In relation to measuring analytics, most cable advertising reps know about audience reach, demographics, and top-line results. Of course, this data is nowhere near as deep as the analytics data from an online advertising campaign. With online, we can know who's responding to our ads, what they're doing on our websites, how much time they spend there, and whether or not they complete a purchase.
But even without that in-depth level of data, most people believe that cable advertising works. But too many cable advertising reps allow themselves to be beaten when it comes to measurement. When compared with the detailed analytics available for online ads, television advertising can be somewhat sketchy. However, that only makes it far from being useless.
Television advertising (and offline tracking in general) can provide much greater insight than most people think. Understanding this can help make cable advertising measurement almost as precise as online advertising measurement.
Gathering data, and making decisions based on that data, requires a system that can take into account imperfect, incomplete, and subjective information, and then provide context for that data in order to help us understand the situation.
In order to deal with the vagueness of cable advertising measurement, you need to find a doable level of tracking, accept it with all its imperfections, gather the data, analyze the data, and learn more as you go. You can improve on the system itself as you learn more. This enables your television advertising measurement system to evolve into a system that is almost just as accurate as online data analytics.
Some rules to follow are:
You can know if your system is working if the ROI is positive. All you need to do is measure it. And an ROI-positive campaign is incredibly scalable, so it will give you the ability to increase frequency and build brand awareness.
But even without that in-depth level of data, most people believe that cable advertising works. But too many cable advertising reps allow themselves to be beaten when it comes to measurement. When compared with the detailed analytics available for online ads, television advertising can be somewhat sketchy. However, that only makes it far from being useless.
Television advertising (and offline tracking in general) can provide much greater insight than most people think. Understanding this can help make cable advertising measurement almost as precise as online advertising measurement.
Gathering data, and making decisions based on that data, requires a system that can take into account imperfect, incomplete, and subjective information, and then provide context for that data in order to help us understand the situation.
In order to deal with the vagueness of cable advertising measurement, you need to find a doable level of tracking, accept it with all its imperfections, gather the data, analyze the data, and learn more as you go. You can improve on the system itself as you learn more. This enables your television advertising measurement system to evolve into a system that is almost just as accurate as online data analytics.
Some rules to follow are:
- Have intimate knowledge of the company, its performance indicators, and the patterns and trends that already exist with its performance. How would the company be doing if no advertising was running? Identify the patterns and trends that already exist.
- Make sure to do the work. You need to gather data from your advertising campaigns and compare it to your baseline. Analyze the data. Make the incremental changes as you go. Keep an eye out for any peculiarities for that time period and make allowances for those. Over time, this will evolve into a highly efficient analytics machine.
- Make comparisons with what your performance model is telling you with big company-wide metrics like profitability.
- Finally, never burden your potential customers with tracking. Don't create custom URLs just to track the campaigns. This will reduce your overall response rate.
You can know if your system is working if the ROI is positive. All you need to do is measure it. And an ROI-positive campaign is incredibly scalable, so it will give you the ability to increase frequency and build brand awareness.
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