In this latest IAB Member Q&A we focus on the evolution and innovations occurring in brand measurement. Experienced marketers understand the importance of strong brands in driving sales and long-term business success and the role digital channels play in delivering enduring and cost-efficient brand impact. As brand and marketing strategies adjust to changing customer and market dynamics, so must the ways to measure the success of brand building.
Our IAB member contributors have provided some new perspectives on:
- Optimising brand creative
- The long-term impact of brand on sales
- Faster, easier and more frequency brand assessment
- New techniques for gathering consumer and brand insights
- Adjustments in brand measurement for a cookieless world
Many thanks to our contributors from Engine, Facebook, Faster Horses, IAS, Kantar, Neuro-Insight, Oracle Advertising Cloud, Playground xyz, Pure.amplify, Samba TV and SimilarWeb.
Optimising brand creative
Mark Henning, Executive Director Media, Digital and Creative – Kantar
Creative quality contributes heavily to advertising effectiveness. Do you have any new ways to measure or insights on optimising brand creative?
While there is no one-size-fits-all solution to creative and effective advertising, pre-testing with a fast, independently validated solution like Link on Kantar Marketplace (our automated market research platform) will predict how an ad will deliver brand ROI in both the short and the long term. It offers predictive and diagnostic measures to guide ad optimisation to maximise ROI to test ads with confidence in as few as six hours.
So, what have we learned through this process? Well, after reviewing over 10,000 ads last year, we observed five habits of highly effective advertisers shared by the ads that consumers judged in our global Creative Effectiveness Awards. Adopting these guidelines written by our Global Head of Creative Development Daren Poole, will help ensure your advertising will deliver for your brand, in both the short and long term.
- Be distinctive – create the ability to be noticed and remembered in a world where there’s a profusion of ads. Your ad is not just competing in its category. It is competing for attention against the world. Stand out from the category and ideally from any other advertising.
- Brand intrinsically – make sure that the attention won by the ad is in the service of the brand. Ensure the brand is at the heart of your creative or get your branding cues right. A surprising number of brands forget this.
- Be meaningfully different – to grow market share or defend premium pricing you need to show how your brand fulfils consumers’ functional, emotional and social needs in the category AND illustrates your uniqueness.
- Trigger an emotional response – making the viewer feel something wins engagement for the ad and has positive effects on the brand’s emotional associations.
- Talk with your consumers – successful marketers know they can get ‘too close’ to their brand, so they listen to viewer feedback throughout the creative development process and refine ads accordingly.
But it is not just about having a great creative and running it across all platforms. Our studies show that the best results are achieved when the campaign creative has an integrated idea, which is then customised specifically for the platform on which it appears. Campaigns drive 57% more brand impact when both these elements are considered.
We have developed a new solution called Context Lab that helps clients optimise both creative and brand impact across multiple digital platforms. We use technology to place the ad/content within each platform so consumers view the ads/content as they would in a natural browsing environment. We are able to demonstrate that ad performance across all platforms is not the same and provide insight into how best to optimise the creative/campaign to maximise brand effectiveness.
Aimy Le, Marketing Science Partner – Facebook
Creative quality contributes heavily to advertising effectiveness. Do you have any new ways to measure or insights on optimising brand creative?
Internal analysis has shown that creative quality can have a significant impact on the price an ad pays in the Facebook auction. As a result, improving the quality of Facebook creatives is a priority for Facebook. Improving the quality of Facebook creatives using data, is an even bigger priority for the Facebook Marketing Science team.
Over the past few years, our global teams have been working on a range of machine learning tools to isolate and analyse the impact of creative experience on incremental business outcomes at the ad level. Using these tools has enabled us to run creative analyses for our advertisers and agencies to compare top and bottom performing creatives, highlight certain features that top performing creatives follow (that bottom performing creatives don’t follow), and make actionable recommendations on how to improve creative quality.
Furthermore, creative scorecards are another way to assess creative quality, more quickly and frequently. Utilising a creative scorecard means that creative can be assessed early or even before the campaign starts, meaning that an advertiser can minimise their spend on poor quality creatives and direct it to better, more effective creatives. This involves setting up a scorecard to assess whether a creative follows known best practices. Recently, we’ve worked with The Lab Insight & Strategy, who spoke to consumers to understand what makes a good quality online video creative and have developed a proprietary creative scoring framework, which can include whether an online video creative has a single clear message, showcases the featured product/service up front, or contains strong brand cues throughout the creative. Through the use of creative scorecards, a Financial Services brand has made changes to their Facebook online video creative, which has resulted in a 3-4x increase in their Facebook ROI.
