4 good reasons for measuring your advertising performance
In marketing, if it can be measured, you can bet we measure it. However, when it comes to advertisements, we often settle for just using the most basic of indicators. It’s hard to improve on your return on investment when you can only see part of the situation!
Measuring advertising performances is all too often limited to the same indicators as we use for other types of marketing actions.
You’ll probably see most marketers focusing on metric like the number of impressions generated by the campaign across its various formats. Some marketing wild child may even throw in a calculation of the click rate, even if they’re not really sure how to interpret whether the result is good or not.
Great, just great! There are now countless figures available to us, but are they getting us anywhere? Well, not really, from the looks of things.
Why is that?
Because these classic metrics aren’t adapted to advertising performance measurements.
When you launch a campaign, you don’t just want to know how many people have seen it and/or clicked on it.
What you’re really interested in is understanding whether your advertisement has reached the right people, how they perceived it and the impact that it has had for your brand.
Here’s why you absolutely need to start measuring your advertising campaign performances with brand lift (which we also call advertising post-testing).
It’s the only way to know what has worked and what hasn’t worked and, most importantly, to understand why. This avoids you building strategies based on mere assumptions. Because who really wants to commit thousands and thousands of dollars based on “just a feeling”?
With all of this data, you’ll know what to do to optimize your future campaigns and improve your return on investment!
If this intro hasn’t convinced you yet, here are some more details on the 4 good reasons to measure your advertising performances with a brand lift.
OVERVIEW
✅ Reason #1 - To evaluate the quality of your advertisement's targeting
The first criterion that will determine whether your campaigns perform well or not is its targeting.
It seems pretty obvious. The success of an advertisement is built on whether it succeeds in reaching the right audience. Even the best creation in the world combined with a perfectly clear message won’t save the ship if it’s already sinking under poor targeting.
The quality of your targeting is directly linked to your return on investment. The better your targeting, the better the chances of you generating a high return on investment.
With the right indicators, you can even go even further and identify to what degree your campaigns are managing to reach your core target.
Classic metrics don’t give you this level of insight. Only advertising post-testing will allow you to get truly effective indicators when it comes to evaluation your targeting quality.
Among these indicators, it’s definitely worth shouting out the degree of memorization, which tells you what percentage of the population exposed to your advertisement actually remembered it.
You can also evaluate the quality of your targeting by including whether the individuals exposed to your advertising know your brand and/or consumers on your market.
✅ Reason #2 - To know whether your message is relevant to your audience
If there’s one thing that marketing metrics don’t reveal to you, it’s the way your advertising is perceived by your audience.
So, how can you make sure that your message has been received and understand as you intended by the people who’ve seen your ad? How can you measure your campaign’s creative performance?
To answer these questions, you need to turn to the creative diagnostic carried out with the brand lift.
Depending on your goals, it can be composed of several indicators which help you interpret the performance on your advertisement in terms of its perception by your audience.
To do this, we measure 3 main KPIs:
Personal interest in the brand or product reflects the quality of the message and the distribution by its ability to attract attention and spark curiosity in the individuals exposed The approval score allows you to understand whether people appreciated or liked your advertisement The attribution rate evaluates the degree to which your campaign is correctly associated with your brand
Here, you can also get metrics which measure the clarity of the message, its perception and even the interest in your brand or product.
✅ Reason #3 - To identify the real impact of your advertising on your brand
Once you know whether your targeting is doing what it’s supposed to, and whether your message has completed its objectives, you’ll then be looking to understand the impact generated for your brand.
Has the ad positively boosted consideration for your brand? To what degree has the campaign triggered purchase intents?
Here again, your traditional metrics won’t be much help.
The brand lift analysis is based on the discrepancies between the population that memorized your advertisement and those that haven’t.
For each indicator evaluated, we’ll compare the discrepancies in the results between these two populations. The more significant the discrepancies, the more we can consider that the brand impact is significant.
Of course, you won’t evaluate the same KPIs, as you’ll tailor them to your goals. If the aim of your campaign is to develop your brand awareness, you’re mainly going to keep an eye on the brand perception indicators.
If you’re looking to develop your sales, the consideration and purchase intent rates will be much more relevant.
✅ Reason #4 - To optimize your future campaigns through adapted actions
Now, let’s move onto the final reason, which should have you fully convinced that measuring advertisement performance is the way to go.
Launching a campaign means committing budgets, which can often be pretty hefty. So, you can’t afford to multiply actions with a low ROI.
The best way to avoid doing exactly that is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your previous campaigns.
Thanks to the brand lift, you’ll be able to identify optimization opportunities for your ads with greater precision.
The actions undertaken in this sense will give you the key to generating better results, and in turn a much more interesting return on investment.
Now you know why measuring campaign performance is just so important. These 4 good reasons are certainly the most important. That said, depending on your specific goals, using a brand lift measurement may reveal even more actionable insights in relation to your ads.
To maximize the value of the data collected, it’s important that you carry out brand lift analysis for each campaign, not forgetting to monitor your indicators in real time!
To go further, learn how to launch brand lift measurements with Happydemics!
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