To a certain extent, advertising can be a trial and error process. Not all marketing campaigns start out great, right off the bat. Most successful strategies are built on little errors businesses weed out over time by measuring advertising effectiveness.
What’s the Importance of Measuring Advertising Effectiveness?
Sure, you can equate a sudden influx of clients to your recently implemented marketing campaign, or a downturn in lead conversion to seasonal variables, but unless you have the metrics and cold hard statistics to prove it, you can never be sure how your strategy is performing.
When it comes to advertising your business, you need to know the real-world effects of every decision you make, as each of these decisions is costing you money. So, let’s take a look at the different ways of measuring advertising effectiveness, and what advertising metrics you should be using.
Advertising Performance Metrics
Before you can apply any advertising metrics to your campaign, you need to ensure that it is measurable, and this is done by setting time-sensitive, advert-specific goals.
Establishing Objectives
Objectives are everything when it comes to marketing. After all, if there is no goal to work towards, it’s impossible to measure success, as success becomes irrelevant – which isn’t the outlook you want to have if you’re trying to grow your business.
Once you’ve established the objective of an advertisement, you’ll know what metrics to apply to measure performance.
These are known as key performance indicators.
Deciding on Key Performance Indicators
You can think of KPIs as steps that must be taken to achieve your marketing objective.
For example, your overarching objective might be to drive sales of a particular product up 20% by next quarter. Therefore, a KPI to observe would be the number of visitors the product page receives after the release of the ad compared to the traffic it was logging beforehand.
Once you’ve established a quantifiable backdrop for your advertisements, there are literally hundreds of ways to track the performance of your advertising campaign and determine whether you’re pulling in an ROI. Let’s take a look at some of the more commonly used metrics.
Reach
Reach is quantified in different ways depending on the medium, but it always tells you the same thing. It simply refers to the total number of people exposed to your advert — the more, the merrier!
Frequency
Frequency is the number of times each individual sees your advert. Repetition plays a huge role in memory retention, so if each person sees your ad a few times, it’s definitely a good thing; however, too much exposure to the same advert will cause fatigue, and it will start to fade into the background.
Impressions
Impressions metrics are basically a combination of reach and frequency metrics. They measure the total number of times your advert has been seen, even if by the same people.
Cost Per Customer
How much does your advertisement cost when split between the customers it brings? If the cost per customer is less than the revenue they brought in, then your advert is, at the very least, not drawing a loss.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
Similar to cost per customer, this metric measures how much the ad is costing you when divided across the clicks it has garnered.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
How many people are clicking through on one of your online advertisements? If the number is exceedingly low when compared to the overall reach of the ad, it’s underperforming.
Advertising Metrics: How Is the Efficacy of Out-of-Home Marketing Measured
With advancements in technology, thousands of metrics have been made available to the online digital marketer, which may leave you questioning the relevance of traditional outdoor advertising. How would you even go about measuring advertising effectiveness through the impact of a billboard or poster campaign?
Well, you’d be surprised how quantitative this area of the marketing industry is. In fact, as your outdoor ads are mostly going to direct viewers to engage with your brand online in some form or another, it means you can use a lot of the same technologies utilized by digital marketers, to assess your outdoor advertising effectiveness.
One Strategy at a Time
Firstly, to assess how well your outdoor advertising is doing, you need to stabilize all other marketing activities. If you see an increase in interest or revenue, you need to be able to say with confidence that the outdoor roll-out is responsible for the growth.
Traffic Data
Here at bMedia, we use a state-of-the-art car tracking system in all our billboard locations to give you an accurate estimate on the probable exposure of your advertisement.
Landing Page Tracking
Just because your adverts are out in the real world, doesn’t mean you can’t use computers to analyze their performance. By placing a unique URL on your advertisement, you can then use an online tracker to measure how many visitors the URL receives, just by viewing your out-of-home advertising.
Hashtags and Social Media Tracking
You can do a similar thing with hashtags. Assign a unique hashtag to your billboards, and monitor proliferation online across various social media platforms.
Promo Codes
The same principles apply to promo codes too. Let’s say that you’re a watch manufacturer, and you wanted to entice customers with a modest discount. You could print, “Use Promo Code WATCHTHISSPACE for 10% off” on just your billboards, then measure how many customers applied the code at checkout.
Keyword Tracking
It’s quite possible that people will see your advert, get the general gist, but miss the exact wording of a promo code or hashtag. They may then respond to your ad by searching your brand online alongside phrases such as “new deal”, “watch offer”, or “promotion”.
By keeping an eye out for those keywords in your online analytics, you’ll have a clearer picture of how many people your outdoor advertisement is influencing.
Customer Surveys
Don’t get us wrong – state-of-the-art analytics technology is great and all, but you could also just try asking your customers where they heard about your brand and what brought them to your site. Try this in your online contact forms, email marketing campaigns, or even social media.
Mobility Tracking
Another way you can drum up more of an idea about reach, frequency, and impressions is to measure the movement of journeys people make in vehicles or otherwise in a certain area. This can be done by monitoring the GPS location of willing survey participants or, perhaps, asking them to write and submit a travel diary.
Outdoor Advertising Effectiveness: Why Outdoor Advertising Is Essential to the Success of Your Business
As more and more of our lives are playing out in front of screens, we’ve seen a massive spike in the popularity of digital marketing, and while this is an effective means of reaching people, it’s not necessarily the best way to advertise to prospective clients/customers.
The constant barrage of online ads and lead acquisition emails we experience in our day-to-day lives is enough to drive anybody up the wall. Rather than enticing the viewer, they tend to cause irritation and feelings of distrust.
In response to this over-exposure to digital marketing mediums, the value of traditional outdoor marketing has skyrocketed, and bMedia is at the forefront of this surge in popularity.
When people see a bMedia billboard, they’re not scrolling past it at lightning speed or distracted by a million other bits of data, they’re focused on your advert and your advert alone, reading it slowly, weighing up each word, enjoying the visual accompaniment, making a mental note to investigate further once they get to where they’re going.
bMedia Can Help You Grow Your Business
Contact us today and gain access to over 500 high-exposure areas across the entire island of Puerto Rico, meaning that we can single-handedly optimize the reach of your outdoor advertising campaign.
Our intuitive billboard location map makes it incredibly easy to explore your options, but we do so much more than simply provide the space for your advertisements. Our crack team of marketing strategists with years of experience in the industry will help you build your campaign from the ground up to serve your specific business goals.
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