Peter Pynta, CEO APAC – Neuro-Insight
Creative quality contributes heavily to advertising effectiveness. Do you have any new ways to measure or insights on optimising brand creative?
Many long-standing studies support the notion that advertising effectiveness is heavily moderated by quality creativity. In fact, in recent years, creative has been deemed responsible for up to 70% of advertising effectiveness (Jauncey, 2019). Neuroscience metrics have also found creative to be a (if not, the most) significant factor in driving business outcomes. However, many of the current measurement diagnostics tend to be locked into short-term surveillance without the ability to optimise for success. Furthermore, it is very difficult to find reassurance that todays’ advertising builds equity for tomorrow as well.
We believe and continually bare witness to the benefit of measuring creative effectiveness as an input, not as a post evaluation output. We encourage brands to employ a measurement system that offers objective, data-driven optimisation for creative, with metrics that stand the test of time. With respect to ad effectiveness, we would propose that neuroscience offers a robust subconscious metric that can offer advertisers the ability to optimise creative before their hard-earnt money is spent. Long Term Memory Encoding (LTME) tends to be the most predictive metric of ad effectiveness – the vital indicator of how much brand information is being adequately committed in consumer’s minds to ultimately influence their choices.
Subconscious memory structures ensure long term brand building. Quite simply, if an ad is not committed to memory, then it cannot begin to affect any behaviour change! This very fact about the ‘long term’ outcomes of ad exposure may provide the ideal complement to the often-used short-term metrics of success. Perhaps in the near future, we’ll be able to develop a blended set of data inputs that guide both horizons – short-term actions as well as long-term baseline equity – both of which drive the bottom line. This is where the neuroscience of creativity (in context) holds the key to creative effectiveness.
Whilst there are many factors that modulate effectiveness over time, Neuro-Insight’s most recent Case Study of Menulog’s Snoop Dogg TVC (a brand that also used digital video) showcases the endurance and highly effective response (LTME) to message and brand over time. Menulog’s TVC branding analysis over a 5 month period exhibit a 53% greater impact compared to NI’s normative exposure benchmark. The link between NI’s creative measurement over time and market performance is evident in Menulog’s surgency within the food delivery industry; Orders were up 40% in early stages of the campaign and deeper into the campaign, ultimately accelerated to “106% order growth YOY” (Menulog CMO, Simon Cheng).
June Cheung, Regional Director AU NZ IN – Oracle Advertising Cloud
Creative quality contributes heavily to advertising effectiveness. Do you have any new ways to measure or insights on optimising brand creative?
Marketers generally look at reach and frequency to measure the success of their brand campaigns. What we are seeing are brands asking how do we measure the success of our creative at scale? How do we provide a feedback loop to both our media agencies, creative agencies and even teams across the region? For those who have taken this step, they are now seeking and using insights to evaluate creative performance as part of their brand measurement and optimisation strategies.
For example, brands are now using insights to compare the effectiveness of video creative: at a base level, was the creative viewed by a human and was it visible? From an attention perspective, how long was the creative fully on screen, and for the time when video was visible, how does that correspond to the exact creative messaging or product placement that captured the consumer’s attention? Other insights brands are optimising include exposure time and interaction rates.
From the above insights, brands can better compare creative effectiveness: do local influencers have a higher impact compared to creatives without them? What sort of narrative resonates with their target audience and garners the most attention? How do audience targeting strategies impact creative effectiveness? For example, when targeting specific audiences, it’s important to understand if the creative reached a large number of consumers but didn’t necessarily grab their attention and stay on-screen for longer versus reaching a smaller number of consumers but had more impact, captured consumers’ attention and in return resulted in greater brand awareness and ad recall.
For brands looking to explore this evolution of brand measurement, the first steps they need to take is to measure and analyse their creative data and have it in a format that can be easily digested and shared amongst stakeholders to drive action and improvements.
Karim Abboud, Business Director – Pure.amplify
Creative quality contributes heavily to advertising effectiveness. Do you have any new ways to measure or insights on optimising brand creative?
