Now that you have a better understanding of the role of the developer in the buying process, let’s get back to strategizing your advertising campaign.

As with any campaign, you’ll want to define success metrics. You may look at industry benchmarks for general B2B campaigns, or even your own historical data to try to forecast engagement and conversions. While you’re not wrong in doing that, you won’t be comparing apples to apples for campaigns targeting developers.

Here’s why. Developers are naturally skeptical of advertising. They typically won’t respond in the same way even your traditional IT decision makers will. They’re researchers. When they see an ad that’s interesting to them (we’ll talk about that in the next section), most typically won’t click. Instead, they’ll finish the task in front of them and visit your website on their own.

Keep this in mind when planning for and setting expectations around the performance of your advertising campaigns. You may not see the highest click through rates, but measure and understand what happens after a developer views your ad.

Here at Stack Overflow, aggregated campaign performance analysis indicates that the majority of conversions coming from campaigns that run on our site happen not after a click, but after an impression, in a 30 day window.

Seeing an ad on Stack Overflow influences developers to search out more information on their own. On average, 83% of conversions from advertising on Stack Overflow happen without a click.

Stack Overflow Internal Metrics