Advertising can be an expensive part of the marketing mix, so it’s vital to measure the effectiveness of each campaign. This ensures organizations receive a good return on investment (ROI) on their advertising spend. Measurement of advertising effectiveness provides vital insights to inform future advertising budget spend and allows brands to understand the strengths and weaknesses of any campaign.
What is advertising effectiveness?
For all marketers, the goal is to demonstrate the impact a campaign has had on driving sales and conversions; the marketing ROI. Understanding advertising effectiveness is critical for brands and media companies. Brands need to justify advertising budget, while media owners need to prove the effectiveness of adverts.
There are many different types of advertising, including TV, online, outdoor, sponsorship, print, radio, podcast, mobile, social media, PPC, or product placement. Measuring advertising effectiveness allows an organization to have confidence in the success of the creative and chosen channels, and, therefore, investment for future campaigns.
What are the objectives of advertising effectiveness measurement?
Research helps to identify a range of considerations to aid the understanding of a brand’s position and performance. Objectives will vary depending on the campaign, but factors to evaluate may include:
- Recall – how well is the campaign working?
- Messaging – is it conveying the desired messages?
- Perception – is it improving brand perception?
- Consideration – is it drawing people down the funnel?
- Advocacy – who are the brand advocates?
- Sales – is it driving sales and delivering ROI?
How do you measure advertising effectiveness?
There are two sides to measuring the effectiveness of an advertising campaign: creative evaluation and media channel evaluation.
Creative evaluation: when designing research to measure the effectiveness of creative concepts, organizations can ask audiences:
- Is the personality of the advert consistent with the personality of the brand and other experiences of the brand?
- How well-liked is the creative second-by-second? Which scenes or images resonate the best and communicate key messages effectively?
- How clear is the brand?
- What is the reaction to the creative, and does it work on an emotional level?
- How does it perform on key performance indicators (KPIs) against benchmarks for a similar brand?
- Is standout and cut through being achieved, and do people recall the brand?
- Which scenes, images, messages, and elements of the advert are cutting through the strongest?
- How many messages are landing (prompted and unprompted)?
- Is it having the desired impact on the target audience?
Brands can also measure campaign effectiveness using biometric testing methods such as Galvanic Skin Response, Heart Rate and Body Temperature; eye tracking; electroencephalogram (EEG) scanning of brain activity to reveal positive or negative emotions; or facial expression analysis.
Media channel evaluation: when designing research to measure channel effectiveness, organizations can investigate:
- The effects of individual platforms and multiple platforms in a campaign
- The impact on key brand metrics
- Which platform is over or under performing relative to spend
- The optimal media laydown for the available budget and the impact of spending more or less on any of the platforms.
Summary: what do you find out when you measure advertising effectiveness?
Measuring advertising effectiveness helps to build and drive a brand. It tells the organization:
How effective the spend has been and which channels provided the biggest impact on brand perceptions and sales
- The elements of the campaign that have the biggest impact – such as creative and media channel and the impact on brand uplift and/or sales conversion.
More complex measurement (using attribution models) allows you to understand the baseline sales that would have happened anyway and the incremental impact of each channel and the campaign overall.
Measuring advertising effectiveness enables marketing managers to optimize:
- The ability to stand out and cut-through
- The way the desired message is conveyed
- The positioning of the advertised brand as intended
- The levels of empathy that people have with the brand.
Using the insight from advertising effectiveness research enables brands to make changes – however small – which can have a big impact on ROI.
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