As advertisers continue to shift more budgets to digital, and to mobile specifically, there is a need for rigorous creative evaluation. According to a recent study, creative quality determines 75% of impact as measured by brand and ad recall. In fact, without the right creative, other campaign settings such as audience targeting and ad placements won’t help you drive more conversions and engagement. Many would argue that with ad platforms offering sophisticated optimisation tools for AB testing, that is sufficient pre-testing creative. In short no. Pre-testing involves testing creative concepts against your target audiences before going live with a campaign.
Successful Pure.amplify clients are not waiting until mid/post campaign creative insights to measure and optimise brand creative. Our most successful clients are actually using pre-campaign insights research to A/B test their brand creative across their target audiences to ensure that they give their campaign the best chance at success prior to launch. By leveraging the Pureprofile research panel, they are able get insights in hours to make sure that they minimise wastage and maximise the brand impact by choosing the right creative prior to launch. With minimal investment, they will make sure that they are getting larger ROI for their branding campaigns.
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Long-term impact of brand on sales
Mark Henning, Executive Director Media, Digital and Creative – Kantar
While advertising impact on short-term sales is somewhat easier to measure, the long-term impact of brand on sales is more difficult to untangle. Any new insights you can share on the relationship between building strong brands and sales?
Our global meta-analysis of growth drivers shows that brands with strong clarity (the extent to which what a brand stands for is universally understood and perceived by consumers) contribute 70% more to sales. Quantifying long-term sales is challenging. And a big problem with many sales optimisation tools is not including brand equity as part of your analysis; yet; we’ve seen from our work that brand equity metrics are a great surrogate for understanding and quantifying long-term sales driven by advertising. In addition, the strength of your underlying brand can affect the sales outcomes achieved from your marketing activities.
Brand equity is the core element of brand strength and strong brands survive – and some even thrive – during a crisis. And the challenges delivered by a global pandemic is no different. The BrandZä Top 100 Global Brands of 2020 revealed that the total brand value of the world’s most valuable brands increased by 5.9%, despite COVID-19. In fact, the BrandZä strong brands portfolios continue to outperform the market, including the S&P 500 and MSCI World Index, and even in 2020, it dipped less than the global average.
Strong and profitable brands need to be salient and meaningfully differentiated from competitors. Strong brand equity adds resilience – and knowing your brand equity, how to measure it and how to build it, is the foundation for success. Kantar’s Total Marketing ROI approach provides a framework for integrating sales and brand metrics into one predictive system, providing a more balanced approach to driving sales growth today and demand tomorrow.
Yasmin Sanders, Managing Director, Australia at Samba TV
While advertising impact on short-term sales is somewhat easier to measure, the long-term impact on sales is more difficult to untangle. Any new insights you can share on the relationship between building a strong brand and sales?
Short-term sales measurement can be valuable to understand essential channels for driving consumers through the final phases of the purchase funnel. However, the findings should not be taken as the only source of overall campaign performance. Long-term attribution measurement often answers the question, “what happened before that last touch before a conversion?”
Samba TV utilises attribution models that incorporates weeks of ad impressions across multiple platforms (including linear TV & BVOD impression data that mirrors digital capabilities) to understand what drives consumers through the complete funnel. One common finding, performance almost always requires multiple impressions to drive the highest performance rate and incremental lift. If utilising short-term insights to change campaign budget allocation, key channels that help drive brand and sales results could be excluded and performance would decline. The key to building a strong brand and driving sales relies upon an organisation’s ability to unlock insights that truly analyse a complete exposure journey to unlock insights across the entire purchase funnel.
Faster, easier and more frequency brand assessment
Aimy Le, Marketing Science Partner – Facebook
What can brands, agencies, media owners and vendors do to execute faster, easier and more frequent assessments of campaign success for branding?
Getting a faster and more frequent read on campaign performance is important for maximising effectiveness and minimising spend wastage on ineffective campaigns. At Facebook, we actively encourage our advertisers and agencies to adopt this approach as part of their broader measurement framework.
One example of an effective and efficient way to do this is through scorecarding, which involves assessing in real time campaigns and creatives on certain KPIs or principles that we know are tied to better brand or business outcomes. As we know from Analytic Partners’ research that 70% of online video’s return on investment (ROI) is driven by creative quality, a scorecard can be created to assess creative quality based on whether the creative follows known best practices. Recently, we’ve worked with The Lab Insight & Strategy, who spoke to consumers to understand what makes a good quality online video creative and have developed a proprietary creative scoring framework. Example principles in the framework include whether an online video creative has a single clear message, showcases the featured product/service up front, or contains strong brand cues throughout the creative.
