As the global crisis unfolds, marketers are adapting their messages to meet the moment. The stakes are high, and strategy is constantly evolving. Now more than ever, marketers need an accurate and continuous understanding of brand perception. In fact, the IAB recently found less than one-third of marketers felt very confident in the KPIs they are using to measure their success.
Why do so many marketers lack the tools to adequately measure response to their ads? With public perceptions constantly shifting, marketers must be agile and put brand measurement at the forefront of their decision-making. Here are a few tips to help you get started:
Tip No. 1: Start campaign measurement early.
Gone are the days when you could launch a campaign and wait for weeks to understand performance. The first few weeks of a campaign are critical for assessing what’s working and what’s not. While attention-based measures such as viewability and engagement often take top priority, the most important questions are: How are the media actually influencing opinion and recognition of your brand? Are you having a positive impact, or is your frequency driving wearout?
Coupling brand metrics with other behavior signals is essential to gauging and changing perception. Marketers that make optimizations within this early phase can usually see significantly higher performance on upper-funnel goals and prevent missteps from becoming long-term headaches.
Tools such as Lucid’s Impact Measurement Dashboard (below) can give you a real-time view of brand lift across all the dimensions of your media plan. Granular results are updated daily to help you optimize across creatives, placements or channels.
Tip No. 2: Ensure you’re reaching the right people.
When it comes to reaching the target consumer, many of us rely on our activation partner to deliver the goods. Outside of demographics, comprehensive audience measurement may be ad hoc or nonexistent. This often results in marketers spending a hefty premium on targeted media without actually reaching the right customers.
As dollars are continuing to be stretched, the industry can no longer afford to take an audience label at face value. The data landscape may be complex, but finding the best audience data for your campaign doesn’t have to be just guesswork. There are several simple, cost-effective ways to test your first-party, second-party or third-party audiences prior to launching a campaign. Reaching the right audience will help media dollars go further and will improve overall resonance.
Tip No. 3: Bring ad measurement tools in-house.
Directly monitoring your campaign health is critical to understanding the full impact of your media—and bringing the tools in-house is easier than you may think. First, it’s important to work with measurement partners that offer transparent, real-time access to your campaign performance.
The right partner can offer flexible options for in-house ad measurement. For example, our customers can integrate our brand lift measurement technology directly into their analytics dashboards and scorecards via API. Or for marketers interested in a self-serve option, our Impact Measurement dashboard (below) offers full visibility of their performance data in an easy-to-use DIY interface.
Media buyers often have a perception that brand measures are too difficult or costly to optimize, but that’s not the case. With the ongoing advances of digital measurement, it is no longer necessary to rely on proxy measures to predict brand performance. Continuous measurement is now possible, both cheaply and at scale. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, it’s time to consider bringing measurement to the forefront of your branding strategy.
