Measure TV Advertising Effectiveness

How TV Contributes to Your Outcomes

TV is a versatile medium that can generate immediate results, increase sales, and improve brand awareness and perception. In a multi-channel campaign, it acts as the baseload, positively impacting other media.

• Immediate impact can be measured by the extra visitors attracted to the website, registrations, or inbound calls. These effects can be seen within hours or days.
• Short to medium-term effects (weeks) include additional sales generated by the campaign, measured in units sold, revenue, or profit. TV campaigns are often profitable on this metric alone, but the bulk of the payback is usually received in the longer term.
• Long term effects (months) involve an ongoing elevated level of sales and improved brand recognition that are sustained long after the campaign has finished.

Measuring Short and Medium Term Impact

TV advertising effectiveness is measured by correlating changes in target metrics, such as revenue, with variations in marketing inputs like media costs or impressions. To calculate this at a basic level, you need to upload a spot report from your agency, along with calls, registrations, sales, or website data, into the system and run the corresponding analysis. This will report on metrics such as average cost-per-action and return-on-ad-spend. To simplify the process, some types of data, like website traffic, can be uploaded programmatically.

You can assess the impact and effectiveness of different dayparts, program genres, creatives, and other campaign segments by selecting the corresponding dimension on the screen.

For advanced segmentation, you can map advertising activity into custom channels, for example, separating reach-and-frequency driven activity from targeted content or sponsored programs. Custom creative groups can also be created to measure how various messages resonate with different audiences.

The system can report on dimension combinations, as long as the total number of combinations is below the number of data points — days, weeks, or months. To increase the number of data points collected quickly, use geo experiments: nominate sales regions and map advertising, website, sales, and other data to those regions using the provided functions.

Measuring Long Term Impact

As you build your brand, you will enjoy sustained elevated sales levels. Even without continuous advertising activity, sales and revenue will continue to grow. To measure this increase, run the Impact on Revenue analysis quarterly or half-yearly, using the preceding 12 months of data. In addition to media impact, the analysis reports on the “baseline” – the amount of sales occurring without advertising. Changes in the baseline correspond to the long-term impact.

Another way to assess long-term impact is by looking at the average number of Google searches for your brand name and its mentions on social media. The system can programmatically retrieve this data (or have it uploaded) and correlate it with TV advertising, reporting on the impact of the latter on your brand status.

Accountability Reporting

You don’t want the effectiveness gains to be negated by increased costs and diminished exposure, so cost control and benchmarking are important parts of TV advertising management. However, the costs depend on many variables, and a straightforward CPM comparison to other campaigns is not a valid benchmark.

To assist, InContekst provides an accountability dashboard and detailed reports that offer like-for-like comparisons and estimate the cost implications of different ad placements. While information asymmetry between the advertiser and media partners will still exist, these reports will enable you to intelligently query the media and hold them accountable.