White Paper Pundit

Today advertising experts are touting the meteoric rise of online advertising. In response, many consumer-focused companies have dedicated a portion of their total marketing budgets, (about 5%) for online purposes.

With most marketing mediums, advertisers want measurability. In direct mail, the classic formula for success has been around 2%, in consumer response. For online advertising the measure of success is a 2% to 3% based on its click-through rate.

But that may be changing according to blogger Mark Evans, of the MarkEvansTech blog. In his post entitled, “Do Click-Throughs Really Matter“, Mark poses an interesting perspective on the issue:

“With the online advertising market growing by leaps and bounds – although still only 5% of total ad spending – there’s lot of discussion about how advertisers measure success. Is it click-throughs? Is it measured by purchases, the amount of information collected or downloads of white papers, etc.? According to the Journal of Consumer Research, the most important thing for advertisers is exposure and ads that make a consumer feel good about a brand or product. If that’s the case, do click-throughs matter? If not, then there’s little to worry about click-through rates of 2% to 3% if you’re really lucky. Perhaps the power of online advertising is just being there and offering creative that resonates with consumers.”

If exposure is now the measure of success instead of click-throughs, what does this say for measuring white paper success? Until now most companies have measured the success of their white papers based on the number of downloads. Of course, if someone downloads it, reads it, and doesn’t like it, how does that get measured? The bottom line is that it doesn’t, invalidating the use of downloads as the sole measurement of white paper success.

Perhaps one solution to Mark’s theory would be to initiate a rating scale for the content in a white paper library, similar to the way that online reviewers provide one to five stars for books and music on Amazon.com. This of course, assumes that someone will have the diligence to getting back online and providing that input after downloading and reading a white paper.

Either way, it seems that as online advertising matures, marketers are looking for new ways to better measure success. Maybe if exposure is the new measurement stick, then the success of a white paper will be based on the number of people exposed to it (read that as readability and comprehension) as opposed to merely click-throughs and downloads.

Well, at least I can dream about it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 8:15 am and is filed under Industry Insights, WP Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.