Awareness campaigns are a necessary piece of a successful marketing mix for any brand. It goes without saying that in order to build a relationship with potential customers, you have to first make them aware of your brand. It’s hard to call consumers to action if they have no idea what you’re advertising in the first place.
However, it is difficult to tell whether or not your awareness campaign is actually effective. With most marketing efforts you can measure success by sales; but how do you measure awareness of a brand?
The Problem: Awareness campaigns cannot rely on the more common conversion actions of direct response marketing campaigns. How can we measure their success?
Solution 1: View-Through Tracking
This is a solution that is currently in use for many OTT campaigns. View-through tracking works by placing a pixel on both the ad and the brand website. The pixel will then be able to record which users have been shown the ad and which users have then visited the brand website. Users who saw an OTT ad (likely on a TV), remember the brand, and then took the time and effort to later seek out the brand are hugely valuable and motivated visitors.
Solution 2: Monitoring Website Traffic
This strategy is best implemented when running traditional television or radio ads where a pixel wouldn’t work. Before running an awareness campaign, figure out your baseline for website traffic. Then, measure your website traffic during and immediately after the run of your campaign and compare the figures. If traffic increases it can be inferred that your awareness campaign was successful.
Solution 3: Google Trends
Google Trends is a great tool that allows users to observe volume trends (how often a specific topic is searched) on Google over time. Similarly to the previous solution, marketers should determine a baseline before their campaign and compare it to the trends during and after to determine the success of the campaign.
Solution 4: Offline Attribution Study
This strategy is best implemented when running traditional television or radio ads where a pixel wouldn’t work. Before running an awareness campaign, figure out your baseline for website traffic. Then, measure your website traffic during and immediately after the run of your campaign and compare the figures. If traffic increases it can be inferred that your awareness campaign was successful.
Solution 5: Brand Lift Study
Brand lift studies are offered by many different ad platforms and function as a sort of survey. Ads will be shown on these platforms to different users and later on the platform will present the users with a questionnaire on a variety of metrics (favorability, consideration, etc.). It can also ask users if they can recall brands they were shown ads for. The responses on these studies can be used to determine whether or not an awareness campaign was successful. If users don’t remember seeing your ad, it was not very effective.
Bottom line is that when it comes to awareness campaigns, there are a host of different options for measuring success. It just comes down to which solution best fits your business or brand.
If you have any questions or want to talk more in depth about building a successful awareness campaign for your brand, please reach out, we’d love to help.