One of the main challenges for marketing departments is to prove the real impact of each of the actions that are carried out on a daily basis. How do you currently demonstrate that the budget invested for a specific campaign has contributed to the achievement of your brand’s strategic goals? And above all, to what extent? This is the challenge we are addressing through this article, related to a specific marketing performance measurement method!
OVERVIEW
What is the purpose of performance attribution in marketing?
If you are managing a marketing plan, you launch multiple daily actions in tandem and on different channels. Each of these actions may also have different objectives depending on the stage of the marketing funnel to which they contribute.
Quite logically, these actions generate an impact on your consumers and your brand. The challenge here is to understand which ones are really effective and contribute positively to your objectives.
For example, how do you know which actions have the most impact on purchase intent?
For which specific audience? During which time frame? And so on.
By looking at your results at a macro or global level only, you can’t effectively answer these questions.
Your level of analysis will be limited, and you will miss out on more detailed data which should help you understand your performance. Without these data points, you’re lacking evidence to fully master the actions you launch and therefore the investments attached to them.
Unlocking this level of measurement means ensuring you have all the cards in your hand to understand precisely how each of your actions :
👉 reached the right people
👉 impacted your brand objectives on: awareness, preference, store visits, purchase intent…
👉 Generated return on investment
With these answers, you’ll be much more confident in justifying the achievement of your objectives and highlighting your expertise and that of your teams.
How to measure the contribution of a marketing or advertising action to your brand objectives?
The 2 essential tools: brand lift and ad tracker
When talking about marketing performance measurement, we inevitably consider two tools: the brand lift and the ad tracker.
Both serve different purposes. Combined, they are highly effective in measuring the contribution of each of your marketing actions.
Why use a brand lift tool?
With a brand lift, you measure, compare and prove the impact of a campaign within a set group of consumers.
The principle is simple: you collect the opinions of people who have been exposed to your advertising directly and compare them with those of a non-exposed (control) group.
The differences between these two populations allow you to understand the impact of your campaign on several performance indicators measured against your objectives: ad recall, attribution, preference, consideration, purchase intent…
What you need to remember is that brand lift measures the effects of a specific activation at a given moment in time on a pool of respondents who have seen and/or heard it.
Why use a brand tracker tool?
With an ad tracker, you measure the evolution of your performance indicators over time with the general population.
These indicators depend on your objectives and can cover all or part of your marketing funnel: awareness, familiarity, perception, consideration, purchase intent…
Here too, you collect consumer opinions directly, but with two notable differences:
Measurements are done on a regular basis: you can essentially follow the evolution of your indicators between each wave or at any given point in time.
The surveyed population is representative of your market: you also collect the opinions of people who have potentially never been in contact with your brand.
An ad tracker thus allows you to dig deeper into the results of your actions at the level of market segments who have really been impacted by your actions, even beyond your core target.
4 good reasons to combine your brand lift and ad tracker measurements
Advertisers communicate on a regular basis, on several channels at once and at different stages of the marketing funnel.
In fact, what is really interesting when analyzing the impact of a campaign is to understand if its reach and impact extends beyond the initial communication.
This is where the complementarity of the two tools makes sense:
Your one-off brand lift measurement helps you understand the immediate impact of a specific campaign within the people who have been exposed to it. In parallel, your brand tracker measurements will put the impact of this campaign into perspective over time – on your brand’s global performance indicators, and on a representative sample of your market.
In other words, the brand tracker validates the results of all your actions on your market, while brand lifts allow you to explain which ones contributed to these actions and when.
Also keep in mind that a brand lift is only focused on your own performance. The ad tracker acts as a real market analytics to place you at the forefront of your competitors. You no longer move forward with blinders on and monitor what is happening on the market to anticipate communication opportunities.
In a nutshell, here are the 4 good reasons to combine the two tools with examples to illustrate them:
#1 - To link a variation in your indicators to a speech
Let’s take the example of Louise who observed in her January brand tracker wave, that 26% of consumers were considering buying her jeans brand.
In February, she launched a brand lift to evaluate the performance of her latest campaign to increase awareness of her brand. There was a strong impact on consideration among those who remembered it. It is higher than the benchmark for similar campaigns in the retail sector.
In March, the ad tracker wave confirmed the campaign’s effect on the general population. Louise noted a significant gain of +4pts in awareness and +2pts in consideration! The April wave will allow her to confirm if this upward trend continues over time.
#2 - To identify new potential by validating the impact of each message, creative, channel across all market segments
Raphael is disappointed with the results of his last digital campaign. On his brand lift, he noticed that his core target – 45-54 year olds – did not particularly react to the campaign.
However, on his ad tracker, he noticed a strong increase in positive perception of his brand among 18-24 year olds, even though they were not targeted by his campaign.
Raphael decided to directly address this new target audience in his next campaigns. He will therefore use the digital format, because he now knows that they are very receptive to it.
#3 - To evaluate the influence of each action on the perception of your brand compared to your competitors' communications
With her brand lift, Laura finds that thanks to her digital campaign, consumers perceive her brand as more innovative.
By analyzing her new wave of ad tracker measurements, she discovers that her brand is now the second most innovative in its market, whereas it was still third before the campaign, compared to its competitors.
#4 - To validate your multi-channel strategies by analyzing the complementarity between your different media
Hugo ran both digital and DOOH campaigns. The brand lift for its digital campaign shows an impact of +25pts on the positive perception of its brand. The DOOH brand lift reveals very marked differences of +34pts on consideration and +25pts on positive perception between people who recall the campaign and those who don’t.
With the ad tracker and a few weeks after his activations, Hugo observes a significant increase in consideration and a positive perception, but in a smaller proportion.
He therefore worked out that his DOOH campaign contributed to increasing the consideration more than his digital campaign. By analyzing his results in more detail, Hugo will also be able to understand the extent to which digital has contributed to the improvement of this consideration.
This complementarity between brand lift and ad tracker is useful to understand precisely what worked best, replicate it and optimize it!
Measure the contribution of your marketing actions with happydemics
Happydemics is the reference in advertising and marketing performance measurement. Our SaaS platform allows you to carry out your Brand lift and Ad Tracker measurements in a single environment in over 150 countries.
Use templates designed specifically for each of your objectives (branding, drive-to-store, perception, awareness…). Each one combines several of our clients’ most used indicators, giving you the keys to understanding the impact of each action on your consumers and your brand. You can refine your results on your sub-targets and compare them to each other.
For Brand lift, using our templates also gives you access to 15 000 benchmarks to compare your performance against similar campaigns.
Our Brand lift and Ad Tracker indicators respond to each other. You can then easily mirror them to understand the impact of each campaign over time across your market, not just with people who saw it.
By using the Happydemics platform on a daily basis, you can better control the scope of your investments by saving time in reading your results and making the best decisions to optimize your strategies.
