How to test your Ads and campaigns effectiveness

Solution for a digital era problem!

The most creative method of customer acquisition for any company is a persuasive advertisement. Millions of dollars are invested in advertising their products and services. End goal? Impress your audience and bag some business. It’s that simple.

It’s very important to connect with your audience and hit the right mark. Today, the consumer has more control over Ads and can simply hit the BLOCK button if they don’t like it. That’s just millions of dollars and all your efforts down the drain. Just like that. This makes it even more important for your Ads to be well researched so that your campaign doesn’t ride off the cliff. In the next segment, we discuss how to conduct effective Ad research.

However, not every Ad performs. So what about those ads? Is it right for businesses to invest huge amounts just to get zero or negligible ROI? It is here that Ad Effectiveness Research comes into the picture.

A good Ad has the potential to connect to your target audience emotionally. This Ad is the bridge that conveys your emotions associated with your product or service to your market segment.

Your Ad should always be backed by effective research. Everything should be crystal clear, right from your aim to your execution and expected result. So, how do we do this? This is exactly what we will talk about today.

What Is Ad Effectiveness Research?

Surveys, customer behavior, geographical demography, are few words that come to our minds when we talk about research. But, is it enough to evaluate Ads based on a few questions? We are sure not.

Pre-testing your ideas can only give you a rough layout of whether it “might” work or not. There is no concrete figure or guarantee of returns that one can assure you of. Ad effectiveness research helps you monitor your Ad post its release.

The analysis curated after the campaign has aired gives real insights into its performance and ROI. These insights are the game changers that help you improvise, adjust and strategize successful campaigns in the future.

Two Factors That Affect Ad Effectiveness

1. Creativity

Ads are only as good as they are designed. Even after 200 years of advertising, creativity is the main contributor to an ad’s effectiveness.

Thinking out of the box, producing content that makes customers look twice, and creating ads that stick in a customer’s mind are the key results of good creativity.

2. Reach

To influence your target market, your Ad should reach your target market in the first place. You will not increase the effectiveness of your ads by pumping money into advertisement production while compromising on increasing your reach. There should be an adequate amount of digital advertisement and physical advertisement to help increase the advertisement reach.

While designing campaign ideologies and huge business plans, some companies completely ignore measuring their ad effectiveness while other companies hastily undertake ad effectiveness research.

The Key To Conduct Ad Effectiveness Research

Before we can practically start conducting Ad Effectiveness Research there are a few parameters that have to be created for the research;

1. Set A Baseline

An advertisement can reap many benefits. It increases ROI (Return on Investment), increases the customer base size. it increases the company’s exposure and other such parameters.

Setting a baseline for your Ads helps you achieve your research effectiveness more smoothly. You cannot expect your Ads to increase your ROI by 200% and customer base size by 500 months of market presence. There has to be a fine line between high expectations and impossible feats.

2. Curate Your Audience

To reap the best results, a perfect mix and match of your target market is a must. That means, you target your existing audience and try to reach newer ones too. Make sure to include customers from all age groups, ethnicities, and spending nature. This allows you to judge if your advertisements are having the effect that you want them to have on your target market.

3. Prepare A Relevant Questionnaire

One of the best methods of Ad effectiveness research is surveys. A good survey has the power to easily bring to light all the hidden nuances behind any research. Companies are comfortable with surveys and thus they often choose to prepare a survey for their ads’ effectiveness.

Popular platforms like YouTube and Google that generate most of their income from advertisements are prominent examples of companies that use a survey to judge the effectiveness of their advertisements.

Your survey must not have leading questions that induce an answer into the answerer’s mind. The right set of questions are the key to an effective and high returns survey. Ask the people exactly what you want to know.

For example, if you are surveying an insurance plan, the question,” When would you like to sign up for our insurance plan?” classifies as a leading question. Here, the respondent is manipulated to answer the “when”. However, the responsive might not even want to buy the plan in the first place. So, they will give an answer which is not accurate and this results in bad surveys.

Now that we have covered the key to effective Ad research, let’s dive into the methods that help us measure the performance of these Ads and their effectiveness.

4. Forced Exposure Testing

This method measures the immediate effectiveness of an advertisement. With the increasing usage of social media platforms for advertising, this method is best used to judge social media advertisements.

By observing the immediate reaction of the audience, you can identify the effect your advertisement is having. This can be done through reading the comments, observing the number of likes on the Ad and the number of shares it received.

5. Pre/Post Study

This is one of the most prevalent methods in today’s industry. It works by surveying a group before and after they are exposed to the advertisements. By measuring these changes, we get a brief idea of what emotions the Ad will generate in the market.

6. Matched Market Study

This method is similar to the previous one. But this method requires two groups instead of one. One group is exposed to a campaign of advertisements while the other group isn’t.

Their decisions in the market are measured concurrently to determine the effects of the advertisements. During producing geo-advertisements specific to a country or region, matched market study helps identify whether an Ad is effective enough or not!

Bottomline

Ad Effectiveness Research is an integral part of a successful business. Without it, you will have no way of observing how effective your ads are. Crucial questions like, Are the ads influencing people to buy the product? Do the ads create a positive image of the brand?, all of these will go unanswered without an Ad effectiveness survey.

Present times have revealed their necessity and any business looking to become successful has to incorporate this research into its advertising ideology. GermFalcon and Viosys to benefit from this opportunity. They swept into the market when they came to know that concerns over the spread of coronavirus have led to increased interest in ultraviolet LED technology which can be used to kill influenza germs and sterilize surfaces. This could happen because of timely market research which answered the market demand and helped them leverage this opportunity in their favor.

Time and again, strong market research has proven to be profitable for businesses. In times like COVID where businesses are not able to meet their ends, GermFalcon and Viosys have skyrocketed their profits. That’s the power of effective ad research.