calculated differently or incompletely. Some only look at the conversion from Ad clicks, others – through impressions by attributing actions to viewed ads but not necessarily clicked. The second way of calculation is often overlooked by advertisers, but allows tracking end user actions and get a more accurate data about the effectiveness of advertising campaigns in the system.

Evaluation of conversions from ad impressions is the standard post-view conversion, in which the target action is attributed to the channel through which the last Ad was shown before the user made the action. In other words, which Ad impression “pushed” the user to make a purchase or lead. The difference with the conversion from clicks is that the click conversion occurs when a user clicks on an ad, and then performs the conversion on the mobile site.

Mikhail Evdokimov, head of account management:

“The importance of post-view conversions is that it provides a way to measure the true organic install and actions. Without post-view conversions it is impossible to get information about organic installs and to separate the installs which directly or indirectly resulted from marketing activities.

We have a great recent case from one of our major advertisers to demonstrate this. The campaign had generated 12,724,257 impressions of mobile ads and received 140,550 clicks. The advertiser got 1658 installs, which were made from clicks  and additional 8 475 from post-impressions. Thus, the conversion form clicks is 1.18%, and conversion from the impressions, which were made post-view is 7,2%.

Lets assume customer was pay 1 ruble per-click, the installation cost is then 84.77 rubles. Whereas, taking the post-view information into account, the cost of installation drops considerably to 13.87 rubles.”

The importance of this metric is the ability to give a more accurate assessment of the cost-effectiveness of media campaigns and optimizing based on the complete picture of the user actions. View-through conversions allows us to determine the value of advertisements for each channel more objectively. Using this metric, you can define a list of effective publishers or audience groups for a particular campaign, excluding the ones that give the least conversion, and optimize your campaigns based on user feedback, even if there were no clicks.

About WapStart
WapStart is the largest mobile advertising network in Russia and CIS. The company provides services to thousands of mobile websites and applications within local and international markets. Monthly WapStart audience reach is 40 million people and over 5 billion impressions. WapStart possesses advanced technologies of targeting and audience analysis, allowing to carry out advertising campaigns in mobile environment with high investment profitability.