How to assess the performance of your advertising campaign?

Posted by Pauline Poché, November 4, 2020

Launching a new communication campaign is a significant investment for your business and you want to measure its impact on your brand in order to assess the return on investment, or ROI. The data you have already allows you to measure the impact of this campaign on your sales results but these do not allow you to assess your brand building objectives (reputation, image...), which are more intangible. These objectives are measured with an advertising post-test.

A post-test is a type of quantitative study that allows you to measure the impact of an advertising campaign on your marketing target at the end of its distribution. This assessment can also be used to adjust the components of your campaign before a possible renewal to improve its performance.

An advertising post-test can be carried out on all types of media (TV, press, press, radio, digital) and for both single-media and multi-media campaigns.

Conventionally, a post-test will meet three main objectives:

• Assessing the impact of your advertising campaign on your target
  
• Perform a diagnosis of your advertising creations
  
• Measuring the effects of your campaign on your brand indicators and on the intents Of consumers
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Evaluate the impact of the advertising campaign

One of the prerequisites for a successful campaign is its visibility, or rather to know if it has managed to emerge among the other current communications and to mark its target.

A key indicator to analyze is advertising memory, that is, the share of consumers who remember having recently seen an advertisement for your brand. It is the first step. You must have made an impression to hope to work on the image of your brand and make you want to.

Exposure to one or more creations does not guarantee that the consumer will remember your campaign. This is where a second indicator, advertising recognition, comes in: when you present the creation (s) to respondents, how many recognize it and remember having already seen it? When your campaign is composed of several creations with quite different creative axes or broadcast on several media, it is interesting to compare the recognition of your creations in order to see if there are differences depending on the creation or the media used.

Creative diagnosis of the campaign

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A post-test is also an opportunity to diagnose the creations broadcast. This will allow you to assess whether they have been liked or, on the contrary, if there is a rejection by consumers of your creation. If there is no immediate link between the enjoyment and the performance of a creation - a pleasant advertisement can poorly communicate its message and conversely an annoying advertisement can be very well remembered - it is important to know how the advertising is perceived when making decisions about the reuse of a creation and the construction of the media plan.

The creative diagnosis will also make it possible to measure the perception of creation in more detail and to validate that the creative orientations chosen are well perceived by consumers: is it perceived as dynamic, does it make you want to talk about it, etc.

Beyond the image, the aim is also to know what message is conveyed by the creation: has the message you want to convey been well understood? What are the points that stand out the most? Are there others that can be better highlighted in case of reuse of the creation?

Effects of the campaign on brand and consumer behavior

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The third part of the post-test will allow you to measure the impact of your campaign on your brand indicators and on consumer intentions.

It is about observing the differences between people exposed to the countryside and those who have not been exposed. Depending on the post-tests and the sophistication of the system put in place, different criteria will be used to define the exposed/non-exposed groups:

• Recognizing the advertising campaign can be used as an approximation of exposure. However, it is important to keep in mind that this definition only classifies as “exposed” the most committed of them: they will have been exposed and recognize the creation. It is the easiest tool to implement and therefore the most suitable for agile studies.
  
• Another approach will be to use the probability of having seen the campaign or OTS (opportunity to see), calculated by comparing respondents' media habits with your media plan
  
• For digital campaigns, it is also possible to know the real exposure of the respondent thanks to technologies based on “tags” and “cookies”
  
  The first indicator to study is notoriety (Top Of Mind, spontaneous and assisted). It will allow you to see if your advertising campaign has increased the presence of your brand in the minds of consumers. Then, it's a question of seeing to what extent the campaign made it possible to work on your brand image and on what dimensions. Did the campaign successfully nourish the image traits for which it was designed?
  
  Beyond brand indicators, the objective of a campaign is generally also to trigger behaviors and encourage action: purchase, store visit, search for information, etc. We will therefore also study the gap between exposed and non-exposed in terms of consideration, purchase intentions or even recent purchases for short cycle product categories.
  
  

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  When conducting a post-test, it is important to compare the results obtained with the objectives of the campaign and the media plan put in place. The aim of a post-test remains to validate whether these objectives have been achieved and keeping in mind the means implemented. What you learn from your post-test will depend heavily on these two factors.
  
  A campaign to be evaluated? Do not hesitate to contact us if you have questions or create your post-test directly for measure the effectiveness of your advertising campaign.

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