Awareness, Interaction, Engagement – What are these and How to measure?

These terms are used so often in online advertising but what exactly do they mean to an advertiser and how to measure them?

Awareness as the word suggests is when the consumers get aware of the brand. This is the first touch point of the brand with the consumers. This could be done via various channels – Online, TV, out of home (billboards), Search etc. Increase in brand awareness overtime can be measured with pre-post analysis, reaching out to consumers and finding the % awareness in the marketplace and after the campaign doing a similar survey again. The Ad-recall is also a good metric to measure awareness.

Interaction is when a consumer interacts with the brand – this could be mouse-over a rich media banner or calling in for a sweep stake or even clicking on a banner. Some of the common metrics to track this is click-through rate, interaction rate, # of calls received etc.

Engagement should be when the consumer really engages with the brand and goes "Beyond" the basic steps to know more about the brand and tries to build a relationship. Some examples could be signing up for a newsletter, browsing through the site in detail, downloading a widget etc. The deeper the level of engagement the more engaged audience or consumers the brand has.

Calculating Weekly Goals

It is important to calculate weekly goals to accurately keep track of the campaign performance and be able to make changes to the campaign if it is performing below expectations. One of the most common ways to calculate the weekly goals:

Using Historical Data – If a similar campaign has been live in the earlier, then that previous campaign's results can be used to directionally predict the metrics of the upcoming campaign. Sometimes, even using an x% increase year over year or quarter over quarter can be used. One more factor to be considered in the seasonality of the product/service. If the upcoming campaign falls in a higher or lower seasonality curve, then it should be taken into consideration.

After the actual campaign goes live, the forecasted numbers should be validated with the actual and learnings should be applied during the next campaign to reduce the discrepancies.

All consumers are not equal

How do you define the value of a consumer is who visits a website? If someone visited a single page more valuable or someone who visited multiple pages much more valuable.

I guess it depends on page content. If the single page that was visited was one of the most valuable pages on your website, then that one page visitor should be the most valuable consumer on your website. Such pages could be the core product information or landing page. One more example could be the "Submit" more information page i.e. if the consumer takes some action at your website. If the consumer shares some personal information like email, phone, address then this is a perfect time to start a relationship marketing programs. Ask them what they need and provide them…

A consumer could also visit multiple pages which might not be so valuable and as they would not show stronger engagement with the brand or the product.

In the direct response model, especially with an e-commerce engine in place, a funnel based measurement system works very well to evaluate the value of the consumers. The further down the funnel a consumer is the more valuable he/she is. However, in the case of branding websites, there is no linear path that a consumer is supposed to follow. Thus, in the branding websites each pages needs to be assigned a value and then evaluate the value of your consumers.

Click Sequence Tracking – Search, Newsletter, Display, Search

It is very important to keep track of the click sequence before conversion while using more than one channel for a particular campaign. This is very important to apply correct attribution to each media and also to understand how all the different media channels are helping or cannibalizing each other.

The overlap in Search and Display is very high; I have seen numbers as high as 33%. This number could be even higher for products if there is very long research phase like buying a higher priced item example laptops.

There are some advanced reports in DoubleClick's DART (Exposure to Conversion) report which provides the last 10 clicks (by site, placement, time) which helps understand which publisher engaged the most consumers for the first time and then which publisher led to most conversions with least number of other publishers coming in between the first click and conversion.

Some other cookie based systems can provide overlap across all channels – email, search, display, affiliates (DART cannot provide this as DART tracks only Search and Display).

 

Tracking DRTV using Site Analytics

With the advances of web analytics technology, it is also possible to track the impact of DRTV using the web analytics tools like Google Analytics, WebTrends, Hitbox etc.

Usually, the DRTV ads have a unique URL associated with the TV ad, where the advertiser intends the consumer to go to. So, tracking the number of visits to this page would help understand how many consumers the campaign is driving. Using web analytics tools, funnels can be created to track the complete path of the consumers if the campaign involves making a purchase or registration.

One more interesting thing can be done at the call center is giving the customer service representatives a unique URL to open in their browser whenever they receive a phone call, and then finish the process online – tracking this funnel would help understand the complete drop-offs and help make process optimizations.

Measuring the effect of Marketing Efforts – Part II

One more way of measuring the effect of marketing efforts is to do a pre marketing and post marketing efforts analysis. Trending one of the key metrics like conversion rate, ROAS, click-through rate etc. If there is an upward trend, it shows that the marketing efforts have paid off however if the metric is trending downward this is not a good indicator.

Upward or downward movement is a very good indicator but other factors should be considered in making the right decision. The trending could be due to other factors like competitive effect, seasonality, etc.

How to measure lift from any marketing effort?

It is very important to measure the lift from the marketing campaign. This is essential to understand how much more products or consumers are converting due to the marketing/advertising efforts.

A basic test/control methodology should be used to find out the lift in conversion rate due to advertising. This is easy to understand with an example of the grocery store - how likely is someone to buy a product if he/she has not seen any advertising and then how likely is someone to buy a product if he/she has seen advertising. The % difference between the two is the lift from the advertising.

In simple words you found out the purchase intent without the advertising (Control group) and then with the advertising (Test Group). The % difference between the two provides the lift.

How easy is it to implement or execute this?

For Online marketing, it is not hard at all. Comscore has a panel of over 1MM consumers whom they monitor their online behavior. Their solution creates a test/control group based on Ad exposure and conversion.

DoubleClick also has a cookie based solution to segment consumers who saw the ad and those who did not and then calculating the lift due to advertising.

For offline marketing, there are mathematical models which have been used in the past to calculate the lift.