Every marketer wants to draw a response of some kind from the consumers who view their ads. Buying the product or service being advertised would of course be ideal but there are many other possible (and desirable) actions that a viewer can take in response to an ad. This is especially true in the online ad realm, where they can be directed to a Web site to obtain more information; download a coupon; or locate a store near them.

No matter the type of call to action an advertiser uses in its online ads, it’s important to set goals and assumptions at the outset, says Amy Fayer, research director, at New York research firm Dynamic Logic.

The firm groups the calls to action into five categories: offer-based (i.e., “Click here for a coupon”); time-based (“Sale ends October 1”); create your own (“Build your custom dream car”); find something (“Enter your zip code to find a restaurant in your area”); send something (“Share this with a friend”).

Drawing on findings from Dynamic Logic’s MarketNorms database - which spans over 6,000 online campaigns as well as the firm’s experience in measuring the effectiveness of mobile, video, social media and other platforms - Fayer offers.

In general, Fayer stresses the need to keep the overarching marketing objectives in mind. For example, what type of ad, with what type of message or call to action, will get you the response you are looking for? And, don’t forget to consider the consumer’s mind-set. When they see your ad, where might they be in the purchase funnel? You may be placing your ads on sites that have a broad general audience - and hence may be seen by a lot of consumers - but would it be more effective to target niche sites that may reach potential customers when they are closer to buying?

Further, simplicity is king. “Our research has shown that that having simply one or two messages is better from a branding perspective,” Fayer says. “If there are several calls to action within a single campaign, and you are trying to do too much with one ad execution, we have seen that fail from a branding perspective. In the online environment, you are competing for the consumer’s attention. There are so many things on the page and if frequency hasn’t had a chance to build up, a respondent may not take away all the different messages you are trying to convey. ”

Repetition is also effective, she says. “With any given campaign you might have two or three objectives - drive sales, increase agreement with a brand perception, boost product awareness. We have seen that ads that convey the main messaging throughout most of the frames of the ad rotation tend to do better than those that don’t. So, in the case of an ad for a cleaning product that kills 99 percent of germs, it would have the product name and mention the antibacterial elements and a ‘learn more’ call to action. These elements should be featured throughout, so that the online user has a better opportunity to see who and what the ad is for no matter what frame they tune into.”

Lost in the clutter

Fayer says many CPG clients assume that placing a coupon or an offer for a free sample in an ad is the best approach for increasing purchase intent but Dynamic Logic’s research has shown that with so many CPG firms featuring coupons, those types of offers may be getting lost in the clutter.

What has been working better lately, she says, are the ads that promote charitable efforts, where consumers’ actions can translate into donations by the CPG firm to a worthy cause. These types of appeals, being relatively new and different, may stand a better chance of performing well, a finding that the research has confirmed, she says. “We’ve found that some kind of charity messaging was more likely to be persuasive for the category. This connected to some previous research we did where we tried to link copy testing performance to in-market performance. One thing we’ve seen in validation research is that a lot of times what drives purchase intent is an ad’s ability to communicate unique and distinct information. So that finding is good context for why a coupon offer may not be persuasive enough. There might be some other new elements or something more distinctive that might make an ad persuasive in the online environment.”

‘Liked’ by the masses

Asked about the flood of ads urging consumers to like a brand on Facebook as another type of call to action, Fayer says that these ads can be effective but marketers need to keep their expectations in check and realize that their brands won’t instantly be “liked” by the masses. Instead, for targeted audiences - say, moms choosing to like the maker of their preferred diaper brand - these ads can be effective at getting a consumer to engage with a brand.

Speaking of engagement, Fayer says that she and other researchers are seeing more and more rich-media “create and send” ads that invite consumers to make a video or some other creation and send it to friends. These types of ads are scoring well on persuasion because of their interactive nature, she says. “When you look at purchase intent, the harder-to-move metrics are those that are more persuasion-oriented. An ad may do very well on awareness but it might not do so well on persuasion because there are a lot of factors that go into persuasion - a brand might not be relevant, etc. Despite that, we have seen that ads with a viral nature, where consumers create and send something, have done very well on persuasion and we connect that back to the social media element. If someone is sharing your content, if they are sending it to someone, it’s likely you’ve engaged them very well.”

But, she cautions, the decision to go interactive and add, say, a game to an ad needs to be made carefully. While women are known to be big fans of online games, an ad won’t succeed just because it has a game in it. “That is something that involves research. You need to make sure the content is relevant and something that they are going to like. You don’t want to just stick a game in an ad and assume that all women 18-to-34 love gaming. You still want to make sure in your testing phase that among your specific sweet spot in that demographic that they find the content relevant and useful. That makes it more likely it will have a viral element to it.”

Only increase

As technology advances, the use of call-to-action ads will only increase. But just because you can add a call to action doesn’t mean you always should. Nor should you rely on a single metric to gauge their effectiveness, Fayer says. “Many marketers are still clinging to behavioral metrics as a measurement of success - how many people clicked on the ad? Having that call to action is a way to elicit that desired response, whether it’s a click or some other kind of interaction. But keep in mind that a majority of people don’t click on ads. In fact, less than 1 percent click. So an overreliance on the behavioral measures is not good.”