“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
John Wanamaker (1838-1922), a successful US merchant, considered a “pioneer in marketing”
Today, over 100 years after the author of the quote passed away, the issue remains still in place. Companies are anxious to know whether the money they invest in advertising is producing any effect, and want to have it measured.
So, our today’s post will attempt to answer the question asked by each advertiser: ‘How do I know whether an ad campaign was a success or a failure?” Let’s start with the most important factors.
What you consider a success?
To understand the results of your campaign, you should first define its goal(s). The most typical advertising goals are as follows:
- Drive sales
- Increase sales of a specific product/service
- Acquire new clients
- Improve social media engagement
- Improve brand awareness
- Boost website traffic
The goals should be quantitative – e.g. increase sales by 20%, get 1000 Facebook page likes, grow website traffic to 10,000 visits/month etc.
What is the current state of things?
Benchmark what you’ve got before launching the campaign to be able to compare the ‘before’ and ‘after’ results.
Be ready to be patient
Most advertising campaigns have a delayed or cumulative effect, and their results aren’t obvious right away, so don’t make early conclusions and give it some time.
Establish clear measurements
Some goals don’t have immediate monetary reflection, like brand awareness, so they can be measured by tracking metrics that are indirectly connected – like increased website traffic, number of followers on social media etc. Make sure you define which of them to take into consideration prior to setting off.
Calculating the Results of Your Out of Home Advertising Efforts
There’s a specialized formula to calculate your Return on Investment in advertising, but it is limited to the goal of driving sales and revenue. Here it is:
ROI = (gross profit – initial advertising investment)/ initial advertising investment
For instance, your campaign on introducing a new product cost you $5,000 and you sold $10,000 worth of this product, then your formula will look like this:
($10,000 – $5,000)/$5,000= 1
It means, your ROI is 100% and you received twice your initial investment back.
Measuring Out of Home Media Performance
For OOH campaigns that aren’t directly targeted at receiving more revenue, there are other ways of tracking their effectiveness. Basically, you’ve got to “mark” each media channel or ad using special content that no other ad/channel will be using. For instance:
- Coupon codes
- Special URLs
- Hashtags
- QR codes
Thus, measuring the results of your OOH efforts will be as simple as calculating the number of codes/visits to a landing page etc and comparing them to the potentially possible.
Customer surveys
Many companies simply ask their customers how they found their product/service.
As you can see, measuring the effectiveness of out of home advertising may seem difficult, but not impossible. If you aren’t willing to have your money go down the drain for ineffective advertising channels or the budget cut down on what drives real profit, take the time and effort needed to track, measure and interpret the results of your advertising activity.
You can also leverage the technology like Tracklam – online network for placing OOH ads and receive detailed stats on their performance. Sign up now and tame your advertising!
