Reasons to measure advertising effectiveness

Measuring the effectiveness of advertising is essential as it provides marketers with insight into the campaign’s return on investment. It can also build a necessary part of attaining buy-in from senior stakeholders for future campaigns. When reviewing campaign effectiveness, marketers can understand consumer behaviours much deeper so that your brand can then make changes to tailor campaigns for the future, engaging the target audience effectively. 

Despite this, a recent study by ruler analytics found that 17% of marketers stated that proving ROAS (return on ad spend) was one of their biggest challenges. Within this blog post, GottaBe! will discuss why measuring your campaigns’ effectiveness is essential and what you should be looking at when measuring advertising. 

Why is it important to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns? 

Not only will measuring the success of your advertising allow your brand to tailor future campaigns, but it will allow you to make changes to running campaigns. If an ad is not well received with digital advertising, it is possible to end the campaign or make real-time changes to deliver the message more effectively. However, real-time changes are not possible to make when relying on printed materials as there is added time for printing new materials and wastage of current ones.

Gaining insight into the effectiveness of your advertising will allow your brand to plan future marketing investments carefully. Consumer behaviour insights provide information on brand awareness and recognition, allowing you to create tailored campaigns to engage consumers further down the marketing funnel. 

Understanding the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns allows you to optimise future advertising budgets. Knowing which parts of your previous campaigns were most effective means your brand can choose where to allocate your budget to ensure the highest ROI. 

What am I looking to measure?

Awareness

When measuring your advertising, one of the most important things to look at is the impact your campaign has on brand recall and awareness. This indicates how many people are aware of your brand and if your advertising has attracted any new customers. The simplest way to measure the effectiveness of your campaign is to monitor the traffic in-store and online, to understand whether your ad has created awareness of your brand. Take note of the traffic before your advert ran, during and after it has finished. If this increases during the advertisement period, you know your campaign was effective. However, it is important to continue to measure traffic after the campaign has ended as the effects could be delayed for several reasons. 

When understanding brand awareness, it is advised to measure share of voice as this determines how many consumers are searching for your brand and shows your brand desirability. For consumers to directly search for your brand, they must be aware of your products or brand and are looking for more. To calculate share of search, you need to divide the total number of searches for your brand by the number of searches for all competitors. 

Intent

When measuring your advertising, it is essential to look at consumer intent to understand the consumer’s conversion process. Your brand will use site data to see which pages they viewed and how long they spent on each page. Measuring intent allows your brand to ‘read the customers mind’ so you can guide them to what they need. Your brand will be able to gauge whether your campaign was effective if the customer’s intent has increased. 

Measuring the increase in consumer intent will warrant your brand to use direct marketing to reach consumers with the content they have previously looked at, pulling them back into the marketing funnel. We can use intent to understand what the consumer will do, to see if they will make a purchase decision or abandon their basket. We can then tailor our direct marketing to remove barriers; for example, sending a discount code or free shipping may change their intent. 

When we look at consumer intent data, we break it into two parts, explicit and implicit intent.  Explicit intent is the willingness to buy a product or an action taken by the customer showing their intent; this is where we send abandoned basket marketing materials to draw them back in. Whereas implicit intent is based on the consumer’s behaviours, such as browsing patterns on your site. Discount codes or direct marketing may reinterest the consumer. Understanding the differences in consumer intent will allow your brand to make informed decisions and create marketing campaigns tailored to consumer behaviours and needs.

Sentiment

Sentiment in digital marketing is how your consumer feels about your brand or product. Understanding the overall feelings towards your brand and measuring how this has been affected by your advertising will help your brand understand how the campaign resonated with consumers. If you can see an increase in consumer sentiment, you can link this to brand loyalty, but equally measuring bad sentiment will allow your brand to know how to respond. 

Measuring sentiment can be tricky and requires a range of measures to understand. Looking at the reaction and tone of consumers through likes and comments on social media will help your brand to understand the feelings of the consumers but is not an exact measure towards your brand. 

Conversion rate

Looking at how many customers have completed the goal will help your brand see which form of advertising is most effective. By measuring customer conversion rate, your brand can make informed decisions when looking at your ROI; for example, a high conversion rate would indicate a successful advertising campaign and therefore have a good ROI. If your campaign has a low conversion rate, altering what you offer and provide will help create an effortless customer journey that will increase customer conversions.

Measuring the conversion rate of your advertising will give your brand the ability to report on cost-per-acquisition or how much it cost per conversion. This will allow you to calculate the bottom-line of what you are doing more accurately, meaning you can accurately know how much profit you are making. Your brand can then make improvements. 

To calculate conversion rates, take the number of conversions and divide that by the number of total ad interactions that can be tracked to a conversion during the same period. 

ROI

Measuring ROI will prove whether your marketing efforts were successful or not. When your brand understands how well the business is doing and which areas could improve, you can begin to achieve your goals. It is essential to understand if your efforts are paying off or whether you need to change your advertising technique to grow your business. By measuring the ROI of your advertising, you will understand and alter future campaigns to reach your objectives. 

ROI is calculated by subtracting the total revenue from the total cost of investment and then dividing this new number by the cost of the investment, then finally multiplying it by 100.

How can I measure the effectiveness of my campaigns?

Setting goals will allow your brand to see if your campaign has met expectations. If you do not have measurable goals, your brand cannot determine your ad’s effectiveness.

One of the easiest ways to see how effective your advertisements are is to measure site traffic. However, each campaign should have different goals and achievements so that the effectiveness may differ depending on campaign objectives. Marketers need to prove the ROI of their campaigns to understand whether the time and effort that went into that campaign had any impact. However, each campaign should be uniquely measured to understand the campaign’s success properly. Once your brand has measured the campaign’s impact, it needs to look at lead quality. 

Advertisements may see site traffic increase, but how long consumers spend on site and the bounce rate will give your brand an indication of lead quality. Advertising connects consumers with your brand and product, but further work needs to convert them into paying customers. Understanding whether the consumer is converting and making purchases or bouncing off-site will help your brand alter your marketing strategy to improve a consumer’s journey. Analysing data will allow your brand to see how the consumer came to the site so you can see which platforms your advertising was most effective on. All this data can then be used to understand what worked and what didn’t so that you can use this for future campaigns.  

How can I use the data collected when measuring advertising effectiveness?

Once your brand understands how to measure the effectiveness of your advertising, your campaigns will begin to engage with your audience at a deeper level. Over time the quality of your leads will increase, and your brand will understand your consumers more; the two will continue to build together. Continuously improving and adapting your campaigns based on the results will make future campaigns more efficient and effective, leading to higher quality leads.

The team are here to help your brand reach its full potential with your campaigns. We can create campaigns that will match your audience across platforms with a full range of services. GottaBe! is an award-winning field and experiential marketing agency that knows how to get your product in front of audiences. Our digital marketing experts can take your advertising online, or our brand ambassadors across the country will connect with your consumers face to face. Whatever form of advertising you choose to do, we can help. Contact the team today to see what the best platform for you is.