Advertising Tracking Tips by Jerry W. Thomas

The promise of advertising is great. It’s an opportunity for a brand to tell its story directly to the ultimate consumer. It can be a force to influence the trade, and a way to offset competitive pressures. It’s an opportunity to build and maintain brand equity. It’s an opportunity to build and maintain brand equity. The promise of advertising is seldom realized in actual practice. Few companies do basic strategy research to develop a creative blueprint to guide the development of their advertising. Few companies pretest their advertising creative to make sure it will be effective. And even fewer track their advertising once it’s “on air” to measure it's effects of the advertising over time.

The Three Building Blocks of Advertising Success

Three types of research are critical to build a foundation for advertising success:

• Strategy Research. Each brand must develop an in-depth understanding of its consumers and their motivations to serve as a template for creative development.
• Advertising Pretesting. Once the creative is developed (either rough or finished), it’s really important to pretest the advertising. Pretesting helps identify outstanding commercials and ads and it flags the underperforming ones.
• Advertising Tracking. Once commercials and ads go “on air,” the only way to know for sure if the advertising is working is by conducting tracking research. It’s the ultimate “acid test” of advertising effectiveness.

This article focuses on the last of these building blocks, advertising tracking, but remember the first two are just as important.

The Tracking Questionnaire

The term “tracking research” refers to a series of surveys over time among a representative sample of target-audience consumers. A well-designed advertising tracking questionnaire should include these essential measurements:

• Unaided And Aided Brand Awareness. The creation and maintenance of brand awareness is one of the most fundamental (and most valuable) goals of advertising. Advertising can be effective even if it does nothing more than create brand awareness.
• Unaided and Aided Advertising Awareness. These tend to be diagnostic measures. They help indicate if changes in brand awareness or market share are related to the advertising itself.
• Advertising Message Recall. Advertising message recall also provides an indication of consumer memory distortion and learning effects over time. Knowing the elements that have the highest memory value is of great benefit in improving future creative executions.
• Brand Image. Advertising can shape and magnify a brand’s image over time. This is one of the most important strategic benefits of advertising. However, it takes a minimum of one to two years of consistent advertising to cause a measurable change in brand image.
• Brand Trial And Usage. Usage of the subject brand and the major competitive brands allows market share estimates to be calculated and tracked over time. Moreover, both trial and usage are valuable analytic variables.
• Demographics. Key demographics (such as geography, age, gender, education, and income) are extremely valuable in analyzing tracking survey results, in defining the optimal target market, and for linking tracking data to other data sources.

The following question types should be considered for inclusion in an advertising tracking questionnaire. There are times these additional questions can be very useful.

• Aided Advertising Message Recall. Sometimes researchers will include a list of all major copy points and ask consumers who are aware of the advertising whether the advertising communicated each point. This can be an effective way to measure messages conveyed by the advertising.
• Ad Recognition. Typically, a campaign consists of several ads. By showing visual snippets of the ads, the level of ad recognition can be determined. Then, it’s possible to ask follow-up questions, such as the number of times each ad was viewed or whether reactions were positive or negative.
• Promotion Awareness And Usage. If promotion plays a significant role in a company’s marketing plan, then it might be useful to track awareness of a brand’s various promotions.
• Market Segment Analysis. Lifestyle/Psychographic market segmentation analyses are typically based on a set of questions and a segment typing tool so that each respondent can be assigned to a specific market segment. These analyses might reveal that the advertising is doing particularly well among certain groups, but not reaching other segments.
• Media Habits. Generally, it is best to limit media questions to a few important measures, such as the amount of time the respondent spends “consuming” various types of media or favorite types of content.

Once you have decided what questions to ask in your tracking study, two critical sets of decisions remain: sample definition and continuous versus pulsed surveys.

Sample Definition

It's wise to define your sample broadly, to make it as inclusive as possible. For example, even if your target market is defined as consumers 25 to 34 years old, it would still make sense to track all consumers aged 18 to 64 (or older). This broader definition of the sample acts as a safety net, because demographics of a market can change over time. If you define your sample too narrowly, you run the risk of the sample becoming obsolete. Likewise, you should define the product category you're tracking as broadly as possible. Also, always set quotas for gender so that you don't under-represent men.

Continuous Versus Pulsed Interviewing

Continuous surveys offer a number of advantages over pulsed. A continuous survey provides a complete record of consumer measurements over time—with no gaps or missing time periods. Continuous tracking smooths out the effects of short-term disturbances, such as adverse publicity, new product introductions, or bad weather. Continuous tracking is a better monitor of competitive information, since the surveys are ongoing and not biased to the media schedule of one brand (as tends to happen in pulsed surveys).

Pulsed tracking is not without some advantages. Since the survey data is collected at specific points in time (say every 3 months, or every 6 months) it's less expensive than continuous tracking. Pulsed surveys can be concentrated into a short time period to provide highly precise before-after measurements for specific flights of advertising, and the waves of data collection can be precisely timed to coincide with media schedules.

Methodological Purity

Regardless of whether you choose continuous or pulsed surveys, it’s important to maintain consistent methods and processes so that the sample definition, sampling procedures, data collection methods, open-end coding, cross-tabulations methods, and analytical models remain identical from wave to wave and year to year. Stick with your advertising tracking over long periods of time. Some patterns won't become evident for several years. The longer the tracking continues, the more valuable it becomes because everyone (you, the agency, and your marketing staff) is learning how to interpret and act on the tracking results.

Data Fusion and Predictive Modeling

Ad tracking results, with a bit of clever modeling, can be projected down to small geographic areas, such as states or metropolitan areas, by data fusion and predictive modeling. As examples, tracking could be linked to American Community Survey data, sales data by marketing districts and regions, or independent behavioral data, to extract greater value from the tracking study.

Social Media Listening

Using social media to listen to for consumer chatter related to one’s brand and one’s advertising can be an interesting supplement to survey-based ad tracking data. Social media chatter can provide different insights and new perspectives, but it's never a replacement for well designed survey-based tracking research. Social chatter is heavily influenced by many uncontrollable and unknown factors, so it’s not a reliable tracking method. However, tracking social media content can be a stimulus to new learning and help us develop new hypotheses.

Three Building Blocks

If you consistently pursue the three building blocks of advertising success (strategy research, pretesting, and advertising tracking), you'll gradually increase the yield from your advertising investments year after year—and leave your competitors in the rearview mirror.

Decision Analyst's Advertising Research Resources

• Advertising Claims Substantiation
• Advertising Pretesting Video (prerecorded webinar)
• Key Elements to Drive Effective Advertising
• Unlock the Power of Advertising: 8 Steps To Creating Better Advertising
• Advertising Tracking Research Services

For more information, please contact: Bonnie Janzen at bjanzen@decisionanalyst.com or (817) 640-6166 or Felicia Rogers at frogers@decisionanalyst.com or (817) 640-6166.