How to measure post-view conversions

Marketers often use banner and video ads to promote products. But if your sales are generally growing, how can you figure out what advertising has affected this growth and in what way? How can you know who saw your ad and then went to your site and converted into customers? After all, purchases can be made weeks after watching a video! A post-view conversion report reveals this information.

Want to measure the effectiveness of media advertising and understand which video or banner led to a sale? Try OWOX BI and create your own post-view conversion report.

A report on post-view conversions — conversions after a consumer has viewed an ad — helps you understand how ad views affect sales of your goods or services. The buying algorithm often looks like this:

1. The user sees a promotional video or banner ad on a third-party site.
2. The user doesn’t click on the ad (skips half the video, scrolls past the banner, leaves the site).
3. After a while, the user goes to your site and performs a targeted action (buys the item you were advertising).

Such conversions are called post-view conversions. It’s almost impossible to track them because there’s no direct connection between the advertising (a video or banner ad) and the purchase itself.

The trick is to link a user who saw an ad weeks or even months ago on a third-party site with that user’s conversion activity on your site. In the case of deferred conversions, there’s no direct link to the transition. In addition, to track post-view conversions, you need to negotiate with advertising sites. And because many of them are market giants (Google, Facebook, YouTube), it makes things more difficult.

At OWOX BI, we’ve worked with one of the largest multi-channel retailers of consumer appliances and electronics in Ukraine together with the 1+1 Digital media holding to track post-view conversions. You can read a description of our solution on the OWOX blog.

It isn’t possible to calculate post-view conversions by simply pressing a few buttons. First off, you’ll need access to media advertising data on third-party sites. And for this purpose, you must directly cooperate with those sites. You’ll also need a special tracking code that links data on ad views without clicks to activity on your site or in your physical store — that is, data on online and offline sales.

The OWOX BI team uses the OWOX BI Tracking Tag to track post-view conversions. To use this tag, you’ll need to:

• configure the collection of raw unsampled user activity data on your site
• prepare a separate tag for each creative (banner or video) in the ad campaign you’re going to track (You can find detailed instructions on how to implement an OWOX BI Tracking Tag to track conversions in Google Ads Manager in the OWOX BI Help Center.)
• know media ad rotation dates
• collect all data in a single repository, such as Google BigQuery

In addition, your publisher should implement the OWOX BI Tracking Tag in their ad management system. Only then will your Google BigQuery project receive data on ad views.

With OWOX BI Tracking Tags, data is collected at the user level and transmitted in real time to your Google BigQuery project. You’ll now be able to track your customer’s entire path, from viewing ads to going to your website and shopping. With this data, you can calculate the media ad’s ROAS and CPA and get a post-view report.

Read the joint OWOX BI and 1+1 Digital case study on how to measure the effectiveness of video ads.

With a post-view conversions report, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your media advertising:

• Analyze ad views that didn’t lead the viewer directly to the site
• Determine all customer touchpoints
• Measure the ROAS of media ads
• Assess the level of involvement of a new audience
• Increase micro and macro conversions
• Optimize the allocation of your advertising budget

If your business actively uses media ads for promotion, without a post-view report you won’t know which banner, video, and platform brings you the most profit.

Thanks to the OWOX BI dashboard shown above, you can answer the following questions:

• Which advertising campaigns and which platforms best motivate users to visit the site?
• How much has the value of an attracted customer or order increased, taking into account the additional costs of the advertising campaign?
• How many new customers, orders, and purchases did each ad campaign generate?

And with this version of the report, you can see the KPIs for video ads, both overall and by site:

• ROAS with online and offline sales
• CPA taking into account the costs of video and context ads that participated in the sales funnel

Want to build reports like post-view, LTV, and ROPO? Try OWOX BI for a trial period. You'll see how to use it to overcome your marketing analytics challenges.

Use a post-view conversions report to understand which channels work best with media ads, which should be abandoned, and which budgets should be increased. With this report, you can link displays to sales and settlements:

• Customer cost involvement
• Return on video advertising

In other words, it will become clear whether your ad money was spent productively.

If you still have questions, ask in the comments below:)

And if you want to learn more about post-view conversions and other topics in the field of marketing analytics, subscribe to our newsletter with useful tips for today’s marketers and analysts.