A scorecard can also be created to assess media execution best practices. For example, we know that campaigns need to achieve a high enough reach and frequency in order to drive brand outcomes. To measure this more quickly, a scorecard can be created to assess a campaign’s reach and frequency in real time. The scorecard can even be extended to include other KPIs that we know drive outcomes, such as buying objective or audience targeting.
At Facebook, we’ve successfully created and used scorecards with our clients to result in improvements in their Facebook effectiveness. For one FMCG advertiser who adopted scorecards to assess their creative and executional quality, they saw a 42% improvement in their Facebook ROI.
Craig Young, Managing Director Australia – Engine
What can brands, agencies, media owners and vendors do to execute faster, easier and more frequent assessments of campaign success for branding?
The success of a campaign can only be achieved when there is are clear and measurable campaign objectives. Too often we see ‘brand’ campaigns planned to reach/frequency objectives or basic media metrics (eg. play through rate) which are (1) relatively easy to achieve, and/or (2) devoid of any great insight/measurement into the campaign’s true impact or influence.
Ultimately, brands need advertising to generate sales, not click throughs!
Generating changes in consumer behaviour (either in the short or long term) are really all that matters. Even advertising that purports to support long term ‘brand awareness building’ is only useful if that brand effect has an ultimate impact on sales at some point. Brands deserve to know for the advertising dollars they spend not just whether consumers were successfully exposed to advertising or even if that generated a shift in brand awareness, but whether there was actually a change in consumer behaviour – did consumers buy more of their product or service?
Yet too often agencies act as if merely exposing consumers to advertising is ‘job done’.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The technology and capability already exists to conduct nimble, customised, and inexpensive pre/post-campaign effectiveness studies that survey exposed and control audiences to gain greater insight into a campaign’s true effectiveness. We already do this by working with our online panel partners and using our in-house technology to determine whether consumers have been ‘exposed’ to advertising or not, and then surveying them to measure actual stated changes in their resulting behaviour.
June Cheung, Regional Director AU NZ IN – Oracle Advertising Cloud
What can brands, agencies, media owners and vendors do to execute faster, easier and more frequent assessments of campaign success for branding?
Our recommendation is to start small, as the saying goes “Q. How do you eat an elephant?”, “A. One bite at the time”. So, if you are just starting out, build a minimal viable product of two or three disparate parts of your campaign execution and put these together in a centralised data analytics platform that gives you a real-time view, allows you to evaluate what’s working and what’s not, and automate the dissemination of information, ideally downstream to execution partners.
Brands we’ve worked with that do this well have a collaborative approach with their vendors. For example, one of the brands we worked with was attempting to ingest lots and lots of data that was excessive on both sides to supply and process. When we approached the brand to better understand their needs and desired outcome, we were able to offer an alternative way to supply data that was informative and met their needs but was also a much lighter data lift so it was win-win on both sides.
So, work closely and communicate to all parties involved the desired outcome and you’ll be surprised at how working together can lead to faster, easier and the ability to frequently assess campaign success.
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New techniques for consumer and brand insights
Rob Hall, CEO, Playground xyz
How do attention-based metrics help advertisers drive their brand outcomes?
One of the great things about metrics like Viewability is that it provides scalable and consistent measurement across the campaign, helping us verify that 50% of the ad made it onto the screen for one continuous second (2 seconds for video). It is perhaps the most commonly used metric in digital advertising today and forms a big part of how clients assess their campaign effectiveness.
The challenge is that an ad can be on the screen and not seen. This of course makes Viewability the opportunity to see – an absolutely important precondition for driving any impact, but not the same as knowing our ad was actually paid attention to and for how long (a metric known as Attention Time).
What’s the difference between the opportunity to see vs actually being looked at? Well, in a whitepaper with Kantar, we found that compared with Viewability, Attention Time is a much more powerful driver of Awareness and Recall (7.5x and 5.9x respectively). What’s more, for each extra second the consumer looked, Awareness and Recall kept climbing (Awareness on average 11% each additional second, Recall 7%). It’s clearly a case of more is more and brands need to be maximising this attention wherever they can.
So why do clients use delivery metrics like Viewability (and not Attention Time) as proxies for effectiveness on their campaigns? The reason is scale – capturing true attention metrics across a campaign hasn’t been possible as the research techniques are tied to small eye tracking panels.
