Like other business activities, you have to justify the money invested as part of your advertising strategy. To do this, you have to measure the effectiveness of your campaign. As you previously saw, there are qualitative and quantitative indicators to help you do this. In this chapter, we'll cover the different available methods for analyzing your advertising campaign effectiveness.
Analyze Your Advertising Campaign
The Pre-Test
The pre-test is a qualitative study of your future project with your target audience. It aims to validate or reject the project before committing the budget and launching the campaign.
The pre-test allows you to check both the content and its form using a representative sample of the target audience with whom you test your campaign. Thanks to this tool, benefit from consumer opinions, enabling you to make any necessary modifications to improve your campaign for optimal results.
The Post-Test
A post-test is used during the campaign to ensure smooth implementation. When used and in the end, it helps analyze the positive (or negative!) impact.
You can measure, among other things, recall, or consumer sentiment. Using questionnaires, you measure the percentage of people who bought your product during and after your ad campaign.
The Brand Barometer
You can conduct this type of survey every year, perhaps after an advertising campaign. It enables you to assess the progress in terms of brand awareness and attractiveness, and identify challenges you may face in the years to come.
Calculating Profitability
Reconcile the costs incurred as part of your advertising expenses with the profit earned during the same period.
For example, Bio Boost🥤 will invest $300,000 in its advertising campaign, and its sales over the same period will be S450,000. As this is a launch, the ROI for this campaign will be calculated as 1.5x.
Measuring Print Audiences
The main ways to count audiences for print campaigns rely on two distinct measurements: circulation and readership.
Circulation - It can be either paid copies purchased, such as major newspapers or magazines, or free distribution. A good example of free distribution would be titles like Metro. In the U.K., there are multiple editions of the newspaper in various cities around the country that, combined, have a circulation of 1,326,213 (as of March 2020), making it the highest reaching newspaper in the country. Metro newspapers in several other cities around the world work on a similar model, but are not directly related to the U.K. title(s).
Readership - The U.K. editions of Metro are reported to be read by 8,886,000 people (printed copies only). That means 6.7 people, on average, will read each printed copy of the newspaper. Readership is typically higher than circulation for most reputable titles.
Gross Rating Points
The gross rating point (GRP) is the benchmark to calculate the opportunities to see (OTS) that your media plan secures. It is the average number of contact opportunities in an advertising campaign, compared to 100 people from your core target.
The GRP formula = coverage rate (or penetration rate) x the average repetition.
For example, Bio Boost🥤 is launching the advertisement for its new product, which gives a target coverage rate of 60% with an average of two repetitions per person. This calculates to 120 GRPs.
Ad Campaign Recall
Recall of your campaign is a good thing; it reflects its effectiveness. The recall rate can be a fundamental factor in helping you choose your media plan.
You can measure recall by quantifying its spontaneous and prompted scores:
Spontaneous recall is measured by the percentage of people who remember, without any prompting, that they’ve seen your ad.
Prompted recall is the percentage of people who have seen a list of different advertisements and can confirm that they recall seeing yours.
You can obtain this information by conducting surveys.
If you want a high recall, your campaign must attract your target; an impactful ad with a clear message is the key to success.
You calculate your campaign’s attention level to find out how much of your target audience whose attention you captured due to your campaign’s exposure. To do this, use the alpha coefficient (𝞪), where 𝞪 = the percentage of the audience who, having seen the advertising, remembered it. Let’s use our Bio Boost🥤 example to explore this:
Bio Boost🥤 decides to pre-test its launch campaign; the result gives an 𝞪 coefficient of 40%.
This means that the first exposure to advertising drew the attention of 40% of the target.
Upon the second exposure, 40% of those who did not pay special attention to the advertisement did so this time. The second exposure attracted 64% of the total target group:
40% upon the first exposure.
40% of 60% upon the second exposure.
The third exposure attracted 78.4% of the target:
40% upon the first exposure.
40% of 60% upon the second exposure.
40% of 36% upon the third exposure.
Memorization
It is also possible to assess the performance of your media plan using the calculation of memorization. This indicator depicts the memorization power attached to an advertising message.
Beta (𝝱) is the percentage of people who have memorized your message following exposure to your campaign; it introduces a time dimension into your media plan's performance.
The memorization rate 𝝱 can be calculated from the attention coefficient 𝞪 by the formula . If your attention coefficient 𝞪 is 35%, it gives a memorization rate of 12.25%.
The law of advertising recall is the memorization rate you get after the same advertising message has been viewed repeatedly. Here's the formula:
For example, if you take 𝞪 = 35% and 𝝱 = 12.5 %, this will give a memorization rate after 2 exposures of 23.4%.
Let's Recap!
Now you can measure the effectiveness of your press campaign.
Using pre-tests and post-tests, you can check to see if you need to make any changes before, or shortly after, you launch the campaign.
You can calculate how often you need to publish your advertisement to achieve your target audience's desired level of recall.
Now let’s take a look at what it’s like for a digital campaign!
