I often wonder what portion of a client’s post-view conversions they’d see if they weren’t running ads. That is, how many conversions would have happened anyhow, regardless of whether or not the user(s) see my client’s ad? It’s similar to discussing whether or not to turn SEM ads on or off related to your brand keywords, should your brand name be a popular one.

Consider that an ad impression can happen without the user noticing the ad, or without the ad image itself even being visible on the user’s screen. Post-click is what we’re all used to tracking, of course, but there’s value in discerning what your post-view (no ad click) reach looks like. At the very least, you’d like to think that you’re paying to display your ads in places where users are more likely [than average] to be your customer, and that they saw your ad on the screen. As cookies go away and privacy settings evolve, even post-click website activity can be difficult to attribute to specific digital sources. Even with a focus on post-click activity, this analysis can be insightful.

It’s important to understand what post-view can mean, though. For example, it’s entirely possible to “reach” an audience, even saturate an audience with ads for a brief time, and then wait for conversions to roll-in. For example, we recently unpacked a “Geofencing” tool that a client was running and found that 90% of their impressions were derived from 320×50 mobile, in-app placements, mostly games. Their CPM was low, CTR was high, CPC was low, and it laid claim to tens of thousands of in-store visits for their retail client. As it turns out, of the 30,000 or so in-store conversions they’d claim in a month, over 98% were post-view, with those users never having interacted with an ad. Never mind that only 50% of the ad clicks registered a site session (incidental or accidental clicks), or that the clicks which did reach the site showed a 95% bounce rate and an average session duration of 0:02. It’s very possible to leverage cheap online placements and make a pile of trash look successful on paper.

Beyond digging through your data, consider using a PSA to track users who have NOT seen your ad as a means to know what portion of your audience might convert without seeing any ads. It’s an interesting approach, though it can be difficult to segment that population and ensure that they only see the PSA ads. It’s not critical for most clients, but for some it’s important to know how many people “would have” converted anyhow, had you not spent money on paid ads to reach them.

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