“Dear client, we are ecstatic to report that your recent banner campaign has delivered 501 conversions. What’s more due to budget cuts we only spent $0.10 on creative so the ROI is looking fantastic.
In response to this low creative budget we came up with the innovative approach of using a completely invisible banner ad for the campaign. Very creative if we do say so ourselves!
Now you may feel that an invisible banner would be slightly ineffective at building demand and driving conversions but we are happy to report that thanks to our cutting edge post view conversion tracking technology we were able to track 501 conversions from users who were exposed to this banner.”
Campaign Summary
- Campaign Impressions: 13,849,407
- Campaign Clicks: 0
- Campaign Conversions: 501
Ok, all a bit silly, but this campaign is real. TPN created an invisible banner (a 1×1 pixel) and ran this across a few popular websites on our network. We used “standard” post view (impression) conversion tracking to tag users with a cookie once they had loaded the invisible banner and then the system followed them though to the advertisers site where conversions were recorded using a TPN tracker pixel.
If this campaign was real (visible banner) we would have expected 1000 post click conversions, so 500 for not even displaying a banner is not bad 
Why would we do this?
The inspiration for this campaign has its origins in a conversation with a client and their agency where we questioned how budget was being allocated on the basis of “raw” post view conversion data. We tried to explain that “raw” post view conversions is really a measure of a channels reach and not of its direct response effectiveness. For example if you exposed 100% of the internet population to a banner then all the clients conversions could be linked to the banner via raw post view tracking.
The conversation ended with us being told that post view was the “industry standard” and so we should effectively ignore common sense and reality as it was all a bit too hard (don’t rock the boat). Just because something is an industry standard does not mean that it is correct, nuclear testing in the pacific was the “industry standard” but maybe it was not the greatest idea ever.
Now we are not saying that exposure to display ads does not indirectly benefit site traffic and conversions, but we would say that using raw post impression tracking is misleading and is often used irresponsibly just because it generates a big number and ROI.
How should you do it?
It is possible to use post view conversion tracking in a responsible way by working with a network like TPN who can exclude a “control group” who are still tagged with a view pixel but are blocked from seeing any ads from the campaign. The conversion rate of this “non-exposed” group can then be compared to the “exposed” group with the difference in conversion rates being the post view “uplift” of the campaign. This data allows the real post view conversion to be calculated.
There are still a number of other aspects that need to be taken into account if your mission is to estimate non-direct benefits of your campaign but at least you will be working with meaningful post view data rather than the “industry standard” BS.
“Real Post View” tracking is currently in beta so please contact us if you are interested in trialling with one of your TPN campaigns.