But now with the rise of AI to bridge the gap between the panel world and the real world, advertisers are able to extend this measurement to their live digital campaigns, at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional panels. And off the back of this measurement capability comes some amazing optimisation opportunities too.
So while measures such as Viewability are essential, they will increasingly form part of what we’ll come to call compliance or hygiene type metrics associated with delivery. Making sure these remain in great condition is (and will continue to be) a prerequisite for any brand.
However, when it comes to trying to understand brand impact, attention measurement, which produces quality metrics, is the best thing for brands to focus on because it is such a better measure of ad effectiveness as it is a true predictor of brand outcomes. And now that it can start to be applied at scale, we can have more meaningful conversations about the link between campaign performance and brand impact.
Peter Fairbrother, Founder – Faster Horses
What new techniques are emerging for gathering consumer and brand insights?
One in 3 households in Australia now has a smart speaker. Google Assistant reaches vast numbers of Android users. And Siri is there to help iPhone users.
Voice search is already common and continues to expand. From the car to smart home, voice interaction is growing rapidly.
Faster Horses is taking surveys and data collection to smart speakers and voice assistants. Our voice platform enables clients to gather brand insights from voice-enabled surveys in minutes.
Responding to voice-enabled surveys is intuitive and easier for consumers than clicking check boxes in overly long online or mobile surveys.
People type at about 50 words a minute and type on smartphones at 20-25 words per minute, but speak at 150 words per minute, – which means that with voice-enabled surveys, people can provide more, richer feedback in the same amount of time.
The beauty to voice is that it reduces friction, meaning there is a better experience for your customers, and better quality data for generating insights.
In particular, people can provide feedback by voice while actually interacting with a brand – for example while using a product, or immediately after being exposed to advertising, such as during a podcast. Voice surveys provide true in-the-moment feedback.
The 2 main use cases for clients are general feedback about a brand or product “What do you really like and dislike about {BRAND}”, and advertising and sponsor recall in podcasts and streaming audio. We have also conducted studies assessing the fit and alignment between brands and different podcasts.
The richness of the feedback, together with its immediacy, is enabling clients to generate insights faster, via emerging channels. Voice surveys are like unstructured feedback at scale, which are then fed into an AI engine to provide key themes in close to real time.
Peter Pynta, CEO APAC – Neuro-Insight
What new techniques are emerging for gathering consumer and brand insights?
Currently, surveys and focus groups are primarily the most popular methods that brands employ to the gather insights on a range of marketing or consumer-related questions. While the application of these tools can be varied, it is widely accepted that both surveys and focus groups tap into aspects of cognition that are only consciously accessible to the individual. However, through recent advances in the understanding of how the brain processes information, we now know that much of our behaviour is in fact being driven by subconscious processes. These subconscious, emotional processes are outside the access of conscious thought processes and therefore are invisible to the data extraction methods of surveys and focus groups.
Therefore, for those brands who seek a holistic view of consumers, the solution has been to adopt research methods that can tap into subconscious processes. One such method is the use of neuroimaging to directly measure consumer’s subconscious responses. While being a relatively new addition to the market research landscape, neuroscience offers distinct advantages and unique insights for brands. Specifically, our neuroimaging methodology Steady State Topography (SST):
- Allows for precise second-by-second passive measurement of consumers’ response to advertising
- Has academically and commercially validated measures.
Perhaps the biggest contribution that our neuroscience methodology offers brands to is the ability to optimise advertising via an objective, rigorous, scientific method. While previous pre-testing methods focused on pass/fail metrics, neuroscience offers an alternative which plays into the strengths of the creative. In combination with other best practise techniques, advertisers can blend Neuro into their toolkits with the view of tapping both the conscious and subconscious drivers of behaviour.
Matt Hodgson, Country Manager – SimilarWeb
What new techniques are emerging for gathering consumer and brand insights?
I come from a very digitally skewed background, in a particular search. Search is at the heart of most things I do and how I interpret the digital world. It has been proven time and time again that search, in particular, search intent aka traffic, is a very powerful proxy to understand an audience, behaviour and also the power of a brand.
Web traffic and search have been used to understand the impact of some ATL media such as TV. There are many proven case studies that demonstrate the correlation between a TVC airing and the audience engaging with the brand online. Engagement is defined by going direct to the website or searching for the brand which then leads to the website. You can find more about this in the whitepaper ‘TV Impact on Online Searches’ and this software example. This methodology is similar to the way brands should be using search to measure brand efficacy. There is simply no better “zero moment of truth” than someone seeing the brand in the market and engaging with the brand, through search.
