It’s said, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” If your business campaign is going well, there isn’t much to worry about. When the going gets tough, however, it’s a different story. Hence, you’ll need some reliable metrics for measuring TV advertising performance.
TV commercials aren’t stand-alone marketing strategies. They’re part of a more inclusive promotion planning. Online traffic is easily measured in the digital age, if you have the know-how, via paid and unpaid strategies.
With measurement tools at our disposal like Google Analytics 360, it’s relatively straightforward to analyze the impact of all channels on website traffic. Measuring TV advertising performance is different and rather difficult. Yet, for every problem, there’s a solution, and that’s what we’re going to unravel here; beneficial tips for gauging your TV Advertising Performance:
Establishing a Baseline
A baseline is the first step for all kinds of measurements. You need an idea of what is “normal” so you can judge whether or not your current situation is satisfactory. You should consider several factors in establishing the primary criteria. Objective clarity comes before everything else. The baseline should be measurable, preferably specified in numbers and figures.
If your business is in its infancy and you have no idea what to expect, it’s time to learn from others. Start a comprehensive competitor analysis. Evaluate their weaknesses, strengths, tactics, strategies, everything you can get your hands on. Then start comparing your business with theirs, and more often than not, you’ll automatically find your next move.
Baselines should also include a confidence interval, meaning a range of estimates for an unknown parameter. Of course, you may ask: “How’s that related to measuring TV advertising performance”? It’ll help you understand the impact of random events that might not go in your favor, as opposed to the actual objective: promoting your business TV campaign. And sure enough, things will happen, so as they say, ‘hope for the best and prepare for the worst’.
Taking What’s Free
There’s no need to pay for everything. Yes, everything comes at a price, and the most useful are often the most expensive. Nonetheless, the price isn’t always for you to pay, and certainly not always in terms of cash. There are numerous tools and instruments that can be helpful in measuring TV advertising performance.
Google Analytics, for example, is a free tool for measuring your advertising ROI as well as tracking your flash, video, and social networking sites and applications. It helps users identify trends and patterns as far as how visitors engage with their websites, including data collection, analysis, monitoring, visualization, reporting, and even integration with other applications.
Now, Google Analytics is not entirely free. They’ve developed this so-called “freemium” service, enabling small businesses to use the service without paying a monthly charge. However, if you want more advanced features or the ability to do more with the service, there’s a recurring fee, starting from $12,500/month ($150,000/year).
Applying Various Attribution Models
Attribution models are rules determining how credit for sales and conversions are based on how you assign them to touchpoints in conversion paths. The last interaction model or ‘last touch attribution’ is one of the most widely used models, providing 100% credit to the last click, visit, or impression in a conversion path. The ‘last interaction model’ has been the base algorithm in multiple evaluation tools like Google Analytics.
The problem with this model is overlooking the bigger picture. As mentioned before, most marketers don’t settle for an ad hoc strategy. The hypothetical customer can be impacted to various degrees along the conversion path. But the last interaction is the only touchpoint taken into account in this pattern.
There are at least seven attribution models, each serving a different purpose and consequently determining the impact of different variables. Understanding which models offer you the most practical and actionable insights requires some level of experience in marketing. But overall, there’s no doubt that measuring TV advertising performance is impossible without utilizing one or more attribution models.
Using Advanced Segments to Find Money-Making Strategies
Among the features making Google Analytics, such a popular marketing tool is the ability to add segments whenever you run a TV ad and to measure TV Advertising Performance. Advanced Segments enables you to isolate specific types of traffic within your business performance reporting. Advanced features are an easy-to-use interface able to guide you through five main segments: Demographics, Technology, Behavior, Date of First Visit & Traffic Sources.
You can also create custom segments for traffic from social media networks and search engines to see which drives the best traffic or use different age groups to figure out which pages they visit most and how long they stay on your website. You can compare lifts in direct website traffic, organic search, and branded paid search with the lift in demand driven by TV to see its effectiveness.
Google Analytics Solutions aren’t all-inclusive measures. That’s for sure. But they’re undoubtedly more than a few tools for measuring TV advertising performance. They’ll fuel your data-driven investment across different business sectors to ensure current investments are in the right place. And in case they aren’t, you can switch and relocate your focus without hesitation.
Creating Your Own Vanity URL to enhance TV Advertising Performance
A vanity URL is a descriptive and unique web address utilized to redirect URLs from one location to another. The primary and perhaps the only purpose of vanity links is to help people easily remember a specific web address, enabling the link to have a more substantial branded impact than a regular URL. How does that help in measuring the effectiveness of your TV ads?
Most TV commercials include some URL format within them. Instead of featuring your main website URL in the TV ad, you can place a unique URL or, even better, a directory URL tied to a custom offer. Consequently, all the credit from directed traffic to that particular link goes to the ad. The link just has to be brand relevant and easy to recall.
But there’s still one caveat. Many might see your commercial, search for your brand’s name, and find the main URL. These leads won’t be accounted for as created by the TV ad, yet another compelling reason for going beyond a single attribution model.
Keeping Track of Search Volume
It’s SEO time! No way we could finish an article about marketing and not mention the magic word. Search volume refers to the number of times a specific keyword is searched within a particular time frame in search engines such as Google. But why on earth does it matter to know how many times people searched for a keyword?
Simply because it quantifies the potential leads to your services and products. Considering search volume is vital since it directly reflects the popularity of any given query. Keywords with high search volume and low search competition are best suited to exploit an existing gap in the market.
Search volume provides invaluable insight into the lifeblood of business promotion: user demand. When running a TV ad in specific markets, measure search traffic variances to determine the lift triggered by the ad. You can monitor search traffic via tools like Google Trends, Ahrefs, or SEMRush. By highlighting your potential buyers’ keywords, you can better connect your brand to the search queries.
Bottom Line of TV Advertising Performance
Every meaningful approach to marketing evaluation involves some degree of quantification. That’s not up for discussion. To the extent you’ve managed to turn raw data into actionable insight, you’ve taken your business further toward its ultimate objective. That being said, sometimes it takes a leap of faith to give a different strategy a try or believe that the path you’ve chosen will pay off at the end of the day.
And to guarantee your success, you’ll require a professional team by your side with the capability to get the job done and, more importantly, who believes in you. Well, we’re among the best in both. Please contact us, and we’ll get you to where you want to reach.
