First Impressions: Assessing Google Adwords & Twitter’s Reach

I recently had a discussion with the marketing director of a large theatre, where my touring play was showing for one week.  He was trying to persuade me to run a Google Adwords campaign and I was resisting.  I’ve said below why I decided against a generic Adwords campaign and a localised one for a very limited run seemed even less advisable.

He kept saying to me that the last campaign they ran generated 250,000 impressions.  Sounds impressive?  I asked him what his Click Through Rate was and he said low (less than 0.5%, which in my experience is par for the course).  I asked him how many tickets he had sold as a result of the investment and he said hardly any.  Why then, when my main objective with the limited spend I had was to sell tickets, was he pushing me to use this method?

It was arguably more in his interest than mine to run the campaign, as it would put his theatre before a potentially large number of people, at my expense.  My argument was that if I have a shop and 250,000 people walk past, a few look in the window but nobody comes in and buys, I’m bankrupt.  He saw my point but still kept saying “but we got 250,000 impressions.”

I ran an Adwords campaign a couple of years ago which got 10,000 hits on my website and sales from that proved it to be a good ROI.  In order to get those 10,000 hits, my ad had to appear before more than 2,000,000 people.  Although the keywords were carefully refined and monitored and I led a high maintenance campaign, the CTR was 0.38%, not high but we were dipping into a difficult and quite generic market.

What impresses me is not the big number (all that tells me is I have to improve my CTR) but the bottom end – how many clickthroughs, how many sales.  It’s easy to be seduced by the big numbers but they don’t mean much unless they have an end result that makes financial sense.

Like so much in marketing, it’s a numbers game and you have to know your numbers.  You need to send out 10,000 emails, in order to get 1,000 openings and sell 40 tickets.  When a venue marketing manager suggests activity to me, I ask for an ROI illustration, so they understand what they’re asking of me.

I could have been proud that my ad had been put before so many people but it seems to me that’s a bit like saying “I’ve driven around London for a day, so 8 million people could have seen me.”  I’m dubious about the subliminal value of an ad seen out of the corner of an eye.  The vast majority of your impressions are wastage.

If objectives were longer term, then maybe there’s a value in a drip-drip, subliminal exposure to words or image but not when you have a clear and immediate aim.  To me, the marketing director in this case was not seeing the need clearly.

So, to Twitter.  Some people seem to believe if you have 1,000 followers then 1,000 people will read any message you tweet (OK, no-one actually believes that but some sort of do).  It seems to me that only a handful of followers will see your message at any one time (a bigger handful as numbers of followers grow but still a small proportion).  Like the population of London as you drive round, it’s only those who happen to be looking out of their windows or walking down the street as you pass who may see you.  And that’s supposing they haven’t got other things on their minds.  OK, Twitter followers are more targeted (providing you’ve cleared all the rubbish out) but hopefully you get my point.

If you hold an event which 100 people attend and most of them tweet about it, and are then re-tweeted so many times, your maximum potential audience soon expands to some astronomical figure (let’s say 250,000 as it’s a nice round number and has a ring to it).  That’s entirely possible.  Again, it’s exciting to hear that sort of number but how accurate is it?  All it describes is the maximum number of people who could hear about you through Twitter (like the 8,000,000 in London).

Unlike Google Adwords, Twitter is not a marketing tool.  Its benefits and measures are soft but let’s not use that as an excuse for getting carried away.  Without curbing our imaginations (valuable even in my world), you have to be realistic about the effect you’re having.  We can measure so much more now with the new technology so let’s not return to a culture of “pluck it out of the air and hope for the best.”

It’s easy to dwell on the big numbers; you can infer any sort of number you want if you’re not going to be held accountable for your calculation.

What’s impressive is that 100 people attended, lots of them tweeted and some were RT’d.  To infer a readership beyond that is a step too far.  Sure, we could reach 250,000 people from small beginnings but only on a theoretical level. Beware first impressions.

If anyone has any contradictory evidence, let’s hear it.  I love to have my views challenged.