Once your advertisements are running, WaypointAds begins collecting information about how they are performing. You don't need to become a statistician to make use of it. A few straightforward numbers can tell you whether your advertisements are being seen and whether visitors are responding to them.

Return to your WaypointAds Dashboard and you will begin to see those numbers grow as advertisements are displayed and visitors interact with them.

Impressions

An impression is recorded when WaypointAds displays an advertisement.

If a Creative appears 100 times, it has received 100 impressions. This does not necessarily mean 100 different people saw the advertisement. The same visitor may see it more than once while moving around your website or returning to a page.

Impressions are useful because they tell you how much exposure an advertisement is receiving.

If you have several Campaigns running, their impression counts can also help you understand which advertising positions receive the most activity.

Clicks

A click is recorded when a visitor clicks an advertisement through WaypointAds. Clicks provide another useful piece of the picture. An advertisement may receive plenty of impressions but very few clicks, while another Creative might attract considerably more attention from the same amount of exposure. That doesn't automatically make one advertisement good and another bad. Different advertisements have different purposes. A branding advertisement may be valuable simply because it is seen repeatedly, while another Campaign may be intended specifically to encourage visitors to click.

Click-Through Rate

WayPointAds can also use impressions and clicks together to show the Click-Through Rate, usually shortened to CTR. CTR tells you what percentage of recorded impressions resulted in a click.

For example, if an advertisement receives 1,000 impressions and 20 clicks, its CTR is 2%.

This makes it easier to compare advertisements that have received different amounts of exposure. Twenty clicks might sound better than ten, but not if the first advertisement required ten times as many impressions to get them.

Choosing a Date Range

Statistics become much more useful when you look at them over a particular period. The Dashboard's date controls allow you to examine advertising activity for different periods rather than relying entirely on lifetime totals.

This can help answer practical questions such as:

• How did the advertisement perform this week?
• Has activity increased this month?
• What has happened since I changed the Creative?

Looking at reasonable periods also prevents an older Campaign with months of accumulated activity from making a newer Campaign appear unsuccessful simply because it has not been running as long.

Comparing Campaigns

As you add more Campaigns and Creatives, the statistics become increasingly useful.

You may discover that one Zone receives considerably more impressions than another. You might find that one Creative receives more clicks even though both are displayed in the same location. Over time, those differences can help you decide where advertising performs well and what kinds of Creatives attract attention.

Don't read too much into very small numbers, though. If an advertisement has been displayed twelve times and clicked once, there isn't enough information to declare it the greatest advertising campaign since somebody first painted "Cold Beer" on the side of a building.

Give the numbers time to become meaningful.

Statistics Are Information

WaypointAds statistics are there to help you understand what is happening, not to make decisions for you.

Impressions tell you how often advertisements are being displayed. Clicks tell you when visitors interact with them. CTR helps put those two figures into perspective.

Combined with your own knowledge of your website and its visitors, those numbers can help you make better decisions about Campaigns, Creatives, and advertising positions.

And unlike your first advertisement, which deserved a few celebratory page reloads, you don't need to sit there refreshing the Dashboard to watch the numbers change.

WaypointAds will keep counting without supervision.

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