Even if you have the best product developers, your business is still not complete without a good marketing strategy. It’s the process of marketing that gets the word about your offers out there. Without it, your target market will be practically unaware of your existence.

Now, posts on random walls or a few status shares on social media will not be enough. You have to bring your communication efforts to where the people are. Many companies invest a lot in sponsorships just so they get their logos on jumbotrons and posters during big events. Some pay thousands or even millions of dollars just to get ad placements on TV.

Determining the right venue or medium for your marketing campaign is something that business development professionals can help you with. For sure, many of them will tell you to be aggressive in the virtual world since most people spend so much time there already. They will tell you to post your ads on sites that attract high traffic. But is the number of visits the only metric that you need to consider? In this article, we present other metrics that you need to look at.

Bounce Rate

Website analytics present many other data aside from the number of visits that a particular page or website attracts. One of these is the bounce rate, which basically pertains to the percentage of users who closed the landing page or clicked Back to be redirected to the search engine results. The higher the bounce rate is, the worse the landing page is interpreted to be. Most probably, it does not deliver what the user expected to see when they opened the page.

When you place your ads on pages with high bounce rates, the chances are low that it will be seen, let alone clicked, by your target audience. How can they when they do not even interact with the host page?

Session Length

In website analytics, a session is basically a user’s visit. It starts from that user’s entry through a landing page and ends with their eventual departure from the site. If a user goes back to the site, even through the same landing page as last time, it will now be considered another session as the first one is deemed to have ended.

Now, a website can report that they get a lot of sessions each day. But you need to look deeper and see the average length of those sessions. If you see that session lengths do not last more than five to ten seconds, you might want to look for a better place to post ads. You see, five to ten seconds is too short a period for us to reasonably expect the users to even catch a glimpse of your ads, which, mind you, are actually not the main content of the page.

Where to Get These Additional Data?

Administrators of websites, if they really are serious about their online business, usually monitor their site’s performance. They use tools such as Google Analytics to see the number of visits and all other data that we talked about above. Hence, you can always ask for screenshots of their site statistics so that you or your consultants will be able to make better decisions regarding ad placements.