Businesses use television advertising to reach an audience and increase profits, but there might be times when it it is used for purposes such as damage control after some public relations mishap. The effectiveness of TV advertising can be measured by the advertiser’s success in completing a certain goal. Even if the overall goal is to grow sales or income, there might be other, shorter-term intentions, such as restoring a brand’s image or increasing awareness about a product or service. Television ratings agencies offer some numerical grade for judging the success of programs, and the potential effectiveness of ads might be measured based on these results as well.

An increase in sales following an advertising campaign is an indication of the effectiveness of TV advertising. If an advertisement has the ability to evoke enough of a response from viewers that some action is taken to obtain the product or service being offered, it is a sign of a successful commercial. To determine the effectiveness of an ad more precisely, it might be useful to attach goals, for both the short term and the long term, to the promotion.

For measuring how effective TV advertising is in the short term, recognize whether there is increased attention being devoted to a brand. If there is buzz, either in social media or in customer inquiries, this is an indication of how effective a commercial is. It might be necessary to hire a third-party consultant firm to determine what the Internet chatter surrounding an ad might be or to hire a public relations firm to form focus groups and receive feedback on advertisements.

Network television shows in many countries are rated by companies that measure viewership. The effectiveness of TV advertising could be quantified by the success of a television program during which a commercial ad runs. If an advertiser is attempting to reach a certain number of viewers in a specific demographic, this can all be illustrated in the viewership results.

When an advertisement is used for damage control following some unfortunate event, the effectiveness of TV advertising can be determined by the public perception of the brand. If there is an improvement in public perception illustrated through rising sales or customer retention, for instance, this could be a sign of how successful the ad campaign has been. If viewers doubt the sincerity of an ad that addresses some negative event, the effectiveness of the advertisement might become compromised. This might be evaluated by the public response recorded by surveys, polls and revenues.

 

What is actually required to implement TV campaign tracking and measure the direct response effect of your commercials?

 

  • You need granular, at best raw data, e.g. from web analytics tools.
  • Your brand traffic must be flagged in the campaign tree.
  • Sales data from the backend needs to be attributed to traffic.

Precise data about airings is required (usually provided by third parties). A TV media plan is not accurate enough, since actual airing times mostly differ from planned times by at least several minutes. An alternative would be data integration via real-time spot recognition.

The respected timeframe after the airing varies from venture to venture and must be tested. Due to spot overlaps, long timeframes may cause vagueness or incoherence regarding resulting data. Overlaps of airings (see graph below) can be handled by weighting TV induced uplift according to the reach of the corresponding spots.

 

 

Pros and Cons of TV Campaign Tracking

Besides generally quantifying a TV campaign’s impact on your business, one of the main advantages of TV campaign tracking is the comparability of spots regarding all relevant dimensions. Immediate or near time recommendations for optimizing your media plan are provided since placements and motives of TV spots can be evaluated quantitatively. Furthermore, KPIs across businesses, industries, and markets are available.

There are, however, some disadvantages and critical aspects to be considered. The total effect of a TV campaign consists of direct and indirect or late response. While the direct response can be measured as described above, the indirect response cannot be covered by this methodology. Therefore, TV efficiency cannot be compared to other marketing channels.

In addition, there are several technical issues worth mentioning. First, the effort of implementation must be taken into account. Depending on your setup and the scope of your TV campaign, it might take quite a while until you can see first results. Especially the availability of accurate airing data might be an issue depending on the country where commercials are aired. And even if you implemented TV campaign tracking properly, there is still a risk of data errors.

Cross-device tracking can also be an issue, since visitors who look up your brand more than once are not counted as one but as new users when entering the website from different devices.

The main challenge is that brand traffic cannot be separated properly because SEO keywords are in most cases no longer provided. One option to get around the issue is to decide on the destination URL, depending on whether the traffic source of a visit is SEO brand or non-brand. If the landing page is the homepage, it would be SEO brand, otherwise non-brand. Though, not only brand keywords direct visitors to the homepage. As a consequence, all SEO traffic can be considered as TV induced traffic. Still, we think that flagging only the brand traffic, if possible, is closer to reality than taking all traffic into account for TV induced uplift.

In conclusion, direct response measurement is very useful for comparing performance of TV commercials in regards to various aspects, but not for an overall evaluation of TV as an advertising channel. It will not be able to provide you with a holistic view.