Unpacking this, and with an understanding of search traffic, not just search impressions, helps the brand understand brand awareness and the experience the audience have when they click through to a website after searching for the brand. For example, when people search for Toyota. Once they search for Toyota, where do they go next? Do they go to Toyota.com.au OR are they reading about reviews of the new Toyota on Carsales, CarAdvice etc.
The current branded search data suggests there is a total of 615 websites that acquire branded Toyota traffic, the top 6 are:
- 61.51% branded search traffic to toyota.com.au
- 9.33% branded search traffic to carsales.com.au
- 8.14% branded search traffic to toyotafinanceonline.com.au
- 3.78% branded search traffic to carsguide.com.au
- 2.31% branded search traffic to caradvice.com.au
- 2.08% branded search traffic to en.wikipedia.org
Now, before you think, “oh, this is website ranking data” it’s NOT or, “we know this because we use Google Trends”, WRONG! Using actual search traffic data from Similarweb, we can quickly understand the difference between, search ranking, search traffic and even zero-click search. All of these are significant contributors to measuring brand.
Using branded search keywords and understanding the traffic it generates, to which websites and pages on the site go a long way to help the brand understand consumer sentiment, brand efficacy, the path to purchase and much more.
Adjusting for the retirement of cookies
Mark Henning, Executive Director Media, Digital and Creative – Kantar
How are brands, agencies, media owners and vendors adjusting brand impact measurement in preparation for the retirement of cookies?
It is a little bit scary that third-party cookies, the foundation of digital campaign measurement, will soon no longer be a part of our industry. Kantar’s Media Reactions research reveals two-thirds (64%) of media owners and publishers are worried about the impact of a cookieless world and half (48%) of marketers feel their companies won’t be able to provide impactful performance without cookies.
In the cookieless world, passive and deterministic data alone will no longer be sufficiently comprehensive for effectiveness measurement across all digital platforms. To some degree, this has been a challenge for some time as devices and proprietary walled garden environments have limited tracking across digital platforms. At Kantar, we are adapting to this challenge by leveraging both permissioned deterministic data (where available) and supplementing with validated probabilistic approaches to provide a complete picture of campaign performance.
Kantar is partnering with publisher partners globally to directly match research panellists with publisher ecosystem users in a privacy compliant way. This enables us to ingest campaign level exposure data for matched panellists/publisher users without cookies. We then use probabilistic approaches and smart analytics to consolidate and reconcile exposure data across all publishers and platforms to provide a holistic picture of campaign performance.
These new techniques combined with industry collaboration is vital in ensuring continuity of measurement services in the impending post-cookie world.
Chanel Barta, Head of Customer Success ANZ and Brandon Coleman, Sales Manager ANZ – Integral Ad Science
How are brands, agencies, media owners and vendors adjusting brand impact measurement in preparation for the retirement of cookies?
For years, we’ve been using cookies to track our website’s visitors and collect data that not only helps us target ads to the right audiences, but also helps us to understand and measure the impact of digital advertising. With the impending retirement of cookies, and Google’s announcement that it will phase out third-party cookies on Chrome browsers by 2022, marketers will need to evolve and prepare for the deprecation of the third party cookie in order to effectively measure brand impact and utilise effective targeting strategies to impact the bottom line.
It’s important to understand that the brand measurement objectives haven’t changed. Marketers will still need to measure:
- Brand Awareness
- Brand Favourability
- Purchase Consideration
- Purchase Uplift
- Advocacy
When we look at Brand Awareness, we ask the question; is your customer aware of your brand? One way of measuring the impact on brand awareness is by reviewing your website traffic. This should increase over time and your bounce rate, inversely, should decrease over time as your customers spend more time browsing through your site, highlighting a piqued interest in your product.
Looking at Brand Favourability, we want to know; does your customer know your brand well and favour your brand over the competitor? There are two strong ways to measure favourability
1) Spontaneous Brand Recall; These can be done through surveys via publishers or independant measurement vendors. Ask questions like “When you think about insurance, what brands come to mind?”
2) Prompted Brand Recall; This is similar to spontaneous brand recall but the questions will vary. Ask questions like “When you think of an insurance provider, are you most familiar with provider X, Y, Q or R?”
