1. White Walker cold traffic

First, we’re going to discuss strategies and metrics that revolve around generating traffic to your website that’s cold as ice.

Blog post driven ads

Creating ads for blog posts on your website is a great way to generate leads from the traffic you already have flowing in on a daily basis.

Your goal with blog posts isn’t so much to make sales. That’s a huge leap for someone reading a simple post to get a little information about a topic. Most likely, they’re not ready to buy just yet.

Instead, focus on top-of-the-funnel metrics like traffic generation and page engagement. Advertisements like this provide an excellent strategy for driving ice cold traffic to your website.

When running blog post ads, here are the metrics you should track.

• Click-through rate: This will tell you directly how much traffic the ad is driving to your website.
• Engagement rate: This tells you how many people spent a noteworthy amount of time viewing and engaging with your advertisement. Meaning that those people are now familiar with your business.
• Type of engagement (positive or negative): Differentiating between positive and negative engagement is critical. Look at comments, types of reactions, and what people say when they share it. This will tell you not only how many people are engaging with your ad, but what they think of it.

Low-commitment keywords

Every keyword phrase is different.

Some keyword phrases indicate that the searcher is looking for advice. Others, how to do something. And others still, how to purchase.

In this section, we’re going to focus on low-commitment (or ice cold) keyword phrases. These searchers aren’t interested in buying yet, but they are exploring things within your niche to become more familiar with the topics, problems, and pain points.

These are often “how to” phrases, such as “how to generate leads online.”

They might be open to the prospect of working with you. But right now, they are just looking at their options.

When you’re targeting these keywords, here are the metrics you should pay attention to.

• Click-through rate: The more people that click on your result, the more traffic and brand awareness you’ll generate.
• Page scroll depth: This metrics will tell you how far people are scrolling through the page they click on. Do they scroll through the whole thing? Or only the first half? Then, ask yourself why that is the case.
• Time on page: The more time that people spend on your page, the better that page’s ranking. Plus, it tells you how engaged people are with your content or sales copy.
• Bounce rate: If people bounce off your page, it not only hurts your rankings. It also means that people aren’t interested in what you’re talking about. In other words, the keywords you’re targeting and the topic of your page aren’t in line.

Direct mail

98% of consumers bring their mail inside the same day it’s delivered, and 77% sort through it immediately.

(Image Source)

Even if people throw your direct mailer away, they saw your brand name, logo, and message. And that means they’re more likely to think of you later on if they ever require your services. Before the direct mailer, that wouldn’t have been the case.

Of course, you can use direct mailers to only target your customers or clients. But here, we’re discussing high-level direct mail campaigns. In other words, sending direct mail to a lot of people who may or may not be interested in what you have to offer.

When Uber Eats and Airtasker were launching in Australia, they’d send these flyers straight to people’s mailbox.

Here are the metrics that matter most when sending high-level direct mail campaigns.

• Response rate: You should always measure response rate regardless of whether your campaign is high or low-level. This tells you how many people are engaging with your mailer, which helps you determine whether you’re targeting the right people or not.
• Cost per acquired customer: How many people become customers due to your direct mailer, and what does it cost on average to acquire one customer? This is critical for determining the overall ROI of your campaign.
• Average revenue per conversion: How much does each conversion make you? Do different people buy different amounts of product? Again, this helps determine your overall ROI.
• Total ROI: What is the total ROI of your campaign? If you’re spending more than you’re making, it’s probably time to stop.

Display ads

Unfortunately, display ads are easy to miss.

In fact, on Facebook, in-feed ads are viewed 130% longer than display ads on the right. And most display ads end up in sidebars or at the top or bottom of a website.

So what’s a marketer to do?

Sadly, most people are too used to ignoring display ads, which means that the only way to grab their attention is to use an image, color, or sales copy that immediately stands out.

Even though marketers like yourself can use these ads to retarget people who are interested in your product or service, this category still falls under ice-cold traffic. The main reason is that, with display ads, a lot of people will see your brand name, logo, and message, but won’t click.

And that’s okay, so long as you’re using the right metrics to measure your progress.

Here are those metrics.

• Cost per thousand impressions: Most display ads are priced based on thousands of impressions. While impressions are usually a vanity metrics, with display ads, it indicates how much you’re going to spend.
• Click-through rate: A high click-through rate means you’re driving more traffic to your website. If you’re getting lots of impressions but no clicks, you should stop your campaign and rethink it. Something is unappealing about the ad.
• Conversion rate: How many people convert? Let this serve as one of your end goal metrics for display ads.
• Cost per conversion: If you’re spending more than you’re making, consider investing your dollars elsewhere.
• Landing page interaction: Be careful of an ad that attracts clicks and bounces at an equal rate. If people are clicking, you also want them to engage, opt-in or convert.