When we look at Purchase Consideration, we’re simply trying to understand whether or not the customer will consider buying your brand over another. To understand this, marketers can utilise survey monkey and send an email out to their database by asking simple questions like “When you think of an insurance provider, would you consider going with provider X, Y, Q or R?”
Purchase Uplift is important to measure to understand the brand impact with regard to digital advertising. Has there been an uplift in sales since before starting the targeted tactics? It’s important to remember that Sales Volume and Sales Value hinge on how customers perceive a brand. These metrics are not based on research or customer surveys. Both are measured by real data.
Lastly, we look at Advocacy. The easiest way to understand and measure this metric is through the Net Promoter Score (NPS). This measures the willingness of the customer to recommend the product to a friend. Marketers will send through an email to their customers who have recently purchased their product and ask them directly “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend this product to a friend?”
Now that we have an idea of how marketers measure brand impact, it’s helpful to understand the strong and immediate alternatives for targeting the brands customers without the assistance of third party cookies. An alternate, scalable and effective solution to traditional cookie based methods for marketers, agencies and media owners is Contextual Targeting. Contextual is critical for advertising relevance and has a direct correlation to brand recognition and recall; 86% of consumers in Australia think contextual advertising relevance – whether an ad is relevant to the content on the page – is at least somewhat important (Source: IAS Power of Context Australia Research, March 2021). It is important to note that not all contextual solutions are alike; a key element to ensuring customisation and accuracy in targeting is the inclusion of sentiment and emotional analysis. For example, targeting an article about the ‘top 10 at home exercises to do during COVID’ is different to appearing alongside an article on the ‘negative impact of COVID on the employment rate and economy’.
In order to be best prepared for the deprecation of Cookies, marketers, agencies and media owners should be running ‘test and learns’ with providers who offer robust Contextual solutions to assess the effectiveness through measurement of campaign KPIs and objectives, ensuring quality and scale is not compromised.
Peter Pynta, CEO APAC – Neuro-Insight
How are brands, agencies, media owners and vendors adjusting brand impact measurement in preparation for the retirement of cookies?
The death of cookies has been an unknown for brands, agencies, and media owners alike. The delivery of online messaging and branding has been reliant on the availability of cookies, helping to serve relevant information from a brand to the individual who may be visiting a website. “Reach and frequency” figures may be the basis of buying audience tonnage, but this leaves out a core component of the success of online messaging and branding, which is context. Neuro-Insight suggests that this context connection between platform and consumer remains pivotal in messaging and the long-term effectiveness of a campaign.
At a subconscious level, context is a very real and powerful force that ‘colours’ the way consumers process advertising content. This will usher in an approach known as Neuro Contextual Optimisation – just as cookies have delivered one form of refining ad delivery – that factoring in the ‘neural contextual colour’ of an environment will still deliver enhanced effectiveness into the future. For example, content that is innovative will colour the advertising with an innovative quality. This effect and process can be objectively measured at a subconscious level, with the data being used to refine contextually relevant environments. Some studies have indicated that highly matched ads & environments produce an uplift of approx. 25% long term memory encoding.
This subconscious link between the context of the platform and messaging can enable both channels to work in harmony bringing together a campaign messaging to an individual who is engaged with the platform. This context variable cannot be overlooked and is imperative for brands and online media to evaluate, since cookies will no longer automate this process.
Patrick McDonald, Business Director – Pure.amplify
How are brands, agencies, media owners and vendors adjusting brand impact measurement in preparation for the retirement of cookies?
We’re seeing some brands and agencies in particular, placing more onus on sales-based metrics in anticipation for difficulties around digital measurement in general once cookies are gone. Obviously it doesn’t tell the whole brand impact story and it is much easier for FMCG brands, as an example, to gather and analyse sales data quickly and easily. A lot of brands however, really do need to lean on ongoing brand awareness research or even ad recall, as their sales funnel is a longer one. Our core business is etched in market research, so we’ve been taking leadership in offering brand uplift measurement to our media clients as an add on to campaigns. We do this by conducting through research across both a group of our users that we know have been exposed to our clients ads, and those that we know haven’t. We’re then able to quantify uplifts in awareness and purchase intent, as well capturing some invaluable qualitative feedback from our clients. On the publisher side of the fence we’re rolling out a widget solution that can both survey users to gain understanding of the impact of a campaign, but also capture valuable 1st party data or PII in the process. Publisher’s are obviously keen to prove their merit for clients, so tools like this give them an opportunity to provide quick and regular feedback that could be used to optimise creative, executions or even targeting.